The ancestors of Frances Gallatin Stevens Reese (1917-2003) and her husband, Willis Livingston Mesier Reese (1913-1990), were prominent residents of Dutchess County, New York for many generations. Descended from the Reese, Willis and Mesier families, Willis Reese was the Charles Evans Hughes Professor Emeritus of Law, as well as the Director of the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law at Columbia Law School. Frances Reese, known as Franny, was the daughter of Francis Kerby Stevens (1877-1873) and Elizabeth Shaw Oliver (1873-1951). Franny was a founder of Scenic Hudson, which, beginning in the 1960s, fought for 17 years to prevent a power plant from being built on Storm King Mountain in New York.

The Stevens family can trace their lineage to Ebenezer Stevens (1751-1823), born in Roxbury, Massachusetts. He was a participant in the Boston Tea Party, commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Artillery in 1775, and fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. George Washington selected Ebenezer to raise battalions against Quebec to join the expedition against Canada. Ebenezer was present at the surrender of the British General Burgoyne at Saratoga, New York, on October 17, 1777. He served under the French general the Marquis de Lafayette in Virginia. He was later transferred to the New York artillery and in 1781 was one of the commanders at the siege of Yorktown. By 1805 he had risen to the rank of Major General and was involved in the defense of New York during the War of 1812. After his military career Stevens was a successful merchant in New York and a member of the state Assembly.

Ebenezer Stevens’s descendants were also successful in their pursuits. Byam Kerby Stevens married into the Gallatin family, New York bankers who helped found the Astor Trust Company. Alexander Henry Stevens was the Vice President of the Astor Trust Company, and his son, Francis Kerby Stevens was successful in both the New York real estate industry and with his dairy farm in Gladstone, New Jersey. His real estate business had been in the family since its creation by Francis’s great-uncle Samuel Stevens. Francis’s sister, Emily Stevens married into the Ladenberg banking family and gave birth to Eugenie “May” Ladenberg Davie who became an active member of the Republican Party and was the head of the Woman’s Auxiliary during Wendell Willkie’s campaign to unseat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940.

On her mother’s side, Frances Gallatin Stevens Reese is descended from Daniel Augustus Oliver and John Finley Rathbone. Daniel Oliver’s son, Robert Shaw Oliver served in the Civil War, rising to the rank of General after the conflict. He was named Assistant Secretary of War in 1903 under Theodore Roosevelt and served into the administration of William Howard Taft. John Rathbone entered the booming Albany stove industry and in 1845 built the largest stove factory in the world whose products were found as far away as the Middle East. He served as a General during the Civil War and was so successful recruiting and organizing local troops that he rose to the rank of Major General after the war. John Rathbone also ran for mayor in 1864 and became one of Albany’s leading philanthropists as the library at the University of Rochester is named for him.

Despite these successes, the most exceptional member of the family may have been Frances Reese’s uncle, John Rathbone Oliver. Born in 1872 to Robert Shaw Oliver and Marion Rathbone, who was the daughter of John Finley Rathbone, John Oliver was successful as a teacher, minister, doctor and writer. After touring Europe as a teenager he was the valedictorian in 1894 as he graduated Harvard as a Master of Arts. Six years later he enrolled in a seminary and was ordained as an Episcopal priest serving in Philadelphia and Albany. At 32 he left for Austria and studied medicine, obtaining his medical degree at the Royal Academy at Innsbruck. He then served as a surgeon in the Austrian Army until a heart attack in 1915, a condition that denied him the chance to serve in the U.S. Army Medical Corps as his application was refused in 1917. After the war Oliver returned to the priesthood and served in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins where he became involved with prison inmates and became the Chief Medical Officer of the Baltimore court system while earning his Doctor of Philosophy in 1927. He later became a consulting psychiatrist and a professor of history of medicine at the University of Maryland medical school. Oliver was also a prolific writer, as can be seen in this collection, his novel, Victor and Victim, came within one vote of winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.