• Dawes Lore Discussion List
• Dawes Genealogy and Heraldry
• The Midnight Ride of William Dawes
• Explorer Lt. William Dawes
• Astronomer William Rutter Dawes
• Products
  • Dawes Black Horse Ale
  • Dawes Cycles
• Inventions
• Places
  • The Dawes Arboretum
• The Dawes Act
• A Native American named Dawes
• Melody for "It's All in the Game"
• Charles G., VP, Nobel Prize winner

DAWES DELVING DISCUSSION LIST

Alas, Microsoft killed the very fine ListBot service, hoping to force users to switch to an expensive replacement package designed for merchants. I found it not NEARLY as good. Therefore, we are switching to an alternative service which has some nice features, Topica.

Read the list description at www.topica.com/lists/DawesDelving. Please read the discussions, and subscribe by sending an email to DawesDelving-subscribe@topica.com.

GENEALOGY

We now have a set of real genealogy pages for our branch of the Dawes family, thanks to Dan Kangley! It traces all known (and deceased) Descendants of Adrian Dawes of Nottinghamshire. Real genealogists will enjoy this!

Our branch's earliest Dawes is Adrian of Nottinghamshire, whose son Francis (m. Margaret Griffith) came from England in 1702. Francis begot Adrian (1707-1787, m. Susannah Wilkinson) who begot Adrian Jr. (m. Hannah Coate, d. 1830) who begot John W. Dawes, the head of our clan. We may or may not be distant cousins to the William Dawes who rode with Paul Revere, Lt. William Dawes -- explorer, astronomer, and Australian First Fleeter, or the Dawes family of Putney, the extinct baronetcy, original owners of the Dawes achievement, crest, and arms, but we're distant cousins at best.

REVOLUTIONARY WAR PATRIOT

Every child in this country has read the words "Listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere..." In 1776, William Dawes also rode to warn colonists that the British were coming! Here's a parody to Longfellow's poem: The Midnight Ride of William Dawes, which corrects the oversight.

EXPLORER

Lt. William Dawes (1762-1836) of the Royal Marines, astronomer and father of William Rutter Dawes, explorer and adventurer, Australian First Fleeter, has his own page on our site.

From "The Planet Mars: A History of Observation and Discovery" by William Sheehan, we can appreciate the place William Rutter earned in astronomy:

"The opposition of December 1, 1864, was not quite as good as that of 1862---Mars attained a maximum diameter of only 17.3"---but the opposition was nevertheless memorable for the study carried out by Rev. William Rutter Dawes, the son of a mathematics teacher and once an astronomer on an expedition to Botany Bay, Australia. Dawes had studied medicine as a young man and later became a clergyman with a small Independent congregation at Ormskirk, north of Liverpool. After failing health forced him to give up his congregation, he devoted himself entirely to astronomy. In the 1840s he was an assistant at the private observatory of a wealthy businessman, George Bishop, at St. John's Wood, London. After his second marriage---to an Ormskirk solicitor's widow---Dawes acquired the financial independence he needed to set up his own private observatories, first at Cranbrook, Kent, and then, from 1857 until his death in 1867, at Haddenham, Buckinghamshire. He was an exceptional observer noted for the keenness of his sight; but eagle-eyed as he was at the telescope, he was so terribly nearsighted that he could pass his wife in the street without recognizing her!

"Dawes had already made some drawings of Mars in 1862 and at earlier oppositions. In 1864, he used an 8-inch (20-cm) Cooke refractor, usually with a magnifying power of 258x. His drawings, wrote Richard Anthony Proctor, "are far better than any others. . . . The views by Beer and Mädler are good, as are some of Secchi's (though they appear badly drawn). Nasmyth's and Phillips', De La Rue's two views are also admirable; and Lockyer has given a better set of views than any of the others. But there is an amount of detail in Mr. Dawes' views which renders them superior to any yet taken." Camille Flammarion concurred: "The drawings by . . . Dawes brought a new precision to studies of Mars." A case in point: what Beer and Mädler had taken as a small, perfectly round spot (the feature they had designated a) was seen by Warren De la Rue as pointed and by Lockyer as an elongated patch; Dawes, however, resolved it into a bay with two forks, whose extensions, he noted, gave the impression of "two very wide mouths of a river, which however I could never trace. . . . It may be that the sea has receded from that part of the coast, and left the tongue of land exposed." This was the famous "Dawes' forked bay"---a name that is still used from time to time."

PRODUCTS

Dawes Black Horse Ale was made in Canada 50 years ago. I've had a request for the recipe from a homebrewer... any help out there? From time to time, memorablia like the bottle on the left become available on Ebay. To search Ebay for such items, click here. If you want email when they come available, click the "Personal Shopper" link on that page.

I once heard from a descendant of the ale brewers. His name was "Dawe" and he claimed that the real stuff was "Dawe's Black Horse Ale" -- I can't confirm this from the label here. I'm told that the names Dawe, Daws, and Dawes were interchangeable  in the middle ages, so we're all cousins anyway.

Jennifer Dawes of Vancouver, B.C., reports that the Dawes brewery is mentioned in the history of Lachine... and I quote: "In 1811, because of its strategic location and the busy river traffic, Thomas A. Dawes chooses Lachine as the site of the region's first industry, a brewery, and located it along the shores of Lake Saint Louis. The brewery quickly gave rise to Lachine's first urban core."

Dawes Cycles are treasured by bicyclers around the world. You can buy the Edge Team mountain bike pictured on the right for about £650, or street bikes for as low as £190. My favorite -- to look at -- would be the Diploma City Bike, for a mere £250, with a wicker basket up front -- just like in the movies. But have a look around the site: there are a couple dozen machines described there, one is bound to please you. If you're a Dawes and a cyclist, it would seem that one of these would be your ideal machine!

A dealer in England, FutureCycles specializes in recumbent bicycles, but also sells and describes various Dawes cycles, and tells something about the company... I've edited some text from their site:

Dawes, based in Birmingham, has been making quality bikes in Britain since 1926. They offer two special classes of hybrid: Discovery and Street.

Discovery bikes combine the sporty looks, superior brakes, wide gear range and flat handle bar riding position of the mountain bike together with the lighter weight construction and thinner wheels and tyres of the road bike.

The Street range is more for with practical comfort: softer comfort saddles and high rise handlebars, mudguards, luggage racks and prop stands standard. Some also include built-in lighting systems and innovative hub gear systems for ease of use.

Even the "cheap" Dawes bikes (those under £250) show a concern for quality and performance that is missing from many of their competitors.

INVENTIONS

A great-uncle of mine, George from LaCrosse, Wisconsin, invented and patented powdered soap. He reportedly sold the rights for $75. The men who bought it became wealthy. I think the product's name was 'Chipso' or 'Super Suds'. I met George in 1945, when I was 12. He seemed like a pretty contented old man, not at all bitter or grouchy.

PLACES

The Charles G. Dawes home in Evanston, Illinois, is a national historical landmark. It's open for tours year round.

There is a Dawes Road in Toronto.

There's a village in southern Alabama named Dawes.

The Dawes Arboretum is located 35 miles east of Columbus, Ohio on Ohio Route 13, three miles north of I-70 (Exit 132) or five miles south of Newark. AND -- it's FREE. The picture at right is the Japanese Gardens, said to be one of the best in the United States. The arboretum includes 1,149 acres of plant collections. Visit their web site at www.dawesarb.org/   to learn about hours, features, year-round programs, list of plants, pictures, and a printable map. Phone toll free: 1-800-44DAWES.

THE DAWES ACT

The Dawes Act, written by Senator Henry Dawes in 1887, part of solving the "Indian problem". My friend Arlo Stray Calf Dawes says the act was "the first step in the allotting of tribal lands from the Cherokee." You'll find many references to the 'Dawes Rolls' on the Internet today -- they are used as a tool for tracing Indian ancestry. Native Americans today regard the Act as just one of may steps Europeans used to steal their land. Learn more about the story, below.

A CROW INDIAN NAMED DAWES

A fascinating story has been contributed to our site by Gives Frequent Feasts, AKA Arlo Stray Calf Dawes.

MELODY to IT'S ALL IN THE GAME

The melody of the perennially popular song "It's All in the Game" was written by Charles G. Dawes, who composed "Melody in A". He was also the first director of the Bureau of the Budget (now Office of Management and Budget), Vice-president of US 1925-1929, and US ambassador to Britain 1929-1931, and was awarded the Nobel Peace prize.

CHARLES G. DAWES

Besides writing the above song, he was a U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner. He is also credited with the idea of charging Al Capone with income tax evasion, effectively ending his criminal career. For more info on Charles G., press this link. I've swapped e-mail with his grandson Chip Dawes, and hope to get some more stuff if I can find his biography. If you have stories about him, let me know.