Henry Solomon Wellcome, 1853-1936

Abstract

Sir Henry Wellcome, who died on 25 July, 1936, at the age of eighty-three, was by birth an American citizen but transferred his interests to this country after a brief business career in his native land. It was in 1880 that he entered into partnership with Mr. S. M. Burroughs to found the firm of Burroughs Wellcome and Company, which developed rapidly and soon became known throughout the world for its manufacture of fine chemicals, alkaloids, and other medicinal products. Wellcome’s connexion with England, the land of his ancestors, was more firmly sealed in 1910, when be became a naturalized British subject. Henry Solomon Wellcome was born in 1853 in a log cabin about 125 miles from Milwaukee and spent his early childhood amongst the Dakota Indians. His father, the Rev. S. C. Wellcome, was an itinerant missionary who with his wife, Mary Curtis Wellcome, travelled throughout Wisconsin and Minnesota in a covered wagon, preaching to the Indians. In 1859 the family trekked westwards to Garden City, Blue Earth County, Minn., where it established its home shortly before the outbreak of the civil war. When young Wellcome was eight years old the great Sioux Indian rebellion occurred and led to the massacre of more than a thousand whites. He assisted in casting rifle bullets for the defence of the settlement and actually helped his uncle, Dr. J. B. Wellcome, in caring for the wounded. Wellcome’s early contact with the Indians found expression in a life-long sympathy for the Red Man, a sympathy which in after years led him to spend considerable sums of money and energy in fighting for what he considered to be the rights of a certain Alaskan tribe. In support of this mission he published in 1887 a history of the tribe under the title of The Story of Metlakhatala .