Named for a Baptist preacher by a father who had been kicked out of a church for drinking, and grandson of the illegitimate son of a philandering Quaker, Henry Keeling Ellyson was born in Richmond, Virginia on July 31, 1823, some three months after and 500 miles north of his future to-be-illustrious grandson Gordon Ellyson's [Naval aviator number one] illustrious future posthumous in-law Thomas Reade Rootes Cobb [Confederate general killed at Fredricksburg].
At 14, Ellyson began work as an apprentice printer at the Southern Churchman and the Religious Herald. The first was Episcopalian, the second Baptist, and the second won out. The rest of his life was governed—in which order it is uncertain—by journalism, religion, politics and family. The Ellyson plot in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery (which, for a parenthetical within a parenthetical, overlooks the James from a truly grand promontory) is filled with tombstones boasting of missionary work in Asia, so one assumes that Baptist zeal was toward the top of the stack.
In 1841, at 18, he turned entrepeneurial, setting up his own small-job printing office and a never-to-be-abandoned devotion to the newspaper trade. In 1843, he married Elizabeth Pinckney Barnes, ten years his senior, born in Philadelphia and raised in Richmond, and an ardent Baptist. They had three sons—Theo, J. Taylor and William—and one daughter, Bessie, who lived past childhood. Two girls died when still very young, and one son, Luther Barnes Ellyson, whilst tripping over a loaded gun during a Darwinian hunting trip at the age of fourteen. In the 1850s he dove into politics, serving as a city representative to the Virginia legislature in 1854-55, and as sheriff of Henrico County from 1857 through 1865. Following the 1865 Richmond fire, he and James A. Cowardin revived the Richmond Daily Dispatch newspaper, forerunner of today's Richmond Times Dispatch. In 1870 he was elected mayor of Richmond, at which point things (beyond the realm of Baptist ministries in Asia) got interesting.
...to be continued shortly [6/8/03] ...
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