The Proctors
Thomas and Maria Williams Proctor, circa 1910.
Maria Williams Proctor (1853 -1935) and her sister, Rachel (1850-1915), were the heirs to one of the greatest family fortunes in Central New York. Their grandfather, Alfred Munson, settled in Utica as a young man and amassed a great fortune through shrewd investments in burrstones (used for grinding grain), real estate (coalfields in Pennsylvania), canal building, steamships, railroads, and textile manufacturing.
His fortune passed on to two children, Samuel Alfred and Helen. Samuel added significantly to his inheritance by investing in iron manufacturing and the great technological innovation of his age, the telegraph—indeed, he became one of the largest shareholders in Western Union (the Google or Microsoft of its day).
Samuel died without children, and half of his fortune passed onto his sister, Helen, who had already inherited from her father. Helen invested in the artwork that would provide the foundation for Utica’s Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (chartered 1919, launched 1936) and managed her money with great success. At the time of her death in 1894, Helen was worth $3.4m, roughly the equivalent of $100m in today’s dollars.
The Munson-Williams fortune passed to Maria and Rachel, who married Thomas R. Proctor and his half-brother, Frederick, respectively. The Proctors were Vermont natives and prosperous businessmen who had settled in Utica after the Civil War. An extremely successful hotelier and banker, Thomas was an active figure in local politics—although he never ran for office himself—he was a delegate to several Republican National conventions and was on intimate terms with some of the leading political figures of his time, including US Senator Roscoe Conkling (arguably the most powerful US politician of the 1870s), Elihu Root (who served at various times as Secretary of State, Secretary of War, and US Senator), US Vice President James S. Sherman, and President William Howard Taft. At the time of his death in 1920, Thomas R. Proctor was at least as wealthy as his wife, Maria.
Two very wealthy sisters married two very wealthy brothers—and neither couple had children. They decided to invest their great wealth in their hometown. They were great patrons of their church, a local orphan asylum, the county historical society, and the Utica Public Library; Thomas R. Proctor also left bequests to historically black schools and colleges. However, their two greatest achievements were the creation of one of the finest regional arts institutes in the country and Utica’s parks and parkway system.
When they started park building, Utica had only 7 acres of public parkland; by the time they finished, Utica had nearly 700 acres, most of it designed by the leading American landscape architect of their time, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.. Thomas R. Proctor had been involved in creating landscapes for public use for decades, starting in the 1870s—the grounds of his spa resort in fashionable Richfield Springs were renowned for their beauty, and he was on the managing board and served as vice president a semi-public park (to which visitors had to pay an entrance fee) in Utica in the 1870s and 1880s. In the 1870s, he also began to open part of his Bagg’s Hotel farm—a scenic glen—for free to picnickers. In so many ways, his professional career and public service was preparing him to become a grand parks builder.
In 1897, his wife, Maria, and her sister, Rachel, took the process one step further by building a 7-acre park named for their father, James Watson Williams—in so doing doubled the amount of free public parkland in Utica. Clearly, Utica needed more public parkland, and inspired by his past experiences and the example set by his wife and sister-in-law, Thomas R. Proctor launched into a park-building spree that went on intermittently for over 15 years. In 1899, Thomas transformed his 60-acre hotel farm into a free public park that eventually became known as Thomas R. Proctor Park. Now fully bitten, he became an increasingly prominent advocate for a dramatic expansion of Utica’s public parkland and for the creation of a wide, tree-lined boulevard.
He initially expected that, having set an example by creating a large free public park in 1899, that the Utica city government would create more parks at taxpayer expense. However, Proctor encountered resistance to his advocacy for more public parkland—it came mostly from businessmen who feared that parks would be a burden on the taxpayers.
Alfred Munson, sculpted by Erastus Dow Palmer, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute.
Rather than continue trying to persuade in the face of resistance, Thomas R. Proctor, with the support of his wife Maria, took matters into his own hands. Using his own resources, he built two more smaller, 15-acred parks which, like Thomas R. Proctor Park and Watson Williams Park, were not designed by Olmsted—Addison Miller Park (1907), and Horatio Seymour Park (1907)—plus two large Olmsted-designed parks named after US Senator and fellow Utican Roscoe Conkling (1909) and Thomas’s own half-brother, Frederick T. Proctor (1914, donated 1923). He was also the driving force behind the City of Utica’s decision to build Utica’s Olmsted-designed Parkway in 1909-19. The system of 5 parks (Conkling, T.R. and F.T. Proctor, Addison Miller, and Horatio Seymour parks) and the Parkway that was designed to connect them cover an area more than 75% the size of Manhattan’s Central Park.
The Proctors earned the gratitude of their fellow Uticans, who began holding annual Proctor Days to pay them homage, beginning in 1916 and continuing until 1942, 7 years after the death of the last of the two couples, Maria, in 1935. In 2008, Conkling Park, the two Proctor parks, and the Parkway were collectively placed on the National Register of Historic Places under the name of the “Utica Parks and Parkway Historic District.”
Watson Williams Park, created by Maria and Rachel Williams Proctor in 1897. It doubled the amount of public parkland in Utica, to 14 acres.
Rachel and Maria Proctor being driven during a parade (circa 1914).