Jesse Metcalf family papers (SP12.0)

The Metcalf family settled in Providence, RI after the Revolutionary War and opened a leather business under the name Joel Metcalf and Sons. Jesse Metcalf (1790-1838) married Eunice Houghton (1793-1858) 1812 April 19. Widowed with five children, Eunice never remarried. Her oldest son Jesse Metcalf (1827-1899) apprenticed in the cotton broker business under the tutelage of Truman Beckwith and Stephen T. Olney. He moved to Macon, Georgia in 1848 and then Augusta in 1850. He and Olney began their own business under the name Olney and Mecalf, maintaining an office in Augusta until the Civil War.

Married to Helen Rowe in 1852, Metcalf returned to Providence in 1857/1858 where Olney and Metcalf entered the woolen mill business. They incorporated under the name the Wanskuck Company in partnership with Henry J. Steere during the Civil War. Helen Metcalf served on the 1876 Women's Centennial Committee of Rhode Island. She led the effort to use the committee's remaining funds to establish the Rhode Island School of Design in 1877. She and her daughter Eliza Radeke (1852-1931) guided RISD's operations for its first 50 years. Stephen O. (1857-1951), Manton B. (1864-1923), and Jesse H. (1860-1942) joined their father in the family's woolen mills business.

See Nancy Austin's dissertation "Towards a Genealogy of Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design, 1875-1900" (Brown University, 2009) for a detailed history of the founding and early years of RISD.