HENRY WOOD BOOTH

(1837-1925)

born in Cranbrook, Kent, as a child he emigrated with his father, stepmother Harriot Harman, sister Anne and brother George to North America in 1844.

Close personal friend of James Edmund Scripps and member of the same small congregation of the Epiphany Reformed Episcopal Church in Detroit. They were low church Episcopalians who looked to Rev Woolfenden (sp?) for spiritual guidance and followed him to Detroit from Canada. The religious movement was an evangelical form of Anglicanism which did not recognize the authority of a local bishop. There were perhaps no more than 40 parishioners in this small Detroit church. George G. Booth met his future wife Ellen Warren Scripps while attending family services at this small wood church. James Scripps’s Trinity Church was intended as a stone replacement for the wood chapel which burned down.

NOTE: The Scripps mortuary chapel/mausoleum located in Woodmere cemetery on the banks of the River Rouge on Fort Street, though built of stone by the architect Herbert Langford Warren of Boston, was inspired by the design of the original wood Epiphany Reformed Episcopal Church. It was built to memorialize the two young children of James and Harriet Scripps who died in Detroit, a daughter in infancy and their first born son James, who died in a Detroit epidemic in 1882. This epidemic almost claimed the life of James E. Scripps as well.

Henry Booth operated several businesses in Canada. He opened a coppersmithing business in St Catherine’s, Ontario, where he also published a weekly temperance newspaper, which was burned to the ground by members of the anti-temperance movement which represented the majority of the townspeople. He operated several businesses in Windsor, Ontario where he invented a recipe made of wheat, bran and molasses for a decaffeinated substitute for coffee which Henry called “KA-O-KA”. After selling the recipe to the Post Cereal Company in 1895, the name of this product invented by Henry Wood Booth was changed to “Postum”. By family lore, Henry Wood Booth also operated a small chain of self-serve grocery stores in Windsor which he later sold to a company that became Kroger.

Henry Wood Booth was a devoted Christian who made a life long study of comparative religion. He latter wrote a weekly Sunday column in the Detroit Evening News under the byline “The Church Tramp” in which he reviewed religious practices after attending religious services in the city held by various religions and religious sects, both Christian and non-Christian. Though a practicing Anglican, he was decidedly low-church, non-evangelical, non-Calvinist, and wholeheartedly ecumenical. When Henry relocated his family to Detroit from St. Catherine’s, Ontario, he worked for the Barnum Wire and Iron Company makers of ornamental ironwork and fencing.
Note: George Booth, who was hired by Barnum Wire at an early age, later purchased the Canadian subsidiary of the Barnum Company and operated it as Evans and Booth, fabricators and suppliers of ornamental and decorative ironwork with George Booth as the designer.