Sellers, George Escol
URI(s)
Variants
- Sellers, George Ercol
- Sellers, Geo. Escol (George Escol)
Additional Information
Birth Date
- 1808-11-26
Death Date
- 1899-01-01
Birth Place
- Philadelphia (Pa.)
Associated Locale
- Chattanooga (Tenn.)
Associated Locale
- Bowlesville (Ill.)
Associated Language
- English
Field of Activity
Occupation
Mechanical engineer
Exact Matching Concepts from Other Schemes
Closely Matching Concepts from Other Schemes
Sources
- found: His Improvements in locomotive engines and railways, 1849:t.p. (George Escol Sellers, mechanical engineer) page 26. etc. (Geo. Escol Sellers; resident of Cincinnati) - https://www.google.com/books/edition/Improvements_in_Locomotive_Engines_and_R/kSEOAAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PP5&printsec=frontcover
- found: Early engineering reminiscences, 1815-40, 1965:p. xiv, etc. (George Escol Sellers; born November 26, 1808, Philadelphia; d. Jan. 1, 1899; settled in Cincinnati during the depression that followed the Panic of 1837 where he established a plant to make lead pipers; grandson of Charles Willson Peale; Mark Twain, in his Life on the Mississippi (1883: chapt. 47), tells of his having used Eschol [sic] Sellers in one of his book, a name that he could not imagine ("without stimulants") as belonging to a real person and shortly thereafter he met Escol who sued him for libel; whereupon Mark Twain suppressed "an edition of ten million" copies of the book; during and after the Civil War he spent several years in southern Illinois on the banks of the Ohio River trying to use swamp canes as paper stock and studied the Indian mounds near his home; most of the narratives in this work appeared in a scries of articles in the American Machinist (1884-1893) which he wrote after his retirement in Chattanooga; his obituary is in American Machinist (March 30, 1899), vol. 22, pages 250-251; author of Observations on stone-chipping (Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution . . . 1885 (Washington, 1886), pt. 1, pages 871-891) - https://repository.si.edu/handle/10088/10090
- found: Annual report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, showing the operations, expenditures, and condition of the Institution to July, 1885:pt. 1, p. 871 (George Ercol Sellers, of Bowlesville, Ill.; mother's father was Charles Wilson [Willson] Peale; grew up in Philadelphia; author of the essay Observations on stone-cutting) - https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/annualreportofbo18851smith
- found: American Machinist, March 30, 1899:page 250-251 (George Escol Sellers; born November 26, 1808 in Philadelphia; author's obituary) - https://books.google.com/books?id=fMtMAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA256#v=snippet&q=sellers&f=false
- found: Sellers family. Business records, 1774-1834(John Sellers (1728-1804); father of Nathan Sellers (born September 15, 1751; died Aug. 14, 1830) and David Sellers (born April 1, 1757; died December 2, 1813) who were partners in the firm of N. & D. Sellers which manufactured wire in Philadelphia and Upper Darby, Pennsylvania); Coleman Sellers (born November 27, 1781; died May 7, 1834; son of Nathan Sellers (1751-1830)) carried on the business in own name after 1828; Samuel Sellers (born September 16, 1780; died June 1, 1850; son of David Sellers (1757-1813)) was a partner in N. & D. Sellers wire manufacturers (1813-1828) and in 1837 moved to the Forks of the Brandywine, Chester County, Pennsylvania)
- found: American Philosophical Society website, February 16, 2022:(George Escol Sellers, 1808-1899; son of Coleman Sellers (1781-1834) (worked for the N. & D. Sellers firm and moved the family business to land outside of Philadelphia (near present-day 69th Street) and expanded into the locomotive business and is known for several improvements to the design of locomotives, including the pivoted forward truck and wooden frames in the running gears) and Sophonsiba Peale Sellers (daughter of artist Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)); brother of Coleman Sellers (1827-1907); George Escol Sellers worked with his father to develop the improvements in locomotives; created a hill-climbing locomotive for the Isthmus of Panama in 1847; in 1854 Escol established "Sellers' Landing," an industrial center on the Ohio River; in 1864 he invented a new process for paper making, using grass and reed rendered to pulp and forced by steam against a baffle plate; many of his plans ended in frustration and tragedy; his wife and all but one of his children died while living at Seller's Landing, and this remote location made it difficult for his manufacturing ventures to be successful; during these hard years, Charles Dudley Warner first heard of Escol's name and applied it to The Gilded Age, the novel he wrote with Mark Twain and the association with the name of the shady character from the book was source of further frustration for Escol; in later years, Escol moved to Tennessee and devoted significant time to family genealogy and history; after his death in 1899 his paper making process enjoyed resurgence due to paper scarcity and brought him posthumous fame; a few of his papers are in the Peale-Sellers Family Collection, 1686-1963; Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827, APS 1786) produced more than one thousand paintings, including hundreds of portraits of leading Americans during the colonial and early national periods and was married three times, to Rachel Brewster (1744-1790), Elizabeth de Peyster (1765-1804), and Hannah More (1755-1821); three of Charles Willson Peale's sons became artists: Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825), Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), and Rubens Peale (1784-1865); a fourth son, Titian Ramsay Peale (1799-1885, APS 1833), was a naturalist (who made drawings on the exploring expeditions he accompanied) and pioneer in photography, and another son, Benjamin Franklin Peale (1795-1870), became a naturalist and paleontologist; Charles Willson Peale's (1741-1827) daughter Sophonisba Angusciola was married to Coleman Sellers (1781-1834), an inventor and manufacturer of machinery, including locomotives; two of their sons, George Escol Sellers (1808-1899) and Coleman Sellers (1827-1907, APS 1872), were inventors and engineers; Coleman Sellers (1827-1907, APS 1872), served as director of the construction of the hydro-electric power development at Niagara Falls and was married to Cornelia Wells Sellers (1831-1909); one of Coleman's and Cornelia's grandsons was Charles Coleman Sellers (1903-1980, APS 1979), a librarian and historian and the author of several studies of the Peale family, including a Charles Willson Peale biography; James Peale (1749-1831) was the brother of Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and is the father of Anna Claypoole Peale (1791-1878) and Sarah Miriam Peale (1800-1885)) - https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/search/dc.subject%3A%22Sellers%2C%5C%20George%5C%20Escol%22 - https://search.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.B.P31-ead.xml
- found: Find A Grave website, February 16, 2022:author's obituary from the The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia), January 2, 1899, page 3 (George Escol Sellers, one of the most noted engineers of his day, died at his residence on Mission Ridge this morning at 11 o'clock, in the ninety-first year of his age; born in Philadelphia on November 26, 1808; in 1844 he moved to Cincinnati and moved to southern Illinois shortly thereafter where he became interested in coal lands and coal mining with the late Samuel J. Tilden; he is said to have made the first survey for a railroad through Georgia and Tennessee about the year 1849; he was one of the oldest locomotive builders in the United States, having built locomotives for the government years before the war; moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1888;he had the largest collection of Indian relics of any single individual collector in this section of the country; he was a brother of Coleman Sellers, Jr., the distinguished engineer of Philadelphia, and is a grandson of the celebrated artist Charles Willson Peale)
Editorial Notes
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Scheme Membership(s)
Collection Membership(s)
Change Notes
- 1990-01-05: new
- 2022-02-17: revised
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