THE CLEMENS FAMILY

To appreciate the coin collection of James Biddle Clemens, it may help to learn a little about his family, beginning with a wealthy grandfather.

John Mullanphy was born in Northern Ireland in 1758. He joined the Irish Brigade in the French Army at age twenty. He returned to Ireland in 1789 and married a woman half his age, sixteen- year-old Elizabeth Browne (1770-1843). He moved to Philadelphia with his wife and child in 1792, perhaps in search of a half disme. He was successful as a merchant. He moved west to Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1799 and built a house of brick. He returned to Philadelphia and Baltimore to acquire inventory for his store.

He saw St. Louis as a place with good prospects and moved there in 1804, shortly after the Louisiana Purchase. At the time it was a town of about a thousand people, mostly French Canadians. There he served as a justice of the peace. He was a cotton merchant before the war and was in New Orleans in 1815 when general Andrew Jackson seized his cotton bales to build breastworks for defense. At the end of the war, Mullanphy made a great profit selling cotton when the market reopened.

He returned to St. Louis and invested in real estate. He was a philanthropist who contributed land for the first hospital in St. Louis and brought in the Sisters of Charity to serve the sick. He donated land for the Sisters of the Sacred Heart to build a school for orphans.

He and his wife had fifteen children. His son, Judge Bryan Mullanphy (1809-1853) was Mayor of St. Louis for one year 1847-48. He set up a charity for the relief of immigrants.

His daughter Anne (1800-1846) married Major Thomas Biddle (1790-1831), brother of Nicholas Biddle who was the last president of the Second Bank of the United States. Thomas died following a duel with Senator Spencer Pettis (1802-1831).

Another daughter, Elizabeth Frances Browne Mullanphy (1812-1853) married St. Louis merchant James Clemens, Jr.

Mullanphy died on August 29, 1833. He was called the first millionaire in St, Louis and the wealthiest man in the Mississippi Valley.

James Clemens was born in Danville, Kentucky, on October 29, 1791. He went into business with his uncle, James Clemens Sr. (1775-1814). He moved to Sparta, Tennessee, in 1811. During the War of 1812, He and his uncle sold saltpeter to the government to make gunpowder. He moved to St, Louis in 1816. He had a successful dry goods store until retirement in 1846.

In 1832, he was elected a director of the Bank of the United States in St, Louis.

James married Elizabeth Frances Browne Mullanphy (1812-1853) on January 10, 1833. At 20, she was half his age. Upon the death of her father in 1833, she brought a large inheritance into their marriage. They had twelve children with six living to survive him.

 
The Clemens Mansion

In 1859-60, Clemens built a thirty-room Greek Revival mansion in St. Louis noted for the use of ornamental iron. The ironwork included a death mask of his late wife. The building was on the National Register of Historic Places but was destroyed by fire in 2017.

James died on January 12, 1878, and is buried with many family members at Calvary Cemetery and Mausoleum in St, Louis.

The settlement of his estate was complicated and controversial. An eleven-year-old will was mailed to the court from an unknown source. In that will he disinherited two daughters for "disobedient and disrespectful conduct" and a son for "extravagant and improper conduct" and provided for his estate to be divided among his three other children. Since that will was written, some children had died and James Biddle Clemens died six weeks after his father. Newspapers reported the value of the estate to exceed $5,000,000. It was probably less than that amount.

The remaining heirs met and proposed a settlement that the court accepted. The estate was divided and distributed in five equal parts to the four surviving children including the two disrespectful daughters, and to Eliza A. W. Clemens, the widow of James B. Clemens.

James B. Clemens was born in St, Louis on January 18, 1836, the son of James Clemens, Jr and Elizabeth Mullanphy Clemens.

He married Eliza Amelia Wilhelmina von Schrader (1843-1920) on May 27, 1868, in Belleville, Illinois. They had no children.

He followed his grandfather and father in the real estate business. He served on the Mullanphy Board of Relief, set up by his uncle Bryan Mullanphy.

He died on February 27, 1878, and is buried at Calvary Cemetery and Mausolem in St. Louis. His March 7, 1878, obituary in The Osceola Sun stated, "Mr. Clemens had a taste for numismatics. and had the largest collection of ancient moneys in the West.

His collection was sold at auction by Edward Cogan on October 22-25, 1878. The sale included 13 Greek coins and 31 Roman coins. That is not an impressive collection.

James Biddle Clemens and Samuel Langhorn Clemens were third cousins. Apparently Samuel had some fame beyond numismatics. You can look him up.

As prosperous merchants, father and son could have gone through the daily receipts and set aside interesting coins for a collection. As new coins were issued, they could have set aside uncirculated examples. With his banking connections, James Clemens, Jr. may have had access to much of the foreign coinage processed through foreign exchanges in St. Louis.

They collected at a time when there were no local con clubs, no local coin dealers and little competition for their collecting interests.

High denomination gold coins did not circulate much through American commerce. They would have been available through banks. World gold coins were available at the current exchange rate. Collectable pioneering and territorial gold coin and California gold pieces were probably available near their bullion value. Either Clemens could easily afford them.

The Clemens medals and tokens were more of an accumulation rather than a systematic collection. Without coin dealers at the time in St. Louis, Clemens found them in the market somewhere. One lot that impressed me was a boxed set of six wooden medals from the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition.

The Clemens Collection is important as a collection formed on the western frontier in the first century of the United States. It was formed without the benefit of local dealers, investment advisors or telemarketers. Clemens may have supplemented his collection with mail orders from eastern dealers but that is not documented.

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
JAMES BIDDLE CLEMENS (1836-1878) (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n21a12.html)

 

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