Anne Brownlow Patrick died in July 1893 at her mother’s home in Knoxville. A year later, Will married Marie Eubank. I have a copy of their marriage certificate. They were married in Teller County. Marie’s father, William T. Eubank, was an Expressman on a railway. An Expressman was in charge of the mail car and the safe on a train. He lived in Victor, which is in Teller County.
Very little is known about Marie. Family lore has described her as a “socialite,” interested in spending money and having a good time. In a letter to his nieces and nephew, L. L. describes Marie as “the opposite of Anne in every way.” In family lore Marie also stands accused of selling off the knives of Anne’s silver service because of the amount of silver in the knife handles. I think Marie had a very hard act to follow and that we will never really know who she actually was.
I know her father’s name because he sued William Brownlow Patrick (3) (known as Brownlow in the family) and William H. Eddy after Marie’s death in 1909. He claimed that Marie had not received everything she had been entitled to as the widow of Will.
I have been able to trace Mr. Eubank through Ancestry.com. He was born in 1833 in Cooper County, Missouri. He didn’t marry until he was 35 in 1868, the same year his first son was born. Marie was born in 1872 in Leavenworth, KS, I believe. The 1885 Nebraska state census shows William T. Eubank living in Sidney, NE with three children, but no wife. “Mamie” Eubank is listed as 13 years old. Mamie could have been a nickname, the census taker go it wrong, or maybe Marie’s birth name was Mamie and she changed it to Marie later. I have been able to find only two documents that mention Mamie/Marie, the Nebraska Census and her marriage certificate to Will. The only other mention of Marie is in newspaper articles.
W. T. Eubank remarried in 1886 and his three children from his first marriage are never listed in any census, only his new family. I have found a marriage certificate and a death certificate for one of Marie’s brothers that lists their mother’s name, Nannie G. Weir. I have no other information on Nannie.
W. T. Eubank’s mother was Nancy Ware and I think Nannie was a relation, but I have been unable to find out how they were related. Cooper County, Missouri is chuck full of Wares, Wears, and Weirs, often times the same person is mentioned in different sources with different spellings.
The only reason I found so much on W. T. Eubank is that his father, Achilles Eubank, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War and in his 70s when he married Nancy. W. T.’s birthdate is four years before his parent’s marriage! So whether W. T. was really Achilles’ son, I don’t know, but Achilles and Nancy did go on to several more sons before his death at 86.
Did Will and Marie have a son? I have not found a birth nor death certificate for such a child. Family lore does not mention a son who died very young. Although, if Marie had been pregnant, that might explain why Will married so soon after Anne’s death, and yet another reason why the family didn’t like her.
Marie is mentioned in newspaper reports as visiting friends along with her “young son.” Brownlow was nine years old when his father married Marie. At the time of the newspaper articles he would have been 12-15 years old. Too old to be called “young,” especially when another article describes a 12 year old Brownlow as traveling on his own from Salt Lake City to Eureka, NV by train. The dates of the reports are also during the school year when Brownlow would have been living with his aunt Clara and going to school in Denver.
Why do I keep saying that the Patricks did not like Marie? Because that is very clear in the family lore. I have also found that in the social columns of Goldfield’s newspaper, there are many times when Mrs. E. T. Patrick and Mrs. L.L. Patrick are mentioned, sometimes together at a social party, but Mrs. W. F. Patrick does not appear to have been invited to events given by her sisters-in-law or events they were invited to.
There are two interesting news articles from March 1905. The first announced a suit by W. F. and Marie Patrick against L. L. Patrick for $100,000. It also promised salacious details about L. L.’s business doings. A day later, Will is quoted as saying he knows nothing about such a suit and I have not found anything else about the lawsuit ever going forward.
So what happened? I think Marie and her lawyer threatened the lawsuit to get L. L. to repay a loan and that Will had nothing to do with it. Did they know that Will had stomach cancer in March? Was she feeling anxious about the future?
She has been portrayed as a gold-digger, but Will had spent the 1880s promoting himself as a successful mining engineer and rich. As a girl whose mother died before she 13 and whose father seems to have abandoned the children of his first marriage, Marie could have thought all her problems were solved when she married a rich, successful man. She would have been very disappointed to find out that it was all show and very little money. Will declared bankruptcy in 1900 and had not found a producing mine in Utah or Nevada. By 1905, she may have been tired of the pretense, worried about a sick husband, and just wanted real money.
When Will died in July 1905 in Rhyolite, it is clear that many of the notices in the Nevada and Denver newspapers had been written by one of Will’s brothers, they left Marie out totally! I found one notice that seems to have been written by Marie or a friend of hers, but most newspapers carried a notice of Will’s death that only mentioned his brothers, sisters, and Brownlow, no widow.
Lucien was able to get his revenge in 1908. Marie had returned from a trip to Europe and was staying at the York Hotel when she became ill with pneumonia. While the nurse was out of the room (Marie was still in the hotel, not in a hospital) Marie took an overdose of her sleeping medication. She lingered for a day and finally died Monday morning on February 11, 1908.
Then there are the nasty articles in newspapers in Goldfield, Durango, CO, and Salt Lake City. The news could only have come from one of the Patrick brothers directly to the newspapers. The articles also mention that L.L. will be going to New York to “help” his sister-in-law. I think the specific newspapers were chosen to ruin Marie’s reputation in both places. Why, I don’t know. But the Patrick family certainly didn’t keep the news quiet.
Until I can find any other information on her, the real Marie is lost to time.
