The Proctor name has settled into many corners of modern life on both sides of the Atlantic. A handful belong properly to American history and a few to British letters and science. Most belong simply to the long quiet labor of a family carrying a name forward. This is a short atlas of the notable ones, drawn from a much longer roster.
Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864)
Adelaide Anne Procter, born in 1825 and dead by 1864, was a notable Procter on this list. She was also the favorite poet of a reigning queen, namely Victoria of Great Britain. The affection was reciprocated by a reading public that placed her ahead of every English poet. They only put Tennyson ahead of her at the height of the Victorian poetry market. Her best-known lyric 'A Lost Chord' became the most commercially successful song of its decade. That was the 1870s and 1880s on both sides of the Atlantic by sales figures. Arthur Sullivan set the lyric to music in 1877 and it never stopped earning royalties. She was a Catholic convert and co-founder of the English Woman's Journal in London. She was a worker among London's homeless population and the poor of the East End. She died of tuberculosis at 38, having worn herself to a thread on charity work.
Richard A. Proctor (1837–1888)
Richard A. Proctor, born in 1837 and dead at 51, drew the first usable map of Mars. He gave the Martian features names that the world used for a full generation. Giovanni Schiaparelli of Milan eventually replaced them with the canals-of-Mars system in the 1870s. That system would haunt Edwardian science fiction and feed H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. Proctor calculated the Martian day to within fractions of a second of modern values. He founded the popular science weekly Knowledge in London in 1881 to lasting effect. The crater Proctor on Mars bears his name in honor of that first map. He died on a lecture tour in New York City of yellow fever in 1888.
William Cooper Procter (1862–1934)
William Cooper Procter was the third generation of the Cincinnati Procter family at P&G. He joined the company in 1883 straight from Princeton and worked through every department. He became president of Procter & Gamble in 1907 and ran the company until 1930. In 1887, his first year as general manager, he gave employees a Saturday half-day off. That made Procter & Gamble the first American company to do so in any city. He introduced profit-sharing in the same year and pioneered worker board representation later. He created a disability pension plan and life insurance for the soap company's workforce. Under his leadership the company grew from $20 million in revenue to $200 million. He was the last member of the founding families to run the Cincinnati business directly.
Redfield Proctor (1831–1908)
Redfield Proctor was born in 1831 in a Vermont village named Proctorsville after his family. He fought in the Civil War with the 5th and 15th Vermont Infantry regiments through the war. He became a colonel and served in the Gettysburg campaign behind the front lines. After the war he built the Vermont Marble Company into a national operation by 1880. The Vermont town of Proctor takes its name from him and his marble quarries today. He served as governor of Vermont, Secretary of War under Benjamin Harrison, and U.S. senator. His 1898 Senate speech on Cuba was one of the moments pushing America into war. That was the Spanish-American War, fought largely on the basis of Cuban liberation arguments. He was the father and grandfather of two more Vermont governors after his own term. The Proctor political dynasty in Vermont ran for half a century from 1878 onward.
Henry Hugh Proctor (1868–1933)
Henry Hugh Proctor was the son of formerly enslaved parents in rural Tennessee in 1868. He became the first African American pastor of First Congregational Church in Atlanta in 1894. He served the Atlanta congregation for twenty-six years through one of the city's hardest periods. After the 1906 Atlanta race massacre he became central to the Social Gospel movement. He worked to rebuild trust between Atlanta's Black and white communities at every level. He was a precursor of the civil rights movement that came a generation later. The Proctor name traveled in unexpected lines across the long arc of American history.
Two More Worth Naming
John Procter was a British artist and cartoonist who lived from 1836 to 1914 in London. His work appeared weekly in the Illustrated London News across the late Victorian period. Mary Proctor was the daughter of the astronomer Richard A. Proctor of Mars-map fame. She became a popular astronomer in her own right and lectured across America. She was one of the first women to make a public career in astronomy. The astronomers in the family kept the trade going across two generations of Proctors.
The Quiet Majority
The roster could continue for many more pages and still not cover the territory. Most Proctors did not make the books or the encyclopedias or the named buildings. They farmed in New England, kept shops in Ohio, and taught school in Indiana for decades. They clerked in London, fished in Cumbria, and served in two world wars under both flags. They raised children who took different paths and changed the family in quiet ways. That's the great work that a family name actually does over the centuries quietly. The list above is the surface of the work that the name has been doing. The body of it is somewhere underneath, in the long line of unfamed bearers of the name. This website is for them too, and for the Proctors not yet born into the family.