Shields Family:
Service from Fort Pitt to Gettysburg to Vietnam
Left: Betty "B.G." Shields, widow of Daniel Leet Shields (left), and her niece Margaret "Margie" Shields Gilfillan have their portraits photographed with family portraits from the past: paintings of relative Mary Shields Shewell (1768-1795) and Amelia Neville Shields de Guirola, Margie's aunt and B.G.'s sister-in-law. In the background is a mantle now in the Gilfillan home that originally graced the library of the Shields Homestead in Edgeworth.
It's often said that Pittsburgh is a big small town. The marriages and alliances struck back before 1800, when Pittsburgh really was a small town, sank roots that became local landmarks. Craig and Neville streets run through Oakland, but some of their descendants are firmly planted in the Sewickley Valley. Other familiar names such as Oliver (as in the downtown avenue) and Leet (yes, Leetsdale and Leet Township) are related to this old family tree.
"Military service has been a long tradition in the Shields family," says Margaret Shields Gilfillan, an associate professor of accounting at Point Park University. The tradition stretches back from Vietnam, where her brother William Dickinson Shields served, to ancestor Gen. John Neville, who purchased 14,000 acres one year before he commanded Fort Pitt on behalf of the Virginia colony. His last home was on Long Island in the Ohio River, now named Neville Island in his honor. Another Revolutionary War-era connection was Maj. Isaac Craig, who married Neville's daughter Amelia and purchased the remains of Fort Pitt, including the Block House, which he turned into his home. (The Block House was a private residence until April 1, 1894, and is now open to the public.) The Irish-born Craig crossed the Delaware with Washington, commanded Fort Pitt and, with Gen. James O'Hara, opened Pittsburgh's first glass factory in 1797. (Look for the historical marker at the foot of the Duquesne Incline that marks the site.) A fourth paternal ancestor, Maj. Daniel Leet, arrived at the Forks of the Ohio after serving on Washington's staff during the Revolution.
As the fledgling U.S. government auctioned depreciation lands to pay Revolutionary War soldiers for their service, surveyors' skills were in demand. Leet was one of those savvy early surveyors who applied his first-hand knowledge of the region, commissioning an agent to buy more than 1,000 acres in present-day Edgeworth in the late-1780s. His daughter Eliza married Philadelphian David Shields; their home, Newington, is still family-owned and -occupied.
Other relatives stayed close by, adding a few other famous American names, including Potter, Dickinson and Whittier, to the clan. Most settled near another family estate, Chestnut Hill in Edgeworth, which stayed in family hands until a few years ago.
Margie Gilfillan says the dark hair and dark eyes shown in Eliza Shields' portrait, which now hangs in her Sewickley Hills home, are another defining family characteristic. "We're tall, healthy stock," she laughs. "The genes persist. We all look alike." Through a maternal grandmother, she is also a descendant of John Potter, who served at George Washington's hastily constructed Fort Necessity in 1754. Through her marriage to Howard Gilfillan, she is a member of the 18th-century Gilfillan clan, whose holdings included the lands near present-day South Hills Village Mall.
It was David Shields' son, Thomas Leet Shields, who built the large 10,000-square-foot Greek Revival home for his family in 1854. Named Chestnut Hill, "it was the classic Pittsburgh Civil War house," says Sewickley Valley Historical Society president Joe Zemba. It was one of the first architect-designed home in the area, created by Joseph W. Kerr.
Service in the Civil War called two of the Shieldses' eight children. William Chaplin Shields, who died at the Battle of Chancellorsville, is memorialized in a stained-glass window in the Shields Chapel on Church Lane in Edgeworth. His younger brother David, wounded several times, returned home, and died in 1937 at age 93. The baby of the family, Thomas Leet Shields, born at Chestnut Hill, brought a literary connection to Edgeworth when he married Helen Whittier Dickinson, who was related to two of America's most famous poets: John Greenleaf Whittier and Emily Dickinson.
"They were sometimes called the difficult Dickinsons," recalls the couple's great-great-granddaughter Margie Gilfillan. "They were bright, demanding and eccentric." But the family was close. A half-dozen Shields families bought properties adjoining "the Homestead," as the family affectionately called Chestnut Hill, with plenty of casual visiting back and forth. "Until I was 9, I lived in the cottage on the property and spent my time between the cottage and the house where my grandparents and uncle lived," Gilfillan recalls.
Left: Painting of Mary Shields Shewell (1768-1795).
"These family members weren't ghosts. They were very much present in our lives and added a richness that is hard to describe. Even as a child, I imagined that I would have a home in which every item represented someone whose memory I cherished. Every time I pass by the credenza in my hallway, which resided in the kitchen in the Homestead, I feel a connection to my grandparents. I also expected that this wonderful extended family would continue."
The last family to live at the Homestead was keenly interested in their family's role in local history. Betty "B.G." Shields, widow of Daniel Leet Shields, helped found Sewickley Valley Historical Society in 1973. Ironically, the terms of a trust dictated that her home be sold upon her husband's death, and it was demolished by a new owner.
Betty Shields, also editor emeritus of the Sewickley Herald, now lives near State College, near her son, Daniel Leet Shields Jr., his wife, Lynn, and their children, Will and Betsy. She is philosophic about the loss of the home where she lived for more than 50 years. "We always knew we wouldn't inherit it," she says. And she retains a deep appreciation for the family she joined. "They had a sense of honor, " she says proudly. "You could always believe their word, and they always did their duty."
Footnote: Woodville, the historic Neville home in Collier Township, stayed in that family until 1975; the restored plantation is open to visitors. Info: 412/221-0348, woodvilleplantation.org.
Christine H. O'Toole, a Pittsburgh magazine contributing writer, is a co-author of Pennsylvania's Forbes Trail: Gateways and Getaways Along the Legendary Route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, with Burton K. Kummerow and R. Scott Stephenson. The historical travel guidebook will be published by Rowman & Littlefield this month.