Crowninshield family

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The Crowninshields are an American family prominent in seafaring, political and military leadership, and the literary world. The family, which immigrated in the late 1600s, is one of the founding families of Boston.

The progenitor in the United States was J. Caspar Richter of Cronenschieldt, an Old Saxon landowner and shipper-trader who moved from the south of Denmark to the village of Cronenshieldt, from which the family took its anglicized name, near Leipzig during the Thirty Years' War. Most of the other ancestral lines of the Crowninshield family in Massachusetts are of more usual English stock.

According to David L. Ferguson's book Cleopatra's Barge: The Crowninshield Story, named after George Crowninshield's yacht that became the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean, the Crowninshield family was responsbile for various other firsts in American history, including starting the first major pepper trade via sea and bringing the first elephant to the U.S.

The Crowninshield influence is particularly visible in Salem, Massachusetts, where they helped settle the town and led it to seafaring prominence. The homestead of Captain John Crowninshield survives as the Crowninshield-Bentley House and is part of Salem's historical tourism industry, while Benjamin Crowninshield's federal-style waterfront mansion, once used by President James Monroe on a trip to Salem, is now used as home for the Brookehouse for Women.

Other places and things named after the family incude Crowninshield Island, located off nearby Marblehead, and the USS Crowinshield, a Wickes-class destroyer during World War I. There are also Crowninshield streets in Providence, Rhode Island; Brookline, Massachusetts; and Peabody, Massachusetts, each locations where noted Crowninshields lived.

[edit] Notable members

• Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee, vice president of The Washington Post
• Arent S. Crowninshield (1843–1908), U.S. Navy Admiral and chief of the Bureau of Navigation
• Benjamin Williams Crowninshield (1772–1851), U.S. Secretary of the Navy
• Caspar F. Crowninshield, U.S. Army captain and American Civil War brevet brigadier general
• Frank Crowninshield (1872–1947), creator and editor of Vanity Fair magazine
• George Crowninshield, noted maritime adventurer
• Jacob Crowninshield (1770–1808), U.S. Representative and Thomas Jefferson's appointment for Secretary of the Navy
• Louise du Pont Crowninshield, historic preservationist and wife of Francis Crowninshield
• William Crowninshield Endicott, Secretary of War under Grover Cleveland

[edit] References

• Ferguson, David. L. Cleopatra's Barge: The Crowninshield Story. New York: Little, Brown. 1976.