Joseph Henry Ogleby was a southern gentleman. Margaret Lenning was 32 years younger than him.
He was a prominent member of the New Orleans business community and a widower. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the MayFlower Society, being a direct descendant of Pilgrim leader William Brewster. With her background, and in her early 20s, she was as eligible a catch as he was.
His wife had died a respectable nine years earlier. He had four grown daughters.
They married in Atlantic City in 1880 and soon after settling in Philadelphia, they had a son, Joseph Henry.
Joseph Sr. did not want disagreements over money to come between his daughters and his new family, so he had his will redrafted in 1883. The girls grew up around their father’s success and he anticipated that his death might bring discord between the families.
Oglesby’s money came from shipping food products to the miners and settlers of California in the 1850s. A successful grain trader and sugar grower, he was also instrumental in the recovery of New Orleans after the devastation of the Civil War.
His invention of a “water elevator”, a screw-driven sump pump, assisted the low-lying fields in managing the regular floods of the Mississippi River. He was active in attracting railway investment which facilitated the movement of goods out of the Port of New Orleans. He also coordinated the building of levees to allow seafaring ships past the often silted Mississippi delta.
Joseph was nominated for mayor of New Orleans, but respectfully declined, preferring to tend to his St. Mary’s Parish sugar plantation “Blue Bell” which sat on 627 acres along the Atchafalaya River and his classic plastered New Orleans townhouse with wrought iron galleries on Charles Street with his first wife and four girls.
He worked to help his adopted the city through commerce. He brought Martin Maloney’s gas lights to Bourbon Street. He initiated the sale of stock in local rail lines. He was elected President of the Louisiana National Bank in 1869, one of the state’s largest financial institutions. Soon after, when his first wife, Margaret Hendrickson fell ill, they traveled to France several times in hopes she would recover, but she passed away in Paris in August 1871.
In the late 1880s Joseph began to plan to build a cottage in Sea Girt on the oceanfront for his wife and son. Margaret planned to call the three story Victorian “Sandown”, after a town in the Isle of Wright, which is also known in literature as “our sea-girt isle” As construction began, Joseph amended his will again.
Sandown, just after its completion in 1888. Marriott C. Morris Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia
This time he willed Margaret just $10,000 and left the rest to all five of his children to split equally. He implored them to place it all into a trust and to “live without disagreement”.
As the house was being built in 1887, Joseph Oglesby took ill. He left his young bride a widow, with a six year old boy to care for. Just before his death, he altered the will for a last time, ensuring that Margaret would get the Sea Girt house, but it was incomplete, and the executor determined that she would have to pay the $3,000 in costs to date, and finish the house with her own money.
Little Joe and his dog Jet, not long after his father had passed in 1888. Marriott Morris Photo
At an auction held just after his death, the New Orleans townhouse, the plantation and his stocks netted over $200,000 to be split five ways. Margaret would have less than $7,000 remaining of her share and $40,000 of Joseph Jr’s share to last the next 40 years. The $47,000 was the equivalent of $1 million today.
Margaret was an Episcopalian, and periodically opened her oceanfront home in Crescent Park for services in the 1890s. But most Sundays she and her son Joseph would have to get her carriage out and drive her horse to Allaire Village’s Christ Church, almost six miles west.
Wanting a place for Anglican services in her own community, she spoke to Right Rev. John Scarborough, Episcopal Bishop of New Jersey. In 1902. She formed a mission, sought donors for the land and paid for the building of a year round church. She selected an appropriate name, as Saint Uriel the Archangel is the patron saint of the wind and waves.
Its 1907 Queen Anne Revival structure with cedar shake siding still beautifies 3rd and Philadelphia Blvd. in Sea Girt.
Her son Joe, lived alone in the house after his mother died in from 1929 until his own death in 1963. Sandown burned down a few months later.
Saint Uriel continues and is a thriving community with a charitable mission and year round services.