***Howard Agnew***
(b. Yonkers, New York, March 26, 1860; d. New York City, April 24, 1894).
New York. White.
Occupation: journalist
Father’s occupation: physician
Howard Agnew’s father, Samuel J. Agnew (1833-1899), was a physician and the son of J. Holmes Agnew (1804-65), classics professor at the University of Michigan during 1845-51 and later head of Maplewood Female Seminary in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In New York in 1859 he married Mary (Platt) Agnew (1843-1911), grand-daughter of Jonas Platt, who represented New York in Congress during 1799-1801. Her father, Zephaniah Platt, was attorney general of Michigan 1841-43 and active in the antislavery movement; he moved to South Carolina in 1868 and served as judge of the 2nd Circuit Court from 1868 until his death. Mary (Platt) Agnew’s sister, Cornelia Platt, was married to AJ Willard, a New Yorker who came to South Carolina after the war and served on the Supreme Court.
Howard Agnew’s parents divorced, presumably in New York, and his mother evidently came to South Carolina to live with her father. She remarried to Theodore Weld Parmele, who is described in the entry on his son Charles Parmele, in her father’s judicial circuit at Aiken in January 1871. Mary became a prolific writer later in life and has a Wikipedia page under Mary Platt Parmele.
When USC closed, Howard Agnew entered Harvard, where he was part of the class of 1881 for four years but did not graduate. Upon leaving Harvard he worked for the New York World under the editorship of William H. Hurlbut. When Joseph Pulitzer took over the paper, Agnew became literary critic of the New York Graphic, the only daily illustrated newspaper in the city. Later he was on the editorial staff of the New York Herald. Poor health prompted him to spend three years in the Adirondacks. From his return to New York City in 1886 until his death in 1894 he was on the editorial staff of the Commercial Advertiser, for which he was also music critic. He married Marion Weston, daughter of Edward and Elizabeth Weston of Yonkers, on Aug. 6, 1884. Their only child, Myrtle, was born at Yonkers on July 2, 1885.
Source: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Report of the Secretary of the Class of 1881 of Harvard College (1906), 167-68.