While Samuel Prescott Bush was busy working in Columbus in the early twentieth century, his wife Flora and their four kids would summer at Cape Cod. Flora would write Samuel love letters all the time, mostly when he traveled for business but also when she and the kids were away. And she didn’t hold back.
“I should like to have you down here for a week after everyone has gone – we should lead an Adam & Eve existence – bathe and roam about. We could have a very happy time near to nature’s heart.”
Samuel had taken over as president of Buckeye Steel Castings on Parsons Ave in 1908. He replaced Franklin Rockefeller who had gotten the company into financial difficulty and stepped down.
Samuel Prescott Bush arrived in Columbus, Ohio by train in 1891 and worked his way up from master mechanic to superintendent and then – after a brief stint in Milwaukee – he was hired back as general manager before being elevated to president.
Bush would soon become one of the most prominent & respected industrialists of his generation.
In 1894, Samuel fell in love with and married Flora Sheldon – a local Columbus beauty. Son Prescott – a future U.S. senator – would be born in Columbus in 1895. The couple would have five children, though their second child Robert would die of scarlet fever at age three.
Samuel was born in Brick Church Orange, New Jersey on October 4, 1863. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ with a degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1884.
Buckeye Steel Castings manufactured railway parts and the railroads were booming. Franklin Rockefeller, who stayed on with Buckeye after ceding power to Bush, was the brother of John D and William Rockefeller, co-founders of Standard Oil. Rockefeller hadn’t spoken with his wealthy brothers in years.
SP – as he was known – and Flora purchased 2.7 acres in Marble Cliff and built a 17-room Dutch Colonial mansion (1550 Roxbury Rd) in 1908 on a hill that overlooked a quarry. Meanwhile the couple sent their oldest son Prescott off to St. George’s – the very prestigious all-boys prep school in Newport, Rhode Island. St. George’s was jacket & tie, very religious, overlooked the Atlantic Ocean and was a big feeder into Yale, Harvard and Princeton.
Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and Flora had already begun working Samuel to invest the $850 for her and the family.
From 1906 to 1914 Buckeye Steel flourished. Samuel began receiving offers from Buckeye competitors trying to lure him away including the Pennsylvania Railroad. He was suddenly in high demand.
Bush served as president of the Ohio Manufacturing Association, sat on the board of the Federal Reserve in Cleveland and was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to serve on the committee for Unemployment Relief. He also served on the War Industries Board and helped organize the first war chest drive.
Locally, he helped co-found the Scioto Country Club and Columbus Academy. He served as director of the Hocking Valley Railway, the Sunny Creek Company and was a trustee for Mercy Hospital. Samuel even volunteered his services as an assistant coach in the new up-and-coming sport ‘football’ for the Ohio State University. He helped coach five years but never beat Michigan.
Then tragedy struck. On September 4, 1920, Flora – Samuel’s beloved wife – was killed after slipping and being struck by a car in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Flora had just learned of her son Prescott’s engagement to Dorothy Walker two months prior.
In 1924, Dorothy gave birth to the couple’s second son in Milton, Massachusetts – George Herbert Walker Bush – who would eventually become the country’s 41st president.
Towards the end of his career, SP built a community center near the plant where most of his employees lived. He also helped fund a church and bought & cultivated 72 acres near their plant to grow & harvest potatoes for 1200 families.
Bush eventually got remarried to Martha Bell Carter of Milwaukee. The couple would sell the Marble Cliff property in 1929 to one of the richest women in the world – Anna Dodge – co-heiress of the Dodge Motor Co fortune. Mrs Dodge was married to Columbus-born silent film actor Hugh Dillman and bought the home for his family to live in.
Samuel & Martha moved to a 60-acre estate called Ealy Farms in Blacklick.
Samuel Prescott Bush died of carcinoma, perforation of the colon and myocardial fibrosis at University Hospital in Columbus, Ohio on February 8, 1948. He is buried in Greenlawn Cemetery.
Survived by his wife Martha Bell Bush, two sons Prescott and James, two daughters Mary and Margaret, two stepdaughters and 14 grandchildren and great grandchildren.
The Bush family plan was to make your money first before you serve. In 1950, while feeling the pinch financially, but also wanting to run for U.S. Senate Prescott’s inheritance check of $55,000 from his father’s estate arrived. Prescott, of course, would be father to president George HW Bush (41) and grandfather to president George W Bush (43)
Samuel’s grandson (41) campaigned in Columbus by train for his own re-election in the fall of 1992. George H.W. Bush’s 21-car Whistle Stop tour stopped at the old Mound Street freight yard on Sept 26, 1992. Bush ended up losing his re-election bid to Bill Clinton.
Anna Dodge sold the Bush’s Marble Cliff home in the 1940s to the Carmelite nuns and it served as the residence for the St Raphael for the Aged. In 2006 the property was converted into Prescott Place Condominiums.
Buckeye Steel Castings was acquired by Worthington Industries in 1980. It was sold in 1999 and went bankrupt in 2002. The seven main buildings on the 88 acres site were razed in 2018.
Sources: Stevens.edu, Stevens Remembers Samuel Prescott Bush and His Entrepeneurial Spirit, Dec 4, 2018; Americanaristocracy.com, Samuel P Bush House; Franklin County Auditor; Duty, Honor, Country by Mickey Herskowitz, 2003; Wikapedia; On this day in Columbus Ohio History by Tom Betti and Doreen Uhas Sauer, 2013; 101 things you didn’t know about Columbus, Ohio by Horace Martin Woodhouse 2010; A Historic Guidebook to old Columbus by Bob Hunter, 2012; Columbus Historical Society, Samuel Prescott Bush by Chuck Cody, Sept, 2017; Columbus Historical Society, George HW Bush Whistle Stop Tour by Chuck Cody, Dec 2018; Columbus Monthly, Lost Columbus: Buckeye Steel Castings Anchored the south side’s Steelton neighborhood by Jeff Darbee, Nov 29, 2022; Rites set for SP Bush, Business, Civic leader, Columbus Dispatch, Feb 9, 1948; Franklin County Ohio Ancestors of Vice President of the USA George Bush by Meg Scott, 1985; Columbus Dispatch, Feb 8, 1990; The Family – the real story of the Bush Dynasty by Kitty Kelley, 2004; The Bushes – portrait of a dynasty by Peter & Rochelle Schweizer, 2004; ‘A look back at Columbus Castings/Buckeye Steel’, The Columbus Dispatch, July 27, 2020. Both pictures are courtesy the Columbus Metropolitan Library. The featured picture is of SP Bush taken in the early twentieth century. The second is of SP & Flora’s Marble Cliff home.