William Gregg Fenwick, 1854-1947
Headstone GPS Coordinates: Grave location unknown in the cemetery.
Birth: 23 November 1854, Hillsboro, Highland County, Ohio.
Death: 16 March 1947, Bremerton, Kitsap County, Washington
Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: None.
American Revolutionary War Patriots*: John Gregg (Virginia) A047656
Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards.
William Gregg Fenwick was born on November 23, 1854, in Hillsboro, Highland County, Ohio. His father, David Fenwick, was a farmer originally from Delaware, and his mother was Eliza M. Gregg of Ohio. William had one younger brother, George Stanley Fenwick.
When William was two years old, the family was renting a house and farmland in Washington Township, Clermont County, Ohio. By the time he was twelve, they owned and farmed their own land in Clermont County.
In June 1880, William was living on his own in Washington Township while attending medical school, having completed two years of college. Later that year, on December 19, 1880, he married Anna O. Wilson, also of Clermont County.
William and Anna settled in Moscow, Clermont County, where they raised three children: daughter Genevra (born 1881), son Earl S. (born 1882), and daughter Aledia (born 1885). Sometime between 1885 and 1890, Anna passed away, leaving William a widower with three young children.
On June 5, 1897, William was appointed U.S. Postmaster in Moscow. According to the 1900 census, he was still living there, working as postmaster, with all three children at home and attending school.
Between 1890 and 1900, William’s younger brother George traveled west, married in Colorado, and eventually settled in Seattle. Several years later, around 1907, William’s son Earl also moved to Seattle, where he married Sadie Hite, daughter of Ashbel and Alice Hite, who are buried in Seabeck Cemetery. By 1910, William and all of his surviving children were living in Washington State. Earl and Sadie made their home in Crosby.
In the 1910 census, William was living in Seattle, owned his home, and was employed as a janitor. By 1920, he was living alone in his own home in Suquamish, Kitsap County. At sixty-four years old, he was unemployed, though he later returned to Seattle.
A January 1924 article in the Kitsap Herald noted that William had visited his son Earl in Crosby at Hite Center before returning to his home in Seattle.
The 1930 census shows William, then seventy-six, living in Broadview, just north of Seattle, in the household of his daughter Aledia Jordan, her husband, and their children.
In 1935, William’s eldest daughter, Genevra, died from a paralytic ileus—caused by her intestines ceasing to function—while recovering from uterine suspension surgery.
By 1940, William was once again living independently in Suquamish. Around 1945, he relocated to Bremerton.
On March 16, 1947, at the age of ninety-two, William died at Roosevelt Hospital in Bremerton after a three-day hospitalization. The cause of death was listed as “apoplexy,” now known as a stroke. He was buried in Seabeck Cemetery near members of the Hite family.
In Fred Just’s book Seabeck and the Surrounding Area (page 140), it is noted that William’s “biggest fear was that grave robbers would steal his body, so his casket was encased in concrete.”
The reason for this fear is unknown, but it may have stemmed from stories William heard during medical school about doctors exhuming recently buried bodies for anatomical study.