The van Hoevenberg Family

Henry van Hoevenberg, Jr

1879-1955

6th Generation

Henry van Hoevenberg, Jr. was the eldest child of Dr Henry van Hoevenberg and Sarah Louise Wood van Hoevenberg. He was the grandson of Dr James Oliver van Hoevenberg, and grand nephew of Martin Henry van Hovenberg.

Henry was born on September 1, 1879 in Kingston, New York. He and his siblings constitute the end of the line for the van Hoevenberg family in Kingston, stretching back to Lieutenant Henry van Hoevenberg in the Revolutionary Period. Henry attended the Kingston Academy as a youth, and then attended Columbia University in the City of New York, where he graduated in 1902 with a degree in law and became a member of the New York Bar.

He was also an outstanding athlete, as one could even guess from the sporting pictures of his childhood, and was selected by sports writer Walter Camp as an All-American in football for his last two years at Columbia.

He later went ot Alaska and the Pacific Northwest, setting in the Rogue River Valley of southern Oregon in 1910. For 27 years he owned a large pear orchard there, and served several times as president of the Oregon State Horticultural Society.

With the collapse of agricultural prices and the the rise of a strong union movement during the Great Depression of the 1930's, Henry Jr. went to San Francisco in 1937 to join the new profession of labor negotiation. (This would have put him in the neighborhood of Alfred Andrew and James Jacob, cousins of his father, though neither side had the slightest inkling even to the existence of the other.)

In 1939, Henry moved to Seattle as a manager of the Alaska Salmon Industry (a group of cannery owners formed to manage labor contracts), a position he held throughout World War II until his retirement in 1945. After several years in Port Angeles in Washington state, he returned to the negotiation field in Oakland, California, where he and his wife died in 1955. Both are interred in Lincoln Memorial Park, Portland. Oregon.

Henry's departure to the Pacific Northwest around 1910 was partly due to his despondency at the failure of his suit for the hand of Kathryn Eltinge Lawton, who was the ward of Alton Parker, and who forbade the union. On the West Coast, he eventually married Jessamine Adele Bushnell, and they had one child, Vivian Isabelle, born March 23, 1917, and a co-author of the article, "The van Hoevenberg Family." That marriage failed, and he was re-united in marriage with his childhood sweetheart two years later.

(Adapted from the article "The van Hoevenberg Family")