John Patee

In the old Pentucket Cemetery at Haverhill, Massachusetts, stands a stone: “Here lies buried ye body of Peter Patee who died October the 19, 1724. Aged 80 years.'

Peter was born in England, probably in the parish of Lansdowne, Somersetshire, near Bath, in 1644. In Mt. Mora Cemetery, St. Joseph, Missouri, stands the stone marking the grave of his great-great-great-grandson, John Patee, who died February 13, 1868. Linking these two men from father to son were the lives of four Patee men, Richard, Seth, Eliphalet, and Edmond, and their participation in King Philip's War, the French-Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, and much other American history.

John Patee's father, Edmond, was born at Salem, New Hampshire, in 1764. When he was only fifteen years of age, in 1779, he enlisted in the Army as a fifer. He was at Valley Forge; he received a pension for his services in the Revolution; and he was called "Captain. After the war he married Elizabeth Turner, and settled in Pawlet, Vermont. He was a carpenter by trade. About 1794 he moved to Milford, New York, and in I 804 to Sempronius, New York. About 1820 his halfbrother and other members of his family moved to Delaware County, Ohio, and began to manufacture agricultural machinery. Edmond followed them to Westfield, in Delaware County, where he died in 1823.

John Patee was born August 8, 1794, at Milford, New York. He grew up on his father's farm, and became a schoolteacher at a salary of $5.oo a month. About 1830 he married Mary Cone, a Quaker, and began to travel through the states west of Ohio selling the agricultural machinery which had been manufactured by his relatives. Before 1840 he brought his family to the newly opened Platte Purchase of Missouri, and lived for several years at Rockhouse Prairie in the southeastern part of Buchanan County. He manufactured and sold "fanning machinery, weaving the wire screens himself. These were used to separate grain from the chaff. He was successful in this business and saved up the sum of $9,000.

In 1845 John Patee purchased two quarter sections of land adjoining, on the south and southeast of Joseph Robidoux's 'original town' which had been established in 1843. He paid $13.00 an acre for the 320 acres. Some of the land was marshy so he raised hay on it while it was being drained. This crop was in demand by the westwardbound wagon trains, and was sold profitably. He then had the land divided into lots and added to the town of St. Joseph. These additions extended south from Messanie Street to Mitchell Avenue and east from Sixth Street to Thirteenth, the area being known as "Pateetown. He also opened a drugstore-the first in St. Joseph-in May 1845, at the corner of Main and Francis Streets, where, in addition to drugs, he sold paints, oils, varnishes, surgeons' instruments, and schoolbooks. The town of St. Joseph was experiencing rapid growth: 1845 - 600; 1846 - 800; 1850 - 3460; 1860 - 8932. Patee was successful in the sale of his lots; he became quite prosperous, and was regarded as the wealthiest man in St. Joseph. In the 1860 census he was listed as owning $250,000 of real estate and $20,000 of personal property. As one of the leading businessmen, he was a stockholder in organizing the St. Joseph Branch of the Bank of the State of Missouri in 1857. He gave to the city a square block of land, now known as Patee Park. He built for his family a fine house with columns on the west side of Tenth Street between Patee and Olive.

Joseph Robidoux had known the rivers as the highways of Commerce and travel; John Patee believed in the railroads. He was much interested in the building of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad and sold forty acres of his land between Sixth and Eighth Streets, south of Olive, to the railroad for its terminal facilities. The first passenger station was at the southwest corner of Eighth and Olive Streets. In anticipation of the coming of the railroad, he built a hotel on his land at Twelfth and Penn Streets. This was the 110-room, four-story, brick Patee House constructed between 1856 and 1858. It was equipped with its own water and gas works and cost $180,000 to complete. The press reported:

This imposing structure is one of the finest in the Western cities. It is larger and certainly better furnished than any hotel in St. Louis. It is provided with all the conveniences used in the metropolitan cities. All honor to John Patee who had the head to conceive and the nerve to prosecute so grand an enterprise to its consummation.

In 1860 John Patee's younger brother, Alvah, came to St. Joseph. He had been born at Sempronius, New York, in 1804 and lived on his father's farm until he was sixteen, when the family moved to Delaware County, Ohio. His father died in 1823 when he was nineteen, so he and his brother Henry, two years older, managed the farm until 1860. In 1824. Alvah married Miss Roxanne Smith. Of their four children Eliphalet L., born 1827, and Almira E., born 1832, lived in St. Joseph. Alvah's first occupation after his arrival in St. Joseph was selling lightning rods in northwest Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas. In 1863 he bought a hundred acres of land south of the city limits and on the west slope of King Hill. There he raised grapes and made wine.

When the first through train of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad arrived on February 14, 1859, a cannon was fired from the top of the hill just north of the Patee House. The railroad opened its office in the building. A year later the freighting firm of Russell, Majors & Waddell, owners of the Central Overland & Pike's Peak Express Company, established headquarters in the hotel as they planned to launch the Pony Express from this eastern terminus. On April 3, 1860, the cannon was fired again as the first west-bound rider started off for the Pacific. The Patee House was the last outpost of comfortable life for the travelers to the West and a meeting place for travelers from all parts of the nation. The high points of the week were the arrivals and departures of the Pony Express riders. Their ten-day mail service over the two thousand miles to Sacramento, California, lasted only eighteen months, until the telegraph line was completed in October 1861.

The outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 brought difficult times to St. Joseph and to John Patee. Being a prominent man of wealth, a slave-owner, and a Southern sympathizer-as were many of the St. Joseph citizens-he was a marked man. He was called upon to supply provisions to groups of soldiers planning to join the Southern cause.

This he did, and was later arrested and thrown into jail for ‘aiding and abetting the enemy. He was sentenced to be hanged but his friends broke into the jail and released him. It was then necessary for him to hide out during much of the war. The provost-marshal took over the Patee House as his headquarters and many Union officers were quartered there. The federal soldiers were quartered in a camp of tents nearby. John Patee's property was neglected and declined in value. When the war ended he was no longer a wealthy man and was in debt. The war dragged on to its end in early 1865. John Patee decided to raise money by disposing of the Patee House in a lottery. Tickets were printed, seventy thousand in number, which were to be sold throughout the West at $2.oo each. Forty prizes were offered, the grand prize being the hotel itself. Ticket sales dragged, but it was promised that the drawing would be held as soon as sixty thousand of the tickets were sold. The date was finally selected as April 26, 1865. On that morning a block of one hundred tickets was returned from an agent in Illinois, unsold. In order to permit the raffle to go off on schedule, John Patee bought them himself. When the final drawing was made the next day, it was decided that the winning number was held by Mr. Patee himself. The lottery had been carefully supervised, however, and no charges of irregularity were ever made.

The lottery permitted John Patee to pay off some of his debts. It was clear by now that the Patee House was in the wrong location to be successful as a hotel. It was too far from the center of activity in Joseph Robidoux's 'downtown area. In September 1865 a girls' academy was opened by the Reverend James H. Robinson. It was called 'Patee College. In December 1868 the leading hotel in the downtown district, the 'Pacific House' at Third and Francis Streets, burned. To supply the need of hotel space the Patee House was again opened as a hotel and remained in business until the Pacific House was rebuilt in 1877. Again the building was used as a girls' school, 'St. Joseph Female College, until 1881. In that year it again opened as the World's Hotel and when Jesse James was killed in April 1882, his widow was escorted there. By that time the building had come to the ownership of Robert W. Donnell, who offered to give it to the city of St. Joseph for a girls' seminary, provided a fund of $10,000 was raised to furnish and equip the building. The efforts to raise this sum were unsuccessful so in 1886 Mr. Donnell sold the building to the R. L. McDonald Manufacturing Company for use as a shirt factory. It served that purpose until 1957. In 1964 it was sold to the Pony Express Historical Association and is now used as their museum.

John Patee did not long survive the war, and the traumatic decline in his fortunes. He died February 13, 1868, continuing to express by his will his native generosity. Among other bequests, he instructed his executor to pay over annually the interest on a thousand dollars to a former slave, Ann, for the duration of her life. His funeral was attended by the old settlers of the city and he was buried in Mt. Mora Cemetery.

The family relationships of the Patee descendants were complicated. John and Mary Patee had two children-Elijah C. born 1830 and Minerva born 1834. Alvah and Roxanne Patee had four children of whom Eliphalet L. was born in 1827 and Almira E. was born 1832. Elijah C., had a daughter, Emma, who married John Donovan, Jr. Their daughter, Emma, married Douglas McCaskey; their son is John D. McCaskey.

Minerva was married three times: Eli Denny, Blackford Griffin from Virginia, and Samuel Russell from Virginia. She died when only thirty-four leaving a son, Frederick Blackford Griffin, aged six. He was taken back to Virginia to be brought up by his grandfather. Eliphalet L. was a doctor in St. Joseph. His third wife was the widow of Elijah, his cousin.

Almira married James Wellington Clayton in Ohio and had two children-Frankie Clayton and Alvah P. Clayton. They decided to go to St. Joseph in 1865 and Mr. Clayton went ahead. When Almira arrived, she learned that her husband had died a short time before. Her second husband was Samuel Russell, who had been left a widower when Minerva, her cousin, died.

Frankie Clayton married Frederick Blackford Griffin, her second cousin, who had returned to St. Joseph. Alvah P. Clayton (Pet'; mayor of St. Joseph) married Miss Mattie Gunn, daughter of Dr. Robert Gunn, and had three sons: Robert Griffin Clayton, Edward Smith Clayton, and Alvah Patee Clayton, Jr.