Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society
History Quarterly Digital Archives

Source: January 1979 Volume 17 Number 1, Pages 21–22

In Memoriam

• Emma-Belle Beale
• C. Colket Wilson, Jr.

Page 21

During 1978 the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club was saddened by the loss of two of its members by death. The contributions, as well as the warmth and good humor, of both Emma-Belle Beale and C. Colket Wilson, Jr., will be sorely missed.

Emma-Belle Beale

On July 1st Emma-Belle Beale died at the Princeton Medical Center in Princeton, N.J., after a lenghty illness. She was 89 years of age.

Born in 1889 in Chicago, her family soon afterwards moved to Pittsburgh, where she grew up, attending the Margaret Morrison School.

Following the First World War, Miss Beale went to Europe with the Red Cross to help children who were victims of the war. For the next two years, her work with the Red Cross took her to Egypt; to Jerusalem; to Damascus and Aleppo, in Syria; to Poland, where she worked in War­saw, Kracow, Czestochowa, and Bialystock; and to France. For her work in Europe she received two citations and Awards of Merit from both the French and Polish governments as well as from the American Red Cross. (She also met the British archaeologist and soldier of fortune, T. E. Shaw, better known as "Lawrence of Arabia".)

Page 22

Returning to the United States, she continued her work with the Red Cross, with assignments in places from Kentucky to Pennsylvania, be­fore becoming a house mother at Girard College. Miss Beale then did social work in New Jersey and New York, notably at King's County Hospital in Brooklyn, where she was a medical social worker for twenty years.

Retiring in 1959 at the age of 70, she then came to Berwyn, where her sister, Mrs. Anna Beale Crawford, then lived at 118 Orchard Way. With more time to devote to the culinary arts, the "fruits of her labor" were well known to the members of the T-E History Club.

C. Colket Wilson, Jr.

C. Colket Wilson, Jr., or "Buz" as he was more familiarly known, died at his home on Swedesford Road on November 1st, after having suffered a heart attack in late August and a stroke in September. He lived in this area for all his 87 years.

The son of the late C. Colket and Emily Rambo Anderson Wilson, he was born in Bridgeport, Pa. He attended the Episcopal Academy and re­ceived a B.S. degree in economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1915. He was also manager of the 1915 Penn soccer team. It was as a student that he first started commuting to Philadelphia, which he continued to do for seventy-four years.

Following graduation, he became an insurance broker with Hopkins and Company, now Bishop, Biddle and Smith in Philadelphia. In 1932 he was elected to the Board of the Philadelphia, Germantown & Norristown Railroad Company (of which both his father and grandfather had served as president) and in 1945 became secretary-treasurer of the company.

In addition to the Tredyffrin Easttown History Club, Buz Wilson's his­torical interests included the Diamond Rock Old Pupils Association, of which he was a past president; the Sons of the Revolution; the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Agriculture; the Swedish Colonial Society, of which he was a member of the Board and a past governor; and the Valley Forge and Chester County Historical Societies.

He was also an original member of the Washington Memorial Chapel, ser­ving as a vestryman for many years; a former member of the Tredyffrin School Board; and at one time president of the Tredyffrin Easttown School District.