A Little Bit of Everything

February 28, 2025

Sometimes you acquire a collection for one reason and then are pleasantly surprised at the unrelated richness of the material. Let me explain. In 2016 we received donations from the daughter of Mercer Mance and Kathalyn Stuart Mance. This was a collection of things acquired by our dear departed friend and colleague Wilma Gibbs Moore. I assume Wilma had pursued the material because Mercer Mance (above left) was the first Black judge elected in Indiana in 1958. He and his wife were active in the Bethel AME church, the Fall Creek YMCA, and the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Indianapolis.

I recently processed the Mance collection, and I did find it to be a rich resource for learning about the Democratic Party in Indianapolis during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. However, I also found myself unexpectedly engrossed in a wealth of photographs and information about the Stuart family, ancestors of Mercer Mance’s wife Kathalyn. The Stuarts started the well-known Indianapolis businesses Stuart Mortuary and Stuart’s Moving and Storage. But unexpectedly, I discovered a link with America’s pre-eminent composer and bandleader.

Kathalyn Stuart’s father William Weir Stuart was a well-known dentist in the city for over fifty years. But before that, shortly after his arrival in Indianapolis from Athens, Alabama in 1893, he was hired by none other than John Philip Sousa to be his personal valet and bookkeeper.

As the family story goes, William Stuart and his brother left Alabama in search of educational opportunities. Their destination was Chicago. But upon reaching Indianapolis, William got a job as a stable hand and decided to stay. His brother continued north. In Indianapolis, Stuart met several prominent customers of the livery like James Whitcomb Riley, ex-president Benjamin Harrison, and Sousa. But Sousa, ostensibly in the city for a performance of his popular band, invited young Stuart to accompany him on tour.

Indianapolis Journal, 20 November, 1898

Sousa, the bandleader dubbed the “March King” who in 1896 composed “Stars and Stripes Forever,” appeared in Indianapolis with surprising regularity at that time. The Sousa band performed at Tomlinson Hall in October of 1893 and again in March of 1894. They returned in April of 1895 to play at William English’s opera house on Monument Circle. They were back in Tomlinson Hall twice in 1898–in January and November. I haven’t pinpointed exactly when Sousa hired Stuart, but by the time they returned to Indianapolis in September of 1901, Stuart had in his hand strong and convincing letters of recommendation from William English, O.W. Williams, who owned a music store on the Circle, and cornetist and band director Leslie E. Peck. Peck wrote of Stuart, “His honesty I do not question and would feel safe with any part of my affairs in his hands.” These letters are included in the Mance collection.

William Weir Stuart

On ancestry.com (available for free to patrons in our library), I was able to locate Stuart’s passport application from Paris in April of 1903. Sousa’s band was finishing up an engagement at the Noveau Theatre there and preparing to travel to St. Petersburg, Russia. This lines up just right with other great items in the Mance collection: One is a small account book Stuart kept while on tour with Sousa in Europe in 1903. In the book, Stuart tracked the expenses he paid on Sousa’s behalf in Paris and cities and towns across the United Kingdom. Also, the above portrait of Stuart was taken in St. Petersburg.

William W. Stuart’s account book

Eventually, Stuart broke the news to Sousa that he wanted to go to college and become a dentist. Sousa reacted with dismay, feeling that “William could have no better or more honorable position than with him” (again according to a genealogy report written by Stuart’s grandson Monty, also in the collection). William Weir Stuart graduated from the Indiana Dental College with honors in 1910. In the 1920s, his office at 729 ½ N. West Street was just a stone’s throw from the then-bustling Indiana Avenue and the Madam Walker Theatre. He reportedly provided dentistry services for Indianapolis schools, Flanner House, the YMCA, YWCA, and more.

Now, my dentist is pretty good at in-office banter (even if I find it extraordinarily awkward that I can’t reply while his hands are in my mouth). But I can only assume that it pales in comparison to the anecdotes that Stuart could have flung around. Not many dentists can believably claim that they toured the world with an international celebrity before the age of 30 and had been presented in the court of King Edward VII.

Matt Holdzkom is an archivist at the Indiana Historical Society. He's a circus history enthusiast, dog person, puppeteer, casual cyclist and karaoke nut.

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