John Flannery was an American banker and cotton merchant, who was regarded as a financial authority and as a man of good safe judgment, whose sagacity had been strikingly shown in private business and in public finance.
Background
John Flannery was born on November 24, 1835, in Nenagh, Ireland, the son of John Flannery and Hannah Hogan. The famine and revolutionary period of the middle nineteenth century ruined the elder Flannery; whereupon, in 1851, the father and son emigrated to the United States.
The father, however, remained only a short time and died on the vessel that was taking him back to Ireland.
Career
Flannery, after holding minor clerical positions in various places, settled down permanently in Savannah late in 1854.
Fond of martial affairs, he joined a noted military organization, the "Irish Jasper Greens, " and on the outbreak of the Civil War, went, with the rank of a junior lieutenant, as a volunteer with that company, into the Confederate army. Promoted to a captaincy (October 1862), Flannery served throughout the war, returning in 1865 to Savannah.
Resuming his interrupted business at the age of thirty, he occupied for nearly half a century a position of leadership in his community. He became a partner in the cotton-commission firm of L. J. Guilmartin & Company, which after some years was dissolved and reorganized under the title of John Flannery & Company.
Twenty-four years after this reorganization Flannery incorporated his concern as the John Flannery Company (1901) for the purpose of admitting into the business a number of the younger men who had served him long and faithfully. This corporation was for years one of the most important cotton-houses in Savannah. Flannery retired from business in 1906.
During his long career, he was always among the leaders in enterprises undertaken for the good of Savannah.
He was an organizer and director and for twenty-five years the president of the Southern Bank, later the Citizens and Southern Bank, one of the strongest of the Southern financial institutions.
Flannery was a member of the committee that erected the Cotton Exchange building and was president of the Exchange; he was for many years chairman of the City Sinking Fund Commission; as an organizer of the Savannah Hotel Company he took part in the construction of the famed De Soto Hotel; and he was a director in many other corporations, railway, utility, and manufacturing.
He was active also in the civic, social, religious, and philanthropic life of the community. John Flannery died on May 9, 1910, in Savannah, Georgia.
Achievements
Religion
A devoted Catholic, he established a fund of $50, 000 (since grown to $100, 000), the interest of which was to be used to aid Catholic enterprises in Georgia.
Views
John Flannery was for fifty years an ardent supporter of the Jasper Greens military company.
Membership
John Flannery was vice-president of the Hibernian Society, and took a keen interest in the Georgia Historical Society.
Personality
In his personal life John Flannery was simple and unostentatious.
Connections
In 186, John Flannery married Mary Ellen Norton of Taliaferro County, Georgia, and they had six children.