Though his name has since faded from the minds of most Americans, without Samuel P Bush, the Bush family as we know it today would’ve never come to be.
And whilst he never held political office himself, the relationships he forged as a businessman and industrialist allowed his son to make a fortune on Wall Street, his grandson to become vice president and later president, and his great-grandson to become president as well!
Ancestry
Early Life
Samuel Prescott Bush was born in East Orange, New Jersey on October 4 1863 as the second of four children born to Episcopalian priest and attorney Rev. James Smith Bush, and his second wife, Harriet Eleanor Fay.
As his older brother, James Freeman Bush, had been named in honor of his father, when Samuel was born, his mother named him in honor of her grandfather, Samuel Prescott Philips Fay – a former US Army captain and judge from Concord, Massachusetts.
When Samuel’s father became a rector at San Francisco’s Grace Church (now Grace Cathedral), Samuel, along with the rest of his family, followed his father there, living just a stone’s throw away from the church for five years, between 1867 and 1872.
Growing up the son of a priest and a deeply devout mother, religion naturally played a huge role in Samuel’s early life, with he and his siblings attending their father’s sermons all the time and learning to read by reading the Bible.
Yet Samuel’s education wasn’t solely informal. Though the majority of his early education was done by his parents, Samuel attended the prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey and graduated in its 1884 class.
Much as his son, grandson and great-grandsons later would, Samuel P. Bush excelled academically and at sports, playing on SIT’s college football team – one of the first of its kind in the country!
A Start in Business
Though there was initially an expectation that Samuel would follow in the footsteps of his father and older brother and become a priest, Samuel made it clear to his family that he intended to become a mechanic and engineer.
To that end, he managed to secure an apprenticeship upon graduation as a junior mechanic with the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis Railroad, better known as the Pan Handle Route.
Based in Logansport, Indiana, Samuel P. Bush learned all there was to know about maintaining the steam engines used along the Pan Handle Route and quickly became one of the company’s star mechanics.
Moving to Dennison, Ohio, and later Columbus, Ohio bases, Bush rose to become the company’s Master Mechanic in 1891, and again in 1894 to the position of Superintendent of Motive Power.
And all seemed to be going well for Bush. He married the beautiful and well-connect Flora Sheldon (a descendant of the Livingston Family) in 1894, was in a well paid job he enjoyed, and his first son, Prescott, was born in 1896.
Yet as the years progressed, Samuel’s family began to grow – his second son, Robert, was born in 1896, followed by a daughter, Mary, in 1897 – but Samuel found himself constantly at odds with management, who began telling Bush how to run his mechanics.
Despite not being mechanics themselves.
As such, when the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad put an ad out looking for a Superintendent of Motive Power, Samuel was first in line to apply, and moved his young family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1899 after being given the job.
Industrialist
Though he was free to run his mechanics however he saw fit at Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, Bush didn’t stay there long.
In 1901,
