Charles Herreshoff :: Biography Biographical Essays

Charles Herreshoff After Agnes Muller died in the cold Prussian winter of 1766, her three-year-old son was alone in the world. It was said later, though there was no proof, that Agnes’s husband Corporal Eschoff went mad with grief – surely only that could have explained his subsequent abandonment both of his post as bodyguard to Frederick the Great and of his only child. In any case, he disappeared forever, leaving his former townsfolk with only the vague notion that he had "gone to Italy." The boy’s childhood has been lost to the past. An account written two centuries later by a descendant suggests that he lived with maiden aunts until the age of eight, when the women sent him to live with a professor in Potsdam. This, the account explains, is how the boy finally met Frederick the Great – the monarch consulted with the boy’s professor. Another, more sordid tale mentions the rumors that Frederick himself had fathered the child. Frederick, the story goes, was completely impotent and thus flattered by the suggestion. And so, this version continues, partly out of pride and partly as a joking revenge for the desertion of his bodyguard Corporal Eschoff, the emperor took the boy under his wing and sent him to a school for the children of nobles, equipped with the names of two kings and a surname that meant "lord of the manor": Karl Friederich Herreschoff. What is certain is that Karl Friederich left his native Prussia for the United States around 1786. This voyage across the Atlantic marked the beginning of a metamorphosis: that of Karl Friederich Herreschoff, uncertain but cultured young immigrant, into Charles Frederick Herreshoff, promising young merchant. Charles struggled for a decade in his adopted country, first starting his own firm and going bankrupt; eventually, he went to work for a mercantile firm where wealthy and successful John Brown was a senior partner. The young man’s pleasant demeanor and charm, as well as his talent for good conversation and elegant music, are mentioned in more than one account. He had no good family name and no money other than what the firm paid him – but he had personality, and he hoped that would be enough to catch the eye of Brown’s much-beloved younger daughter, Sarah. By 1798, Charles appears to have already made some kind of declaration to the young woman he affectionately called Sally.