HERBERT FULLER CHAFFEE, son of Eben Whitney Chaffee and Amanda Fuller was born on Nov. 20, 1865 in Ellsworth, CT and died in the Titanic disaster on the North Atlantic Ocean April 15, 1912.

He married December 21, 1887 Carrie Constance Toogood, daughter of George Edwin Toogood, who was born in Wells, England January 27, 1823, and came to America in 1834. George Edwin married Ellen Board in July of 1854 in Manchester, Iowa. She had been born in Burnham, England, March 2, 1830 and had come to America in 1849. One of 8 children, only 3 surviving to adulthood, Carrie was born August 28, 1864 in Manchester, Iowa, and died July 4, 1931 in Amenia, North Dakota, where she is buried.

Bert returned to the farms in Dakota that spring, and visited Carrie at her home in Manchester, Iowa in July, where they became engaged. Then he returned to Dakota, keeping up a lively correspondence with Carrie, until going to Iowa to be married on December 21. They both returned to college at Oberlin where they stayed together until March, when Bert was called to Connecticut on account of his father becoming ill. He traveled to Dakota with his mother and father in April, and Carrie joined him there May 1, 1888. They moved into living quarters above the store for a few years, until their house was built. Their house was rebuilt in 1895 as the family and business grew, and again in 1905, and was finally wrecked on Carrie’s orders in 1920.

As Bert and Carrie settled into their new life in Amenia, Dakota Territory in 1888, Bert was “appointed assistant treasurer and assistant agent of the company”. Soon a son was born, named Eben Whitney after Herbert’s father, on September 28, 1888. After his father’s death in 1892, Herbert eventually assumed the position of President and General Manager of the Amenia & Sharon Land Company. He was described as a “man of exceptional business ability and successfully conducts the affairs of the extensive farm of which he is head… and is held in the highest esteem by his fellow men. Mr. Chaffee is a man of broad mind, and keeps pace with the time in all public affairs, and is earnest in his efforts to advance the community in which he lives and strengthens good local government, and is deservedly popular.” [from the Compendium of History and Biography of North Dakota, Ogle & Co., Chicago, 1900]

By all accounts, Herbert F. Chaffee was a very exacting man. Although he knew how to delegate authority, he was not one to overlook even the smallest details. He learned to handle the details of finances early in life from his father, who always kept an account book in his pocket. Personal letters and files among the company records show lists of H.F.Chaffee’s expenditures made as a youth on train trips to his academy in Connecticut and even record day-to-day accounting of all money that he spent, down to the penny for candy. It is not surprising that under his management the company grew into a million-dollar organization.

In 1904 Herbert took Carrie and his three oldest children, Eben, Dorothy and Herbert Laurance, by train to St. Paul, where they boarded a Mississippi River paddlewheel steamer and cruised down the river to St. Louis and the 1904 World’s Fair. The return trip landed Eben and Dorothy at Oberlin Academy, Ohio, where they were enrolled in the secondary level classes. Young H.L. returned with his parents to Amenia where they rejoined the two youngest, Florence Adele and Lester, at the large manor house, and H.L. continued his tutelage at home with Miss Louisa Tasker.

In April of 1912, Herbert finally took Carrie on their long-overdue honeymoon. By then, both Eben and Dorothy were married, and Eben’s wife Dolly was expecting their first child, who would be Herbert’s first grand-child. H.F. and Carrie traveled east by train, dropping H.L. at Oberlin College (between Toledo and Cleveland) and in New York City they boarded the RMS Cedric to begin their first-class Cook’s Company Tour of Europe. After sailing through the Azores and Gibraltar, they saw the sights in Genoa and Naples, and it was at this point that they were summoned home to Dakota for a hastily scheduled board meeting. They left the tour and the Thomas Cook Company re-booked their passage home aboard the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. Herbert and Carrie made their way via Rome and Paris to Southampton, England, where on April 10 they boarded the majestic vessel and made themselves comfortable in first class cabin E-3. On the night of April 14, Herbert and Carrie were settling in to their cabin for the night when the ship's purser knocked gently on their door. He told Herbert and Carrie to put on their coats and to hurry and get into one of the lifeboats. Herbert saw that Carrie was safely put into lifeboat #4, the second-to-last boat to leave the stricken ship. As the boat was slowly being lowered into the sea, Carrie looked up to him, still standing at the rails, and asked why he wasn't also getting into the boat as there was room for more people. He replied: "I will see you later dear." Herbert turned and disappeared into the crowd and was never seen again.

Walter R.Reed and Herbert Laurance were at the docks in NYC to meet Carrie when she disembarked from the rescue ship Carpathia on the night of April 18. They didn’t linger in NYC, but soon boarded a train bound for home. Herbert Laurance left the train at Oberlin, and Walter Reed returned to Amenia with Carrie, stopping in Minneapolis to meet her new grand-daughter, who had been born just a few days before. The Evangelist Billy Sunday was in the middle of a tent revival meeting in Fargo when Carrie returned to Amenia, having pitched his tabernacle at 7^th Ave N. and 5^th St. on April 7^th. He ended his campaign in Fargo on the 12^th of May, and on the 13^th spoke in Casselton, only a few miles from Amenia, perhaps at the invitation of Carrie. Until he headed out for his next engagement in Pennsylvania, he may have spent several days comforting the grieving and traumatized Carrie, staying, along with his entourage, at the manor house in Amenia. [According to the E.W.Chaffee Descendants volume published by Carter Chaffee in 1998: “During that summer, Billy Sunday, the most famous and foremost of the era’s "born again" evangelists, along with his wife Helen, their business Manager Fred Rapp, secretary and pianist Robert Matthews, their bible teacher Miss Florence Kinney, and others in his entourage, spent several weeks at the Chaffee home in Amenia, North Dakota.”] In the autumn of 1912, Carrie, most likely unable to face the long Dakota winter alone in the manor house, bought a house in Minneapolis, and spent the following winters there with her two youngest children, where both attended school, returning to Amenia during the summer seasons.

Along with her music, which was an important part of her life up until time of her death, Carrie also was a leader in charitable work in North Dakota and in Minneapolis. She was a charter member of, and active in, the American-Chinese Education Committee, Canton, China, though as far as we know, she never traveled to Asia.

The White Star Line, owners of the Titanic, paid 27% of the $251,000 claim that the family of H.F. Chaffee had filed against it. In addition, H.F. carried a considerable sum of personal life insurance, almost $150,000, the largest of anyone aboard the RMS Titanic, with his family as benefactors. The Land Company also carried a policy on his life, for which they collected $50,020.84.

After his untimely death at age 46, appraisers valued Herbert F. Chaffee’s estate at $1,228,118.15. To keep that large block of property together so as not to upset the financial status of the Amenia and Sharon Land Company, his estate was formed into a holding company, the H.F.Chaffee Company. Its officers were his wife Carrie, his son Herbert Laurance, his daughter Dorothy Stroud, and her husband Peter Stroud. Walter Reed was elected president and general manager of the parent company, A&S Land Co., replacing the deceased, and Carrie Toogood Chaffee was made vice-president.

She remained in London during the fall of 1919, enrolling Lester at the University of London for the term, and in January 1920, with extended visas, they followed much the same tour route as her trip with Herbert in 1912, traveling by ship through Gibraltar to Genoa, Italy, and then taking several months to enjoy France and Switzerland before returning to New York over the north Atlantic in March. Carrie was a strong and determined woman, and whether this trip was simply to share the cultural adventure of Europe with her children, or to enjoy the pleasures of leisurely travel for herself to places she longed to return after the earlier trip with her husband had been cut short, or to prove herself gritty enough to return across that terrible sea, these are things we will never know. We do know that upon her return in 1920, with her children all embarking on lives of their own, she had the large manor house in the center of the village torn down, and moved into the smaller house, the “Reed” house, at the edge of the village park. It was clear that after H.F.’s death in 1912, the Land Company could not hold together indefinitely because it lacked his leadership and control over the extensive operations. As his son, Herbert Laurance, so clearly stated it: “After Dad’s death the company lacked a dominating figure and simply had too much family politics involved.” Asked if his father could have pulled the company through the trying times of the 1920’s and 30’s, he answered, “There would have been no doubt that the company could have survived those trying times… as he proved himself as extremely foresighted, and excellent business manager, and I am sure that he would have had the business in such a state of organization that it would have been able to exist even through those extreme conditions.”

As it was, when Lester, the youngest, turned 21, the company started to be dissolved. In 1922 the assets of the Land Company were divided among its stockholders, and from that time on each was on their own. The World War I grain boom had already busted and tough times for farmers were on the way. The last meeting of the Amenia and Sharon Land Company stockholders took place on February 25, 1925. The last effort for a family get-together was at the Plaza Hotel in Minneapolis on Thanksgiving of 1930. Carrie died in Amenia the following summer, July 4, 1931, following a long illness. Funeral services were held on the 8^th, and she was buried in the family plot in the Amenia cemetery, on the banks of the Rush River.

Children, all born in Amenia, North Dakota:

i. Eben Whitney, b. Sept 28, 1889; d. Aug. 14, 1961 in Port Lavaca, TX; m.(1) July 15, 1911, Jesse Lillian Maud (Dolly) Beesley; (2) May 2, 1931, Laura Antoinette Miller; (3) July 29, 1943, Ellen Jane Schenck. He is buried in Amenia, ND.

ii. Dorothy Adelia, b.June 15, 1890; d. Nov. 1969 in Minneapolis, MN; m.(1) Dec. 21, 1910, Peter Elbridge Stroud; (2) Aug. 22, 1939 George Irish Langworthy.

iii. Herbert Laurance, b. June 24, 1892; d. July 2, 1971 in Fargo, ND; m. (1) June 18, 1915, Gertrude Auld Bacon; (2) Dec. 26, 1968 Francis Asleson. He is buried in Amenia, ND.

iv. Ester Carolyn, b. 1895; d. 1898; buried in Amenia, ND.

v. Florence Adele, b. June 2, 1900; d. Feb. 10, 1990, in Marin Co., CA; m. June 2, 1920, Sydney M. Higgins.

vi. Lester Fuller, b. Oct. 30, 1902; d. Jan. 1982, in Fargo, ND; m. (1) Feb.6, 1930, Dorothy Stephens; (2) 1946, Frances Brown; (3) Dec. 15, 1955, Faye Osterndorff. He is buried in Amenia, ND.

To see more pictures of Herbert, Carrie and their family, click here for the Photo Gallery

Sources:

-Descendants of Eben Whitney Chaffee, compiled by H.L.Chaffee, 1969 and Carter G. Chaffee, 1998

-The Day of the Bonanza by Hiram Drache, 1964

-History of Amenia & Sharon Land Company. by Dr. Wm Hunter (unpublished mss)

-Titanic Inquiry Project; Limitation of Liability Hearings: http://www.titanicinquiry.org/lol/claims/chaffee-c34.php

-Titanic article: http://thechronicleherald.ca/titanic/archive/82909-lives-lost-on-titanic-cost-1881111- Herbert F. Chaffee