Notable Incidents & Curiosities
The “Blackleg” of the Family (Branch 46)
“Many of us have a black sheep in the family, but few of us can say we have a ‘blackleg,’” writes Sue Lattea Cox of William Latta, son of John Latta, who disappeared from Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. Research turned up a William Latta in Bath, Ohio — a tavern keeper at what became known as “Latta’s Corners” (later Montrose) whose hotel served as a hangout for a counterfeiting ring active during the Ohio canal boom of the 1820s. The fuller story of William Latta’s career as a counterfeiter — arrests, an Iowa prison sentence, and a governor’s pardon reportedly bought with counterfeit money — appears in the Branch 3 page, where the family that merged from Branch 46 is recorded.
T. L. Latta’s Role in Motion Picture Invention
Eadweard Muybridge, who pioneered motion photography decades before the Lumière brothers’ first films and may have personally inspired Thomas Edison, photographed galloping horses for former California Governor Leland Stanford starting in 1872, and continued large-scale animal-and-human locomotion studies at the University of Pennsylvania from 1884 under William Pepper’s invitation — producing 781 plates for his Animal Locomotion publication.
Among Muybridge’s human subjects, identified decades later by researcher Marta Braun of Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnic University while preparing an exhibit for the National Museum of American History, was Thomas Love Latta, a Penn baseball player and great-grandson of Rev. James Latta, D.D. (a member of Penn’s first graduating class, 1757). Muybridge made a number of motion studies of Latta during his time at the university.
Tom Latta: Boomtown Saloonkeeper
When Colorado prospectors crossed the Continental Divide in 1879 and struck one of the richest silver lodes in the world, their camp — first called Ute City, soon renamed Aspen — grew explosively; by 1893, Aspen’s 12,000 residents supported six newspapers, four schools, three banks, electric lights, a hospital, two theaters, an opera house, and a saloon district. Tom Latta kept one of Aspen’s boomtown saloons, in a building later listed on the National Register of Historic Places (New Brick / The Brick Saloon / Red Onion, 420 E. Cooper Ave., listed March 6, 1987).
A Novel Way to Get a Middle Name
A researcher’s account of tracking down her great-great-grandmother, known only as “Polly Reed Ford,” whose marriage to Isaac Schultz Latta on November 7, 1821 in Geneva, Ontario County, NY was the only fact recorded in a family booklet compiled by her grandson — a study in how much detective work one unexplained middle name can demand.
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