• Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flickr
William Spencer Hungerford (SH144) is mentioned frequently early on in this recollection of Capt. Stephen B. Hanks. The discovery of this article was made by Jon Bernard, a student of early American oil painters, who was attempting to put a name to the artist of the oil painting that can be found adorning the photo section in the above-listed fellow's entry in THFFI.

Here is Jon's 16 May 2020 email to Richard W. Hungerford Jr. (US26) and his short reply:

Jon Bernard

5:13 PM (3 hours ago) 16 May 2020

to me



Hi Richard,

At this stage I haven't figured out who painted the subject
& his family. But I haven't given up. I found the Case
Antiques website where they have been featured, and have
done a bit of research about the subject & his family. He
was fairly peripatetic, and since (by his clothes) the
portrait looks 1840 +/- 5 years, it is important to pin down
his location, so that we can match it to a known location of
the artist (who we can tell was something of a journeyman,
given slight awkwardness in the arm length proportions in
his & her portraits). Nonetheless, we have a good chance of
finding him. The 1840 Fed Census has him in Litchfield co
CT, but soon thereafter he apparently made his way west.

I got sidetracked for 3 days after I found his name in
Newspapers.com as part of the memoirs of steamboat pilot
Stephen B. Hanks. Those memoirs were published serially, in
weekly installments that lasted a year or so, in newspapers
such as "The Lacrosse Tribune". I got so enamored with his
story that I extracted them into one WORD document
(attached), as I could not find a digital version of this
memoir in a book already.

I thought you might want it. Once opened, you can CTRl-F
"Hungerford" and find his few entries in that work. It seems
he used his lawyering skill to acquire timberlands in St.
Croix Falls WI and kept an office in St. Louis MO - that's a
lot of Mississippi in between!

That is some website you have created for documenting all
the Hungerfords. About the most professional I've come
across. Nice work.

Jon B



Richard Hungerford

8:34 PM (29 minutes ago) 16 May 2020

to Jon


Dear Jon:

Thank you for the update. I look forward to hearing about any new successes you have in your research. I did take note of William's nomadic ways when I found him in the census records. I greatly appreciate the attached document as well as the compliment regarding the website.

Regards,

Richard

Download File

Submitted by Richard Hungerford at 7:06 PM on May 16, 2020.

← Go Back

Edit Item Delete Item