1925 Biography - Robert E. Farrell

Robert E. Farrell is a veteran of the New Orleans cotton market, though a comparatively young man in years. He has spent nearly thirty years of his life with the same firm of cotton brokers at 843 Union Street.

Mr. Farrell was born at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, July 1, 1878, son of William H. and Mary (Morris) Farrell, his father a native of Ireland, and his mother of New Orleans, where she is still living. William H. Farrell was a contractor and builder, and died when his son Robert E. was six years of age. His widowed mother then removed to New Orleans where her son attended public schools and the Soulé Business College. He was only sixteen when he went to work in a railroad office, and two years later at the age of eighteen became an employe of a cotton firm. With that firm he learned all the details of the cotton brokerage business and in a few years had reached the position of a partnership and has since been one of the active men in this organization. Mr. Farrell has been a popular and resolute Citizen of New Orleans and for five years was president of the Young Men's Gymnastic Club.

On September 8, 1897, he married Miss Fannie Newman Young, who was born in Mississippi. They are the parents of three sons and four daughters: Miss Frances M., Robert W., William Mason, Charles Fernand, Maud Dorothy, Mary Elizabeth and Margaret Dixie, the oldest being twenty-three and the youngest eight years of age. The son, Robert W. is a graduate of the Gulf Coast Military Academy at Gulfport, Mississippi, and is now associated with his father in the cotton business. The two other sons, William Mason and Charles F., are members of the class of 1925 in the Gulf Coast Military Academy and have made splendid records in that institution; Charles being captain of Company B, on the sixth highest offices in the battalion, while his brother is captain of Company A. Charles was captain of the football team in 1924, and was elected president of the senior class. Mr. Robert E. Farrell is a director in the Canal Commercial Bank & Trust Company at New Orleans.

Contributed 2021 Nov 04 by Mike Miller, from A History of Louisiana, by Henry E. Chambers, published in 1925, volume 2, page 11.