Wilbur 'Will' Eesley

Wilbur “Will” Eesley was born October 6, 1910 in Columbus, Ohio, to Charles Leonard Eesley and Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley — one of six children, with at least four brothers and two sisters surviving into adulthood. He took his degree at the Ohio State University School of Architecture and worked in the Columbus area until 1949, when he moved his young family to Marietta. There he practiced architecture for the rest of his career, first with Scott and Eesley and then with Eesley, Lee, Vargo and Cassady, from which he retired around 1978.

He married Margaret “Peggy” McMaster on June 20, 1942. They had four children: Charles (Chuck’s father), Jeanne, Anne, and Margaret (“Maggie,” who would later build the four-generation photo archive that is now this site’s paternal image layer).

In Marietta he was a longtime member of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, serving on its business committee for many years. He served on the Marietta Tree Commission and the Bicentennial Commission, was past president of the Marietta Kiwanis Club, and sat on the Betsey Mills Advisory Board.

He drew, but he also built. He designed the Highland Ridge Road house in Marietta that his son Charlie would later raise his own son in, planted the orchard that went with it, and built a small red bridge over the pond out back — the same bridge Charlie and Chuck would later rebuild together. He was, in Chuck’s eulogy for his father, “my grandfather [who] always had some interesting new wood-carved toy that also taught some physics principle.” The 1985 Family History cover — the Goldie flour mill of his grandfather’s emigration — is his hand. So is the 1942 ration-card Christmas card now in Maggie’s archive. The visual signature of the paternal line is his.

He was one of Charles Leonard and Lillie Dale’s ten children. By 1986, when he died, the surviving siblings were his two sisters: Mary Eesley Bean of Narberth, PA (who had just published the family history) and Helen Burnes of Worthington, OH. Four brothers and one sister had gone before him: Leonard David Eesley (1904–1976), Donald Stuart “Don” (1908–1975), Lyle (1914–1942, lost as a POW at Cabanatuan), Dale Dudley George (1916–1939, engaged to Thelma when he died at twenty-two), and his sister Jean Goldie (1912–1924, age twelve). Two other brothers — Thomas Leonard (b. 1906) and James Michael “Mike” (b. 1908) — appear in the 1985 register without death dates and were also gone by 1986. Mary would write the 1985 Eesley Family History that became the relationship backbone for this archive — making her, on a project like this one, the single most important figure in the previous generation of family record-keepers.

Source: Will’s obituary, Marietta paper, June 1986.