Spencer Proudfoot Shotter
Born1855
Wellington County, Canada West
DiedDecember 5, 1920(1920-12-05) (aged 64–65)
NationalityCanadian
OccupationBusinessman
Known forChairman of the American Naval Stores Company
Greenwich Plantation

Spencer Proudfoot Shotter (1855 – December 5, 1920)[1] was a Canadian businessman.[2] A naval-stores magnate, he purchased Greenwich Plantation in Thunderbolt, Georgia, and renamed it Greenwich Place. The site is now occupied by Greenwich Cemetery.

Personal life

Shotter was born in Wellington County, Canada West, in 1855, to Spencer Lough Shotter and Mary Proudfoot.[3] His father was a native of Kent, England.[4] Shotter was a grandnephew of William Proudfoot, a Canadian politician.[4]

He married Isabelle Eagle Davis, daughter of George Davis, in 1881.[3][5] She died a year later, shortly after the birth of daughter Isabel, the couple's only child.[3]

Shotter remarried, to Elizabeth Wallace Owens (whose grandfather, George Welshman Owens, owned Savannah's Owens–Thomas House), and had four more children: daughters Elizabeth (1886), Eleanor (1888) and Mary (1891), and son Spencer Owens (1892).[3]

He began his career around 1885 in Wilmington, North Carolina,[4] but made his fortune after moving south to Savannah, Georgia,[4] by processing the wood from Georgia's pine forests to make turpentine, used in shipbuilding. He established the American Naval Stores Company, which led to the creation of enough jobs to assist in Savannah's exit from the post-Civil War depression.[3]

In 1898, two years after purchasing Greenwich Plantation, he built an opulent Beaux-Arts mansion, said in several publications to have rivaled the Vanderbilts' Biltmore Estate.[6] It had double colonnades, twenty-eight columns on three sides, each measuring twenty-eight inches in diameter and more than twenty feet tall.[7] It had extensive gardens containing expanses of lawn, boxwood hedges, imported plants, and decorative pools.[6] He renamed the location Greenwich Place.[7] The mansion stood until 1923, at which point it burned down.[7]

Shotter also owned Shadow Brook in the Berkshires of Massachusetts between 1905 and 1912, but was still a resident of Savannah.[8]

In 1909, Shotter lost his fortunes (and was jailed for three months)[9] after becoming embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit.[10] The United States Supreme Court decided in the defendants' favor on June 9, 1913, reversing an earlier judgment.[10][11]

In 1917, he sold Greenwich Place to Doctor Henry Norton Torrey, a brain surgeon from Detroit.[12][13]

Shotter was a member of the Chatham Hunt Club, alongside Mills B. Lane Sr,[14] and of the Georgia Historical Society.[4]

Death

Shotter died in his sleep on December 5, 1920, aged 64 or 65. He had been visiting daughter Isabel in New York City,[3] and was staying at the Hotel La Salle.[4] After a funeral service at Savannah's Christ Church,[4] he was interred in Savannah's Bonavanture Cemetery. His second wife and two of their children, Elizabeth and Isabel, were also buried in Bonaventure upon their deaths in 1935, 1956, and 1966, respectively.[3]

Shotter's mother, a native of Scotland, preceded him in death by six months. She lived to the age of 90, and was socially active until her death.[4]

Shotter is mentioned in John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994). Berendt states Shotter is a forebear of Savannah district attorney Spencer Lawton, before describing Greenwich Place.[15]

References

  1. ↑ Bisback Family Antiques, August 25, 2016
  2. ↑ "Savannah Weighs Value of Art and History Amid COVID-19 Crisis" - TheCurrentGA.org, September 12, 2020
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Spencer Proudfoot Shotter (1855-1920) - HouseHistree". househistree.com. Retrieved 2023-03-09.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 "Spencer P. Shotter". Oil, Paint and Drug Reporter. 98: 26. December 13, 1920.
  5. ↑ De Leon, Thomas Cooper (1909). Belles, Beaux and Brains of the Sixties. G. W. Dillingham Company. p. 98.
  6. 1 2 "BEFORE MIDNIGHT, BONAVENTURE AND THE BIRD GIRL EXHIBITION GUIDE" - Telfair Museums
  7. 1 2 3 Greenwich Cemetery - Forest City of the South
  8. ↑ "The Berkshire Hunt", New York Times, September 16, 1906
  9. ↑ FIVE MEN CONDEMNED TO SERVE TIME AND PAY FINES - Los Angeles Herald, May 15, 1909
  10. 1 2 "EDMUND S. NASH, Spencer P. Shotter, et al., Petitioners, v. UNITED STATES". LII / Legal Information Institute. Retrieved 2023-03-09.
  11. ↑ "NAVAL STORES QUITS, AFTER TRUST SUIT; Loss of Credit and Inability to Raise Working Capital Force Suspension". The New York Times. Retrieved 2023-03-09.
  12. ↑ "Eleanor Torrey West, Preserver of Her Inherited Island, Dies at 108" - New York Times, January 28, 2021
  13. ↑ "Bonaventure Cemetery: An Iconographical Insight into Victorian Views on Death" - SouthernArt.UA.edu
  14. ↑ "The Chatham Hunt Club, Savannah, Ga". Bit & Spur. 6: 778. 1908.
  15. ↑ Berendt, John (1994). Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Knopf Doubleday. p. 206. ISBN 9780307538376.
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