| The son of George Washington Heard (1793-1863) and Elizabeth Ann Farley Heard (1802-65), Augustine received a fine early education to prepare him for Harvard College where he graduated in 1847. During the next ten years, except for a return trip to the United States in 1851-2 for health reasons, he was “employed by his uncle Augustine Heard, the head of the trading, banking, and shipping firm Augustine Heard & Co. – one of the largest firms operating in China,” according to Heard genealogist Edward W. Hanson. Augustine worked in the main office at Canton, which was moved to Hong Kong in 1856 at the outbreak of the second Anglo-Chinese war.
According to Hanson, as an agent of the firm, Augustine Heard was said to have been the first Western businessman permitted to trade in Siam when he traveled there in 1855. In 1858, while in Baltimore, he married Jane Leep deConnick, the daughter of Belgium’s consul at Havana, Cuba. For the next several years, Heard represented Augustine Heard & Co. in Europe, primarily in England, France, Belgium, and Russia. At the time it was said that “Mr. Heard’s carriage and his wife’s jewels were as fine as any in Paris.” Clearly, they lived on a grand scale.
Although Augustine Heard & Co. failed in the early 1870s (as many American houses doing business in the Far East did), Heard spent a number of years in the Orient afterward. From 1890-94, he was appointed U.S. Minister to Korea by President Benjamin Harrison. He was decorated with the Order of Leopold by King Leopold of Belgium, a high honor.
Augustine’s wife died in 1899. His later years were spent in Europe and Washington, D.C. He died in 1905 aboard the steamship Koung Albert off Gibraltar, while on a voyage home from Italy. He had outlived two children: his son Augustine died as an infant; John died at age 36. Of his other children, Augustine Albert became involved in railroads; Amelia married Russell Gray, who headed the American Mutual Liability Insurance Company; and Helen Maxima, who married Max Von Brandt, an officer in the Prussian army, later a Prussian Consul for the North German Federation, German Resident Minister in Japan, German Minister Plenipotentiary to China, and a distinguished author of books on Far Eastern affairs and Chinese history.
Today, the Heard House Museum proudly displays a dignified, full-figure portrait of Augustine Heard.
Source: Edward W. Hanson, The Heards of Ipswich, Massachusetts (privately published, 1986). |
