The Sad Downfall of St. Charles Benjamin Gaither Gwynn

St. Charles Benjamin Gaither "Bloke" Gwynn was born in Spartanburg SC on December 11, 1874.  He was the second son of Confederate Captain Andrew Jackson Gwynn and his wife Marie Louise Keene, both Marylanders, and the brother of my great-grandmother, Louise Gwynn Scrivener.  Great-grandmother Scrivener was a scrapbooker and saved many clippings about her family members.  In fact, it was her interest in family, and the fact that her notes and clippings were passed along to me by my grandfather, that started me working on genealogy many decades ago.

St. Charles, or "Bloke" as his friends called him, was by all accounts a genial fellow with a silver tongue.  One story in great-grandmother's scrapbook recounts that his fellow cadets at the Citadel  regarded him as the most accomplished orator of the academy and was frequently called upon to write excuses for delinquents. "It was," the newspaper writer noted, "a hard case when he couldn't write an excuse that would get the transgressor out of the demerits and consequent curtailment of leave."  And, he added, "the Bloke had troubles of his own for which he had to write some masterpieces in the way of excuses."  The Bloke was frequently in charge of setting of parties and generally regarded as a "prince of good fellows."

His classmates apparently never thought of him in any other light than as a future barrister.  After his graduation from the Citadel in 1894, he went on to Georgetown Law where he was elected president of his class and graduated in 1897.

Before settling in to practice law in his home town of Spartanburg, St. Charles served as a 1st Lt. in the 3rd Engineers Division during the Spanish-American War.  He returned to marry Alabama-born Moselle Hayes in New York City in November 1898.  His brother, Rev. Andrew Gwynn, officiated at the wedding, but he was the only family member in attendance.  According the news account of the wedding, Miss Hayes was "a stranger to his father's family, not having been seen before by any member of the family."  After the wedding, the couple hurried back to Gwynn's military post in Macon, Georgia, without stopping in South Carolina to meet the family since Gwynn's 10-day furlough was up.   (One has to wonder how the family reacted to this.)

In any case, St. Charles was soon back in Spartanburg and started up a law practice but by 1900 he and his wife and one-year-old son, Marion Hayes Gwynn, were in Manhattan.  By 1901, Gwynn was the lawyer for and a member of the Board of Directors of Consolidated Liquid Air Company, a reorganization of Tripler Liquid Air. This was the beginning of the end for Gwynn.

Charles Tripler, a New York inventor, had come up with a process for efficiently manufacturing liquid air and touted its benefits for many industries.  He was able to raise quite a bit of capital, but investors lost their shirts when the company couldn't produce as promised.  Consolidated Liquid Air was an attempt to restructure the company involving two former US Senators, Marion Butler of North Carolina and R.F. Pettigrew of South Dakota.  This venture did not fare any better.

Gwynn must have invested everything he had in the company.  By 1904, there were judgments against him by several creditors and by 1906, his mortgaged property was being auctioned off in New York.

In 1907, Moselle set up a Women's Exchange in Spartanburg, probably as a way of making some money, and by 1910, she listed herself in the census as a widow and two of the three Gwynn children were in an orphanage in York County SC, St. Charles, age 7 and Edith, age 5.  I was not able to find St. Charles Gwynn in the 1910 census and for many years, I assumed that he had died before that date.

However, I then read some of great-grandmother's clippings more closely.  When St. Charles's mother Louise Keene Gwynn died in 1913, her obituary lists her son St. Charles as a survivor.  Likewise, when his brother John Bowie Gwynn died in 1918, his obituary also mentions his brother St. Charles, and says he is in the English Army.  Did he go to England to join in fighting World War I?  I have not been able to find a record of him in England or coming back to the US.  Perhaps someday, that record will turn up and I'll know the ultimate fate of the Bloke.

Moselle Hayes Gwynn filed for divorce in 1914.

Meanwhile, by 1925, Moselle and all three of her children were back in New York City.  Moselle did not remarry and died in New Jersey in 1968.