The Real Thomas and Mary Rathbone
Thomas Rathbone served in the US Army before and during the Civil War.
In the final chapters of A River Divides, fictional Virginian Betsy Henderson meets a very real Washington City resident calling himself Thomas Rathbone and his wife, Mary. Betsy and the couple become fast friends, perhaps sensing a common flight from their pasts.
Thomas Rathbone was born under a different name—John Carling—to John Carling and Mary Ann Woodcock Carling on October 9, 1833 in Otley, Yorkshire, England. He, still calling himself John Carling, “a bachelor,” married Manchester native and “spinster” Mary Humphries, two years his senior, in Lancashire in 1855. So when they met Betsy, they would have been in their early thirties and been married a little more than eight years.
The Carlings-turned-Rathbones eventually had seven children, three of whom—John, Godfrey or “Teddy”, and Mary Louisa—were born before they migrated to the US. Their fourth child, Bertha, was born in late August 1864 and lived until 1957.
In England, Thomas worked as a clerk for the Electric Telegraph Company. He changed his name–according to family lore–to escape debtors’ prison for his brother’s debts and fled to America just before the Civil War. He left his family in England, expecting them to follow as soon as possible.
John, now Thomas, joined the US Army in May 1860 and served as a private, then lance corporal, in New York harbor until July. He recruited for the army in New York from then until early 1863. Presumably by this time, Thomas had suffered hearing loss due to close work with cannons.
Thomas Rathbone, previously John Carling, was a founding member of the Lafayette Post of the Grand Army of the Republic.
On January 2, 1863, he began working in the office of the Adjutant General of Army, Washington City. His wife and three children joined him in the US on Good Friday, 1863, after crossing the Atlantic on the ship Vanguard, and shortly thereafter he left the army (as a sergeant) to work as a civilian clerk in the office of the US Provost Marshal General. He became an US citizen January 8, 1864.
From July 1864 to January 1865, he served as First Lieutenant in the War Department Rifles, defending the capital.
After the war, he served as clerk in auditor’s office of the US Treasury, where he served for many years as chief of the bookkeeper’s division. He was also for a while a correspondent for The Evening Star and a founding member of the Washington, DC-based Lafayette Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. He was very knowledgeable of law and practice in his clerk work and was referred to as “the walking encyclopedia” of the Treasury Department. He retired in 1920 at about age 87 because the law required it.
In 1855, Mary Humphries married John Carling (later Thomas Rathbone) in Lancashire, England. They had seven children.
At some point, Thomas purchased and moved his family to the Octagon House in Hyattsville, Maryland. According to the book Images of America: Hyattsville, the Octagon house “was built by Bladensburg druggist Henry T. Scott around 1853, its construction was attributed to a Mr. Swain. The spacious entry hall contained the stairs and opened on the main floor into only two rooms, the upper levels having two large rooms and one small one. An addition, the ‘trailer,’ was added to accommodate larger families.”
Mary and Thomas Rathbone moved their family to the Octagon House in Hyattsville, Maryland.
The house was “bulldozed in 1955 for construction on the spacious grounds of a row of modern houses on little lots.”
Mary Rathbone passed away January 5, 1923, and Thomas followed May 1, 1924. Mary and Thomas are both buried at Ft. Lincoln Cemetery in Brentwood, Maryland.
(My apologies to the real Mr. and Mrs. Rathbone for the liberties I took with their lives in A River Divides).
They were John Carling and Mary Humphries when they married in England, 1855.
Sources:
Damron, Andra on behalf of the Hyattsville Preservation Association. “Images of America: Hyattsville.” Arcadia Publishing. 2008. Print.
Puerzer, Ellen. October 2009. Hyattsville. Inventory of Older Octagon, Hexagon and Round Houses. October 22, 2013. From http://www.octagon.bobanna.com/MD.html.
Thomas and Mary Rathbone family records used in this post are in possession of and used by courtesy of Amy I. Anderson, 2nd great-granddaughter of Thomas and Mary Rathbone.
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