Lampton family.
James J. Lampton (1817–87) was Jane Lampton Clemens’s “favorite cousin” (SLC 1897–98, 19, in MTA, 1:89). Born in Kentucky to Jennie and Lewis Lampton (the brother of Jane’s father), he studied both law and medicine and was a major in the Kentucky militia. He lived for a time in Louisiana, Missouri (about twenty-five miles southeast of Hannibal), but by the late 1850s had moved to St. Louis with his wife, four daughters, and a son. One daughter, Katharine, remembered Samuel Clemens’s frequent visits to the Lampton home when he was a Mississippi River pilot: “He and father were great cronies; both were keenly intellectual men, deeply interested in politics and all the great questions of the day” (Paxson, 4). Although a lawyer by profession, in the 1860s Lampton worked as a salesman and bill collector, then went into business for himself as a cotton and tobacco agent. His eldest daughter, Julia, regarded as the beauty of the family, went insane after learning of President Lincoln’s assassination; she tried to hang herself, claiming she was Judas Iscariot, and was placed in the St. Louis County Asylum. A relative who met Lampton in 1863 described him as “a man of tall, erect figure, with a military bearing. . . . a very pleasant gentleman; affable, cultured and well educated” (Keith, 9, 15). Mark Twain portrayed his cousin in The Gilded Age (1874) as Colonel Sellers, the incorrigible optimist who believes each new speculative venture will yield him a fortune. In his autobiography Clemens described Lampton as “a man with a big, foolish, unselfish heart in his bosom, a man born to be loved”; and he recalled seeing him in St. Louis in 1885: “He was become old & white-headed, but . . . the happy light in his eye, the abounding hope in his heart, the persuasive tongue, the miracle-breeding imagination—they were all there; & before I could turn around he was polishing up his Aladdin’s lamp & flashing the secret riches of the world before me” (SLC 1897–98, 21–22, 25–26, in MTA, 1:90, 91–92). “Jane Lampton Clemens” (86–87) includes a brief discussion of Lampton (St. Louis Census 1860, 649:353; Kennedy 1860, 303; Edwards 1867, 505; Varble, 29; Paxson, 4; Keith, 9, 15, 51; Turner, 593–94; MTBus, 121; James J. Lampton to SLC, 24 Dec 79, CU-MARK; Katharine Lampton Paxson to SLC, 13 Dec 1904, CU-MARK; “Died,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 3 Mar 87, 7).
James Andrew Hays (Jim) Lampton (1824–79), described in “Villagers” (98), was the son of Benjamin Lampton and his second wife, Polly Hays. He was the half brother of Jane Lampton Clemens, but as he was twenty-one years her junior, Jim generally kept company with her older children, Orion and Pamela. Born in Columbia, Kentucky, Lampton was about ten when his family moved to Florida, Missouri. [begin page 330] He was orphaned by the age of eighteen, and the following year, in December 1843, married Margaret Glascock. She died in early 1845, leaving a baby who survived only a few months. Lampton inherited property through this infant, including a slave named Lavinia. He settled briefly in Hannibal, where he rented the dwelling next to the Clemenses’ Hill Street home, then attended McDowell Medical College in St. Louis. In November 1849 he married Ella Evelina Hunter and moved to New London, about 10 miles south of Hannibal, evidently intending to practice medicine there. He soon retired from the profession, however, because he couldn’t bear the sight of blood. In New London he served as an agent for Orion Clemens’s Hannibal Western Union. By the fall of 1853 the Lamptons had returned to St. Louis, where Jim worked as a clerk in the surveyor general’s office until he became a steamboat agent in the mid-1860s. An active Mason, Lampton was described by a fellow lodge member as “a cultured gentleman, of large worldly experience and bright intelligence. . . . His genial disposition made him friends, and his frank and honest nature held them to him. He was a transparent man, and carried his whole true character in full view of the world” (Garrett, 7–8; Bible 1862; Woodruff, 24; Colonial Dames, 39; MTBus, 17–18; Varble, 161–63, 209–10; Hannibal Journal, 22 Nov 49, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; “Agents for the Western Union,” Hannibal Western Union, 10 Oct 50; SLC to Pamela A. Moffett, 3? Sept 53, 8 Oct 53, L1, 13, 17; Knox, 110; Edwards 1866, 533; “Death of A. J. H. Lampton,” St. Louis Missouri Republican, 4 Feb 79).
Ella Evelina (Hunter) Lampton (1834?–1904), the wife of James Andrew Hays Lampton, was born in Virginia. Her birthdate is uncertain, in part because she may have deliberately reduced her age by as much as ten years. A notation in Jane Clemens’s Bible records Ella’s birth in May 1834 (Bible 1817), making her fifteen years old when she married James Lampton, even though one history of the Lampton family reports her earlier marriage to a man named Plunkett (Keith, 9). Other documents give 1837 as Ella’s birthdate. Her work as a newspaper correspondent, disparaged in “Villagers,” remains unidentified. James and Ella Lampton took young Dr. John J. McDowell into their home as a boarder probably in the late 1850s; in 1860 he lived with them in Carondelet, a St. Louis suburb. Ella and John McDowell’s intimacy, as “Villagers” (98) notes, was “an arrant scandal to everybody with eyes.” Although Clemens and his aunt cared little for one another, he assisted her when his uncle’s death left her in straitened circumstances. In 1881 he wrote his sister, Pamela: “I have no feeling toward Ella (now) but compassion for her bereavements & hard fortune, & admiration of her courage & spirit in facing disaster with a brave front” (4 Feb 81, NPV, in MTBus, 136). During the 1880s he sent her money and tried to find secretarial work for her daughter, Catherine, but was increasingly irritated by requests for assistance. On the envelope to one of her letters, he wrote: “Neither read nor answered—a woman who has been all her life a coarse, vain, rude, exacting idiot” (Ella Lampton to SLC, 2 Aug 85, CU-MARK; St. Louis Census 1860, 656:637; St. Louis Census 1900, 893:15; Pamela A. Moffett to SLC, 7 Feb 81, CU-MARK; SLC to Charles L. Webster, 31 Mar 83, 17 May 83, NPV, in MTBus, 212–14; SLC to Annie Moffett Webster, 18 Oct 86, NPV, in MTBus, 366; “Funerals,” St. Louis Star, 23 Aug 1904, 8).
Catherine C. (Kate) Lampton (b. 1856), mentioned briefly in “Villagers” (98), [begin page 331] was the only child of Ella and James Andrew Hays Lampton. Born in St. Louis, she had the red hair that was considered a Lampton family trait (Bible 1817; MTBus, 136; Gould 1882, 683).
