Gold-Fated Family: The story of the Unsinkable Molly Brown’s husband
By Jack Smiles Correspondent to The Citizen’s Voice, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Oct 29, 2023
A little known fact: James Joseph “J.J.” Brown, the husband of the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, the famed Titanic survivor, grew up in Pittston. His father, John, an Irish immigrant, moved the family from Waymart, where J.J. was born, to Carbondale and then to Pittston.
You can read about Brown, his wife Molly, his family and his strong connection to Pittston in the book “Gold-Fated Family” by Jody Pritzl, a writer in Denver, Colorado, who volunteers at the Molly Brown Museum in the home where she and J.J. lived when they were husband and wife.
J.J. lived here in Pittston from 1858, when he was a toddler, until 1879, when he moved to Colorado to seek gold, despite warnings about violent claim jumpers and Indian raids.
From the book: “In 1877, Jim Brown ignored the warnings, trusting other reports that the Black Hills had yielded eight million dollars of gold and a promising future for new arrivals. He set off on a 1,600-mile journey, leaving behind aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters, and brothers that worked at the Pennsylvania Coal Company.”
In Colorado J. J., against all odds, struck gold and became a multimillionaire. Pritzl wondered just how much money he really had and, as she put it, “went down a rabbit hole” looking for the answer?
J.J. came back to Pittston annually after he struck it rich to visit his family. In September 1914 Brown came to Pittston and stayed with his brother-in-law Thomas Cavanaugh on Vine Street. Cavanaugh was the widower of Brown’s sister Catherine. Brown and Cavanaugh’s daughter Helen left on Monday on a planned trip to the Southwest and Colorado.
The next day, Cavanaugh was killed in the Pennsylvania Coal Company’s No. 9 shaft by a fall of coal. J.J. and Helen turned around and came back for the funeral. Cavanaugh’s death hit Brown hard as he had tried to lure his brother-in-law to Colorado several times. J.J. and Helen bonded after her father’s death and J.J. helped raise her and her four siblings.
Asked in an email why Pittston was so important to Brown and why she felt the need to come here to research, Pritzl wrote: “I felt after visiting Pittston that it was a family place where residents in the 1880s and 1900s didn’t receive credit for helping to industrialize America. J.J. lived in Pittston from about 1858-1877. His sister, Kate Cavanaugh, lived there until her death in 1904. Her husband and children, Helen, Lawrence, and James lived in Pittston until 1914. Brown is a difficult name for tracing descendants but I did manage to contact a grandson in California. I came up empty in Pittston. There may be descendants of J.J.’s brother Edward in the Scranton area, and cousins in Carbondale.
“Having absorbed J.J. Brown’s home in Denver, Colorado, bought with gold dividends, I was curious about his roots. Thinking I might write a book, I flew to Pennsylvania in 2019, to spend a couple of days absorbing J.J. ‘s world, which he spoke of fondly.
“It has been said that to understand someone, stand in the spot where they were raised or the cemetery where they rest. Climbing the hills to Vine Street, where J.J. Brown spent his childhood, I felt a sense of place. Because of the beautiful setting, the river and hills, I could see J.J. and his brothers in their youth, playing, before tragedy came.
“It was a hot July day, when I visited the old St. John’s cemetery. Finding a vacant office and with no map, I wandered through the rows of graves, careful to step around. The only sound came from bugs buzzing in my ears. I scanned the headstones looking for Brown family members. Without a cloud in the sky, my shirt was drenched in sweat, and I considered abandoning the search.
“There was one marker, larger than all the others. I guessed it had been placed to mark the end of a prominent Pittston person’s life. Curious, I gravitated toward it. The monument said Brown and included J.J. ‘s parents, and that of a sister and brother. Something clicked for me.
“The stone was more modern than others, not what I expected after learning that Pittston’s main employers were coal mining companies. I took some pictures, and when I returned to Denver, I contacted a tombstone expert. I pieced together the beginning of a story of a man who erected a tribute to his parents and siblings in a place that meant something to him.
“No matter his wealth, J.J. at his core was a miner who began his career in Pennsylvania coal mines. He was a family man, and a Catholic, the kind that carries responsibility like a knapsack. I found the formation of his fear of death from the Brown monument that honored his mother, dying when he was ten years old, and his father, when he was 20. He likely wanted to start over and go west, perhaps with the intention of returning to Pittston since he always came back to visit the place that formed him.”
The first chapter of the book Outrunning Death: 1846—1877, Pritzl writes wonderful descriptions of what Pittston, and living here, might have been like in the 1860s.
Here’s one passage:
“Children smelled burning coal and heard hissing while they gawked at the large steam engines near the Water Street Bridge. Trains stopped daily, with passengers departing and arriving from Baltimore and Philadelphia. What did the inside of a passenger car look like? Working class boys could only guess, since a train ticket to New York City cost ten days of a father’s hard-earned mine wages. Travelers were gentlemen, dressed in shirt collars and overcoats, glancing at their gold watches for the time. Easterners carried newspapers in their satchels to keep track of railroad and stock prices. They were busy making deals with bankers and capitalists. Few paid attention to the commoners sharing the streets.”
Pritzl went deep into her rabbit hole investigating J.J. ‘s life in Colorado, as a shareholder, owner, and superintendent of various
To sum that up Pritzl writes:
“Mrs. J.J. Brown had boarded the Titanic known simply as the wife of a mining millionaire. When the Carpathia docked in New York four days after the sinking, she became an international heroine.”
What started as a quest to find out just how rich J.J. was turned into this book. For the answer you’ll have to get the book. At the end he reveals how much he earned, how he earned it and how it was spent.
Jody is a member of the Colorado Author’s League who, in 2020, was awarded a first prize for her nonfiction book, Immigrants, Ornaments, and Legacies: A Story of American-Made Glass Christmas Ornaments. In 2021, Jody’s book, That Championship Year, was a finalist for nonfiction.
The book is available at Amazon.