The Life and Death of Powell Alexander McDonell

There has not been much reason for anybody to go digging into the life of Powell Alexander McDonnell.  He did nothing to sear his name into the history books, or even be mentioned in one history book to my knowledge.  He was not particularly prominent among his small community in Alameda in the late 19th century.  He was one of the early vegetable farmers on Bay Farm Island, had no children of his own and died in 1908.  In fact, the only feature of Mr. McDonell’s life that gave me cause to spend an afternoon researching any possible information about the man’s 84 years on the planet was that he had owned some furniture.  His dining room set was passed to his niece, Hattie, whose daughter one day donated the table, chairs and china cabinet to the Alameda Museum.

I hardly glanced at the polished dark wood furniture when the museum director, George Gunn, pointed it out while explaining the need for information about McDonell to go with the display.  It was my first day as an intern and the furniture was just one stop along a series artifacts I needed to research- there was also pottery from a long defunct Alameda brick maker, a Victorian dollhouse and set of china that all required some amount of research the largely volunteer museum staff was not trained for and did not have time for.  Each item we looked at drove home the fact that I was supposed to be the trained researcher and, at that moment, I did not have the slightest idea of how to find out anything about these long dead people.  About McDonell, George wanted to know when he moved to Alameda, if he served in the Civil War as his grandniece claimed and when he died.

Luckily, the museum had a copy of the 1888 voting register.  I felt a sudden rush when we opened the withering, yellow tome and found the name: P.A. McDonell.  There he was.  His name neatly typed into the rolls, telling us he was from Alabama and was 60 years old at the date of registration.  He was a real person.  It’s not that I thought the lady who donated the furniture was lying about having a great uncle who actually existed, but seeing his name printed in official government records made him real to me.  He registered to vote.  In 1888, he could have voted for Grover Cleveland or Benjamin Harrison for president.  Being a white man from Alabama, he probably was a Democrat who voted for Cleveland, but that’s some drastic speculation.  I knew nothing of the man; why he left the South, nor why he chose Alameda, California to settle.  I yearned to know more, to know everything about P.A. McDonell, a man ignored by history, but real nonetheless.

At the Alameda Public Library I began where every trained historian begins: Google.  Of course, that came up dry, but I was able to knock out the mysteries of the pottery company and dollhouse fairly quickly.  After searching through many of sites dedicated to finding Civil War veterans (established thanks to this country’s booming interest in genealogy, but perhaps not as helpful when the person your looking for has no direct decedents who maintain an online memory), I found one Allexander McDonell who served as a corporal in the 42nd Infantry, Company K, “The Bull Mountain Invincibles”, from Marion County, Alabama (I wasn’t able to find the original site I used ten days ago, which had given me the most information [in the future I’ll write this stuff down], but I did link to the two of the sites that give almost the same information).  The 42^nd fought in some of the major battles of the war, at Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Atlanta.  Though the first name is absent and the middle name is spelled slightly different, these were reasonably common and minor discrepancies for any record keeping in the 19^th century.  The time, place and the spelling of McDonell with one “n” (much more rare than the double “n” spelling), seemed to be enough to confirm to George we had our man when I reported back.

I never was able to establish exactly when my subject left the Yellowhammer State for the Golden State, but my first thought was to check the library’s old directories.  Sure enough, there was a P.A. McDonell in the first Alameda directory of 1877, listed as a resident of the Yosemite Hotel.  Two years later, he is listed as a resident and farmer on Bay Farm Island.  The directories themselves were a pleasure to search through, with every inch of space extra space packed with old advertisements for Bay Area teamster companies, boot makers, oyster depots, funeral homes, lawyers, parasol stores… parasol stores!  How delightfully quaint, while also being totally frinking awesome, is a store that exclusively sells women parasols? 

Then I remembered the California Digital Newspaper Collection from my Public History class and The San Francisco Call opened many small windows into the lives of McDonell and his relatives.  The obituary for his wife, Harriet, in 1903, mentions she was one of the first settlers on Bay Farm Island, residing there for 42 years.  When I searched Bay Farm Island itself, one of the earliest hits was from a "Lost & Found" listing in 1867 for a “Large Lighter, with Anchor and Chain” (perhaps some kind of boat?) found by P. McDonell.  After that there is nothing about the family until Harriet’s death, which apparently was a double tragedy because while at the funeral Marie McDonell contracted pneumonia and died two weeks later.  Marie was the wife of Edward, one of Powell and Harriet’s nephews, who was only 31 years old and had a child of only 11 months (ever get wispy about living in bygone age?  These are nice reminders that the 21^st century isn’t so bad.  Another document I came across recently while at the museum is a report from the Alameda School District superintendent in 1881 describing how many kids have either died or missed school due to a outbreak of Scarlet Fever).

In 1905, a family dispute went to court and was blurbed in the papers when Edward attempted to claim the family farm before his uncle Powell had died.  Edward, who was a captain in the U.S. Army, said the old man had signed the deed over to him and simply forgot.  Powell insisted that nobody was supposed to touch the plot until he died, in which case the farm would be divided to his foster children, Edward, James and Hattie.  I never did figure out how it was that Powell and Harriet came raise their nephews and niece, while never having children themselves, but for all intensive purposes it seems they raised a sibling’s offspring as their own.  This is where some oral history from the living relatives would be nice, and in my opinion probably fun to do, but that’s for somebody writing an article on the early settlement of Bay Farm Island. 

Anyhow, Powell lost the court case to Edward and was enraged enough by the outcome to destroy the deed to farm (the S.F. Call fails to mention how Powell disposed of the document, but I like to imagine that he either tossed it into a fireplace while drunk on whiskey on a dark and stormy night, or he simply crumbled the paper into a ball and ate the deed when Edward came around to gloat).  A judge decided with the physical deed or not, Edward would get the farm and it would seem that was the end of that.

On April 29^th, 1908, Powell Alexander McDonell died in his home at 1041 Lincoln Ave in Alameda (his obituary mentioned Powell was 84 at the time of his death, meaning his family believed he was born in 1824, where the voting register of 1888 had him born in 1828).  It was in the early 1890s that members of the McDonell clan were first listed at 1041 Railroad Ave, which was renamed Lincoln some time between 1905 and 1908. 

I drove past the house on Lincoln on my way home that day.  The address fits a beautiful and large Victorian on the corner of St. Charles Street.  I can assume this is indeed the same house the McDonell’s moved into after they stopped living on the farm.  The same house where Powell lost his beloved wife of more than four decades.  The same house where two soldiers of different generations, men who were nearly father and son, were torn apart over a small plot of land that is most likely part of a golf course now. The same house where actual lives were led, for better and worse, around a dining room set of dark polished wood that I would one day hardly glance at in the Alameda Museum.

How many other people have lived there? I wondered from my parked car.  Who lives there now?  Meh.  Nobody important, I’m sure.  I'm going to get a burrito.


Addendum: So how's this for a huge slap in the face?  Without really thinking about it, I just typed "Powell McDonell" into Google to find a picture perhaps to add to this posting.  I knew there was nothing there, I had checked ten days ago.  Everything there is about the man is from what his grandniece told George and what I found in old San Francisco Call issues, right?  So why did this pop up in my search?!  
First of all, it gives a quite a bit more information than I had.  Secondly, it completely changes his Civil War service to the Mexican-American War!  I don't know how reputable this site is, but honestly, it makes more sense when considering the time-line of McDonell's life.  Should I rewrite the above post?  Probably.  Am I going to?  Hell no.  Most of the facts remain.  I knew the Civil War connection was sketchy, but I wanted to believe I had found the right guy.
Finally, and probably most upsetting to me, is the fact somebody else already wrote something about Powell McDonell.  The whole point of this post was to write about somebody who had slipped through the cracks of history, an ordinary person historians have no reason to research and write about.  Donna L. Becker kind of undercut me there.
Obviously, I will be changing my write-up for the Alameda Museum so the correct information is displayed with the furniture.  
Here's where I should say: "Lesson learned", but what did I learn?  Check Google?  I still can't believe I got tripped up by a Google search.