The Smitleys: Giving Back to the Electric City

This blog post was written by library volunteer Diane Leone.

Among notable people of the past who made important contributions to the city of Schenectady are banker Joseph Whitmore Smitley and his wife, Jane Ellis Smitley.  Their generosity of spirit and civic-mindedness made life better for many residents.

Smitley home at 802 Union Street, 1910.

Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library Photo Collection.

  Born March 4, 1848 in Pittsburgh, Joseph Smitley worked for the Pullman Palace Car Company beginning in 1868, first in Pittsburgh and then in Philadelphia.  He was sent to New York City to help manage the company in 1886, resigning in 1891 to help organize the Union National Bank in Schenectady.  In 1907 he left that institution for the newly established Schenectady Trust Company, for which he eventually became the first vice-president. He lived in a stately home at the corner of Union Street and Nott Terrace at what was then 802 Union Street, which later become the rectory of the Church of St. John the Evangelist.

Mr. Smitley was well-known for his charitable works.  He served on the boards of many organizations, some of which he helped establish.  One of his primary philanthropic beneficiaries was Ellis Hospital.  He wanted to create a monument to his mother, Kiziah Whitmore Smitley.  As president of the Board of Managers at Ellis, he knew that there were no residences for nurses employed at the newly constructed institution. With his own money, he built the Whitmore Home for Nurses, which was furnished at the expense of his brother, John H. Smitley of Pittsburgh, who was also responsible for establishing an endowment to sustain the home. An article in The American Journal of Nursing (1907) paints an attractive picture of the facility:

The floors are all of hard wood beautifully supplied with oriental rugs.  The library and reception rooms are most attractive.  Mr. Smitley has also furnished for the nurses a complete collection of all the standard works as well as a selected reference library. . . The sleeping apartments are models of their kind, with a sufficient number of bath appliances.  We cannot but hope that the nursing work and nurses may find such friends as Mr. Smitley.  A more fitting memorial than “Whitmore House” would be hard to find.

While very altruistic, Mr. Smitley’s wealth allowed him to indulge a personal pastime – driving.  His garage, featured in a 1912 issue of The Horseless Age magazine, was considered “one of the best-equipped private garages for the care and repair of automobiles in the city, and the owner has spared no expense in making his garage most complete and modern in every detail.”

Mr. Smitley's garage courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Photograph Collection and can be seen in The Horseless Age.

Sharing Mr. Smitley’s benevolent  spirit was his second wife. Born in Rotterdam in 1835, Jane Ann Schermerhorn was the widow of John C. Ellis, the president of Schenectady Locomotive Works, who died in 1884.  Four years later, she married J. W. Smitley, whose first wife, Ida, had died in 1886.  The second Mrs. Smitley’s philanthropy took many forms, including improving the lives of the less fortunate.

Elmer Avenue School in December 1973.
Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library
 Photo Collection.

  In 1905 she founded the Eastern Avenue School, later named the Elmer Avenue Neighborhood School (now closed) to educate the children of immigrants employed at GE and ALCO.  With funds that she obtained a few years earlier, Mrs. Smitley helped develop the surrounding area.  A former resident of Elmer Avenue who researched the street, expressed admiration for Mrs. Smitley in this Daily Gazette article of June 2016:

"She must have been an amazing woman. . . She had the first eight houses built on Elmer Avenue on spec, and it’s her name that’s on the original deeds. In 1903 that’s as far as the trolley went up, and those were the suburbs of Schenectady. She was from an old Dutch family, one of the first to arrive in Schenectady, and the Dutch really encouraged their women back then to be business women."

Postcard of the Home of the Friendless. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library Photo Collection.

Founded in 1868, The Home for the Friendless, which cared for destitute women without relatives or friends to help them, found its new home through the efforts of Mrs. Smitley.  With her generous $25,000 donation, the home was relocated from Green Street in the Stockade to 1519 Union Street, where it opened in 1908 and still stands. Partly as a result of Mrs. Smitley’s urging to upgrade its image, the name of the facility was changed to the Old Ladies’ Home.  Since 1968, it has been known as The Heritage Home for Women.  Mrs. Smitley also provided assistance to organizations such as the Salvation Army, particularly during holidays.

Postcard of the Mohawk Golf Club.
Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle
Library Photo Collection.

Her husband was involved in much of her charity and civic-minded work.  As one-time president of the Old Ladies’ Home, he was instrumental in facilitating its move to Union Street.  The couple also helped secure a new location for the Mohawk Golf Club, located originally on Rosa Road.  Mr. Smitley’s farm on Troy Road--once the property of his wife’s late husband, John C. Ellis--was sold to the club, which opened at 1849 Union Street in 1903, and has become its permanent location.

Predeceasing her husband by fourteen years, Mrs. Smitley died in 1911.  In her will, she bequeathed a total of $85,000 (worth around $2,258,000 today) to several organizations: $25,000 to the Hospital Association of Schenectady (Ellis Hospital), $20,000 to both the Old Ladies’ Home and the Children’s Home of Schenectady, and $5,000 each to The Schenectady Free Public Library, the YMCA and the YWCA. As one obituary read, “Perhaps but few will ever know the scope of her private generosity, and the words of advice and good counsel and expressions of sympathy and comfort that have gladdened many a heart.” She is buried at Vale Cemetery with her first husband, John Ellis, and their two children, Mary Cochran (nee Ellis) and John Elmer Ellis.

In 1913, Mr. Smitley married Margaret Neal McFarlane.  When he died on November 30, 1925, he had been retired from his business life for fifteen years. The Schenectady Gazette noted his reputation as “Well read, highly cultured, genial and convivial,...greatly respected and beloved as a businessman and friend.” He is buried in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Cemetery, along with his first wife, Ida.  He was survived by his son, Robert.

Mr. and Mrs. Smitley’s imprint on Schenectady will long be felt.

Additional photos of the Smitley's residence can be seen below:

The Jersey Ice Cream Company

This post was written by library volunteer Gail Denisoff.

The Jersey Ice Cream Factory on the corner of Liberty and Yates Street. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library and Archives.  

During the teens and twenties of the last century the familiar red and white sign of the Jersey Ice Cream Company beckoned to Schenectadians in search of a sweet treat.  Located on the corner of Liberty and Yates Streets, the Jersey Ice Cream Company was considered a state of the art facility providing “brick ice cream” and other novelty items. The building that the Jersey Ice Cream Company occupied was also notable for being the residence of President Chester A. Arthur during his time at Union College.

The former ice cream factory is looking good! It currently houses an antique store called The Katbird Shop. Courtesy of Google Maps.

The Jersey Ice Cream Company was formed in February of 1912, the successor of the old Staples Ice Cream Company that had been in operation for many years.  In May of 1912, an article in the Schenectady Gazette extolled the modern “cream making appliances” and the sanitary conditions of the plant due to daily scrubbing.  The facility had cold rooms that were kept at a constant temperature winter and summer to keep the ice cream frozen.  The silver lined freezers were surrounded by freezing liquids kept cold by blocks of ice harvested from the pond in what is now Steinmetz Park on Lenox Road.  Until it burned down in 1929, a large ice storehouse next to the pond was owned by the company to stock ice for its plant. 

The Jersey Ice Cream Factory's icehouse is seen in the background. Courtesy of the Grems-Doolittle Library and Archives.   

The ice cream was made with only fresh cream, granulated sugar and fruit flavors which made for a pure rich product.  It was sold in one quart or one pint bricks. The “Jersey Bricks” employed modern packaging for the time: the ice cream was frozen into a brick shape and then wrapped in vegetable parchment, sterilized paper and then put into a cardboard carton.  This “Famous Jersey Tripl-Seal” promised a hygienic product for the protection of their customers.  They offered a variety of flavors; vanilla, chocolate and strawberry, Neapolitan which contained all three and other rotating flavors such as coffee, pistachio, maple walnut, orange, pineapple, cherry custard and coconut, depending on the season.  At Christmastime they also offered novelty items such as Jersey Frozen Pudding, Holiday Moulds, Holiday Mousse and Bisque Toroni.  Advertisements stated that Jersey Ice Cream “is the most economical dessert for a family.  It requires no time for preparation, no fire for cooking and no materials.  You buy it ready for eating.  Every member of the family enjoys it and it is good for all.”

An advertisement showing the various flavors of Jersey's Brick Ice Cream. Courtesy of fultonhistory.com.

The company flourished under the leadership of F.T. Killeen, president and Lawrence M. McGinley, treasurer and general manager.  The company was very active in the community sponsoring baseball and bowling teams over the years and even had a checkers team that won the eastern regional championships.  They also donated ice cream for many civic events in Schenectady.  By August of 1929 the company had outgrown the Liberty and Yates Street plant and had purchased property on Brandywine Avenue for a new facility that would cost in the neighborhood of $200,000. The Schenectady Gazette reported that McGinley said the new plant “will be modern and sanitary in every respect and probably will take first rank among plants of its kind in the state. One of the features will be the predominance of electric refrigeration in the new plant. Mr. McGinley said that the growth of the business of the Jersey Company made it absolutely necessary to abandon the present quarters.”

Do you scream for ice cream? There's nothing that says Halloween more than a potato shaped ice cream mould. Courtesy of fultonhistory.com.

The new plant was never built.  In October of 1930, the Jersey Ice Cream Company certified to the New York Secretary of State that it had changed its corporate name to the Schenectady Ice Cream Company.  In November, the General Ice Cream Company, which had is main offices in Schenectady, acquired the Lenox Road and Brandywine Avenue properties which had belonged to the Jersey Ice Cream Company. In the spring of 1931, the company was taken over by General Ice Cream Company, a subsidiary of National Dairy Products, Inc. and Lawrence McGinley was made General Manager of both companies and chief territorial representative for National Dairy Products.  In July of 1931 the Schenectady Ice Cream Company filed with the Secretary of State a certificate of voluntary dissolution.  Later, Sealtest Dairy had a presence in the area, providing milk and ice cream products.  It was owned by National Dairy Products.  Currently, Hershey’s Ice Cream has a distribution plant on Albany Street in Schenectady.