Alfred Goldsborough Jones

A. Goldsborough Jones, the son of a sea captain from Canada, traveled much in his life.

He was born in Boston in 1821 to George G. Jones of Nova Scotia and Ann Forman of New York City and New Brunswick, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia with a B.A. and M.A. in 1840 and 1843 respectively and from Harvard with an LL.B in 1842 (his degrees are listed as for Alfred George Jones). He clerked for John L. Mason in Brooklyn and there met Theodorus Bailey Myers, who introduced him to his uncle, Theodorus Bailey, a Navy captain.

Was it disenchantment with the law or a severe case of wanderlust, or both, that led Jones in 1853 to decamp to San Francisco, where he invested in real estate and then set to sea from Honolulu on board the St. Mary’s, a sloop of war, commanded by Theodorus Bailey? The ship called at the Marquesas, where in 1842 Herman Melville had jumped ship and lived for a month among the inhabitants. Out of this experience came Melville’s first novel, Typee. Jones’s diary tells of his meeting the people that Melville knew, including the King, Te Moana, and his wife Queen Vaekehu.

Jones concluded, “Melville had a truthful basis for his book but that his imagination was very largely drawn upon for the attractive features of the same.”

In a few years, we find Jones on the board and the managing director of the Sixth Avenue Railroad, which had a route from the intersection of Chambers and Hudson Streets originally up to Sixth Avenue and 43d Street and by 1865 up to 59th Street. The board had three other Centurions on it, Frederick J. De Peyster, Charles H. Marshall, and Waldo Hutchins. Another director was Lorillard Spencer, on whose yacht, Gipsey, Jones took many a cruise.

The New York street railways were horse-and-mule-drawn along rails buried in the streets. The line owned 393 horses and mules (the mules were being sold off and horses substituted. About three horses died every year).

They were also segregated. The North, and New York City, invented Jim Crow before the South did. The Sixth Avenue Railroad was the defendant in more than one case brought by “Colored” patrons who had been forcibly evicted from their streetcars. In a dispiriting number of cases, the courts and juries found in favor of the railroads. Maria Jenkins and the Reverend G. W. Pennington were evicted from the Sixth Avenue Railroad, brought suits, and both lost. The Sixth Avenue and the other railroads eventually saw the light and by the mid-1860s had desegregated their cars.

The Civil War brought the infamous Draft Riots to the City. The Colored Orphan Asylum was adjacent to the current Century clubhouse at 43d Street and Fifth Avenue. Jones’s Depot for the Sixth Avenue Railroad was down the block at 43d and Sixth, right behind the Asylum. On July 13, 1863, when rioters came uptown after the Asylum, which they burned to the ground (all 223 orphans escaped out back and survived), Jones corralled his horses and took them to the safety of a vacant lot at 43d Street and Broadway, after he had taken the streetcars up to Central Park. He described what happened next:

Tuesday, July 14 ’63

Riot still raging fearfully—many lives lost and property destroyed. About 12 o’clock a crowd of rioters brandishing long clubs entered the depot to look for men working & compel them to join their ranks—they seized me & dragged me to the street. I promenaded arm and arm with a drunk Irishman & was let go upon making a “speech against the draft”—with word & matter of the draft entirely left out. They said I was all right & left me after shaking hands generally. . . . I slept after 1 at night in a car in the Av. in front of depot.

During the war, Jones served as an adjutant to General Asboth in Kentucky.

Jones was nominated for the Century in 1856 by Clarence Livingston and seconded by Thomas R. Foster. His diary is replete with “evening at Century.” He made pithy comments about the entertainment and other goings-on. The 1864 club election of G. C. Verplanck as president was a contentious matter, Verplanck being thought a Copperhead and “was believed to be disloyal.” Verplanck lost the election to George Bancroft by a vote of 110 to 62.

Among other events he duly recorded: a motion to chide the Admissions Committee was voted down in 1858 (imagine chiding the Admissions Committee!); the Twelfth Night Festival (1859) was “rather a farce”; “drank too much punch at Century and spent the next day in bed” (1859); “a warm discussion with Edward Cooper who is a democrat lamenting that ‘whoever is not now an abolitionist at heart is either a fool or a knave’”; played billiards with Albert Bierstadt (1865) and complained about the food, especially a “boar’s head” dinner.

He was elected to the Admissions Committee in 1864 in a contested election (there seemed to be lots of contested elections in the early days of the Century). He also served on a committee to revise the by-laws. In 1865 he proposed an unsuccessful amendment to the constitution to increase the number of members from 400 to 500. The By-Laws Committee would meet at the Depot of the Sixth Avenue Railroad, thus becoming the first Century meeting on West 43d Street.

Jones was an inveterate theater and operagoer. He heard Henry Ward Beecher preach and because of the crowd stood in the side aisle. He played billiards at the Century and bowled tenpins, dutifully recording his scores (194 was his highest) and played euchre and chess. He skated in Central Park and traveled.

Jones died at his home at 315 Fifth Avenue on April 11, 1868, at age forty-six. He was survived by his brother, William B. Jones, and his sisters, Catherine Griffing and Georgiana Onativia.

Alexander Sanger
2020 Century Association Yearbook