Chard Powers Smith papers

The writer Chard Powers Smith was born in Watertown, New York, and educated at the Pawling School and Yale University, class of 1916. Following service as a captain in the U.S. Army Field Artillery during World War I, he received a law degree from Harvard in 1921, but early abandoned the practice of law to make his living as a writer. A regular at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, throughout his career, he published in a variety of genres. His best known works include Artillery of Time, a historical novel; Where the Light Falls, a biography/memoir of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; and The Housatonic: Puritan River, part of the Rivers of America series.

Smith was born into comfortable circumstances in upstate New York, his parents’ marriage having joined two of Watertown’s most prominent families. His father, Edward North Smith, practiced law in partnership with his father, and was later a Justice of the New York Supreme Court, Fifth District. His mother, Alice Lamon Powers, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, died in childbirth when Smith was eleven. Smith maintained a home in an old mill in nearby Sackets Harbor for many years, and based much of his writing on family and local history.

Like many writers of his generation, Smith traveled and lived in Europe intermittently in the 1920s, and moved in American expatriate social and literary circles. He studied at Oxford in 1921, and in that year also married Olive Cary Macdonald; she died of complications from pregnancy in 1924 while the two were living in Italy. In addition to inspiring his own volume of poetry, Along the Wind, Smith’s first marriage was purported to be a source for Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot;” Smith maintained a bitter grudge about the story all his life.

In 1929 Smith married Marion Antoinette (“Nanette”) Chester. The couple lived in Connecticut and had two children, Chard Powers Smith, Jr., and Marion Kendall Smith. Smith and his second wife divorced in 1957, and in the same year he married Eunice Waters Clark, a professor of French. After spending the last two decades of his life in Arlington, Vermont, Smith died in a nursing home in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1977.

Leonard Powers (1795-1884) m.1815 Diadema Caldwell
--Diadema Powers m.1845 Salmasius Bordwell
--Isaac Proctor Powers (“Ike” ) (1826-1908) m.1858 Lorinda Lamon (circa 1838-1921)
----Charles Lamon Powers (1870-1871)
----Alice Lamon Powers Smith (1872-1906)

Savillian Smith (b.1807) m.1836 Louisa Chafee
--Hannibal Smith (1839-1899) m.1866 Amelia Marsh
----Edward North Smith (1868-1943)
----William Hannibal Smith
----Elizabeth Chard Smith m. Frank Gallup
----Amelia Lydia Smith
----Eli Marsh Smith

Edward North Smith m.1894 Alice Lamon Powers; m.1923 Marion Ward
--Chard Powers Smith (1894-1977)
.......m.1921 Olive Cary Macdonald (circa 1888-1924)
.......m.1929 Marion Antoinette Chester (“Nanette”); divorced 1957
------------Chard Powers Smith, Jr. (“Cepe”) (born 1931) m.1953 Mary Elizabeth Carey (“Dusty")
----------------------Arthur Tremaine Smith ("Trem")
----------------------Carey Smith
----------------------Sarah Smith
------------Marion Kendall Smith (“Kendall”) m.1959 William Clinton Stanley
-----------------------Eamon Stanley
-----------------------Sam Stanley
.......m.1957 Eunice Waters Clark

Sources of information include: Monroe, Joel H. Through Eleven Decades of History: Watertown, a History from 1800 to 1912 with Illustrations and Many Incidents (Watertown: Hungerford-Holbrook Co., 1912), and Haddock, John A. The Growth of a Century: as Illustrated in the History of Jefferson County, New York, from 1793-1894 (Philadelphia: Sherman & Co., 1894).