DEMETRIUS T. EATON (1855-1920)

Demetrius T. Eaton (1855-1920), was born the eldest of eight children on January 22, 1855, in Marion County, Indiana, son of James Anderson Eaton (1833-1921) and Mary Ellen Davis Eaton (1836-1924). The Eaton family descended from the time of the American Revolution and their genealogy is published in Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, Vol. 89 (1955) : 296.

Demetrius T. Eaton is of special interest to American numismatic historians and to the Numismatic Bibliomania Society since he was a stamp, coin and numismatic literature dealer active from the last decade of the nineteenth century to 1920. Although he specialized in philatelics, i.e., stamp collecting and dealing he also collected, bought and sold the more traditional numismatic material of coins and coin literature, though both stamps and coins and their respective literature are always to be correctly understood as part and parcel of the entire class of the field of numismatics.

According to the 1880 U. S. Census he was living with his parents working as a clerk in a dry goods store. On April 26, 1882, he married Jeannetta "Nettie" Smyth (1860-1950), of Pennsylvania, and they had a son Earl Arlo Eaton (1887-1968). In July 1895 he joined the American Philatelic Association and was APA Member No. 1039. He began advertising in The Philatelic West in Volume 7, No. 1, June-July, 1898, first exclusively as a stamp dealer.

When Eaton first emerges as a stamp and coin dealer in November 1898 he not only offers foreign copper coins but also numismatic literature for sale. His interests were in ancient Roman and foreign copper coins. Not atypical in 19th and early 20th century coin and stamp periodicals we find the list of books with several typographical errors.

Among the coin books are : Cook's Medallic History of Imperial Rome (1781); Charles Wyllys Betts, American Colonial History Illustrated by Contemporary Medals (1894); James Ross Snowden, A Description of the Medals; of Washington of National and Miscellaneous Medals; and of Other Objects of Interest in the Museum of the Mint (1861); Noble's Dissertations upon the Mint and Coins of the Episcopal Palatines of Durham, 1780; Sir Charles Fellows, Coins of Ancient Lycia Before the Reign of Alexander. With an Essay on the Relative Dates of the Lycian Monuments in the British Museum. (1855).

According to the 1900 and 1910 U. S. Census he lived on 618 East 10th Street, Muscatine, Iowa, and listed as a stamp dealer. He began corresponding with the Chapman Brothers by June 1901.

He died June 26, 1920.

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