Havilah Babcock

Born in Franklin, Vermont, Babcock moved with his family to Waukesha, Wisconsin, in 1846. In 1849 they moved again to Neenah, Wisconsin, his father had gotten a contract to excavate and construct the Neenah portion of the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway.

At age 12 he became a child laborer in his father's project, thus bringing an end to Babcock's education. Following his mother's death in 1851 and the completion of the waterway project in 1852, Babcock found work as a box boy at a local dry goods store where he also slept at night, as his widowed father had begun farming with a new wife six miles from town. At age 16 Babcock was promoted to clerk, in which he achieved notable success selling dress goods to women.

In 1857 due to his success in sales, the wealthy father of his friend John A. Kimberly set the two young men up as equal partners in the Kimberly & Babcock Dry Goods Store, providing them with $5,000 in new goods. The business was an immediate success, and while still only in their teens, the partnership was quickly recognized as a formidable teaming of talent, leading to directorships with the newly organized First National Bank of Neenah (what is today Associated Banc-Corp), and to the construction in 1869 of the Reliance Mill, the largest flour mill constructed in Neenah, which helped make it the second largest flour milling center in the state behind Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 1876 Babcock became a financial partner in the founding of the Bergstrom Brothers Stove Works under the direction of D. W. Bergstrom, a former clerk at Kimberly & Babcock. At the time of his death Babcock was planning to be a partner in the founding of the Bergstrom Paper Company.

Babcock (who was a devout Presbyterian) early success in dry goods was due in part to his physical attributes. In the decades before the Civil War women did not generally shop in public except in dry goods stores, a fact which New York's Alexander Turney Stewart turned into one of history's largest personal fortunes by hiring handsome young men to clerk in his Manhattan department store. Babcock, standing six feet tall with the brooding good looks of a Midwestern Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), similarly assisted a dedicated following of local women in adapting current fashions to flatter their personal attributes. Best known among his followers was the wife of territorial governor James Duane Doty.

A voracious reader in spite of his limited education, and possessed of artistic sensibilities, Babcock was also a talented tenor and soloist in his church choir. He initially hoped to marry his partner's sister, Emma Kimberly, but when she rejected his proposal Babcock turned his attentions to their cousin Frances Kimberly, a graduate of the Emma Willard School, and upon whom he called at her home in Watervliet, New York while in the East buying goods for the store. The two married in 1872, and on their wedding tour visited Babcock's cousin Orville E. Babcock, the personal secretary of Ulysses S. Grant who was later indicted in the Whiskey Ring.

Together the Babcocks raised five children: Helen, Caroline, Henry, George and Elizabeth. Although it pained him to be separated from them, all five became graduates of Eastern colleges, his daughter Caroline also studying sculpture under Daniel Chester French at his studio in Manhattan, and later at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Caroline would later become a Presbyterian missionary in Korea with her husband James Edward Adams. A great hunter and fisherman, Babcock encouraged a taste for the out-of-doors in his children, taking them and their friends on annual camping parties at Eagle River, Wisconsin. His interests as a genealogist, music lover and Anglophile were similarly shared with his children, all but one of them as adults still living at home at his death in 1905.

Three of Babcock's children subsequently married and only two had children, his granddaughter Anne becoming the wife of Theodore Roosevelt III. Those children that remained in Neenah were either founders or major contributors to the YWCA, the Boys' Brigade, Theda Clark Hospital, the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, the Emergency Society, Oak Hill Cemetery, the First Presbyterian Church and the Visiting Nurse Association.

More than 100 years since his death, Babcock's Bible study class - which was composed entirely of women - still meets at the First Presbyterian Church of Neenah and is known today as the Friends Class.