In the In Times Past column, David W. Dunlap explores New York Times history through artifacts housed in the Museum at The Times.
George Jones (1811-1891) was more than the founding publisher of The New York Times in 1851. In the 1870s and ’80s, he helped bring down the Tweed Ring, turned The Times from Republican to Democratic and built a headquarters for the newspaper in Lower Manhattan that still stands as a New York City landmark.
The vacuum left by Jones’s death proved impossible to fill. His heirs tried for two years and then sold The Times in 1893 to a group led by the newspaper’s editor in chief. The new owners struggled for three more years before selling to Adolph S. Ochs (1858-1935), whose family has since controlled The Times.
On Dec. 8 of this year, Elizabeth Ellis, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Jones, opened a new window on this tumultuous era. Accompanied by her daughter, Stella Adams, Ms. Ellis came to the Times building in Midtown Manhattan to share a cache of family documents with Times employees, including Sam Dolnick, a deputy managing editor and a great-great-grandson of Ochs.
The documents, which she lent to the Museum at The Times, include 138 letters written to Jones from 1869 to 1872, a copy of his will, and a courtroom transcript from 1893. They tell of Jones’s triumphant defeat of Tweed, the affectionate esteem in which he was held by his staff and the difficult decision faced by his heirs to let the newspaper go. It is safe to say that no one from The Times had seen them in 130 years.
“Did I know George Jones was my great-great-great-grandfather?” Ms. Ellis wrote in an email last week. “I think the honest answer is: ‘Yes! Sort of.’”
Ms. Ellis is a graphic designer who lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. She hadn’t been keenly aware of her family’s consequential role at The Times until she dived into her genealogy during the Covid pandemic.
Then, last year, Ms. Ellis reconnected with her cousin Sylvia Kimball Perry, a keeper of family history. “She told me her mother had three big boxes of our maternal grandmother’s papers if I was interested,” Ms. Ellis wrote. On opening the boxes in November, Ms. Ellis said she was “delighted and surprised to find some fascinating items relating to George Jones and the nascent New York Times.”
“I was so excited about my findings and wondered if anyone would be as interested in this stuff as I was,” Ms. Ellis wrote. “On a whim, I Googled the words, ‘New York Times museum,’ and discovered to my utter delight that there was indeed a person who might be as interested as me.” (This columnist.)
Ms. Ellis and I quickly agreed to get together. What started as a business meeting turned into an informal reunion of the two families most central to New York Times history; a fine segue into the newspaper’s impending 175th anniversary.
David W. Dunlap, a retired Times reporter and columnist, is the curator of the Museum at The Times, which houses Times artifacts and historical documents.
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