Wednesday, March 13, 2013. Rain all day yesterday, sometimes heavy, windy, clearing after night fall with the air feeling fresher.
American Family History from East to West. If you didn’t read John Foreman’s Big Old House installment this week (yesterday’s NYSD homepage), about Linden Place in Bristol, Rhode Island, you’re missing a great saga of generations of a New England family by the name of DeWolf. The DeWolfs and their descendants lived in the same grand Federal style mansion in Bristol for two centuries. As John Foreman points out, the house, now a museum, even contains the family furnishings from long ago.
![]() | ![]() | | Ethel Barrymore holding her son Samuel Colt. | ![]() |
The DeWolfs were made rich firstly from the ill-gotten gains as shipowners in the slave and rum trade that flourished up until the mid-19th century. If there is such a thing as bad karma, well, the DeWolfs had their share, as the story of Linden Place bears out. After the last male DeWolf died, the females carried on, and the surviving family name was Colt, as in Colt .45. Its last patriarch was one Samuel Colt.
When I was living in California I knew a Samuel Colt. He was known as “Sammy,” a nice man, cheerful and somewhat shy, he was well into his seventies, and maybe beyond when I knew him. Sammy was “the son of Ethel Barrymore,” a title that followed him through his life.
Mother was a great stage and film star, and member of a very famous American theatre dynasty along with her brothers Lionel and John Barrymore. Drew Barrymore is her grand-niece, although she was born, long after Ethel died.
Sammy, it turns out, having done a little research after reading John Foreman’s piece, was the great-great-grandson of Samuel Colt (born in1814), inventor of the revolver, and the grandson of the last patriarch of Linden Place, also Samuel Colt.
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