Prestonia Mann Martin and the Mann Family of New York

Prestonia adopted several children with her husband John Martin. Oral history and a source or two indicate that she adopted them in a grand experiment in nature vs. nurture. Sadly, the experiment did not turn out well. It's really hard to find out about these children. The oldest ended up living his life in Keene NY, where her utopian community was, doing odd jobs. The daughter, who, I am told, was described as a "gypsy" and was found on the streets of NYC wrapped in newspapers as an infant, totally drops from view. I know almost nothing about her, but I was shown some pictures of her when she was a child. John Martin's will is cruel to her, and says something like, for reasons she knows, she gets nothing.

A second son drops out of sight even sooner. He's in one census as a young boy, and in the next, ten years later, he's gone.

The third son, apparently adopted when he was a teenager, is the most fascinating and tragic. His name was Oliver Johnson Keyes. Researchers up on their abolition history will recognize that there was an Oliver Johnson who was the editor of an anti-slavery publication. He went to Columbia in NYC. Inexplicably, one day when he was 26, in 1932, he went to a hardware store in Manhattan, bought a hammer, then caught a train to Winter Park, where Prestonia and John were then living. He went to their house and attacked John Martin with the hammer, almost killing him. Later, John Martin wrote to a friend that he wouldn't recommend anyone ever adopting children. In later photos of John Martin, you can see a dent in his head. According to the one newspaper clipping I found about the incident, it was Prestonia who stopped the attack and called the police, and waited with Keyes for the police to arrive while her husband was nearly mortally wounded in another room.

I tend to feel that it wasn't so much that she was a "bad mother" which is the rap she got, but rather, that she adopted children who were seen as "difficult." Was she adopting kids with a history of mental illness in their families? Hard to say. It's an area of my research that needs more attention.

John and Prestonia Mann Martin donated a lot of money to the Hungerford School, a boarding school for African American children in Florida.

Sometime between 1900 and 1915, John and Prestonia purchased a house on Staten Island in NYC. The house, built around 1850 and lived in by Samual MacKenzie Elliott, according to one source, harbored Blacks during the 1863 draft riots. Elliott rented another house he owned on Staten Island to Sidney Howard Gay. Elliot was Unitarian.