Richard Wilton: Lost at Sea

Richard Wilton Sr., born in England in 1795, was brought to America at the age of two or three.  He served as a private in Captain Jacob Howell’s Company, Colonel Putnam Farrington’s Regiment of the New York Militia in the War of 1812. He married Elizabeth Singhaus on December 30, 1821 in Wrightsville, PA. The couple left their home in Pennsylvania and moved to Payson, Illinois in 1832. Their son Richard Jr. was a child of six when they moved. They had a second son, Abraham born in Payson. Though Richard Sr. was a teacher and farmer in Pennsylvania, he purchased several acres when he came to Payson and listed his occupation as a farmer. By the agricultural census of 1850 he had over 275 acres and had built the only local brick farmhouse that stood just a couple of miles south of Payson for the next 150 years. The Wiltons sold the farm and house in 1867 to George Hewes when they moved to Hannibal, Missouri. Hewes had it illustrated for the 1872 Adams County Atlas.

Other Wiltons moved west. The niece of Richard Sr. came from Pennsylvania in 1855 and married Onias Childs Skinner in Quincy. He became an Illinois Supreme Court Justice in 1855.

In 1846 Richard Jr. returned to Pennsylvania to attend the Strasburg Academy. In 1849 he joined William Jenkins Worth’s Infantry, which was under General Winfield Scott. An invasion of Cuba was rumored at that time but  Worth died shortly after Richard Jr. joined. While his family remained in Payson, he became a lawyer and served two years as District attorney in York, Pennsylvania.

Like so many others, he went to California for the Gold Rush which began in 1848 with the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill. He was listed as a gold miner in El Dorado County in 1852. However he returned east to marry Frances Baker Bordley later that year.  She was the daughter of a lawyer turned portrait painter. They had one daughter born in 1854.

At some point, he returned to California but not for long. In August 1857 he boarded the S.S. Sonora of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line in San Francisco to return home. The ship traveled south and arrived at Panama City on September 2. From there the passengers, cargo and mail boarded a train and travelled over 3 hours (48 miles) to Aspinwall Panama, a port on the Atlantic Ocean. At the port, the passengers and goods boarded the S. S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer under federal mail contract and captained by United States Navy Captain William Herndon.  The ship was bound for New York City departing on September 3. It stopped in Havana, Cuba for restocking and left there on September 8, 1857.

The Central America, a.k.a. The Ship Of Gold, which was making a routine mail, passenger and cargo journey from Aspinwall (now Colón), New Granada (now Panama) with a stop in Havana then to New York laden with extensive holdings of gold (estimated at over 30,000 pounds) from the Gold Rush of California.

The ship sailed into a massive storm, with waves estimated by many witnesses as 30-40 feet high, beginning on September 9, and went under with more than 425 men aboard on September 12. Richard Jr. was one of the men lost at sea approximately 160 miles east of Charleston, South Carolina. The women and children had been sent by lifeboats into the storm and were saved by nearby ships. Several men were rescued by ships passing the bodies floating in the water the next day. Four men were rescued nine days later adrift in a small partially damaged and abandoned lifeboat in the Gulf Stream.

There is great difficulty in finding a reliable passenger list, however, there is a listing for R. Wilton, age 31, from Illinois and many newspaper accounts listing Richard P. Wilton as having died. He was registered as a resident of Quincy, Illinois. The shipwreck was widely reported across America.

The loss of this ship and its treasure is attributed to be one of the causes of the financial panic of 1857. Gold reserves backed the currency and banking systems in America at that time. Officially the government holdings on board were listed as slightly over $1,500,000 at face value. However, the  estimate was well over $2 million considering the passengers and privately minted gold and silver coins, ingots, nuggets and gold dust. In 2020 terms that would be over $300,000,000 and some estimates list the loss in excess of $1 billion. The loss of the ship  was devastating to many businesses in America, causing banks and businesses across the country to fail.

An autobiography of surviving passenger Oliver Perry Manlove (1831-1917) written in 1915 noted that Manlove recognized Wilton as they were bailing out water from the sinking ship. They knew each other from being young schoolmates in Illinois according to Manlove, who was from Illinois until 1850 when he is documented as living in Wisconsin.

Today this shipwreck is renowned for the 1988 recovery of over 7,000 gold coins plus ingots, gold dust, and silver by Thomas G. Thompson and associates at depths of 8,500 feet, and in 2014 the recovery of an additional 3,000 gold coins plus ingots and silver coins by the California Gold Marketing Group.

There is a memorial obelisk to Richard Wilton in the Fall Creek Chapel cemetery in Payson Township, Adams County, Illinois. It has a carved anchor and the inscription, “Was lost at sea.”

Two Richard Wiltons lived in Adams County in the 19th century and in researching them, a third one joined and visited the HSQAC, Quincy, Payson and Hannibal to learn more about their lives and communities. He will be back.

Sources:

Bowers, Q. David. The History of the S.S. Central America “Ship of Gold” [Excerpt]. The History of the S.S. Central America “Ship of Gold” – PCGS Grades the “Ship of Gold” Coins

Klare, Normand E. The Final Voyage of the Central American 1867. Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1992.

Kinder, Gary. Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. New York: Random House, 1998.

Koshy, Binu. Columbus-America Discovery Group and the SS Central America. Wiley Informs, case3.PDF (columbia.edu)

Wreck Site. PDD Central America (+1867). www.wrecksite.eu WRECKSITE – CENTRAL AMERICA PASSENGER SHIP 1852-1857