Charles Lawrance

Lawrance was born on September 30, 1882, in Lenox, Massachusetts, the son of Francis Cooper Lawrance Jr. (1858–1904) and his first wife, Sarah Eggleston Lanier (1862–1893).[1] After his mother's death in 1893, his father remarried to Susan Ridgway Willing, a sister of Ava Lowle Willing (who married John Jacob Astor IV).[1] They had a daughter, a half-sister to Lawrance, Frances Alice Willing Lawrance, who married Prince Andrzej Poniatowski (son of Prince André Poniatowski) in 1919.[2] From his parents marriage, Lawrance had a younger sister, Kitty Lanier Lawrance, who was raised by their paternal grandfather, as their parents died when she was still young.[3] In 1915, Kitty married W. Averell Harriman, the Governor of New York (they divorced in 1928).[4]

Lawrance's maternal grandfather was banker Charles D. Lanier, a close friend of Pierpont Morgan.[5] His great-grandfather was James F. D. Lanier, who founded Winslow, Lanier & Co. His paternal grandfather was Francis Cooper Lawrance, of Paris and Pau, France.[3] In 1885, his paternal aunt, Frances Margaret Lawrance, married George Venables-Vernon, 7th Baron Vernon.[6]

Lawrance attended the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, before Yale University, where he graduated in 1905, where he was a member of Wolf's Head.[1]

Shortly after his graduation from Yale, he joined a new automobile firm that went bankrupt by the financial panic of 1907. He then went to Paris, where he studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, experimenting with aeronautics at the Eiffel Laboratory.[7]

1927 Collier Trophy

President Coolidge (left) congratulates Charles Lawrance on the air-cooled aircraft radial engine that won the 1927 Collier Trophy

President Calvin Coolidge congratulated Lawrance for his development of the air-cooled aircraft radial engine that won the 1927 Collier Trophy for the year's greatest achievement in American aviation.[13][14]

In 1932, he wrote a book entitled Our National Aviation Program.[15]

In 1910, he married Emily Margaret Gordon Dix (1885–1973), a daughter of Rev. Morgan Dix, the rector of Trinity Parish.[16] They lived at 153 East 63rd Street,[17] in the National Register of Historic Places listed Barbara Rutherford Hatch House,[18] and together, their children were:

• Emily Lawrance (1911–2004),[19] who married Joseph S. Frelinghuysen Jr. (1912-2005),[20] the son of US Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen Sr.[21]
• Margaret "Mardie" Lawrance (1913–2005),[22] who was married to Drayton Cochran[17][22] and later to Winston Frost[19]
• Francis Cooper Lawrance (1916–2004), who graduated from Harvard in 1939,[1] and who married Priscilla Howe.[23] After her death in 1977, he married Anne Dunn.[24]

Lawrance died at his Long Island home, Meadow Farm in East Islip, New York, on June 24, 1950.[7][25]

• Charles Lawrance
• The Charles L. Lawrance papers at the American Heritage Center