Col. Edmund William Cole, CSA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_William_Cole

Colonel Edmund William Cole (July 19, 1827 – May 25, 1899) was an American Confederate veteran and businessman. He was the president of the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway, and the founder of the American National Bank.

Early life

Edmund William Cole was born on July 19, 1827, in Giles County, Tennessee. He grew up on a farm.

Career

Cole moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1845, where he worked as a store clerk and later as a bookkeeper in the post office. In 1857, he was appointed as the superintendent of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad by its founder, Vernon K. Stevenson.

During the American Civil War of 1861–1865, Cole served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army. General Samuel Jones described Cole as "active and zealous" during the war.

Cole was appointed as the president of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad in 1868. Cole acquired four more lines and renamed it the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway in 1873. According to historian Jesse C. Burt, Jr., "His grandiose scheme for uniting disparate pieces of rail properties into a solid and well-managed enterprise was probably the first large rail consolidation to be attempted in the South." When August Belmont purchased it from Stevenson in 1880, Cole resigned, and he was succeeded as president by James D. Porter.

Cole co-founded the American National Bank in 1883. He also invested in real estate in Downtown Nashville and coal mines in Sheffield, Alabama. He was also an investor in the Sheffield Hotel, where he banned the sale of whisky.

Philanthropy

In 1885, Cole founded the Randall Cole School, and he hired Dr W. C. Kilvington as superintendent. In 1887, Cole donated it to the state of Tennessee, and it was renamed the Tennessee Industrial School. In 1894, it moved into the Anna Russell Cole Auditorium, named for Cole's second wife.

Cole served as the treasurer of the board of trust of Vanderbilt University. In 1892, he donated $5,000 to endow the annual Cole Lecture, "for the defense and advocacy of the Christian religion."

Cole made a donation to the Bruce family shortly after the Lynching of Ephraim Grizzard in 1892.

Personal life, death and legacy

Cole was married twice. His first wife, Louisa McGavock, died in 1869; her funeral ceremony was conducted by reverends John Berry McFerrin and Robert A. Young. They lived at 182 Church Street. His second wife, Anna Russell, was a native of Augusta, Georgia whose father had served as the first Democratic mayor of Augusta after the Civil War. Their wedding, conducted by Bishop Holland Nimmons McTyeire, was attended by Confederate veterans Bushrod Johnson and Edmund Kirby Smith. The Coles first resided at Terrace Place, a three-story townhouse on Church Street in Nashville, until they moved into Colemere, a mansion designed for them by Confederate veteran and architect William Crawford Smith. They had a son, Whitefoord Russell Cole, who became a prominent businessman. Cole was a member of the Democratic Party, and he attended the McKendree United Methodist Church.

Cole died of heart disease on May 25, 1899 at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. His funeral was held at the McKendree United Methodist Church in Nashville. After his death, his widow hired sculptor George Julian Zolnay to design his bust; it was installed in Kirkland Hall, the administration building of Vanderbilt University. When Kirkland Hall burned down in 1905, it was replaced with a marble bust alongside his widow's portrait by Willie Betty Newman.

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https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/edmund-w-cole/

Edmund “King” Cole, a leading late nineteenth-century railroad entrepreneur, financier, and philanthropist, was born in Giles County, a descendent of a prominent Virginia family. Cole's father died when he was three months old, leaving his mother with a large family to support. Cole worked on the family farm until he was eighteen and had little schooling and few advantages. In 1845 he left the farm for Nashville, where his life became a Tennessee version of the Horatio Alger story of rags to riches. Cole worked as a store clerk and attended night school. In 1851 he became a bookkeeper for the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad; by 1868 he was the company's president.

Over the next decade, “King” Cole transformed this dilapidated railroad into a formidable contender among the rail systems of the central South, linking Nashville to St. Louis to the north and Atlanta and Savannah to the southeast. Cole envisioned Nashville as the gateway connecting the growing Midwest commerce in grain and meat to the cotton-producing South. In 1879-80 Cole moved to implement his scheme to build a grand trunk line linking the Midwest to the Southeast and a line of transatlantic steamers. As he was putting his plan into place, the rival Louisville and Nashville (L&N) system secretly organized a coup and took over Cole's railroad, which by then was known as the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis (NC&St.L). The merger, one of several that established L&N's regional dominance, ended competition for railroad service to Nashville, except for a brief and futile challenge by Jere Baxter and the Tennessee Central.

Cole resigned from the NC&St.L following the takeover, and for the next two years he served as president of the East Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia Railroad, which also controlled the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. Cole resigned in 1882 and channeled his business energies into Nashville banking and real estate, becoming a major property owner and developer. He financed the construction of downtown office buildings, including the Cole Block at Union and Cherry (now Fourth Avenue). Much of his entrepreneurial energy and capital also went into the founding of several different Nashville banking institutions. During the 1880s, when the city laid its foundations as a regional financial center, Cole was among the leading financial architects. Chief among his banking enterprises was the American National Bank, which he founded in 1883.

Cole became a prominent philanthropist in the late 1880s, a southern version of the many American capitalists of the Gilded Age who supplemented and offset their reputation for acquisitive fortune building with public-spirited charities. A civic-minded man, Cole served on the State Board of Health and was active in the Tennessee Historical Society. A devout Methodist, he donated his time and fortune to the promotion of Methodist missionary and educational work. He was an important donor to the Methodists' Vanderbilt University; among other contributions, he endowed a lecture series which continues to bear his name. In honor of his late son, Cole also donated to the State of Tennessee property for the Randall Cole Industrial School, designed to educate orphaned and wayward boys. Established in 1885, it was renamed the Tennessee Industrial School in 1887. In an 1890 autobiographical sketch, Cole depicted his life as an American parable of success which owed much to his strict Methodist mother and her lessons of hard work and self-denial, in particular abstinence from drink, tobacco, gambling, and dancing. These values guided Cole's philanthropy as well.

Cole married twice, first to Louise McGavock Lytle of Williamson County, who died in 1869, and in 1872 to Anna V. Russell of Augusta, Georgia. Among Cole's survivors was his son, Whitford R. Cole, who continued in his father's footsteps as a successful railroad magnate with the L&N and a leading supporter of Vanderbilt University.

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http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=35309530

A cholera epidemic broke out in 1873. Many people died. A huge mass of orphans who needed homes were the result.

Judge Ferriss was determined was determined to further the cause of the dependent children, so he appealed to his friends for subscriptions and raised two or three thousand dollars and began to make further appeal throughout the State. Colonel E.W. Cole, after reading one of these letters addressed to the public, agreed to give one thousand dollars for the cause. Others offered smaller sums. Colonel Cole made a larger purchase of land, and proposed to donate that, but the legislature refused to accept the offer.

In 1887 the school had grown so large that Col. Cole could not continue to maintain it and he turned it over to the State of Tennessee. In July of 1887 Col. Cole offered to turn the land and buildings over to the State free of charge. The school had a value of $60,000 at this time. The name was then changed to the Tennessee Industrial School also known as T.I.S.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=35309530

GEDCOM Source

@R1603087236@ Ancestry Family Trees Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com. Original data: Family Tree files submitted by Ancestry members.

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