Businessman, Humanitarian, Conservationist, Statesman

By Michael Kelly

Frederic Walcott was born in 1869 to a prominent family in New York Mills, NY. His great-great grandfather established the first cotton mills in New York state and garnered a sizable fortune. Walcott’s father married Emeline Alice Welch, daughter of noted Norfolk physician William Wickham Welch, forging Frederic’s lifelong attachment to his mother’s hometown. Walcott received a ‘thoroughly classical’ education at Lawrenceville and Phillips Exeter Academy before matriculating at Yale where a close friendship was initiated with Starling Childs of Pittsburgh, a fellow member of Skull and Bones and Psi Epsilon fraternity.

After graduating from Yale in 1891, Walcott joined a cousin for a year-long world tour. Upon his return, he settled down to learn every facet of the manufacture of cotton cloth. By 1905 he had succeeded his father as the president of the Walcott & Campbell Spinning Company.

On Valentine’s Day 1899, he married Frances Dana Archbold, the daughter of John D. Rockefeller’s partner at Standard Oil. On their honeymoon in Yokohama, Japan his bride contracted a fever and died just four months after their marriage. Subsequently, Walcott married Mary Hussey Guthrie, a scion from Pittsburgh, with whom he had two sons.

Frederic Walcott, left, waits to be introduced as a speaker at the Norfolk Library on March 6, 1939.

In 1907, Starling Childs, then an attorney at international investment bank William Bonbright & Co. in New York encouraged Walcott to get into banking. Disengaging himself from the family textile business, Walcott moved to the city where his relationship with Childs and General Electric founder Charles Coffin secured him an appointment to help rescue the Knickerbocker Trust, a large, influential banking concern which had recently failed. Following the successful reorganization of the Knickerbocker Trust, Walcott was named vice president in 1908. He left the Trust in 1911 to become vice president at Bonbright & Co.

Aside from their mutual business interests, Walcott and Childs also shared a passion for the outdoors and land conservation. Longtime members of the Boone & Crockett Club, the oldest wildlife conservation group in the nation, the two friends began looking in the Adirondacks for unspoiled woodlands to protect from development; but due to his family ties, Walcott persuaded Childs to consider buying land in Norfolk, which had been deforested by the defunct charcoal industry.

Childs was impressed with the possibilities of Norfolk’s rugged terrain, which in some respects is comparable to the Adirondacks, but is more easily accessible from New York. Starting in 1909, Walcott and Childs bought large tracts of abandoned land at bargain prices. The original 400 acres they acquired grew into the 6,000 acres straddling Norfolk and Falls Village, known today as Great Mountain Forest.

The landed partners set about creating their woodland preserve, planting an abundance of indigenous tree seedlings and saplings and stocking the ponds and burgeoning woods with deer, waterfowl and game birds from as far away as Canada.

The United States stayed neutral in World War I until 1917, but Americans were well aware of the atrocities being committed by the German soldiers. In 1915, Bonbright & Co. sent Walcott to Europe to negotiate desperately-needed war loans for France and Italy from the United States. In moving letters home to his wife and sons, Walcott described in graphic detail the horrors of war he was witnessing.

While in Rome meeting with Italian officials on December 6, 1915, Walcott “received a sudden awakening” in the form of a cable from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. asking him to represent the Rockefeller Foundation and report on war refugees in German-held Belgium. The foundation wanted Walcott to observe the situation first-hand to determine the amount of money and supplies they should donate to relief efforts. They also instructed Walcott to meet and evaluate 40-year-old Herbert Hoover, one of the most successful and wealthy mining engineers in the world, who had organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium the previous year.

Sharing a predilection for public service, Walcott and Hoover hit it off immediately, becoming lifelong friends and political allies. After the United States declared war on Germany in April 1917, Walcott resigned from all his banking and business positions to serve without pay as Hoover’s aide in the newly-created United States Food Administration. In 1919 President Woodrow Wilson sent Walcott to the Paris Peace Conference to testify as an expert witness on the European refugee crisis. For his humanitarian work during World War I, Walcott was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor and decorated with the Officer’s Cross by Poland.

After the war, Walcott returned to his commitment to conservation. He gave forestry lectures, published papers on game preserves and became president of the Connecticut Board of Fisheries and Game and the American Wildlife Foundation. An avid fisherman and hunter, he was also a skilled ornithologist who foraged for and meticulously preserved birds’ eggs and nests. He left his extensive ornithological collection to the Millbrook School where his grandson had been a student.

Walcott’s warm relationship with his friend and fishing companion Herbert Hoover continued, leading to Walcott getting involved in politics and being elected a Connecticut state representative in 1924. On the coattails of Hoover’s victory as president of the United States in 1928, Walcott was elected to the United States senate. Walcott lost his bid for reelection in 1932, as did Hoover, who was blamed for kowtowing to Wall Street bankers and precipitating the Great Depression.

For the duration of his life, Walcott continued promoting the public good. He was Connecticut’s Commissioner of Welfare from 1935 to 1939, a regent of the Smithsonian Institute for eight years and a trustee of Trinity College, Connecticut College and the African-American university Bethune-Cookman in Florida.

In his later years, Walcott became an accomplished amateur watercolorist and photographer, spending more time at his commanding 1910 home Tristram Hall overlooking Tobey Pond, blissfully embowered in his beloved Great Mountain Forest.

Walcott died on April 27, 1949 at the age of 80 and is buried at Center Cemetery in Norfolk.

Photo courtesy of the Norfolk Library archives.