Peter and Paul Remsen remember the portrait of John Henry Kirby that hung in their family home growing up.
While Kirby is best known as a lumberman, East Texas timberland owner and the man for which Kirbyville was named, he was even more in the Remsen home.
The portrait was father James Kirby Remsen’s tribute to the man who’d been a family friend and mentor since youth and set him on a path to success after graduating boarding school.
And until recently, that’s the only relationship the family could confirm between Remsen and Kirby.
“You know, you look a lot like him,” Peter, then 15, recalls telling his father while staring at the portrait.
“That’s when the whole story rolled out,” he told The Enterprise.
James Kirby Remsen long suspected John Henry Kirby was much more than simply his mentor. He believed Kirby was his father — the product of a dalliance between Kirby and Remsen’s mother Edna Weeks Foster. His mother at the time was married to Marcellus Foster — a wealthy businessman and founder of the Houston Chronicle — when he was born in 1901.
The Fosters and Kirbys ran in similar Houstonian elite circles, “and Edna Weeks was a knockout,” said Paul, who’s seen one of the few surviving photos of his grandmother.
The brothers remember their father recounting the day his mother took him to visit Kirby after she’d divorced Foster.
Remsen was just six years old.
Weeks told Kirby she believed Remsen was his son.
“Edna, I think you’re right,” he responded, as the story goes.
It’s a belief that would go unfulfilled in substance – Kirby couldn’t pass along his family name or heritage without confirmation.
And in that time, there were no paternity tests. They couldn’t prove Remsen was his biological son.
And in the early 1900’s, talk of illegitimate children among the wealthy elite simply wasn’t done.
The true story of James Kirby Remsen, as he was then known, was better left unsaid. And while Kirby would forever be part of his name, it would never be his last name.
Instead, he gave Remsen the only thing he could – a path to success in a world of wealth.
At the age of 20, Remsen was given a job at Standard Oil, part of the Rockefeller family’s holdings.
Later, Kirby became interested in the Texas Steel Company in Fort Worth — a failing business which he bailed out, putting Remsen at the helm as president.
He turned the business around, and it became a success – a cycle that would be repeated when Kirby later installed Remsen as president at the flailing Vancouver Lumber Company in Canada.
He made that business a success, too.
Then came the Great Depression.
Like so many, Kirby, lost everything.
It was a domino effect that felled Remsen’s business success, leading him into government work – first with the CIA, later with the National Security Council.
It wasn’t the tycoon success of Kirby and other turn-of-the-century elites, but Remsen did have success and with wife Joan Cox Remsen, went on to birth two sons – Peter and Paul.
And the two gone on to have their own success. Paul Remsen worked in the metals industry and founded Stainless Structurals, Inc. Peter Remsen went to work for IBM after serving in Vietnam.
But their familial success story dating back to someone of Kirby’s stature remained mere speculation until they got a call a few years ago from a woman named Gail Pitt, granddaughter of Marcellus Foster.
She was doing genealogical research and asked if they’d be willing to do a DNA test, as all had been told they were Foster’s biological grandsons.
The DNA tests revealed Peter and Paul Remsen had no relation to Foster. As their father long suspected, they were indeed the biological descendants of John Henry Kirby.
More than 100 years after James Kirby Remsen’s birth, it was finally confirmed that he was the first direct male descendant of John Henry Kirby. That made his sons, Peter and Paul, the sole remaining male heirs to the family name.
The existence of male Kirby heirs was discovered by Silsbee Ice House Museum curators while setting up a new exhibit at the revamped museum space – an exhibit dedicated to Kirby.
“The story comes full circle back to DNA,” museum curator Susan Kilcrease wrote in a Facebook post in advance of the exhibit’s opening.
“A local Silsbee woman, Sharon Baldree, had been searching Ancestry.com for her family. Through DNA, she discovered that she was the great-granddaughter of Sarah Kirby — John Henry Kirby‘s sister. Further research in the site’s DNA records also connected her to a third cousin, Paul Kirby Remsen. Upon reaching out to him, she learned of his story and shared it with a friend associated with the Ice House museum, and we immediately reached out to him,” Kilcrease said.
The Icehouse Museum set about authenticating the newly-discovered lineage, using data like passport, death, marriage and other records.
“The most convincing evidence is that Ancestry.com showed John Henry Kirby and James Kirby Remsen were father and son according to DNA,” said Kilcrease, who contacted the site for expert confirmation.
“I was told that if they are linked by DNA in the database as father and son, this is in fact, indisputable,” she said.
Kilcrease called the discovery “an amazing and history-changing story. This information makes James Remsen’s sons the closest related living relative to John Henry Kirby alive today, and James Kirby Remsen the only biological son of John Henry Kirby.”
When she later spoke to Paul Remsen, she was struck by the way he spoke.
“I am well read in documents written by John Henry Kirby and am familiar with his unique way of communication. In conversing with Paul Kirby Remsen, I found him to sound remarkably like his grandfather,” she recalled. “It felt to me almost as though I was having an opportunity to meet John Henry Kirby in person.”
In late April, Kilcrease got the next best thing. She and education director Debbie Brown met Peter and Paul Remsen.
The brothers and Paul’s wife Cindy Remsen visited the Ice House Museum on April 28. It was their first trip to the Southeast Texas communities where their grandfather was born, raised and created the timber empire that would forever seal his place in the annuls of history.
The trio received an enthusiastic greeting as they walked through the museum doors and were then given a tour of “The Kirby Parlor” exhibit, which has drawn an unprecedented level of interest and museum visitors, many of whom came from out of town, Brown said.
They got to know their larger-than-life grandfather through photographs, the furnishings and artwork he’d collected, and a number of carefully-preserved typed and hand-written letters.
Kilcrease read from one letter displayed atop an ornate bureau in the parlor. In it, Kirby wrote to Laura Fortenberry – a close childhood friend and first love – after receiving a birthday letter filled with youthful memories decades later.
The correspondence is rife with the unique language that so resonated in Kilcrease’s first conversation with Paul Remsen.
“On this bright November day, I recall with distinctness that 50 years ago, I thought that if anything happened that I could not in due time become the husband of little Laura and have little Laura for my wife, that the whole universe would collapse,” Kirby added that his dream was forced to change when he as a young man realized he’d never wed the “little Laura who had blossomed into the full sweetness and witchery of her winsome womanhood.”
The brothers broke out in broad smiles as Kilcrease read the last sentence aloud, Paul exclaiming, “That’s our grandfather!”
The brothers spent the afternoon taking a deeper dive into the museum’s artifacts, which included archived notebooks filled with letters detailing Kirby’s business and personal communications, a kind of diary recounting his journey to success.
“How heartbroken Kirby must have been to not be able to recognize (James Kirby Remsen) as his son and heir to carry on his name,” Kilcrease remarked to the Remsens.
It’s a sentiment the brothers understand.
“We’re more than thrilled to confirm what our dad always thought, but more sad that he couldn’t be here to have this confirmed and know for sure that he was the son of John Henry Kirby,” said Peter Remsen.
kbrent@beaumontenterprise.com
