£800 - £1,200
Union History/Derbyshire/US History: Robert Watchorn 1859 -1944 was a coal miner, union leader, businessman, and immigration commissioner. Born in Derbyshire, Watchorn immigrated to the United States after the U.S. Civil War to become a coal miner. He soon involved himself with unions and served as President of the Pittsburgh District Miners' Union and secretary of the National Miners' Union. He also founded a night school for miners. In 1891, Pennsylvania governor Robert Pattison appointed him Inspector of Factories and Mines. Watchorn then worked as an inspector at Ellis Island. In 1905, he became a commissioner at Ellis Island and instituted various reforms, such as the building of hospitals on a nearby island. In 1909, Watchorn began working as an assistant to the president and treasurer of the United Oil Company of California, and in 1916 he founded the Watchorn Oil and Gas Company. The fortune Watchorn gained from the oil industry allowed him to become a philanthropist. He worked as an immigration commissioner under President Theodore Roosevelt and his later philanthropy gave his two-hundred-acre New York estate to the Atlantic Union Conference of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, with the understanding that it was to be used as a church-operated medical facility. He also made sizable donations to Protestant churches in California, Oklahoma, and his home country England. Watchorn's donations from the year 1915-1936 totalled nearly US$1.5 million. The lot contains a cast bust of George Washington that was given to Watchorn by Roosevelt by repute measuring 11ins, rare family photographs and a booklet from July 1929 marking the inauguration of the Watchorn Memorial Primitive Methodist chapel in his hometown of Alfreton.
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