1830 Duncan's wife Catherine Colquhoun and son Daniel Colquhoun McIntyre, his wife Margaret Jane Adams/Malloy and children moved to Brazil. This occurred shortly after the disastrous outcome of the Civil War and the infestation of the south by carpetbaggers. First indication of their presence in Brazil is a letter written in 1869 (Old Letters), but we believe they were there closer to 1867. The telegram of 1867 was sent in care of W.A. Gunter, but delivered in the States. They were part of Col. W.A. Gunter's expedition. Gunter, in cooperation with the Brazilian government, started a colony of disgruntled southerners in Campinas, Brazil. Catherine, 1830 Duncan's wife, and her sons, Daniel Colquhoun McIntyre and Robert D. died and were buried near Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Daniel was injured during the construction of (according to family legend) Brazil's first sugar mill. A beam fell on him and he died several days thereafter. Five years after her husband's death Margaret Jane and her daughter Margaret Isabelle McIntyre returned to the States. They returned to Laurinburg, NC and seven years after their return Margaret Isabelle married Duncan Thomas McIntyre, her second cousin 

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Pérola Byington

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pérola Byington

BornPearl Ellis McIntyre
December 3, 1879
Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, São Paulo, Brazil

DiedNovember 6, 1963 (aged 83)
New York City, New York, U.S.

NationalityBrazilian–American

OccupationPhilanthropist

Spouse(s)Albert Jackson Byington

Pérola Ellis Byington (December 3, 1879 — 6 November 1963) was a Brazilian philanthropist and social activist. She was an advocate for mother and children's health assistance in Brazil during the first half of 20th century.[1]

 

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1Biography

• 2Death

• 3Legacy

• 4References

 

Biography[edit]

Born Pearl Ellis McIntyre, she was the daughter of Mary Elisabeth Ellis, and Robert Dickson McIntyre, American Confederado immigrants established in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste. She adopted the Portuguese form of her name (Pérola) and in 1894 when Pérola was fourteen years old, she completed the preparation for the Normal School, but was prevented from entering because the minimum age requirement was sixteen years old. Then, she received private lessons, except Latin, which she took at a boys' school , where Pérola had to hide behind a folding screen so as not to attract the attention of the teacher and the boys. In 1897, Pérola took the entrance exams for the annex course of the Law Academy of São Paulo. She didn't passed the geography test and neither was well received by the academicians, who did not see with good eyes the opening of the course for women. In 1899, at the age of 19, Pérola finished the normal course. In 1901 she married the industrialist Albert Jackson Byington,[2] — also a Confederado — in Brazil, with whom she had two children.

During the First World War, Byington was in the United States, where she was responsible for a section of the Red Cross. Already back to Brazil, she continued participating in philanthropic activities. From the 1930s, Byington alongside the teacher Maria Antonieta de Castro led a campaign to combat child mortality, called "Cruzada Pró-Infância", (Crusade for Childhood) a task which she held for 33 years.[3] She also dedicated herself to several other programs in defense of the disadvantaged, especially children, having been awarded several commendations of merit.

Death[edit]

She died in 6 November 1963, in New York City, United States.

Legacy[edit]

In her honor, a hospital dedicated to women's health in São Paulo is named after her.[4]

Pérola, a municipality of the state of Paraná, was named after her; Alberto Byington Júnior, Pérola's son, was one of the partners of the Companhia Byington de Colonização Ltda., the company that bought land and settled in the region.[5]

Byington is the great-grandmother of actress Bianca Byington and singer Olivia Byington. She is also the great-great-grandmother of the musician Gregório Duvivier.

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The Avenida Paulista Series is about to be 2 years old, throughout this period we publish, weekly, the history of the mansions of the early twentieth century and the buildings that succeeded them. There have been 60 stories published so far, some of them so rich, they have won chapters.

There are still many other houses, but the information begins to rarify .... Therefore, we invite those who have information - researchers, descendants, curious - to participate in this unpublished survey on the avenue.

This week we will introduce the Albert Jackson family home and his wife, Pearl Byington, which was number 127 on the old number. Through a scholar, Marcos Cesar da Silva, whom we thanked, we had access to a photo of the house. During this week we researched the family, but there was no time to write the text, so we will give voice to what we find published.

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The origin of the family is told below, by means of the opening section of an article by Rafael de Luna Freire entitled "From electricity generation to electric amusements: Alberto Byington Jr.'s business trajectory before the production of films" published in 2013, in the Historical Studies Journal of Rio de Janeiro.

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"Mary Elizabeth Ellis, a professor at the Piracicaba College in Piracicaba (SP), founded by presbyterians in the southern United States, came from the Mississippi. Due to the War of Secession, she was brought to Brazil at the age of nine, going to live in the house of her grandfather, Henry Strong, already established as a farmer in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, one of the main centers of American immigration in the interior of São Paulo. In 1878, Mary married another immigrant, Robert Dickson MacIntyre, assuming her husband's surname (Mott, 2003: 22-3).

One of Mary and Robert's three daughters, Pearl Ellis MacIntyre (who later adopted the name of Pearl) was born on December 3, 1879, on the family farm. After living in several cities in the interior of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, he moved with his parents and his two sisters to the capital of São Paulo, where he studied at the Escola Normal Caetano de Campos. As a normalist, she was invited to work as a governess in the mansion of a wealthy family from São Paulo, but refused. By that time, he was already married to Albert, a young American immigrant (Mott, 2001: 219).

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A native of Elmira, in the state of New York, Pearl Jackson's boyfriend, Albert Jackson Byington, was born on January 22, 1875. In 1893, at age 18, he worked for six months at the Chicago International Fair. "After this," according to testimony of Paulo Egydio Martins, "was hired to come to Argentina and settled in Buenos Aires with his friend Charles Williams. In 1895 he came from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, to work with the Canadian engineer James Mitchel, responsible for introducing the electric tram in the capital. Then he went to São Paulo to work at Light & Power "(Martins, 2007: 106).

From the manual work in the process of electrification of the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo "up the post and pulling wire", in the words of Martins, began the career in Brazil of the American immigrant (later naturalized) and life Albert and Pearl, or rather, Alberto and Pérola, a couple of Brazilian citizens, as would often be emphasized.

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The young couple settled in Sorocaba and in 1901 Alberto Byington acquired the Sorocaba Electric Company, which had a small thermal plant (De Lorenzo, 1993: 55-6). From Sorocaba he moved to Campinas, then the second most populous city in the state, where Alberto organized in 1904 the Cavalcante, Byington & Cia., That would give rise to the Company Campineira Luz e Força, probably associating itself with the local businessmen connected to the coffee . Gradually, the American continued in the strategy of buying and building small electric power plants in the region.

In that sense, in March 1913, Alberto Byington became the representative in Brazil of the newly created company The Southern Brazil Electric Company, Limited, linked to English capitals. During World War I, faced with the import restriction on coal, the main input of thermal generation, there was an even greater investment in Brazil in hydroelectric generation.

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No wonder, Byington & Sundstrom, Alberto Byington was responsible for the complex construction of the Hercílio Luz bridge, which connected the island of Santa Catarina, where Florianópolis is located, to the mainland, inaugurated in 1926, after four years of construction. (..)

The expansion of Byington & Cia in the 1920s meant that the company had a branch in New York and in the main cities of Brazil: Rio, Sao Paulo, Santos, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Salvador and Recife. "

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Pearl Byington was one of the founders of the Crusade for Childhood, an important institution with the goal of reducing child mortality. Her granddaughter, Maria Elisa Botelho Byington, worried about the preservation of her grandmother's story and the Crusade, wrote the book "The gesture that saves - Pearl Byington and the Crusade for Childhood", edited in 2005 by Griffin Historical Projects and Editorials

At the launch of the book, Maria Elisa, gave an interview to Paula Protazio Lacerda, from Época Magazine, and some excerpts about her grandmother published here.

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"Pearl married Alberto J. Byington and had two children. In 1912 the family took their children to study in the United States. The war broke out and they could not return to Brazil. With that, my grandmother started working at the American Red Cross raising funds.

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The American Red Cross extended its services beyond the battlefields to care for the wounded. It instituted campaigns for the prevention of accidents at home and in transit, and pioneered rural visits to treat distant families in the city. Pearl may not have acted in all these areas, but acquired, say, by "osmosis" that work environment.

When he returned to Brazil, he worked in the Red Cross of São Paulo, with the founder, Maria Rennotte, his mother's companion in the Piracicabano College. Then, with all this experience, at the age of fifty, she inaugurated the Pro-Childhood Crusade together with Maria Antonieta de Castro, a health educator. Its purpose was to combat child mortality.

Pearl and her team had wonderful ideas. They held many campaigns, competitions and public events and suddenly the Crusade fell in the taste of the press. Several newspapers published all the campaigns of the Crusade. The last campaign, in 1963, shortly before the death of Pearl was on channel 9, TV Excelsior. It remained 27 hours in the air. I do not know how, but someone invented a toll and all the taxi drivers agreed to go through the toll that night. There were many actions in favor of the Crusade for Childhood.

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Pearl received numerous awards and decorations. In São Paulo, Pérola Byington Hospital, in its honor, is dedicated to the care of women and a nucleus of professionalization for young people in situation of social vulnerability. In its hometown, Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, the avenue where the world's largest lathing industry is based, was named Avenida Pérola Byington.

Pérola, a municipality in the state of Paraná - formerly a district of the municipality of Xambrê - was named after him, on behalf of his son Alberto Byington Júnior, one of the partners of the Company Byington de Colonização Ltda. , acquired land and colonized the region.

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About the house of Paulista Avenue we know little, (maybe in the book have some information, which I bought, but not yet). What we have determined is that Pérola used her house for meetings and events of the Crusade for Childhood, in addition to collecting donations, as in this matter of 1930 on Children's Week, instituted in Brazil by Pérola.

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The family appears at this address in telephone directories from 1920, but before that, 1917 the place appears on behalf of the family of Willian Speers, an Englishman from Newcastle, who came young to Brazil. He worked for 53 years at the São Paulo Railway Company, where he became superintendent and representative of the company in Brazil. In 1910, the house was in the name of his son JP Speers.

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Until 1935 we find news of the actions of the Crusade on Paulista Avenue, then in the late 1940s beginning of the 50s, we found the address in the name of Mario Dias Castro, who lived in another Paulista house (The story can be read on this link ) and was brother of Ernesto Dias Castro, owner of the House of Roses.

In the area of ​​Avenida Paulista, was built between 1973 and 75 the Pedro Biagi Building, in the current number 460 of Avenida Paulista, with a project by the architects Mauricio Kogan and Luis Andrade Mattos Dias.

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The tower has 23 floors, with two modulated pillars of apparent concrete that emphasize its verticality, and on the roof, the pillars end in hollowed arches. At the ground level there is an agency of Banco do Brasil, and on the lawn a work by Franz Weissmann (1911 - 2005), as indicated by a reader. Thank you!

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The building was named after Pedro Biagi, who was an Italian immigrant, who became a well-known farmer and owner of sugar mills in the interior of São Paulo.

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​Pedro Biagi's anthology: "When I made my first brick, I did not think I would have a building with my name on the main street of the main city of Brazil!", Referring to the Paulista Avenue building in São Paulo. So much that it was walled in the building itself.