Roe family.

Alfred Cox Roe And Emma Wickham Roe

Alfred Cox Roe was born on April 7, 1823. The eldest son of Peter Elting and Susan Williams Roe, he grew up in Cornwall on the Hudson, New York, and graduated from New York University in 1843. The following year he established the Cornwall English and Classical School in the Canterbury district of Cornwall, New York, at which he taught for almost two decades. Ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1863, Roe was appointed chaplain to the 83rd Regiment of New York Volunteers. This unit was destroyed at the Battle of Weldon Railroad in August 1864 and Roe was re-commissioned in the 104th Regiment, in which he served until his discharge in July 1865. He was Eastern Secretary of the American Christian Commission in New York City 1866-1869. In 1870-1871 he was pastor of a Presbyterian church in Lowell, Massachusetts. He then returned to New York state, serving Presbyterian congregations in Geneva 1871-1873, Galen 1873-1874, and Clyde 1875-1876. He moved to Cornwall on the Hudson in 1877, and, there founded the Cornwall Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies. The school failed in 1882, and he returned to New York City, where he opened the Berkeley Institute in Brooklyn in 1883, followed in 1888 by the New York Collegiate Institute of Harlem. Roe retired in 1895. He and his wife then joined their daughter and son-in-law, Mary Wickham and Walter Clark Roe, in Texas, and moved with them to Colony, Oklahoma in 1897. Alfred Cox Roe and his wife returned East in 1901, and settled at the Wickham home in Manchester, Vermont, where he died in September of that year.

Alfred Cox Roe married Caroline Powell Childs (-1859) in 1847. Three children survived to adulthood: Frank Childs Roe (1850-1889), Susan Williams Roe (1852-1873), and Caroline Powell Roe Landon (1859-1897). In October, 1860, Roe married Emma Wickham (1832-1901). Surviving children were Elizabeth Merwin Roe Page (1861-1943), Mary Wickham Roe (1863-1941), and Joseph Wickham Roe (1871-1960).

Emma Wickham Roe was born in New Haven, Connecticut on October 23, 1832. She was the only child of Joseph Dresser Wickham and Amy Porter Wickham, who died shortly after Emma's birth. She attended York Square Academy in New Haven in 1845-1846, and also attended Burr and Burton Seminary, of which her father was principal, in Manchester, Vermont. During 1854-1855 she taught French and music at Oxford Academy, where her step-mother, Elizabeth Merwin Wickham, had been preceptress. Emma Wickham married Alfred Cox Roe in 1860, and accompanied him in his many career changes. After her husband's death, she remained in Manchester until her death in December 1906.

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Mary Abigail Roe

Mary Abigail Roe, youngest sister of Alfred Cox Roe, was born in Cornwall on the Hudson in 1839, and attended Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester. Never married, she kept house for her father until his death in 1877. She then became a teacher of natural history, first at Cornwall Collegiate Institute and then at Berkeley Institute, both founded by Alfred Cox Roe. During the late 1880's she taught at Los Angeles College, and several years later became an instructor at the Lady Jane Gray Academy in Binghamton, New York. She published at least three novels, Free, Yet Forging Their Own Chains; Left in the Wilderness ; and A Long Search, and wrote Reminiscences of E.P. Roe after the sudden death of her novelist brother. Mary Abigail Roe retired to Manchester around 1900 and later moved to Watertown, New York, where she died in 1920.

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Walter Clark Roe and Mary Wickham Roe

Walter Clark Roe was born in 1859, the second son of James Gilbert and Caroline Clark Roe. He attended Sigler's Institute in Newburgh, New York and graduated from Williams College in 1881. He taught at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and in 1884 joined the faculty of the Hill School in Pennsylvania, where he remained until stricken with tuberculosis in 1889. With his wife Mary Wickham Roe, he moved to Ft. Worth, Texas and studied for the ministry while convalescing. Ordained by the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1892, he served four mission stations in the Ft. Worth area before being called to a Dallas church. While there, Roe became interested in the Indian missionary work of the Reverend Frank Hall Wright and in 1897 he succeeded Wright as head of the mission of the Reformed Church in America at Colony, Oklahoma. In 1908 he was named Superintendent of Indian Missions for that church. Roe also took up the cause of Geronimo's Apache band, then prisoners of war at Ft. Sill, and in 1912 journeyed to Washington, D.C. on their behalf. Already suffering from Addison's Disease, he sailed for the Bahamas in hopes of recovery and died in Nassau on March 12, 1913.

Walter Clark Roe married Mary Wickham Roe, his first cousin, in 1887. The couple had no surviving children. Both Roe and his wife always referred to Henry Roe Cloud as their adopted son, and he incorporated their name into his in 1908.

Mary Wickham Roe, daughter of Alfred Cox and Emma Wickham Roe, was born in 1863 and educated at her father's schools. In 1883 she became a teacher at the New York Normal School, now Hunter College, and in 1885 joined her cousin, Walter Clark Roe, at the Hill School; they were married two years later. Following their 1889 move to Texas, Mary taught at the Ft. Worth High School. She worked closely with her husband at the Colony Mission and after his death continued to serve the Reformed Church as a missionary and advisor until 1924, living at Colony and making many lecture tours for the Women's Board of Domestic Missions. In the 1920's, she became interested in Protestant missionary efforts among Latin American Indians. She visited several of these missions and was a delegate to the 1925 Pan-American Mission Conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. She left Colony in 1931 and settled in Claremont, California. Despite some ill-health, she remained interested in mission work and was attending a mission conference in New Mexico when she was killed in an automobile accident on June 17, 1941.

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Joseph Wickham Roe

Joseph Wickham Roe, born in 1871, was the youngest child of Alfred Cox and Emma Wickham Roe. He prepared for college at Burr and Burton Seminary and at the Hill School, and graduated from Yale's Sheffield Scientific School in 1895. Following graduation, he worked for several manufacturing companies, but returned to Yale in 1906, received the M.E. in 1907, and taught mechanical engineering and machine design at Sheffield Scientific School until 1917. In that year, he was commissioned a major in the Aviation Section, Signal Reserve Corps of the Army. After the war, he worked briefly in private industry, returning to teaching in 1921 as professor and chairman of the Department of Industrial Engineering at New York University, from which he retired in 1937. He was a consultant for the Navy during World War II. Joseph Wickham Roe was the author of numerous articles and several books on engineering and management. He spent his retirement years at Southport, Connecticut, where he died in 1960.

He married Nellie Allen of Dallas in November, 1902; she died in January, 1903. In 1915, he married Mrs. Mary Sherwood Lambertson of Southport, who died in 1960. The couple had no children, but Mrs. Lambertson had one daughter, Elizabeth L. Pratt, by her first husband.

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Henry Roe Cloud

Henry Roe Cloud was born on December 28, 1886 in Winnebago, Nebraska, the son of Winnebago parents who died when he was young. Cloud attended an Indian school in Nebraska, prepared for college at Mt. Hermon, and entered Yale in 1906. In his freshman year he was befriended by Walter Clark and Mary Wickham Roe and soon after began using the name of these adoptive parents. He received his A.B. in 1910, becoming the first Indian to graduate from Yale. In 1913 he earned his B.D. from Auburn Theological Seminary and was ordained in the Presbyterian Church. After taking his M.A. at Yale in 1915, he founded the Roe Indian Institute (later the American Indian Institute) in Wichita, Kansas and served as its superintendent for fifteen years. Roe Cloud was co-author of the 1928 Meriam Report on Indian administration and in 1931 he was named special regional representative of the Office of Indian Affairs. He was appointed superintendent of Haskell Institute in Wichita, Kansas in 1933, the first full-blooded Indian to hold that position. Cloud left the Institute in 1936 to become assistant supervisor of Indian education-at-large in the Office of Indian Affairs. His further posts were superintendent of the Umatilla Indian Agency in Pendleton, Oregon and regional representative of the Grande Ronde and Siletz Indian Agency. Cloud was active in the Society of American Indians and at one time served as the editor of the Indian Outlook .

Henry Roe Cloud married Elizabeth Georgian Bender in 1916. A Chippewa and a graduate of Hampton Institute, Elizabeth Bender Cloud served as Boy's Matron and Financial Executive at the American Indian Institute for almost twenty years. In 1951 she was named Oregon Mother of the Year. The couple had four surviving children: Elizabeth Marion (b. 1917), Anne Woisha (b. 1918), Lillian Alberta (b. 1920), and Ramona Clark (b. 1922).

From the guide to the Roe family papers, 1802-1977, (Manuscripts and Archives)