Thomas Harding Ellis (6 September 1814–11 April 1898), president of the James River and Kanawha Company, was the son of Charles Ellis, a Richmond merchant, and Margaret Keeling Nimmo Ellis and was born at his uncle's Clover Green plantation in the part of Campbell County that later became Appomattox County. He received his early education at private schools and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1833. He joined his father's business, but left in the spring of 1836 to become private secretary to his uncle Powhatan Ellis, the United States chargé d'affaires in Mexico. Ellis returned home the following January and again worked with his father and a brother. In March 1839 he went to Mexico as the mission's secretary of legation, but came back to Richmond in 1841 after his father's death and formed the mercantile firm Thomas & Charles Ellis with his brother. The following year Ellis became the captain and commander of the Richmond Fayette Artillery. On 27 April 1848 he married a widow, Euphania Claiborne Taylor Harrison. They had no children but adopted a son and a daughter.

During the 1840s and 1850s Ellis joined a series of business and civic institutions, including the Virginia Colonization Society, of which he was treasurer beginning in 1849. At the time of the 1850 census, he owned five enslaved laborers. On 28 June 1848, the directors of the recently organized Hollywood Cemetery Company elected Ellis president. He had been an early trustee of the debt-ridden concern located just outside Richmond. Dedicated on 25 June 1849, the cemetery became a popular burial ground by the time the body of former president James Monroe was reinterred there on 5 July 1858.

Ellis took over another financially troubled but prestigious institution when the James River and Kanawha Company's stockholders elected him president on 26 October 1853. The company sought to construct a canal and road connection from Richmond to the Ohio River, which would enable goods and resources to travel between the Atlantic and the West. It had difficulty raising adequate capital, however, and remained dependent on state appropriations. Two months after Ellis was elected president, the company asked the General Assembly for more money to extend its canal that then stretched from Richmond to the town of Buchanan in Botetourt County. Railroads were becoming a less-expensive transportation option by then, and in 1856 the company suspended construction. A severe flood and the Panic of 1857 reduced business and as of 1 January 1858 the company had $5.7 million in debts.

In 1859 Ellis and the company opened negotiations with Ernest de Bellot des Minières, who sought to purchase the canal on behalf of a group of French investors. The on again, off again talks led to an agreement in August 1860. Because the state government owned 30,000 of the company's 50,000 shares of stock, the governor informed Ellis in September that he would call a special session of the General Assembly for January to take up the matter. The assembly approved the new Virginia Canal Company on 29 March 1861, pending the raising of $20 million in capital.

Shortly after the Convention of 1861 voted to secede from the United States, Ellis volunteered to raise a unit of men who were exempt from military service to defend Richmond. He commanded the 300-man Home Artillery, but in August 1861 it voted to disband and turned over its arms and equipment to the regular forces. The Civil War earned Hollywood Cemetery additional prominence as a burial place for Confederate soldiers and officers. The General Assembly voted in January 1862 to bury former United States president John Tyler at Hollywood. During the war Ellis announced to the stockholders that the company was earning a profit and needed to acquire additional property.

The James River and Kanawha Company continued operations during the war, but the Virginia Canal Company failed to raise $20 million to purchase it. In 1865 United States forces damaged the canal, including locks, bridges, and an aqueduct. After the war, Ellis unsuccessfully tried to revive the plan to sell the canal to the French investors. The canal was then mired in debt without a financial savior, and influential investors turned against Ellis's leadership early in 1867. He defended himself in a series of letters to the Richmond Enquirer but submitted his resignation on 23 February of that year.

Ellis resigned as president of the Hollywood Cemetery Company in May 1870 and moved to Chicago, where he formed a real estate partnership. The October 1871 fire that destroyed part of the city doomed the real estate venture. During the next few years, he served in a series of financial-sector jobs, culminating in December 1873 as the president of the financially troubled Bank of Chicago. Beginning the following December, he spent nine years as a railroad clerk. Ellis had long been interested in his family's history, compiling A Memorandum of the Ellis Family in 1849, and by the 1870s he had begun writing articles based on his reminiscences of Richmond, most notably recollections of his childhood friend Edgar Allan Poe that were published in the Richmond Standard on 7 May 1881. Ellis returned east two years later and worked in Washington in a series of government positions. His wife died on 10 July 1897, and in poor health himself, Ellis returned to Richmond in March 1898. Thomas Harding Ellis died of chronic cystitis at his sister's house in the city on 11 April 1898 and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery.

Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates on gravestone; autobiographical sketches in Thomas H. Ellis Papers, Accession 40060, Library of Virginia, and in S. Bassett French Papers II, Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va.; Thomas H. Ellis Papers, Robert A. Brock Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif., microfilm in Library of Virginia (Accession 41008, Misc. Reel 4318); Thomas H. Ellis Letter, 8 Sept. 1837, Accession 42484, Library of Virginia; Ellis correspondence in various collections, esp. Ellis Family Papers and Powhatan Ellis (1829–1906) Papers, at Virginia Historical Society, Richmond, Va.; Richmond City Marriage Bonds; Richmond Enquirer (semi-weekly), 2 May 1848; Richmond Enquirer, 8, 9, 12–14, 21 Feb. 1867; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 28 Mar. 1867; Richmond Standard, 7 May 1881; Mary H. Mitchell, Hollywood Cemetery: The History of a Southern Shrine (1985), portrait between 34 and 35; obituaries and memorials in Richmond Dispatch, Richmond Times, and Washington Post, all 12 Apr. 1898.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Matthew S. Gottlieb.

How to cite this page:
Matthew S. Gottlieb,"Thomas Harding Ellis (1814–1898)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2016 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Ellis_Thomas_Harding, accessed [today's date]).

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