Digital Resources Member Directory

Member Directory (1847 - 1922)

Notable MembersClub FoundersSearch TextsSearch All
Club Founders

The concept of the Century Association was proposed during a meeting of the Sketch Club in December 1846, when it was decided to found an association composed of authors, artists, and amateurs of the arts and letters. On 9 January 1847, a group drawn from “upwards of one hundred” prospective members reportedly were invited to attend an organizational meeting to be held on 13 January. This invitation list is unfortunately not extant, but the following forty-two members, as first reported by John H. Gourlie in “The Origins and History of ‘The Century’” (1856), are generally accepted to have been founders of the club.

This may be an imperfect list, however. Several of the names were never printed in club rosters, which may suggest they declined election; on the other hand, complete member rosters in the earliest years are currently available only for 1851, 1854, 1855, 1857, and 1860, and the club has always recognized each of the names as a founding member.

There is also evidence of some errors of omission. Member James Henry Beard was not acknowledged in historic membership rosters until 1940, when his son Daniel Carter Beard donated a copy of his father’s initiation fee receipt dated 11 March 1847. Beard did not go through the admissions process, which suggests he was among the first hundred who were invited to join and thus could justifiably be considered a charter member. Other members who apparently skirted the admissions process include William H. Appleton, George W. Austen, Frederic Diaper, and Henry Lawrence.

The poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790–1867), widely celebrated in his day and memorialized with a monument in the Poet’s Walk in Central Park, was said to have been an early Century member in Gourlie’s reminiscences. Halleck had indeed participated in the Sketch Club, but no other club records indicate he was in the initial group of invited Centurions or was subsequently elected. Finally, a letter dated 7 April 1848 in the Margaret Clapp Library of Wellesley College signed by twenty-one individuals identified as members of the Century includes the name of John Neilson Jr. (1799–1851) among twenty other known members. (The letter was an invitation to John G. Chapman to set a date for a going-away dinner at the Century before his departure on a trip to London.) Neilson, a brother-in-law of Hamilton Fish, was an insurance executive and amateur artist who, like Halleck, had attended meetings of the Sketch Club. If further corroborating evidence supporting their membership is someday uncovered, one or both of these names may be officially entered on the rolls.

Jump to:  A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

1–20 of 42 results. Next >

1 of 3
Next

About The Member Directory (1847-1922)

Sources & Credits

The Membership Directory (1847-1922) – formerly known as the Century Association Biographical Archive (or CABA) – a project of the Century Association Archives Foundation, was created to support its public mission to make the historical records of the Century Association accessible for scholarly research. The first phase of this resource was published in 2018 with a cutoff date of 1890 for members’ year of election, a date chosen to correspond with the final year the Century occupied its old clubhouse on East 15th Street. In 2020 the database was expanded to include Centurions elected between 1891 and 1922, more than doubling in size to 3,383 individual member profiles and thereby representing about 30 percent of the club’s entire historical membership roster.

As far as possible, information and documents have been drawn from the Century’s own archives. Key collections are described in the finding aid. Additional sources are also identified below.

Member Identifications
Most historic Century members were readily identified, although data gaps from the mid-nineteenth century posed numerous interesting challenges. In hundreds of cases, the identification of members required research outside club records: members who resigned were rarely given Century memorials, occupations were not routinely listed for new members until the early 1880s, and street addresses were not printed until 1888. Positive identifications were established through external clues, such as known social or professional relationships between the Century member and his proposers (or members he in turn sponsored). As of August 2020, all members had been identified with certainty.
Biographical Data
Genealogical websites such as www.ancestry.com and www.familysearch.org were favored resources in locating or verifying places of birth and death, residences, and occupations. Digitized searchable newspaper collections at www.newspapers.com, www.genealogybank.com, and www.newspaperarchive.com provided hundreds of informative obituaries and news accounts. City directories, university and professional society necrologies, digitized full-text books, and www.jstor.org all were heavily consulted, as were standard reference works such as Appletons’ Cyclopaedia of American Biography, King’s Notable New Yorkers, Dictionary of American Biography, American National Biography, and Grove Art Online. The New York City Municipal Archives’ birth and death records were viewed on microfilm (with an assist from online indexes at www.italiangen.org). Visits to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Trinity Cemetery in Upper Manhattan, and Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx all yielded birth and death data otherwise not discoverable. The website www.findagrave.com, hyperlinked throughout the site, was generally relied upon only for determining burial locations.
Professions
The professions of candidates for membership were identified in the minutes of the Admissions Committee and monthly member meetings beginning only in 1882; all these have been recorded in the database. To fill the void, more than 1,350 surrogate occupational designations were researched by the editor and are searchable here. The site does not differentiate between professions taken from club records and those that were obtained via external research. In 2024, more general “Discipline” categories were also assigned to aid researchers using the Directory. As these were based solely upon the data available they may not fully encompass an individual’s areas of professional pursuit. Any corrections or oversights may be directed to the Archivist.
Proposers, Dates of Election, and Membership Tenures
Information was gathered almost entirely from Admissions Committee minutes and monthly meeting minutes. Throughout the history of the club, more than 99.5 percent of proposers have been documented. The normal number of sponsors is two (a proposer and a seconder), but in earlier years one sponsor was sometimes sufficient or as many as seven were listed. In many instances only a surname is listed for a sponsor, creating ambiguities whenever there were multiple members by that name. Resignations were not routinely recorded until the 1870s, so the end dates of many members’ tenure are not known except as ranges of years owing to the sporadic publication history of membership rosters. (From the founding in 1847 until 1863, rosters are available only for 1851, 1854, 1855, 1857, and 1860. Additional rosters are known to have been published for the years 1853 and 1862 but have not been located.)
Memorials Texts

The earliest tributes to deceased members took the form of resolutions passed at monthly meetings. Beginning in the 1860s, the club Secretary prepared a necrology and some descriptive text for the annual meetings held each January; over time these gradually lengthened and became far more informative. Composing the memorials remained the duty of the Secretary until 1950, when the club historian George W. Martin was assigned the task.

This collection includes slightly modified excerpts from two more contemporary resources, both by permission of their authors. William A. Frosch’s “Our Original Amateurs” (2010), a publication of the club’s Committee on the Archives, contains twenty-four sketches of the founding members who were not professional authors or artists. James Charlton’s capsule biographies for his “Centurions on Stamps” exhibition (2011) cover twenty-one subjects elected before 1891, which are reproduced here as well.

In preparing texts to upload to the website, the earliest memorials were transcribed from manuscript minutes. Later tributes in published book format were scanned on Bookeye 4 equipment, converted via an OCR process to .txt files, then imported into Microsoft Word. A team of volunteer proofreaders checked the files against the originals to ensure accuracy.

Portrait Photographs

The vast majority of the photographs were drawn from several folio albums of member portraits that the Century began compiling in 1862. Several images betray evidence of water or moisture damage; some of the album volumes in the Member Photograph Albums Collection have been disassembled and their contents dispersed. The photographs were scanned on a Bookeye 4 and cropped individually and sized to a uniform 3:2 aspect ratio.

Twelve rare images of various Century founders come from three copies of a book entitled The Sketch Club 1830–1847: Founders of the Century 1847. Each copy is unique, with slightly differing contents and sequence of photographs. One was Daniel Huntington’s personal copy in which he labeled the photos with the names of his Sketch Club and Century friends. The Frederick Hill Meserve Collection consists of two volumes of portraits in carte-de-visite format that were donated to the club in 1954 by the eminent collector of historical photographs and Lincolniana. A selection of 143 photographs from this collection has been included in the website.

Forms of Citation

For memorials texts, please cite the byline, subject’s name, original print publication, and the URL for the digital resource:
Cary, Edward. Memorial of Eastman Johnson. Century Association Yearbook (1907). In Century Association Membership Directory (1847-1922). Available at www.centuryarchives.org/member-directory. Accessed on December 6, 2018.

For portraits, please cite the subject name, original location, and the URL for the digital resource:
Portrait of Eastman Johnson. Century Association Archives, Member Photograph Albums Collection, Album 2, Leaf 62. In Century Association Member Directory (1847-1922). Available at www.centuryarchives.org/member-directory. Accessed on December 6, 2018.

For all other information, cite as follows:
Century Association Member Directory (1847-1922), q.v. “Eastman Johnson.” Available at www.centuryarchives.org/member-directory. Accessed on December 6, 2018.

Credits

Timothy J. DeWerff, Website Concept, Researcher, and Editor
Alexander S. Vastola, Scanning Technician and Proofreader
Nathaniel Granor, Data Engineer and Website Developer
Brynn White, Current Administrator

The editor wishes to acknowledge the contributions of scores of predecessors who have chronicled or preserved the Century Association’s history. There are too many to list individually, but Theodore Bolton, Viggo Conradt-Eberlin, Henry S. F. Cooper Jr., William L. Daniel, James H. Duffy, John Durand, Russell A. Flinchum, Sylvia Franklin, Rodman Gilder, John H. Gourlie, Jonathan Harding, Augustus R. Macdonough, Allan Nevins, Elihu Root, and George Templeton Strong merit special mention.

—TJD, December 2018