William Bayard Cutting
Father of Iris Origo
https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n84228810/
WILLIAM BAYARD CUTTING (January 12, 1850 – March 1, 1912) was the son of Fulton Cutting and Elise Justine Bayard. When he was two years old his mother died and her parents, Robert and Elizabeth (McEvers) Bayard, took care of him and his younger brother, Fulton. Educated in a private school in New York, he graduated from Columbia College at the age of nineteen, and from the Columbia Law School in 1871, with A.B., A.M., and LL.D. degrees. He was admitted immediately to the New York Bar but did not practice, as his time was claimed by innumerable business, civic, and philanthropic activities. On April 26, 1877, he married Olivia Peyton Murray, daughter of Bronson Murray and Ann Eliza Peyton. They had four children: William Bayard Cutting, Jr. (deceased), Justine Bayard Ward (deceased), Bronson Murray Cutting (deceased), and Olivia James (deceased).
http://www.bayardcuttingarboretum.com/about-us/about-william-bayard-cutting/
Big Old Houses: The Thing Done Handsomely
by John Foreman
She was the beau ideal of an American debutante of the 1870s — pretty, amused by the world, and confident of her position in it. Olivia Peyton Murray's (1855-1949) landowning ancestors were in the Doomsday Book. Besides swaths of Surrey, later descendants owned tracts in Manhattan, notably Murray Hill. To characterize Miss Murray's life as predictable isn't really fair, but it is true.
In 1877 she married the eminently appropriate William Bayard Cutting (1850-1912), known as Bayard. Like the Murrays, the Cuttings had been in America since the 18th century. Bayard's grandfather married a Livingston and was steamboat pioneer Robert Fulton's partner in a Brooklyn-Manhattan ferry. When Bayard Cutting's mother died in 1852, 2-year-old Bayard and his infant brother, Robert Fulton, were parked with maternal grandparents in bucolic Edgewater, NJ. Grandpa Robert Bayard was a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant's sister. Alexander Hamilton died in a Bayard family house. As my late mother would have put it, these were people with background.
In 1886, Bayard and Olivia Cutting, now married 9 years and accompanied by two (of an eventual four) children and a (very) large staff moved into a sprawling Tudor Revival mansion named Westbrook. Designed for them by Charles C. Haight (1841-1917) it was located in the South Shore Long Island village of Oakdale. If you are at all familiar with New York Society's florid romance with Long Island's north shore, you may well be asking yourself what in the world they were doing in Oakdale? I quote from my own book, "The Vanderbilts and the Gilded Age," published in 1991 by St. Martin's Press.
"In the 1870s, Oakdale was a famous watering spot for the elite ... (and its famous) ... South Side Club was a hunting and fishing association whose membership, according to social historian Mary Cable, had 'more wealth per member than any such club in the United States.' Belmonts, Bennetts, Goelets, Tiffanys, Whitneys, Lorillards, Cuttings, and Vanderbilts shot, fished and socialized there .... The antecedent of this club was a humble tavern in the wilderness, operated by one Eliphet (Liff) Snedecor ... As early as 1828 the Smithtown Star was singing the praises of Snedecor's, where 'we find the hunting and fishing ... something to marvel about.' ... The American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine urged readers in 1839 to 'get in at Liff's if possible. The way you live there is none of your common doings.' ... In 1867, the railroad arrived ... (and by) ... the 1870s, South Side's reputation had changed from that of a hinterland gem known only to the cognoscenti to a favorite retreat of the nation's movers and shakers."
http://www.newyorksocialdiary.com/the-way-they-live/2014/big-old-houses-the-thing-done-handsomely
William Bayard Cutting (January 12, 1850 – March 1, 1912),[1] a member of New York's merchant aristocracy, was an attorney, financier, real estate developer, sugar beet refiner and philanthropist. Cutting and his brother Fulton started the sugar beet industry in the United States in 1888. He was a builder of railroads, operated the ferries of New York City, and developed part of the south Brooklyn waterfront, Red Hook.
Cutting was in New York City on January 12, 1850. He was the son of Fulton Cutting (1816–1875) and Elise Justine Bayard (1823–1852). He was the brother of Robert Fulton Cutting (1852–1934), a financier.[2]
His paternal grandparents were William Cutting (1773–1820) and Gertrude Livingston (1778–1864),[3] the sister of Henry Walter Livingston, a U.S. Representative from New York, and the daughter of Walter Livingston, the 1st Speaker of the New York State Assembly.[2] He was the nephew of Francis Brockholst Cutting,[2] also a U.S. Representative from New York.[4] His maternal grandfather, Robert Bayard, was Robert Fulton's partner. Cutting and Fulton were brothers-in-law who had married Livingston sisters. Cutting ancestors included members from the Bayard, Schuyler and Van Cortlandt families of Colonial New York.[5]
Cutting attended, studied law and graduated from Columbia College.[1]
utting, a lawyer, assisted his grandfather, Robert Bayard, in the management of his railroad company. In addition, W. Bayard Cutting continued to operate the ferry system of New York City and the city of Brooklyn.[1]
In 1895, Cutting and his brother laid out a golf course at Westbrook, known to be the first private golf course in the United States.[6]
Cutting was a member of the famous Jekyll Island Club (a.k.a. The Millionaires Club) on Jekyll Island, Georgia. He was also a founding member of the good government organization, the City Club of New York.[1] Cutting also was one of the founders of the New York Metropolitan Opera.[7]
His Long Island estate along the west bank of the Connetquot River, purchased from George L. Lorillard in 1884, and the country house called "Westbrook" which he built there, are now the Bayard Cutting Arboretum,[8][9] in Great River, New York.
On April 26, 1877, he married Olivia Peyton Murray (1855–1949), the daughter of Bronson Murray of Murray Hill, New York. They had four children:
William Bayard Cutting, Jr. (1878–1910), who was secretary to the U.S. embassy to the Court of St. James's. He married 30 April 1901, Lady Sybil Marjorie Cuffe, daughter of Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, 5th Earl of Desart and Lady Margaret Joan Lascelles.[10]
Justine Bayard Cutting (1879–1975), who married George Cabot Ward in 1901. She developed the Ward Method of music education as a way to teach sight-singing to children in Catholic schools in order to promote Gregorian chant.
Bronson Murray Cutting (1888–1935),[11] a U.S. Senator from New Mexico who was killed in an airplane crash.[12]
Olivia Murray Cutting (1892–1963), who married Henry James, a Pulitzer Prize winner and the son of psychologist William James, in 1917.[13]
Cutting died of acute indigestion while on a train coming back from El Paso, Texas.[1]
Through his eldest son, he was the grandfather of Dame Iris Margaret (nee Cutting) Origo, Marchesa of Val d'Orcia (1902–1988), the Marchesa Origo, the author of many books.[14]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bayard_Cutting
