CENTERBURG — The path to happiness in life can have some twists and turns. But few paths wander as far afield as the story of the peculiar marriage of Daniel and Nanette Paul.
What begins in central Ohio will stray to Kansas, Washington D.C., New Jersey, and Indiana, among other places — and the road will be bumpy.
Who was Daniel Paul? He was a farmer, a politician, a banker, and something of a mystery. He was born around 1834 in Licking County, but his family moved a little ways north into Knox County, near Martinsburg, where they had a large farm.
For many years, that farm and his family was Daniel Paul’s life. Unlike the average young man, he remained at home, showing no particular interest in getting married. After his father passed away, Daniel remained living with his mother and successfully managing the prosperous farm.
At some point, he began to get involved with politics and was nominated by the local Democratic party to run for state senator in 1873. Paul won the election and served for the next few years. His name was bandied about for a possible run for Congress, but was ultimately passed over. Paul left the state senate in 1877 to begin a career in banking, which is what brought him to Centerburg. There, he was successful and respected.
Remarkably, after decades of life as a single man, in 1888, he announced his engagement to a 22-year-old woman from Plain City, named Nanette Baker. It was evidently widely assumed the couple would be moving elsewhere, as a local newspaper ran the comment: “Daniel Paul, Ex-Senator and proprietor of the Centerburg Bank, is preparing to leave us. This will be an inconvenience to the business men of our town.”
But they didn’t leave. The Pauls settled down in Centerburg, and Daniel continued working at the bank until taking his retirement in the early 1890s.
If anyone expected children to follow the May/December marriage, that didn’t happen. In fact, not much else of note seems to take place until the spring of 1893.
“Gone, No One Knows Where”
On May 9, Daniel Paul quietly mentioned to his wife that he had some business to attend to in Toledo. He got on a train and traveled there, meeting with lawyers. On the evening of May 11, he boarded the Toledo & Ohio Central Railroad train running to Centerburg. But when the train got to Centerburg, he was not on it.
After a few days, his wife contacted the authorities about her missing husband and the story broke statewide.
The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote, “Daniel Paul, one of the weathiest and most prominent citizens of Knox County, Ohio, has mysteriously disappeared. The missing man is a retired banker, and has a palatial residence at Centerburg.”
Another article said, “Mr. Paul was a man of exemplary habits, about 60 years of age, tall and slender build, carriage very erect, iron gray hair, mustache and chin whiskers. He always wore gold-rimmed spectacles. Owing to a long-standing dyspeptic condition he suffered greatly at times with his head, and he has been apprehensive for some time of some mental aberration.”
Rumors ran rampant that Paul had lost his mind, had committed suicide, had run off with another woman, or that he had been waylaid by robbers.
A police detective followed the ‘other woman’ theory, following a lead from a citizen in Centerburg who pointed out that a local widow had left town with her “charming” daughter the same time Paul disappeared, and that the widow had since returned without the charming daughter in tow. But nothing came of the lead.
A telegram came from Monroe, Michigan, about a body found in a lake, but it likewise proved to be unrelated. Nanette Paul announced a $1,000 reward for information about her husband.
The rumor mill really exploded when it was revealed that shortly before leaving on his business trip to Toledo, Daniel Paul had sold his interest in the Centerburg Bank and other business projects, and left carrying $35,000 in government bonds. That was a tremendous sum in those days, and it made Paul’s disappearance look quite intentional.
Word spread around the country about Daniel Paul’s disappearance, and he was finally identified in Kansas City, almost a month after his vanishing act. Nanette was wired of his location, and she immediately traveled west to gather her wayward husband.
Paul explained away his actions by saying that “sickness produced mental trouble, and, losing his identity, he boarded a train of cars, and when he came to his senses, he found himself in Kansas City. He felt too chagrined to make his whereabouts known, until he learned that a reward was offered and that detectives were shadowing him.
On her way to Kansas, Nanette received a telegram from Daniel saying that he wanted to return home with her. The newspapers cheerfully quoted Shakespeare: “All’s well that ends well.”
Gone Again
Less than a year later, it happened all over again.
In February of 1894, Daniel announced a business trip to Centerburg, yet did not return on the evening train. When Nanette opened a box Daniel had left behind, she found instructions to his successor at the bank, Mark Cook, to set up investments to provide for his wife, but for neither of them to make any effort to seek him or try in any way to discover his whereabouts.
All the train conductor could tell investigators was that Paul had kept paying the fare, station to station, until the end of the line in Athens, Ohio, where he disappeared.
Nanette took a different approach this time. She paid for large ads in several national newspapers that said, “DANIEL PAUL, Please communicate with me, Important! Nettie B. Paul.”
Somehow, the two were reconciled, though their story takes an unexpected new turn here.
Nanette joined Daniel in Washington D.C., where they establish a nice home on Park Road Avenue in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood, north of the White House. The couple began appearing regularly in Washington social columns for the events they hosted for actors, musicians, and social clubs.
In 1900, Daniel described his occupation on the U.S. census as “capitalist,” later describing himself as “retired” in 1910. By that time, Nanette’s occupation was listed as “lecturer.”
She became a dynamo in the capitol city, earning her law degree, becoming a member of the legal bar association, establishing an academy for girls, and being one of the co-founders of the Susan B. Anthony Society. Nanette B. Paul becomes very prominent as a women’s rights advocate, and goes on lecture tours around the United States.
She writes about law and also pens a biography of Susan B. Anthony. Her lectures range from law to comparative religion to historical costume of the Middle East. Hardly a month goes by without some announcement in the Washington papers of Nanette giving a talk.
At first she is always identified in the custom of the time as “Mrs. Daniel Paul,” but as the years go by, she becomes more known as “Mrs. Nanette B. Paul.” Daniel gradually disappears from the limelight.
The Blind Philosopher
According to the account later written by a friend of his, Daniel Paul left Washington and moved to South Bend, Indiana, to live with his nephew, William E. Miller, around 1916.
Was this another case of Paul fleeing his wife?
We do not know, for this time, there were no newspaper headlines about his departure, his fame long having become eclipsed by that of his suffragist wife. But it certainly caused no disruption to her busy professional and social schedule.
By early 1921, she was even asked to testify as an expert witness in front of the House Judiciary Committee in Congress about the advisibility of giving the vote to residents of Washington D.C., as she had already been central to the drive to get women the right to vote in 1920.
Daniel Paul continued to live in South Bend until his death, which came on Friday, July 1, 1921, at 11:40 p.m. A friend, C. N. Fassett, wrote an appreciation of Paul as a letter to the editor of the South Bend Tribune. Fassett said that Paul was both blind and bedridden, and had been for some years because of the effects of rheumatism.
“Instead of having a depressing and distoring influence upon his spirit,” Fassett wrote, “these afflictions conduced rather to the creation of a philosophy which kept his heart free from the bitterness of resentment and turned his mind to the comtemplation of human interest.”
Fassett said one of Paul’s favorite intellectual amusements in his latter years was to calculate in his head the number of seconds that he had been alive. No mention was made of his wife.
The summer Paul died, Nanette was spending the season sharing a cottage in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with another prominent women’s rights advocate, Anna E. Hendley. As far as can be gathered from the newspaper reports, she did not attend her husband’s funeral.
What she did do was to contest her husband’s will, which apparently sought to distribute his remaining fortune to various relatives, and not to Nanette. The battle was settled by the District of Columbia’s supreme court in the wife’s favor. Despite their tremendous difference in age, Nanette only outlived Daniel by seven years. She succumbed on April 10, 1928, at the age of 62, after “a long illness.”
In the end, we’re left to wonder, what made these unusual people tick? We may never know. The apparent incompatibility, and their interests (or apparent lack thereof) make one wonder if it was in truth a marriage of convenience, a social screen for two people with interests they were compelled to keep hidden.
If so, it would at least possibly explain some of the odd detours of their lives. But lacking any proof, Daniel and Nanette Baker Paul remain a mysterious story of misadventure and fleeting fame, both forgotten today.
Except here, of course. History Knox is the home for forgotten stories.
