Artistic Life of Paris and Laura’s Mother

some questions answered: the life of laura barney to learn English so that anyone in her company had to speak French.4

In 1802 Ursula married William Miller, Laura’s great-grandfather, a prominent and successful trader from Rapids County, Louisiana. Several years later in 1815, the young family moved north and settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Miller prospered in real estate. Ursula passed away five years later of yellow fever. Miller followed his wife in death after five years, from cholera, but lived to see the marriage of his youngest daughter Ellen to Samuel Napthali Pike.5

Samuel Pike, Laura’s maternal grandfather, was the first child born to a poor German-Jewish father and a Dutch-Christian mother in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1822. The family immigrated to America when he was five years old. The only items that Samuel’s parents had brought from Europe were two Dutch Renaissance paintings and a few pieces of silver. One day while on a stopover in Cincinnati in July 1844, Sam walked through an upscale neighborhood whose streets were lined with fine houses. A young woman named Ellen Miller appeared on the balcony of one of them. While he was gazing intently up at her, he fell into a hole in the street and the young woman came to his rescue. They subsequently fell in love and were married the following year. Ellen had a sister called Louise, whose great grandson David Bruce became a dear friend of Laura and of her only close family members several decades later in Europe.

The young couple had grown up in wildly different circumstances. Sam Pike had known poverty all his life; he was determined to make a fortune and was willing to work hard to obtain it. Ellen had been raised in luxury and did not worry about money. And there were other major differences. He was intelligent, clever, attentive and cordial and developed interests in poetry and painting, while she was private and introverted and spent much of her time reading. She was a practicing Catholic but he professed no faith. Rather than follow one of the family religions – Catholicism, Judaism and Protestantism – they took a middle road and joined the Episcopal Church. Despite their differences, the marriage was considered to be a happy one.

Sam Pike made his initial money in the distilling and bottling of whiskey for which there was a big market but then diversified, investing in property from hotels to office buildings and land and even a trolley system. In time he became a multimillionaire entrepreneur and distiller with wide-ranging interests that included collecting paintings and rare books, playing the flute and writing poetry.

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