Estate Find

The

Eleanor Custis Wright

Collection

Staffordshire Meat Platter

Joseph Heath Co

1845-1853

We offer from the Eleanor Custis Wright family collection an English blue tissue transfer-printed earthenware meat platter in the “Italian Villas” pattern manufactured by Joseph Heath & Company. Active from 1845-1853, Joseph Heath produced pottery on the Newfield estate on the main road between Tunstall and Goldenhill in Staffordshire, England.

The Potters Wheel mark is impressed on the reverse side of the meat platter and a transfer is printed with the pattern name “Italian Villas” in an architectural cartouche with the initials J.H.& Co.

The meat platter has a scalloped rim decorated with a floral border surrounding a scenic depiction of a couple aside large architectural urns in a garden along a lakeshore. Across the lake, a boat sails near an Italian villa built on the water’s edge.

The meat platter measures 19 1/4” in length, 15 1/2” in width and 2 3/4” in height.

Showing normal wear appropriate for age and use, the meat platter is in very good antique condition free of chips, breaks, cracks or repairs.

Provenance

Eleanor Custis Wright (1924-2023)

Charles Alan Wright (1927-2000)

The family China of Eleanor Custis Wright descended through a rich time span of American history.

Custis became a captain of the militia in 1664, a colonel in 1673, was a member of the governor’s Council (1677–1692) and in 1692 became commander in chief of all forces on the Eastern Shore. Custis became wealthy through land speculation, tobacco planting, and facilitating trade between Virginia and the Netherlands and its colonies.

In 1706 Col. John Custis IV of Williamsburg (1678-1749) married Daniel Parke’s daughter Frances Parke (1685-1714) and their son Col. Daniel Parke Custis (1711-1757) married Martha Macon Dandridge (1731-1802). Two years after the death of Daniel, Martha married George Washington who raised her three surviving children at Mount Vernon.

Dr. Henry Wilson (1827-1897) and his wife Alicia Brewer Griffith Wilson (1840-1913) had six children. Their daughter Henrietta (Etta) Chauncey Wilson Whiteley (1863-1908) married James Stone Whiteley (1855-1931) in 1888.

James S. Whiteley partnered in 1876 with Bernard Nadal Baker (1854-1918) forming Baker-Whiteley Coal Company, established on South Clinton Street in industrial Canton, as a coal company with mines in Pennsylvania and selling and transporting coal to American and foreign steamships, tugs, lighters and shore facilities.

At one time Baker-Whiteley Coal Company employed 2,000 men and ran 200 tugboats.

Ensign Edwin Nash Broyles, Jr (1926-1953) lost his life flying the last mission in Korea, July 26, the day before the cease fire went into effect.

In 1950, Henrietta Broyles (1929-1963) married Patrick Hemingway (b. 1920), son of the writer Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961).

Eleanor Custis Broyles (1924-2023) first married Angus W. Clarke Jr. and then in 1955 married Charles Alan Wright (1927-2000).

Charles Alan Wright (1927-2000)

The following is an excerpt of “In Memoriam: Charles Alan Wright”. This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting of Professors Douglas Laycock (chair), Roy Mersky, and L. A. (Scot) Powe. 2000.

Mr. Wright . . . was something of a child prodigy, and so the long career of Professor Wright got off to a very early start. Born in Philadelphia on September 3, 1927, he graduated from Wesleyan University in 1947 and from Yale Law School in 1949, clerked for Judge Charles E. Clark on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and assumed his duties as assistant professor of law at the University of Minnesota in 1950, just before his twenty-third birthday. He was promoted to associate professor in 1953. He joined the faculty of The University of Texas at Austin in 1955, at the age of twenty-seven. Professor Wright was a popular and successful teacher, teaching large sections of Constitutional Law and Federal Courts year after year.

Mr. Wright studied under the mid-century legal realists at Yale, and the best of legal realism is apparent throughout his life's work. A more momentous formative experience came in his clerkship with Judge Clark, who had been the reporter and chief draftsman for the original Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 1938, and who continued to serve actively in the rulemaking process until 1955. During that clerkship in 1949-50, Mr. Wright and Judge Clark coauthored Mr. Wright's first article on procedure. The origins of Professor Wright's greatest work - a lifelong study of legal practice in the federal courts, principally organized around the various sets of federal rules - lie in this apprenticeship with Judge Clark.

Professor Wright's reputation rested first and foremost on his monumental treatise, Federal Practice and Procedure. This is the one indispensable reference work on procedure and jurisdiction in the federal courts. Begun in 1969, by the time of Professor Wright's death it had grown to 57 large volumes, with second and third editions of many volumes and frequent supplements to all the volumes. He recruited a team of distinguished coauthors; the volumes are variously credited to Wright; Wright & Miller; Wright, Miller, & Kane; Wright, Miller, & Cooper; Wright, Miller, & Marcus; Wright & Gold; Wright & Graham. Professor Wright was the one author common to all volumes, the leader and organizer of the whole project.

The treatise has been cited more than 50,000 times in on-line texts, periodicals, and judicial decisions. This remarkable set of books is but one of the more than 250 entries in Professor Wright's bibliography.

Professor Wright's reputation also rested in part on his fame as a Supreme Court advocate. He personally argued thirteen cases in the Supreme Court of the United States, including a remarkable series of nine cases from 1968 to 1973. He won ten of the thirteen cases outright, won half his point in another, and lived to see his position substantially vindicated in the two cases he lost.

Professor Wright's most famous and most difficult client was President Richard M. Nixon. Professor Wright represented the President on constitutional issues growing out of the Watergate investigations by Congress and the special prosecutor. For a time he clearly appeared to be the President's lead lawyer, but then there was a shuffling of responsibilities, and he did not argue the case in the Supreme Court. It seems clear that his client lied to him, and it seems equally clear that Professor Wright could not have saved the Nixon Presidency even if he had been given full control of the case. Professor Wright steadfastly refused to comment on his representation of the former President, resisting the temptation to clarify his own role at the expense of a client's confidences. Of all the many things he did in his extraordinarily full life, representing President Nixon was the one thing most visible to the non-legal public, and it became the centerpiece of many of his obituaries.

Another large piece of Professor Wright's work was his service to The American Law Institute, a select organization of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars that produces independent studies and summaries of American law. Professor Wright was elected to the Institute in 1958, when he was only thirty. From 1963 to 1969, he served as reporter for the Institute's massive Study of the Division of Jurisdiction Between State and Federal Courts. At the conclusion of that project, he was elected to the Council, the small group that reviews every draft document before its submission to the membership.

For the last seven years of his life, he served as president of the Institute.

Professor Wright served for nearly 30 years, under appointments from three different Chief Justices, on various committees to propose revisions of the federal rules of procedure or the statutes granting jurisdiction to the federal courts. He was a frequent speaker at the circuit conferences of federal judges; some federal judges described him as their coach. He served eight years on the permanent committee to supervise the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, seven years on the Commission on the Bicentennial of the Constitution, ten years on the Committee on Infractions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (five years as chair), and two years as chair of the NCAA Administrative Review Panel.