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fortis non ferox

This morning I gave an exam to three students in the ‘Pavilion Room’, a formal dining room or parlor added to the Victorian house at Brown University which now houses the History Department. And I brought my camera to photograph the wood coat of arms, on the amazing scallop-shiplapped chimney hood:

More or less argent a lion rampant gules, on a chief sable three crescents or. Papworth doesn’t give us anything close to this (1:105 is where the lions with stuff on a chief are found). Burke’s general armory (1032) may get us into the ballpark, with the only family using ‘fortis non ferox’ as that of Trotter, and specifically a Trotter family that combines a lion rampant (azure) and a chief (ermine).

Unfortunately no such imaginative late-Victorian Providence Trotter is found in Crozier, Bolton or Matthews. I suppose I’ll have to look up the house itself, but it would be more fun to smoke this out another way. Not a plaque or brochure at all in the house itself, mind you, except those relating to Mr. Peter Green, the late 20th-century benefactor after whom the house is now named.

UPDATE: the family is Kimball — see comment.

One Comment

  1. Nat Taylor wrote:

    Richard Lichten of the Usenet group rec.heraldry definitively identifies this coat with a Kimball family, centered in New Hampshire. Not sure which member of this family lived in Providence, or whether another family of the same name might have appropriated their assumed arms!

    Friday, December 18, 2009 at 23:04 | Permalink

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