Two Lives, One Death and a Mystery
I used to live in a condominium in Northern Virginia. The address said Alexandria, but really it was more like Springfield — a much less trendy neighborhood on the wrong (read: cheap) side of the Beltway.
After I moved in, I got in the habit of riding my bike around my new neighborhood, both to get some exercise and to get to know the place where I was living. One of the routes I would cycle along took me past a little graveyard next to a church. Sometimes I would stop there for a moment to catch my breath, take a drink of water and look at the gravestones.
Which is how I discovered this one.
If you visit this grave today, you’ll have trouble reading the inscription. (The photo above was taken in 2010.) So allow me to provide you with a transcript:
BRYANT A.
Son of William and Julia Lyles
Born May 8, 1898
Killed on Smoot’s Dredging Machine.
Sept. 1, 1917.
Now, dear reader, I don’t know about you. But if you’re anything like me, you will have found that inscription completely arresting.
I mean, “Killed on Smoot’s Dredging Machine” is not the sort of thing you find on your average gravestone. It feels like a charge, an accusation; a bony finger pointing at someone from beyond the grave.
I had to know more. I had to know the story that had led to this gravestone, this accusation. So I started researching.
Was I able to put the whole story together? Unfortunately, I was not. My research skills proved inadequate to the task. But I was able to learn a lot — enough that we can start to see the outlines of the people and events this marker commemorates, even if only dimly in the fog of time.
So I’m writing up what I have here, in the hopes that it helps add to our memory of those who came before us, and that perhaps it might help a better researcher than I someday provide us with a definitive telling of this story.
One death
Here are the basic facts about the event a century ago that put Bryant Lyles in his grave.
Sandwiched in with other “Police News Notes” in the September 2, 1917 issue of the Washington Post, we find a brief notice.
Bryant Lyles, 19, of Alexandria, Va., was drowned yesterday when he slipped from a dredge on which he was working about a half a mile above the Highway bridge. Corbin T. Jackson, also of Alexandria, who was working with Lyles, tried to save him, but in vain. The body was recovered.
The “Highway bridge” in the notice was one of the complex of bridges spanning the Potomac that have long connected Northern Virginia to the District of Columbia at DC’s 14th Street. While there are still bridges standing there, the Highway Bridge is not among them; first opened in 1906, it was torn down in the late 1960s to make room for the modern spans still in use today.
The following day, underneath news that thirteen young men of Alexandria had received their draft notices (the U.S. having just a few months before entered the First World War), a brief notice was posted of a funeral for the drowned man to be held that weekend.
Thanks to the assistance of the kind folks at the DC Archives, I was able to track down a copy of Bryant Lyles’ official death certificate. It records him as a “laborer,” age “20?” years, whose cause of death was drowning and asphyxiation resulting from an “accidental fall over board.”
With that, Bryant Lyles drops from the public record. But these documents give us just the barest outlines of the story: a river, a boat, a fall. If you’re anything like me, you want to know more. Who was this man? What led him onto the river? And why does his gravestone has the name of another man — “Smoot” — on it?
To find answers to these questions, we have to dig deeper. And when we do, what emerges is a classic American tale: a tale of two families of Alexandria, Virginia, one rich, one poor, and of a brief, tragic intersection of their stories in a boat on the Potomac River.
Two Lives
Bryant A. Lyles
Let’s begin with the man whose life the stone commemorates: Bryant A. Lyles.
The first thing to understand in attempting to tell his story is that we will be severely hampered by history’s standard disinterest in the lives and deaths of the poor. While entire volumes are written on the dining habits and fashion fancies of the rich and powerful, when it comes to the lives of nearly everyone who ever lived, we must piece together what we can from official records, fragmentary documents and other maddeningly limited bits of information.
I was able to establish Bryant Lyles’ family presence in Fairfax County, Virginia back to the year 1850. That year’s Census records the household of “William Lylls, Farmer,” aged 74 years.
William Lylls was Bryant Lyles’ great-grandfather. Also recorded in the household was a youth, Ferdinand Lylls, aged 12; he was Bryant Lyles’ grandfather.
Fast forward a decade or so. Ferdinand has grown to manhood; I can’t find him in the 1860 Census, but the District of Columbia’s marriage records record him wedding a woman named Mary Frances Dobson on April 15, 1861, two days before Virginia would secede from the Union. Ferdinand’s last name in the record is spelled “Lyles,” so whatever drift took the family name from Lylls to Lyles must have been complete by then.
Four years later, in the records of the Union Army, we find a brief mention of a report of Confederate troops making camp near Ferdinand’s house.
By the 1870 Census, Ferdinand and Frances had three children.
The youngest of these, two-year-old William T. Lyles, would grow up to be Bryant Lyles’ father.
And this is where the story of Bryant Lyles’ heritage begins to get murky. Records start contradicting each other; puzzling blank spots show up in the historical record.
We know from his tombstone that Bryant Lyles was born on May 8, 1898 to William and Julia Lyles. And the District of Columbia’s marriage records record a marriage taking place between a William T. (or G.) Lyles, age 22, and a Julia Davis (or Davais), age 19, on November 25, 1891.
However, in Virginia’s marriage records, we find another marriage. This one again involves William T. Lyles, now age 31; but this time he’s marrying a woman named Mary Simpson, age 20.
The certificate for this second marriage records William’s current marital status as “widower.” So Julia must have passed away sometime between her marriage to William in 1891 and William’s second marriage in 1899.
The first marriage produced two children: Bryant and an older sister named Effie, who is recorded as having been born in 1893. Did Julia die giving birth to Bryant in 1898 — a not uncommon occurrence in 19th century America? Or was she carried away by something else — some illness, some accident? I have not been able to turn up her death records, so it’s difficult to say. All I can say for certain is that, somewhere between Effie’s birth in 1893 and William’s remarriage in 1899, she died. And that, after a time, William moved on.
And here the records get even more puzzling. Moving forward to the 1900 Census, we see something interesting. William, Mary and Effie are recorded living together as one household, as you would expect.
But there is a name missing from the record of that household. Bryant’s name.
If we dig further into the 1900 Census records for Fairfax County, however, we quickly discover that he has not been overlooked. He is recorded in the Census, as he should be. But he is recorded living not with his father and new stepmother, but with his grandfather. At two years old, he is living in the household of Ferdinand Lyles.
This strange separation appears to have endured through the rest of Bryant Lyles’ childhood. We see evidence of it in an Alexandria city directory from seventeen years later.
Bryant and Ferdinand Lyles are both recorded as living at the same address: 305 Commerce Street. But William T. Lyles is recorded living at a different address: 307 Commerce Street.
Right next door.
There are so many questions that could usefully be asked based on this evidence. But the central one is: why was two-year-old Bryant sent away to live with his grandparents?
It’s not hard to dream up hypotheses. Perhaps William’s first wife died giving birth to Bryant, and having the boy around conjured up too many painful memories. Perhaps William’s second wife, with whom he would go on to have eight children, didn’t want reminders of his first marriage hanging around the house. (The presence of Effie in their household in the 1900 Census would seem to argue against this; but Effie disappears completely from the historical record after that one appearance, so it’s possible that an error was made by a census-taker.)
Who can say? I tried. I researched this question for more than a year. I did not want to write this piece without being able to answer it. But in the end, it defeated me. So one of the central questions in the short and tragic life of Bryant Lyles remains unanswered, at least for now.
That city directory is from 1917, the same year that Bryant Lyles would meet his death on the river. It records him having found employment as a laborer, much as his forefathers had. So now it’s time to meet the second man in this story — the man who Bryant Lyles would be working for on the day he died.
Lewis Egerton Smoot
As the image above indicates, a complete telling of the story of the Smoot family in America would be an endeavor far beyond the modest scope of this essay. Having first arrived in the New World in the early 17th Century, the Smoots took root here and flourished, eventually becoming prominent members of society across Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina. (And also, Utah — a Smoot was one of the original Mormon pioneers who followed the church in its westward migrations; and his son, Reed Smoot, became a U.S. Senator from Utah and co-author of the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.)
Of all the branches of the Smoot family, the one we are interested in is the one that produced William Albert Smoot. Born on August 30, 1840 in Alexandria, William reached his young adulthood just as the Civil War was breaking out. He joined up on April 17, 1861, four days after the surrender of Fort Sumter and the day the Virginia Convention voted to secede from the United States of America. He served for a year with the 17th Virginia Infantry Regiment before transferring to the somewhat more upscale Company H of the 4th Virginia Cavalry — the infamous “Black Horse Cavalry” that had tormented retreating Federal soldiers at the First Battle of Bull Run. He served out the remainder of the war with the 4th. According to Harry Wright Newman, he was wounded in combat seven times.
At war’s end, William returned to Alexandria and settled down, establishing himself in the coal and lumber businesses. At these he prospered, and by 1885 he had become wealthy enough to purchase one of Alexandria’s great houses, a Georgian mansion known as Colross located on Old Town’s Orinoco Street, to use as his family residence.
(Don’t bother trying to visit Colross in Alexandria; it eventually passed out of the hands of the Smoot family, and in 1929 it was dismantled brick by brick and moved to New Jersey, where it has served as the administrative building of the Princeton Day School to this day.)
What kind of man was William A. Smoot? It is hard to reconstruct a man’s personality a hundred years after his death, when all you have to go on are family trees and dusty newspaper articles. An article I found in the March 14, 1908 issue of the Washington Post, however, may serve to give us at least a suggestion of his personality.
In that article, we learn two things about William Albert Smoot:
- At age 68, he was still spry enough to run out into the night and take four shots at men who were tampering with his property; and
- Despite having mustered out of the Confederate Army as a lowly private, by 1908 he was sufficiently important to be addressed as “Colonel Smoot.”
But I’m getting pretty far off track here, because, as interesting a life as William A. Smoot had, in this story we don’t really care about him. We care about his oldest son, Lewis Egerton Smoot.
Lewis Egerton Smoot was born in Alexandria on August 12, 1876.
Unlike his father, L.E. Smoot’s life was not marked by excitement and adventure. He seems to have devoted it to one singular purpose: the growth of the company he founded in 1900, the Smoot Sand and Gravel Corporation.
At this, he was spectacularly successful. Quarrying and selling sand and gravel out of the Potomac may not sound exciting, but L.E. Smoot built an empire upon it — an empire that would make him one of the richest men in Washington.
It is hard to find details of the life of L.E. Smoot in the public press; he appears to have been quite publicity-shy, giving only one interview that I’m aware of in his entire life. So for much of the detail below I’m indebted to a long three-part profile of the man written by reporter Aubrey Graves that appeared in the Washington Post over the week of October 5, 1958.
Graves’ profile made the breadth of Smoot’s empire clear:
This man of self-imposed obscurity is a power in the land. So important is he in the economy of the Nation’s Capital, a shutdown of his firm in 1939 held up $50 million worth of Federal and private construction and brought to a standstill practically all building in metropolitan Washington…
In 1940 Smoot’s firm supplied 95 per cent of all sand and gravel used by area builders. Today it supplies something like half the total…
Only a few trusted associates know the extent of his holdings. He once owned the Alexandria Gazette, “lock, stock and barrel.” The Southern Building was one of his properties.
He has bought more than a dozen entire city and county bond issues, including one (in Alexandria) for $750,000.
Building materials provided by Smoot Sand and Gravel went into the making of the Jefferson Memorial, National Airport, the National Gallery of Art, the Statler Hotel (which still operates, as the Capital Hilton), and too many other Washington buildings to list. His crowning achievement was the construction of the Pentagon, into which, Graves tells us, “two-million-odd tons of sand and gravel” were poured — every last ounce of which was provided by Smoot Sand and Gravel.
Looking back at the beginnings of that empire from later in life, Smoot took care to portray his success as the natural result of enterprising entrepreneurship and hard work. At the age of 16, he said, he had decided upon the career he wanted to embark upon in life: managing the family estate in King George County, which had been held by Smoots for nine generations. However, his father, he recounted, would hear nothing of it.
“No,” his father told him, “you’ve got to make some money.”
“So, I worked like thunder.”
And work like thunder he must have done, because he claimed that by age 30 — just six years after going into business — he was rich enough to retire. But Graves points out that Smoot’s work wasn’t enough, by itself, to get his enterprise off the ground.
His father gave him $25,000. He borrowed another $75,000 and in 1900 started a sand and gravel business.
A 24-year-old man in a position to raise $100,000 is rare enough today. Imagine how rare it must have been in 1900, when the value of a dollar was so much greater than it is now. (In 1905, the average working adult male earned $11.15 a week.)
Even with a hefty hand up at the start, though, Smoot’s success was remarkable. By age 30, as previously noted, he was rich enough to retire. By 1940, his company’s products were essential to anyone who wanted to build in Washington. By 1958, he was being referred to as “a power in the land.”
How did he get there? I’m sure hard work was at least part of the reason. But another part seems to have been a willingness to engage in some pretty sharp dealing.
The sharp dealing can be seen in how Smoot Sand and Gravel obtained the raw materials that were the foundation of its business. In the Washington area, the most plentiful source of sand and gravel is the estuary of the Potomac River. The river’s tide washes sand and loose rock downstream, where it gathers over time near the mouth of the river. (This is why a company like Smoot would employ dredges — they are machines, either based on shore or on boats, that scoop up that stuff.)
So, if you are going to run a sand and gravel business in the DC area, you are going to have an interest in getting access to the Potomac, because that is where your raw materials will be coming from. And, according to Graves’ reporting, when it came to access to the Potomac Smoot Sand and Gravel had snagged itself a heck of a deal:
From mid-channel to the Virginia shore, Maryland’s Board of Public Works has granted Smoot permission to dredge for sand and gravel. For this privilege no fee or royalty is paid…
Smoot also operates under free permits issued by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, whose only concern is to make sure his dredging operations do not interfere with navigation of the river…
Any business that can get its raw materials for free (except for the cost of hauling them away) is a business that’s starting out from a pretty strong position.
Where they couldn’t get the right to dredge for free, Smoot took care to buy up the adjacent shoreline, thus gaining “riparian rights” to dredge from along that shore all the way out to the middle of the river:
[Smoot spokesman Alvin M.] Parker declined to reveal how much riverfront property Smoot owns on the Virginia side, but admitted it was considerable. He said his company maintained a crew, including geologists, to test for sand and gravel deposits…
“After we find a deposit, we try to acquire it,” added Parker.
Beyond the ability to dredge out from the land they owned, these purchases had another benefit as well. Since the riparian rights went along with ownership of the shore, once Smoot Sand and Gravel owned the shore, they could not just dredge there themselves but also deny competitors the legal right to dredge there. As Smoot’s land holdings grew, competitors had fewer and fewer places they could go to gather their own raw materials. And as Smoot’s wealth grew, it was able to employ expensive specialists to constantly survey the river for new deposits — thus giving them the first chance to bid on the land that would govern the rights to that deposit, and lock his competitors out of it before they even knew it existed.
That all may seem like such a lopsided deal that only a fool would push it any further, but L.E. Smoot was not, it appears, the kind of man to leave a nickel on the table just because he’d already picked up a dollar. In at least one instance, a dispute over just how broad Smoot’s riparian rights really were even made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In the 1931 case Smoot Sand & Gravel Corp. v. Washington Airport, Inc., the Court mediated a dispute between Smoot and one of the city’s airports, whose land butted up against one of Smoot’s riverine worksites. (In a bit of cosmic synchronicity, this airport was located near the Highway Bridge.)
The cause of the dispute? The airport believed that Smoot’s right to dredge inland from the river extended only as far as the river’s water ran at low tide. Smoot, anxious to squeeze out every last possible inch of sand, insisted that the rights extended as far as where the waterline stood at high tide. (And the Court agreed with him.)
But I’m digressing again. In this story, we’re not as interested in the gaudy excesses of Smoot’s later years. We’re interested in his early days, when he was just one more man on the make, out to turn wet sand and ground-up rock into gold.
We’re interested in the days when his path crossed that of Bryant Lyles.
… And a Mystery
Thanks to an item in the April 24, 1900 edition of the Post, we have a record of L.E. Smoot at the very beginning of his career, buying the first of what would be many rivercraft to begin his dredging operations.
Presumably in honor of his father, he named that first dredge the W.A. Smoot.
Seventeen years later, just months before Bryant Lyles met his death, we find Smoot in the records of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. His company has been contracted to dredge out parts of the Potomac to make it easier for shipping to pass through to the city of Washington.
Nearly two decades have passed, so the dredge doing the work is no longer the W.A. Smoot. Its name indicates that it is a successor— the W.A. Smoot Number 3.
The exact details of the project on which Lyles died in the river have escaped me. It definitely wasn’t the work for the Corps of Engineers described above, as that work was complete by February of 1917, and Lyles didn’t die until September. It may have involved the W.A. Smoot Number 3, but without having a record of the specific project, it’s impossible to say for certain.
What responsibility did Lewis E. Smoot carry for the death of Bryant Lyles? This is another question I have been unable to answer. If the pages of the Post are any indication, working on a Potomac dredge was a job that carried at least some degree of danger; a search through the archives for “Smoot” turns up several stories of men on his dredges suffering injury or dying over the decades. But were his dredges uniquely dangerous somehow? And was dredging in general more dangerous work than other forms of manual labor, such as construction? (Twenty men died building the Brooklyn Bridge.)
These are questions we would have to answer to be able to establish responsibility here. And I have been unable to turn up the data we would need in order to answer those questions.
So we come to the end of this story with more questions than answers:
- What project was Bryant Lyles working on when he died?
- Was his death purely accidental, or did it stem from some underlying cause — unwise behavior, inadequate safety precautions, a flaw in the design of the dredge?
- Who erected his headstone? Why did they choose to use it to point a finger at L.E. Smoot and his dredge?
We have, in other words, a mystery. A mystery that I was unable to solve.
Perhaps someday, a better researcher than I will come along and answer these questions once and for all. I hope so. In a quiet graveyard in northern Virginia, an accusation in stone demands nothing less.
Sources and Further Reading
Books and Publications
Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 1861–1865. (National Archives Microfilm Publication M262, 128 rolls.) National Archives, Washington, D.C.
Bulletin 93: Census of Manufactures: 1905 — Earnings of Wage-Earners. United States Bureau of the Census, 1908.
The Smoots of Maryland and Virginia; a genealogical history of William Smute, boatright, of Hampton, Virginia, and Pickawaxon, Maryland, with a history of his descendants to the present generation. Newman, Harry Wright. 1936.
Marriage Records. District of Columbia Marriages. Clerk of the Superior Court, Records Office, Washington D.C.
News Articles
“New Dredge Starts for Lower Potomac.” The Washington Post, April 24, 1900.
“Fires Shots at Fugitive: Col. W.A. Smoot Makes Double Capture at Alexandria Wharf.” The Washington Post, March 14, 1908.
“Police News Notes.” The Washington Post, September 2, 1917.
“13 Draft Men Called: Alexandria Selectives Ordered to Report Tomorrow.” The Washington Post, September 3, 1917.
Graves, Aubrey. “Sand-Gravel Executive, 81, Successful but Shy.” The Washington Post, October 5, 1958.
Graves, Aubrey. “River Deposits Make Firm Rich.” The Washington Post, October 6, 1958.
Graves, Aubrey. “Smoot Strikes Hit D.C. Contractors.” The Washington Post, October 7, 1958.
