Spencer Tracy_ A Biography - James C. Curtis [19]
John D. Tracy was honest, industrious, charitable, a pillar of the community, but the Tracys were still lace curtain Irish, devoutly Catholic in a town that was largely Methodist and Presbyterian. Freeport was known for its Henney Buggies, its Stover windmills and bicycles, and the coffee mills and cast iron toys manufactured by Arcade. Rail service was the landbound city’s lifeline, but when John Tracy, the younger, began courting the twenty-year-old daughter of Edward S. Brown, son of the late Caleb Wescott Brown of the Browns of Rhode Island, John’s upright father couldn’t begin to pass muster with the merchant miller of Stephenson County.
According to family lore, Caleb Brown was directly descended from the famous mercantile family of Providence, specifically Nicholas Brown, who entered the family business at an early age and whose son was the Brown after whom Brown University was named. Caleb Brown came to Freeport by way of Buffalo, Oneco, Cedarville, and Silver Creek. In 1857 he built a flouring mill on the banks of the Pecatonica, which, starting in 1865, supplied a grain-and-feed store he opened on Galena Avenue. He bought the Prentice house, a ponderous brick showplace on West Stephenson Street, and joined the First Methodist Church. Gradually, the operation of both Brown’s Mill and the store fell to his eldest son, Ed, a Civil War veteran who was also town supervisor and a member of the First Presbyterian Church. Ed Brown married Abigail Stebbins of Silver Creek in 1867, and the couple had three children who lived to adulthood: Emma, Caroline, and Frank.
Exactly how John Tracy made the acquaintance of Carrie Brown is unknown, but it is unlikely that they met socially. John attended school at St. Mary’s and the University of Notre Dame, while Carrie graduated from Freeport High and spent only a short time in college. It may be that they met through the family business, or perhaps at the bank, where John had been a teller. She was one of the most beautiful girls in Freeport, a “down easterner” who didn’t lack for proper suitors. When word got around she was seeing an Irish Catholic from Liberty Street, the town was properly scandalized. Ed Brown, in fact, may well have had a word with Tracy Sr. on the matter, for J.D. imposed a strict curfew on his two eldest boys.
“This door will be locked at ten o’clock,” he declared, “and nobody will be allowed in after ten o’clock!” Both John and Will appealed to their sister Jenny for help. “I would sit up on the stairs or at the upstairs window and wait for those two to come home,” Jenny later told her daughter Jane. “I would sneak down and open the door so that they would be able to come in the house, and God knows sometimes it was two or three o’clock in the morning and I would have sat there all night. My nerves were ruined when I was a very young girl.”
There was little love lost between the Tracy boys and their rigid old man, but Jenny adored her father and faithfully went to Benediction with him every Sunday night. J.D. wasn’t any happier about his son’s relationship with a Protestant girl than were Ed Brown and his family, but John and Carrie were the real thing, a genuine love match at a time when arranged marriages were still common among the Irish. Amid much gnashing of teeth, the union was made legal on the evening of August 29, 1894. The Browns opened their home on upper Stephenson for the event, and Father W. A. Horan of St. Mary’s agreed to officiate. “In accordance with the wishes of the bride and groom the wedding was a very quiet and informal affair,” the Daily Journal reported, “no attempt at display being made excepting that the