#52 Ancestors Week 17 Land: Ellen Isham Schutt Pomological Artist

What, you may ask is a pomological artist?  It was a new word for me too.  Pomology is a branch of botany that studies and cultivates fruit.  A pomological artist, therefore, is an artist that specializes in drawing fruit.  And I have one of those in my family.

Francis and Lizzie Schutt

Ellen Isham Schutt (Aunt Nell, my 2X great-aunt really) was the daughter of Francis Granger Schutt and Emily Elizabeth Thomas "Lizzie" Wallis. Francis, a New York businessman, ran a furniture store in Georgetown.   His youngest daughter Nell was born 15 April 1873 in Oak Grove, Arlington County VA, where her father had bought property after the Civil War. The area is now the Cherrydale Historic District.

Indian Bael

From 1904 to 1914, Nell worked for the United States Department of Agriculture as an illustrator.  During this period she painted over 700 watercolors of various fruits and nuts. Her subjects ranged from the common

(apples, hickory nuts) to the then-exotic (bael, custard apple, cashew nuts), and quite a few show fruit damage from mold, insects, and other causes.  Her precise

style resulted in watercolors that at times look more like drawings than paintings. She also modeled some fruit such as apples and pears in wax to demonstrate the effects of long storage and packaging on fruits.

Custard Apple

In 1914-15, Nell worked at the University of California Berkeley doing drawings of apples in a variety of conditions including cold storage, core rot, and moth damage.

(Illustrations: U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705.)

For more examples of Nell's work, see the UC Davis website at https://calisphere.org/collections/19667/. 

In 1909, Nell turned her talents to architecture.  Having seen her father's home go up in flames, she determined to build a fireproof home for herself.  According to my cousin Larry, who heard the story from Nell herself and actually lived in the house briefly as a child, she was a one-woman dynamo.  She had molds made to make concrete blocks on the property, rolled up her sleeves, mixed the concrete, poured the molds, mortared the blocks and built the house.  Well, the degree of her involvement in the actual construction may be somewhat overstated, but the plan for the all-concrete house and the general architecture were definitely hers.  She named the place "Ellenwood,"  after herself. It was an imposing house, with columns in the front and a two-story high front porch. Cousin Larry also remembers that Nell salvaged some four-foot concrete urns left over from the St. Louis World's Fair which she used to adorn her front porch and driveway.  Ellenwood was unfortunately torn down in the 1960's to make way for an expansion of St. Agnes Church, but a little bit of it can be seen in the photo below that shows Thomas Smythe Wallis (second from the left) with his brothers, Francis, Harry and John standing in front of the house. 

After her father's death in 1914, Nell married Walter David Blackburn in Florida, but the marriage ended in divorce.  In 1917, she married her cousin Thomas Smythe Wallis and lived with him at Ellenwood, in the Cherrydale section of Arlington.   Thomas Smythe Wallis was the younger brother of my great-grandmother, Theresa Evalina Wallis (Dama), the 9th of 13 children of Francis Adolphus Wallis and Georgianna Willson. Nell and Tom had no children. 

Nell and her mother were both very interested in genealogy and Nell started the Francis Wallis chapter of the DAR that served the Washington DC area. Cousin Larry remembers a fabulous Wallis family tree drawn to resemble a botanical tree where he could see his own name in one of the tiny branches.  Some of her research still survives at the Maryland Historical Society.  

Thomas Smythe Wallis died in Virginia in 1949.  Nell died in 1955.  They are both buried in Columbia Gardens Cemetery in Arlington VA.