Oaksmith, Appleton, 1827-1887

Adventurer, author, shipowner, and industrial promoter, of Hollywood, N.C.

Appleton Oaksmith, North Carolina state legislator from Carteret County, N.C., was the son of Seba Smith (1792-1868), Maine and New York political humorist, and Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806-1893), author, lecturer, and reformer, who used the name Ernest Helfenstein.

Appleton Oaksmith of Carteret County, N.C., was the son of Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith. Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806-1893) was a Northern abolitionist who came to the South in the pre-Civil War period to make speeches and engaged in temperance and religious missionary work in the South after the war. She was a writer whose articles were published in monthly magazines in the North. Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith served as pastor of the Independent Church, Canastota, Madison County, N.Y., in 1887. Seba Smith was a journalist, owner of the Courier, and was the author of Major Jack Downing's Letters, which, according to a clipping in the collection, were very pungent and amusing productions that were a great hit in the times of Andrew Jackson's administration. He was chief editor of the Great Republic Monthly .

Appleton Oaksmith was a representative of Carteret County in the North Carolina legislature in 1874. He was connected with the Carolina City Company (also known as the Carolina City Land Company), being appointed its agent in Carteret County in 1884 and its receiver when it was dissolved in 1886. He and his wife, Augusta, had at least four daughters, Elizabeth, Corine, Mildred, and Pauline, who drowned 4 July 1879.

(For further information, see Selections from the Autobiography of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, edited by Mary Alice Wyman (Columbia University Press: New York, 1924), and Two American Pioneers, Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Columbia University Press: New York, 1927).