Background
William Thompson Walters was born on May 23, 1820 in Liverpool, Pa. , the son of Henry and Jane (Thompson) Walters, both of Scotch-Irish descent. The father was a country merchant in comfortable circumstances.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Businessman merchant art collector
William Thompson Walters was born on May 23, 1820 in Liverpool, Pa. , the son of Henry and Jane (Thompson) Walters, both of Scotch-Irish descent. The father was a country merchant in comfortable circumstances.
Impressed by the unexploited mineral resources of western Pennsylvania, his father sent him to Philadelphia to be trained as a civil and mining engineer.
Returning to his native district, young Walters explored it on foot and horseback. He was first employed at an iron furnace at Farrandsville, then in Lycoming County, where about this time the first iron was made on a commercial scale with coke. Soon afterwards he entered the employ of Burd Patterson at the Pioneer Furnace, Pottsville, where the practicability of smelting iron with anthracite was demonstrated. In 1841, when the canal along the Susquehanna River from Columbia, Pa. , to Havre de Grace, Md. , was opened, Walters removed to Baltimore and entered the produce commission business, trading particularly with Pennsylvania. As a result of this business interest, he later became the controlling director in the Baltimore & Susquehanna Railroad (afterwards the Northern Central), connecting Baltimore with the canal. In 1847 he formed a partnership with Charles Harvey in the foreign and domestic liquor trade, in which he continued until 1883, when his expanding interest in railroads absorbed his time. Walters' commission business, which early shifted from Pennsylvania to Virginia and the Carolinas, was responsible for his important participation in the railroad development of the South. He became intimately acquainted with Southern merchants and planters, making interest on loans to them as well as receiving commissions on the sale of their produce. An investor in a steamship line between Baltimore and Savannah, and in other water routes, he was quick to recognize that the many railroads being built in the South between 1840 and 1860, unconnected though they were, would prove the successful rivals of steamboat transport. Often these little railroads, joining the cities on the fall line and spreading westward from the Southern ports, fell into financial difficulties from lack of co"rdination and from over-expansion, and before the Civil War, Walters, with a few Baltimore associates, began buying up these "ribbons of rust, " and was about to commence their consolidation, centering upon Wilmington and Norfolk, when the war compelled abandonment of such plans. Walters had opportunity to employ his organizing ability two decades later, however, when the Southern roads, physically ruined by the war, were financially wrecked by the depression following 1873. A primary reason for cooperation between the roads was the development of truck farming in eastern North Carolina and Virginia, which required efficient through service. Walters led the cooperative movement through the successive stages of informal agreements, physical connection and formal contracts for handling through traffic, and the holding company, and was ready at the time of his death to begin with outright absorption and consolidation. Walters began buying pictures when a young man, and while resident in Paris from 1861 to 1865 - because his active Southern sympathies made him unpopular in Baltimore - he became intimately acquainted with many painters. He attended the Paris expositions of 1867, 1878, and 1889, and that of Vienna in 1873, buying many canvases of contemporary painters, such as Corot, Munkacsy, Millet, Millais, Delacroix, Detaille, Fortuny, GÏrÏme, and Alma-Tadema. He compiled Antoine-Louis Barye, from the French of Various Critics (1885), for which he wrote a preface. His paintings, in addition to an important collection of Eastern ceramics, crowded his Baltimore home and were placed later in two galleries added to his house, which were occasionally opened to the public. These collections were enormously enlarged by his son, who at death bequeathed them, with a new gallery, to the city of Baltimore. Walters was the patron of poor artists, the chief of whom was the sculptor William Henry Rinehart, who began life as a stone-cutter in Maryland. Walters was a trustee of the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, and chairman of the art gallery committee of the Peabody Institute, Baltimore.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
He was a small man, with a thin, straight nose, walrus mustache, stubbly beard and hair, and keen eyes. A trait noticeable to his friends was a fondness for trinkets of gold and enamel, of which he gathered a large number.
In 1845 he married Ellen Harper of Philadelphia, who died in London in 1862.