[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]
An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]
America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.
Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]