Hampden man became dentist for the Kaiser

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The death of a Hampden harness maker’s son who became Kaiser Wilhelm II’s dentist created a stir in Maine a century ago today. The press played up the story as a great morality tale. When Alonzo Sylvester died by his own hand on Jan. 10, 1905, he had gained the friendship of Germany’s last emperor, but the wealthy doctor couldn’t pay his bills.

Educated at Hampden Academy, young Alonzo had loftier ambitions than working in the harness shop of his father, Hiram.

Older people in town told the Bangor Daily News the day after his death that he had been “a bright, active and attractive young man with a strong personality and a daring spirit.” Those talents took him to dizzying heights, but the transition between rural Maine and the glitter of prewar Berlin must have been a lot to handle.

“Few Americans of such abilities waste them as he did. It is a fair proof that ordinary humanity cannot endure the rare atmosphere of unhindered license, which surrounds a throne. Sylvester was a success as a dentist. He failed when he tried to be a king,” lectured one writer anonymously, and perhaps unfairly, in an account republished in various forms in both Bangor newspapers.

In 1860, Sylvester was living at home with his parents and two sisters in Hampden, according to the U.S. Census. A decade later, at age 25, he was still living in Hampden, now with a wife, Julanah, 22, and an infant daughter. At some point he had developed wanderlust. His profession was listed as seaman.

The next year, 1871, Sylvester received a degree from the Boston Dental College (now Tufts dental school). He worked with Dr. E.T. Wasgatt, a Bangor dentist, for an unspecified amount of time before leaving for Germany in 1872, where the advanced skills of American dentists were highly valued.

The dates are significant. Thanks to the Hampden Historical Society, I was able to find Julanah Sparrow Sylvester’s grave in the Locust Grove Cemetery. She died on Aug. 27, 1871, the same year Sylvester graduated from dental school and the year before he left for Germany.

A verse inscription on her gravestone was, perhaps, written by her grieving husband, who lies buried on the other side of the cemetery. It says:

We lay thee here in peaceful sleep

While faraway we roam

But angels shall thy spirit keep

Til we all reach your home

In Germany, word of Sylvester’s professional skill spread, and soon he began treating the boy, Wilhelm, before he became emperor, and many of his relatives. The two became so friendly that the harness maker’s son eventually was appointed “a Royal Prussian councilor” and court dentist.

Although Sylvester never mixed in royal society, the Kaiser walked to his office, located in “one of the finest homes in Berlin,” unattended by guards and talked to him at length. He could drop the role of emperor for an hour or two and ask questions freely about America and other subjects of interest to him. They went riding together, and Wilhelm gave his dentist fine art as gifts.

Accounts agree that Sylvester became wealthy. He made “millions.” His house was “a museum of works of art.” He put on lavish dinner parties at his Berlin mansion or his summer place on the Baltic.

He owned a yacht that slept six, and he was a member of the Kaiser’s yacht club. A picture of him in the Bangor Daily Commercial after his death shows a middle-aged man with a benign gaze sporting a walrus mustache and what appears to be a yachting cap jauntily cocked to one side of his head.

Sylvester adopted German ways, German citizenship, even German looks – “big, blond and bluff.” But he remained a proud American in spirit, flying the American flag at his home and returning to the United States to attend a meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati, a group for male descendants of Revolutionary War officers.

The details of Sylvester’s downfall revolve around several events, the precise importance of each being impossible to gauge at this late date. The result, however, was that he put a bullet through his head one night while lying in bed. He was found by his successor, Dr. Arthur N. Davis, clutching a long pistol with a gold-plated barrel and a pearl handle.

In his memoir, “The Kaiser As I Know Him,” Davis never mentions the suicide note described in the newspapers. In the note, Sylvester accused a former partner named Watson of ruining him by breaking off his association prematurely and starting a rival practice that had taken away most of Sylvester’s patients.

“You boasted you would run me under the earth. You have done it,” the note reportedly said. Sylvester demanded that the former partner pay his daughter Florence $25,000. A medical student in California by then, she was the offspring of Sylvester’s second marriage, to an American woman who was a daughter of the famous scientist and author, Alexander Winchell.

The doctor had had a stroke within the last couple of years before his death that had damaged his physical skills, and he was dependent on Watson, and then Davis, to continue his practice.

Watson had deserted him because of his “dissolute life style” and “high riotous living,” said an account widely published in the papers. This included his association with young women that had led to the end of his second marriage. They included the actress Vilma von Mayburg, whose career still receives brief note on the Internet today.

These relationships, in fact, had left him in “bad odor” with much of the American community in Berlin and had contributed to his loss of patients.

The newspapers also reported that shortly before his death, Sylvester had been ill with the flu and had been talking incoherently.

So here is a smorgasbord of potentially interlocking motives and causes from which one can piece together nearly any theory about his suicide.

Sylvester’s daughter Florence idolized her father, devoting much of her autobiography, “Three Incarnations,” to defending his character. When her parents’ marriage dissolved, she chose to live with her father. He encouraged her to go to America and get an education ending at medical school at Berkeley. When he killed himself, she was devastated.

“Never before in my life and never since then have I been so utterly alone. For almost 30 years he had been the center of my life and thought, of all my deepest emotion. The core of everything worthwhile was shattered. I hardly knew which was worse, his loss, or the consciousness that I had failed him,” she wrote in the book, which was not published until 1954 under the name Florence Sylvester Winchell. She had married her cousin, also a scientist, in midlife.

While avoiding discussion of the events leading up to his suicide, her accounting of his life is far different from the gossipy condemnations found in the newspapers: “He had carried the principles and ideals of his Americanism into a foreign land and had lived them; he had risen from an ambitious farmboy and saddler’s apprentice to royal honors; his generosity had aided many, his deep tenderness and loyalty had made him a host of friends,” she wrote.

While collecting material for this column, I corresponded with Thomas Vinson, who has an antique cigar lighter from Sylvester’s yacht, Uarda. He welcomes hearing from anyone who has information about the yacht at tomvinson@gate.net. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.