Mr. and Mrs. William V. Latham

 

These oil paintings of Mr. and Mrs. William V. Latham are on display in the second floor hallway of the Follett House Museum. Both natives of Connecticut, William V. Latham and Mary A. Bouton were married in Erie County, Ohio in May of 1856. From the 1850s until 1895, Mr. Latham was a merchant tailor in Sandusky, Ohio. In 1854, he operated a business with H.S. Adams on Columbus Avenue, a few doors down from Water Street.

Soon after, he became a sole proprietor, and by 1886, was in business at 212 Columbus Avenue. By the 1870s, Mr. Latham's brother in law, Charles E. Bouton, became a partner at W.V. Latham and Company. (Mr. Bouton became Sandusky’s Mayor in 1895.)  This photographic portrait of W.V. Latham was taken in the late 1800s by Sandusky photographer W.A. Bishop.

On December 18, 1895, William V. Latham died at the age of 72. A lengthy obituary in the Sandusky Register of December 21, 1898 read in part, “The middle aged and older men of this city knew the late W.V. Latham as a man of upright life and pure impulses. Loyal to his friends, faithful to his family, generous in an unostentious [sic] way, he went about the business of life from his youth up without creating frictions or arousing antagonisms. He had no use for shame, despised hypocrisy and never pretended to be other than he was. An honest, well disposed gentleman…The useful business of life of life is in the hands of the quiet and unassuming, and of such was this unpretentious gentleman, who has crossed the divide and is now at rest where physical pain and mental sorrow cannot reach him.” 

Funeral services took place at the Latham residence on Adams Street. He was buried at Sandusky’s Oakland Cemetery. Mrs. W.V. Latham survived until 1927, when she passed away at the age of 88.