James Davenport Whelpley

Whelpley was born in New York City on January 23, 1817, the son of Rev. Philip M. Whelpley, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, and his wife, Abigail Fitch Davenport, a descendant of John Davenport, the first minister of New Haven.

Whelpley graduated from Yale College in 1837, after which he assisted Henry Darwin Rogers for two years with Rogers' Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. He then enrolled in the Medical Department of Yale College, from which he graduated in 1842. He remained in New Haven until 1846, engaged in the study of the sciences, and in literary pursuits. He then went to Brooklyn, New York, and began to practice his profession, but was soon obliged to relinquish it from ill-health. In 1847, he moved back to New York City, and became the editor and one of the owners of the American Whig Review, the journal to which he had contributed since 1845.

In 1849, he formed a project to establish a commercial colony in Honduras, and while planning this enterprise, spent two years in San Francisco, purchasing and editing one of the daily papers there. His arrangements were complicated by the presence of the filibuster William Walker in Honduras, and upon going there he was detained by Walker for nearly a year, and was forced into service as a surgeon. Escaping to San Francisco, he returned early in 1857 to the East, and again devoted himself to literature, and to scientific studies. For the last ten years of his life he was a great sufferer from asthma, which gradually developed into tuberculosis, from which he died at his residence in Boston, on April 15, 1872.

Whelpley was a member of the American Academy. His scientific research was chiefly in physics and in metallurgy.

Whelpley married (first) in January 1848 Anna Maria Wells, of Roxbury, Massachusetts, daughter of the poet Anna Maria Wells. She died on July 29th, 1860, leaving one daughter. He married (second) in 1861 Mary Louise Breed of Virginia. She survived him, with their three children, including the artist and aviator Mary Taylor Brush.

• The Denslow Palace (1858), published in Atlantic Monthly, July 1858
• He Was Always Such a Fool (1860), published in Harpers New Monthly, January 1860
• The Atoms of Chladni (1860), published in Harpers New Monthly, January 1862
• Courtship by Character (1862), published in Harpers New Monthly, January 1862

• The full text of The Denslow Palace at Wikisource

 This article incorporates public domain material from the Yale Obituary Record.