Walter Prentiss Butler
Civic Leader, Wise Counsel, First Mayor of City of Saratoga Springs
Walter Prentiss Butler was born April 1, 1863, to Civil War Captain James Butler and Naomi Clements Butler in their home at 596 North Broadway. After attending the Saratoga Springs public schools, North Granville and Peekskill Military Academies, and Phillips Exeter Academy, he graduated from Columbia University Law School. Passing the bar the same year, Walter joined the local firm of Pond, French and Brackett, which evolved into Pond, Brackett and Butler. In 1890 he married Mary Ashman Kilmer, sister of his business partner Clarence Kilmer.
Walter became one of the outstanding lawyers in New York State. His most notable case, taken to the U.S. Supreme Court, was successfully defending the Saratoga Vichy Spring Company against the French Republic’s challenge on the use of the Vichy name. He was also a specialist in inheritance tax matters.
In 1915 Walter Butler was elected as the first mayor of the newly chartered City of Saratoga Springs; he declined to serve more than one term. But during that term, he organized the city’s departments, rewrote the charter and drafted the original city ordinances.
Always active in the community, he chaired the local Red Cross from 1917 to 1939 and served as a trustee of the Presbyterian Church and on the board of the Saratoga National Bank and its predecessor, as well as on the county and state Bar Associations and the Elks Lodge.
Walter was the second man in town to own an automobile, a 1903 one-cylinder Oldsmobile. An outstanding golfer, he was an active member of the Saratoga Golf Club and the MacGregor Links, and an amateur naturalist who cultivated familiarity with the region’s wildlife as a camper and angler.
Walter and his wife lived at 22 Greenfield Avenue, raising their two sons Clarence Kilmer Butler and John Prentiss Butler there and staying at that residence till their deaths. When Walter passed away on December 28, 1942, the community’s leaders were lavish in their praise for his amiable disposition, keen mind, honesty, kindliness and leadership.