Follow
Anne Weightman Walker Penfield (1844 - February 25, 1932), was a philanthropist, and one of the richest women in world.
She was born in 1844 to William Weightman and his wife Louisa Stellwagen (1823-1884), daughter of Joseph Stellwagon and Anna Maria Ford. William and Louisa married in 1841. He made his initial fortune from manufacturing quinine for the treatment of malaria, which was greatly in demand during the Civil War, and later in real estate. He had three children, William, John Farr and Anne Marie Weightman. Both sons earned an M.D. degree and eventually worked with their father in the chemical manufacturing company. They each died in their 40's but left a number of descendants. By the time the Quinine King died in 1904 his fortune was variously estimated to be worth between 30 and 70 million dollars, and he left it all to his daughter, give or take a few bequests, such as $750,000 to his grandson, William Walker Weightman III.
His eldest son William Jr. married the socially ambitious Sabine Josephine d’Invilliers and they had 6 daughters. (Please note, as an aside: Thomas Parke D'Invilliers is both a pen name of Francis Scott Fitzgerald and a character in his quasi-autobiographical first novel, This Side Of Paradise.) Sabine challenged the will in court, claiming there was a missing codicil.
His second son, John Farr Weightman (15 August 1845/50-1886), married Martha Thomas Rogers (1848-1903) in 1871. In the 1870 census, John Farr (25) was living at home with his parents William (56) and Louisa (48). From now on it gets confusing. One account says he had three children, two of whom died in infancy, and one who survived him: William Walker Weightman III (4 February 1895 – 1965). And now the data makes no sense at all, because one source says that William Walker Weightman III was 8 when his father died and his uncle, Aubrey H. Weightman, alleging that his mother was unfit and a danger to the child, gained guardianship of him. None of this makes sense. If Aubrey was an uncle, he must have been a brother of John Farr Weightman’s: but he was a son. John Farr died in 1886: WWWIII is said to have been born in 1895. So WWWIII cannot have been John Starr’s son, although he was acknowledged by William Senior to be his grandson in his will. Grandfather? Grandson? Are there other relationships at play here? And why was he given the middle name Walker, presumably after Robert Jarvis Cochran Walker, the man his aunt, Anne Marie, eventually married? Additionally, we do have a motive for Aubrey taking control: WWWIII inherited $750,000 in his ‘grandfather’s’ will in 1904. So let’s play around a little. We find John Farr and Martha in the 1880 census. He is 30, she is 25 and her middle name starts with an F. They have two sons, Malcom R. Weightman (6) and Aubrey H. Weightman (3), and 4 servants. I have no idea what happened to Malcom. Aubrey (circa 1878-1954) married more than once, and we find him in the 1910 census as a 33 year old widower, living in New Jersey with his mother-in-law and his two daughters, Fanny (5) and Martha (3). He may have been divorced by an Helen Potter in 1947. His last wife seems to have been Mary Pape (1893-1958).
The reason I ask all these questions is that young WWWIII went on to have a rather notorious career. Coincidence is a very strange thing: researching Anne Marie’s husband, Robert J. C. Walker, while unsuccessfully trying to find a marriage date for the couple, I note that a Robert J. C. Walker and a woman called Annie had a child called William Wrightman Walker on the 6th of Jan 1865 in Philadelphia. Reference ID: bk 1865 p 8/GS Film number:1289309/Digital Folder Number: 004198957/Image Number: 00379. Annie Weightman, who soon afterwards changed her name to Anne, would have been about 20 at that time. A man born in 1865 called William Wrightman Walker could well have been the father of a son called William Walker Weightman, born in 1895, who would have been about 8 when his grandfather died in 1904, and whose grand-uncle’s name would have been Aubrey. And the existence of this William Wrightman Walker might be the source of mysterious rumours about a beloved grandson who was given 4 million dollars and who ‘died overseas at the age of 21’. Those details are a smokescreen of sorts. I suspect that William Walker Weightman III was really a great-grandson. This may go some way to explaining the mysterious secret note which halted the legal dispute over the old man’s will in 1904, and Anne Marie’s attachment to the Catholic Church.
His daughter, Anne Marie, married Robert Jarvis Cochran Walker (Robert J. C. Walker), an attorney and congressman. He died 19 December 1903 at the age of 65. Anne inherited approximately $10 million from her husband and lived with her father at Ravenhill, in the East Falls section of Philadelphia. After the deaths of her brothers, father, and husband, Anne Marie ran the Powers and Weightman Company for several months in 1904.
To summarise, William died in 1904 at the age of 91, by which time his two sons had predeceased him. Ravenhill passed to Anne. A spectacular court case ensued over William’s $60 million fortune when her widowed sister-in-law, Sabine Josephine d’Invilliers Weightman, now Mrs Jones Wister, sued for part of the estate. In court, a letter, or note, was given to the legal team. When they shared the contents with Mrs Jones Wister, she fainted. She later rallied, suggesting that William Senior had been of unsound mind, because he had made advances to her after her husband’s death. Whatever the truth of the matter, Anne won the case: took the money, and later made bequests to her sister-in law’s children in her own good time.
The alleged grandson, who inherited $750,000 in his grandfather’s will, had an adventurous life as a wealthy young man. He was eventually convicted of bigamy: ‘William Weightman III was the grandson of William Weightman, and a bigamist who tried to commit suicide in 1926. In 1925 he was convicted of bigamy and sentenced to two years in prison. On July 10, 1926 he was sent back to Auburn Prison by a grand jury in Vineland, New Jersey. When his second wife left him he tried to commit suicide with a pistol on November 10, 1926. He had four wives in all. (Wiki) He was interested in cars, planes, speed, women and the theatre, and the Press called him Wild Bill. I think he later received another $100,000 from Anne’s estate in 1933. Anne went on to marry Frederic Courtland Penfield (1855-1922), an orientalist and diplomat, in 1908. To celebrate her wedding she gave $1 million to charity, which must have come as an unpleasant surprise to the rest of the family. Penfield became the United States Ambassador to Austria-Hungary from 1913 to 1917. During the period of United States neutrality (1914-1917) in World War I, he took care of the interests in Austria-Hungary of several of the belligerents.
After her husband’s death, Anne had a strange little interlude dabbling in theatrical productions in New York, which seems out of character.
When she died, only $20 million of the original estate remained.