Happy Thanksgiving

Just a few weeks ago we talked here about Godey’s Lady’s Book and the influence that periodical had on nineteenth century women.  The magazine’s editor for forty years was a lady named Sarah Josepha Hale.  Our national holiday for giving thanks can largely be attributed to her and therefore I thought we should mention her today.

Contrary to what every American schoolchild learns, the turkey-laden tradition of Thanksgiving Day did not really start with the pilgrims and the American Indians.  Sure, they broke bread together and thanked God for the provision He’d given them in their new land and a bountiful harvest.  Given the difficulty of life in the seventeenth century and the religious persecution that drove those first settlers to our shores, it’s ironic that we celebrate just that one day of giving thanks because I’m betting they were breathing prayers of appreciation for every breath, sip of clear water or morsel of food.   Still we have some documentation of a particular feast in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts and that is traditionally the first Thanksgiving Day.

If we fast forward through history two hundred years, we find no national holiday for Thanksgiving, nor do we find Thanksgiving Day anywhere near universally celebrated.   Where it was remembered, it was largely a northern or New England holiday and was virtually unknown in the South. 

Enter one persistent lady:  Sarah Hale.  Sarah believed that The United States should be universally celebrating Thanksgiving Day and she expressed that belief to the President many times.  In fact, she expressed it to five different presidents – remember her tenure as Editor of The Lady’s Book far outreached any presidential administration – and finally a well-timed letter to Abraham Lincoln yielded the results she sought. 

As I read about Sarah Hale, it’s difficult for me to compare her to any of our modern female types.  She is not a women’s lib-er for she advocates women ruling and influencing the world from the home and through the family.  Yet, she was an early proponent of higher education for women and surely one of the very first female-American executives. 

Married at twenty-five, she was a widow by the age of thirty-four.  She was left with five small children.  Despite parents who believed in equal education for both their sons and daughters, Sarah had received no formal education learning only at the feet of her mother and brother.  As a widow seeking to feed her household, she began writing and her husband’s Masonic brethren helped her to get her first book of poems published followed by a novel expressing her views on slavery.  That novel brought her to the attention of magazine publishers and her editing career sprang from there. 

In the third year of a civil war which was supposed to end quickly – the first Confederate volunteers were asked to pledge just ninety days of service -  President Lincoln finally began to see the tide turning in his favor.  It was at this time that he received Mrs. Hale’s letter and believing the nation should be truly thankful at that time, chose to issue the proclamation she requested. 

You can read Lincoln’s proclamation here and I encourage you to do so as we enjoy a day of feasting and family-fellowship; maybe we should think about the nature of the holiday he suggested.  He attributed the peace and bounty of our nation to, “the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy”.  While he speaks of the Civil War when he urges the people, “while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers,” this is surely good advice for our present day as well as, “fervently [imploring] the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation”

I find Sarah Hale’s story absolutely inspiring.  In a day when work for women was largely menial and unrewarding, when a woman’s voice was scarcely heard outside her home and her sphere of influence was confined to the walls of her own house Sarah Hale stepped out and provided for her family while encouraging women across the country and even around the world.  While hers is not a name taught and remembered along with Lincoln or Lee, she left a legacy that we will all enjoy today.

On this Thanksgiving Day I enjoy more blessings than I can even count and I include you precious readers among them.  You have been so kind in continually returning to visit TennesseeMountainStories.com and giving me feedback on the articles and stories here.  Thank you and God bless you!

Midwife's Records

Last week we talked about the writings of Lottie Todd and I am amazed by the information we can glean from her simple journals.  According to the Reagan Foundation, the Reagan library contains, “over 60 million pages of documents, over 1.6 million photographs, a half million feet of motion picture film, tens of thousands of audio and video tape, and over 40,000 artifacts.”  How I wish I had a fraction of that information from my ancestors.  Unfortunately, that is not how most of us live our lives.  A politician at President Reagan’s level is constantly videoed, photographed and documented; for my ancestors I’m thrilled to have a handful of pictures, and a letter he wrote is a great treasure. 

I recently was absolutely blessed to read through sixty-five pages of official documents that once again told me so much more than their author could ever have imagined.   I’ve been researching Mrs. Gracie Todd, who faithfully served the women of Campground, Martha Washington, Clarkrange, Grimsley and Rinnie  as midwife and friend.  Gracie Todd was still “catching” babies in her late seventies and her grand-daughter shared these surviving documents from her career.

There are three booklets that were printed by the Tennessee Department of Health and labelled “Physician’s Record of Birth” and issued to Aunt Gracie (as she is very widely known).  These three span 1932 through 1937.  They are surely not an exhaustive record of her work during those years – in fact, there is a vast gap from 1934 through 1936.  These booklets contained birth certificate blanks with the right portion of the page being the mother’s copy and the left portion the physician’s receipt. 

Many pages are inexplicably blank, the baby’s name is almost never recorded and the location of the birth or address of parents is omitted.  Still, these are precious records that reveal a little glimpse of the lives of the community in the thirties. 

It’s hard to know what kind of statistics hospitals are keeping on us these days, but these forms recorded legitimacy, occupation of both father and mother, number of children of this mother and number of children of this mother now living.  They do not record any data on the baby such as length, weight or head circumference.    I can’t help but read these documents through my twenty-first century eyes when the first question is “how big” when a birth is announced.  My family has a small scale that my great-great grandmother bought with coupons from Arbuckle’s coffee for the express purpose of weighing her babies, and I am unaware that she ever served as a midwife however she had ten children of her own and she wanted to know their birth weights.  Perhaps that is an indicator that most midwives did not try to chart birth weights.

I am also fascinated by the infant mortality rate as recorded here, as well as the age range for the mothers.  Again, from today’s perception, there are a number of very young mothers – one sixteen year old delivering her second child.  And women were successfully birthing babies well into their thirties and forties- one Matilda Lewis is shown at age forty-two having her eighth baby (and all eight were living).  In 1935, about five out of every one hundred babies would not survive, and maybe if I did the math, Aunt Gracie’s records would reflect the same percentage but just flipping through the pages, I’m amazed at how many mothers had six or eight children and all of them were living.  Of course, it’s hard to think about babies as statistics and I know the loss of any one is heart wrenching.  There are certainly a number of sheets showing one or two babies that didn’t make it; then there’s the record of twenty-nine year old Nova Todd’s 1932 delivery reflecting ten births with only two living.  I would like to note that these documents do not reflect the condition of the baby, whether or not this particular child survived.

We’ve talked before about the availability of medical care in this era and we know that hospitals were few and very far between.  So it isn’t hard to imagine how revered a good midwife would have been.  I wonder what women of the early nineteenth would have said had they realized how much safer they were in the hands of midwives.  You see, as more women went to hospitals to have their babies, the rate of both infant and maternal mortality sky rocketed.  Instead of caring for a single woman in labor, doctors were seeing many women.  Without a good understanding of germs and hygiene, they often introduced deadly infections.  Therefore, Aunt Gracie’s tender care, one mother at a time, resulted in page after page detailing healthy babies.

Finally, a note on the time.  She rarely annotates whether the time in a.m. or p.m.  I can’t help but wonder after labor which might have taken many hours, even spanning more than a day and night, perhaps morning and evening were blurred and relatively unimportant.

"If I had a Remembrance Book..."

Do you remember Laura Ingall's opening line, "If I had a remembrance book..." as she thought of all the things she would surely write down?  Do you have such a book?  Are you one of those folks that has volumes of bound books lined up on a shelf with all of your thoughts and emotions carefully chronicled?

I know that journaling can be a wonderful tool for many people.  Whether you are writing your deepest thoughts or jotting down craft ideas, just putting pen to paper sorts thoughts and solidifies ideas.  I confess that I have never consistently kept a journal even though I realize the benefits.  But I sure am glad other folks have kept them and today I want to share one example with you.

Lottie Perie Todd was my great-great-grandmother.  She lived her entire adult life in Martha Washington, Tennessee where she raised eleven children, encouraged innumerable neighbors, helped to start a Sunday School and finally passed away in 1948 at the age of seventy-six.  During the last few years of her life she was bedridden and during this period which she recorded many of the ordinary happenings in her home.

She records major historical events such as, “Surrender of Germany May 7, 1945”.  She records the weather, “Snow December 31, 1945”.  She records both visitors to her home and visits made by her household, “April 5 Thomas came,” and “April 6 Delsie visited Mrs. Cooper”.  She records purchases made for the household, “November 12 Dad got a well chain…” as well as gifts given to them, “April 29 Tom gave me a tablet”.  She records the progress of the family canning, “July 24 canned four jars of preserved peaches and eleven quarts canned peaches and thirteen quarts of blackberries and eleven jars of cucumber pickles”. 

When Lottie’s health rendered her too weak to write, her daughter Delsie assumed the responsibility.  Do you imagine that while Lottie was feeling low, the continuance of this report was a comfort to her?  September 16, 1946 she notes “The last letters I wrote.  I have quit my writing.”  This must have been a very sad day for her.  However, by July 1947, a new book opens with, “Clarence, Mary [and] Jerry went to visit Dewey and Ova [and] went fishing.  Mary picked blackberries.”

There are several little books that span 1944 through 1948.  They mention what today would seem a tiny gift such as fifty cents but there is also a silk gown gifted to Lottie.  She is sending grandsons off to war while welcoming new babies.  She records purchases of a broom, mop and hog feed.  Cows have calves, her son-in-law’s mare dies and all are noted.  From these simple facts jotted down in plain notebooks, we glimpse the daily life of her extended family.

It isn’t hard to read between the lines and see real emotion.  With a family tree beside the books, it’s easy to trace the identities of most of the characters and if you know the community, the neighbors come into focus as well.  Lottie worries for family members and neighbors equally.  Her concern is clear for a grandchild receiving treatments for eczema and for her daughter who will have to pay $40.50 to have her son’s tonsils removed.   When Cal Farley dies suddenly, her heart goes out to the Farley family and her husband and daughter go to visit the widow.  When she learns that a neighbor’s son has received a prison sentence for an accident resulting from drunken driving she is as shocked and hurt as his own parents.

I’ve read through this diary several times and I find myself more interested each time.  Somehow, it draws me into their lives just as a well-written novel does and I find that truly funny since I spend so much energy trying to develop characters and plot lines that leave my readers glued to the pages.  This is the original reality show and today’s often-bizarre reality TV has nothing on it. 

It is beautiful to see the constant stream of visitors coming to see this invalid.  On her seventy-fourth birthday she is surrounded by loved ones including Reverend Bilbrey, Reverend Robinson and Reverend Tinch – three preachers and let me assure you that there were no mega-churches in the vicinity employing a full preaching staff. 

Sweeter still is that this little home was so open and welcoming.  People must have enjoyed being there or they would not have come again and again.  People came to stay the night or the weekend; they brought what they could spare and shared whatever the Todds had.  While Lottie lay bedridden, her family came alongside her and continued to manage the garden, livestock and household making her final years no doubt as joyous as though this illness had never befallen her.

She also kept a scrapbook with cards, newspaper clippings, a few letters she received as well as small gifts.  There are several souvenir handkerchiefs from France and Belgium as well as a Japanese Yen no doubt sent by family and neighbors serving in World War II.

I suppose the primary reason I’ve never kept a journal was simply lack of anything to record.  Mrs. Lottie Todd might have thought she had nothing exciting going on in her little world, yet she has left a work that four generations later is still touching hearts and bringing smiles.  Do you think in sixty or seventy years our children and grandchildren might be interested to read about the things we do in our simple little lives? 

Like it or not, Things Change

WIlder, Tennessee
This beautiful picture of autumn colors is perfect for our subject since the boom town of Wilder has seen so many changes over the last century.

Photo courtesy of Donnie Douglas

For those of us who love history and historical things, change can seem anything but encouraging.  I am not a fan of change – in fact, I downright dislike it.  Yet in the same breath I will tell you that I love both Spring and Fall and both of these are seasons of change.  One of my favorite, historic places has recently undergone a great, and seemingly devastating change.

Key Town, which you have read about many times in my writings, has fallen to the logger’s saw.  It’s not the first time trees were harvested from this little patch of land, and no doubt it will again produce a harvest of hard woods.  And I do enjoy the products of logging, everything from Kleenex to photographs and for Pete’s sake, I’m a writer and I do want my books printed on actual paper.  Still, it’s hard to look at the land stripped bare in places, at the old roads obliterated by a skidder’s tracks and rutted by heavily loaded trucks without feeling a pang of heartbreak. 

I try to avoid places like that because I know it will just hurt my feelings to see it.  And then I listen to the rustle of drying leaves blowing in a gentle autumn breeze and the smile it brings to my face reminds me that all change is not bad.  In fact, even negative changes make way for something good.

I recently had the opportunity to revisit Key Town.  It isn’t as it was in my childhood – and in those years, it was not as it had been in my grandmother’s youth.  Thinking about the changes this place has seen turned my thoughts to change in general.

My current writing project is inspired by a woman who lived eighty-nine years, passing away in 1959.  She was born just four years after the end of The Civil War (her father was a veteran of that war) and she lived through both world wars (she saw her grandson march off to WWII) as well as the Korean Conflict.  Her life began by candlelight and ended with not only electric bulbs but radio, television and the harnessing of nuclear power.  Do you think this woman knew about change?

She would have known Key Town very well and I wonder how she would feel walking along the loggers’ roads.  I imagine she would mourn the loss of the homes where friends had lived and the memories that were created there.  She would think of the families and the hardships and the joys they experienced.  And probably, she would rejoice that the timber was harvested rather than wasted.  I believe she would embrace much of the change that has taken place not just in tiny Key Town, but across the whole Cumberland Plateau.

As I slowly walked my horse along the new paths in Key Town, I couldn’t help but reflect on the changes that must have taken place here over the years.  You will recall the story a few weeks ago about the Indian paintings at Bridge Rock.  Those first Americans walked across the mountain leaving only a few arrow heads and paintings to mark the way for those to come behind them.  Then, European settlers began to infiltrate Appalachia first with the long hunters then families hacking out tiny homesteads.  When the homes of Key Town were built – the homes that my grandparents remembered – the land would have already witnessed many changes.  Then, when the roadways passed the little community by and the last homes were abandoned, the forest began to reclaim it.  Trees grew, along with blackberry briars and weeds which made passage increasingly difficult.  By the time I was out of high school, a thicket of pines had so filled one of the little fields that I could no longer comfortably get my horse through them.  Now, in this latest phase of changes, the removal of so many trees allows easy movement through the whole area. 

My generation has seen a lot of progress as the computer industry has reached into and affected every aspect of our lives.  But those changes pale in comparison to what was seen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  They saw their lives radically changed, but in ways that we now take for granted to a degree that we would be hard pressed to live without them.  I know that lots of the innovations of the industrial revolution were initially scoffed at and rejected.  But inventors persevered, just as the loggers persevered through hot weather, mud and broken equipment to see the mature trees hauled out of Key Town.

Even as I continue to resist many changes – razing of historic buildings or submerging farms and cemeteries to ensure flood control of other lands – I realize how much I enjoy the roads that now run through what used to be historic neighborhoods and the power generated by hydro-electric plants.  In a similar fashion, the bright red of dogwood leaves and golden yellow on maples which I am enjoying today will quickly give way to barren limbs and the stark greys of winter.  But only by facing that bleak landscape do we catch a glimpse of glittering snowflakes, evergreens contrasting against a blanket of snow and finally crocuses peeking through brown leaves and melting ice.

This new look at progress and change cannot dull the pain of lost pieces of history.  Still I have my memories – and along with a number of other folks, I am striving to preserve those memories and stories and to share them with you.  It makes me feel that the most beautiful things we have from yesterday are the stories that we tell today.  I am so thankful for the family and neighbors who have told the old stories again and again until they are written in my heart.  It’s that wealth of tales which allows me to create the fictional characters in historical novels who will remind us of so many who went before, and it is my hope that those characters will reach out to readers for years to come and reveal to them the beauty of our home and our heritage on the mountain.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”  Romans 8:28

Was Grandma a Clotheshorse?

Let’s talk about fashion – historical-fashion.  I want to confess right up front that I’m a fine one to be blogging on fashion.  You are more likely to find me in faded jeans than a stylish dress - sneakers instead of shiny pumps, and frankly I do not understand why anyone would choose low-rise-skinny jeans or platform shoes.  However, as I develop characters for historical novels, I find that I really need to decide whether the farmer's wife is trailing skirts through the mud or if she donned a pair of baggy overalls.  Were those women who spent their days beside a spinning wheel or pulling the beater of a loom wearing hoop skirts?

 Fashion has long been advertised.  Women of the nineteenth century didn't have the dozens of glossy magazines that assault us in every grocery aisle, but they did have Godey’s Lady’s Book to inform them of the latest trends, how and when to wear the popular fashions.  The question I've been asking myself was just how much were our neighbors of yesteryear driven by fashion trends?

Today, anything goes.  I occasionally see pictures from the big fashion shows, but I've honestly never seen most of those styles on the street.  I suppose I would assume that we are more influenced by designers and the styles of celebrities today because we are much more exposed to them.  We see them captured by the paparazzi in every phase of their lives.  It wasn't many years ago that unless you happened upon them in Hollywood or New York City, the only face of an actor you ever saw was the one he presented to his public.   So, it's hard to imagine Clark Gable mowing the lawn in a stained t-shirt, or Vivian Leigh grocery shopping in sweats.  But if I write about a lady trying to make her living as an actress in the 1930’s then I need to decide how she spent her off-camera hours, and what she chose to wear in those times.

My time period is usually half a century before that, and fashion changed a great deal in that span of time - which leads me to my second confession of the day.  Try though I may, my image of history is colored by the classic movies that have portrayed those periods.  Hence I turn once again to Gone With The Wind... (Mammy in her full skirts giving Rhett a tiny peek at her red silk petticoat and Scarlett declaring she’ll wear an off-the-shoulder dress to the barbeque at Twelve Oaks despite the scandal Mammy is sure it will cause.)  The beautiful dresses that David Selznick dressed his actresses in represented a fashion trend that lasted only a few years. 

Hooped skirts measuring up to six feet and corsets cinching waists down to eighteen inches were the culminations of several decades of ever-widening skirts.  Initially the look was achieved with layers of petticoats.  The use of a hooped cage allowed the volume without the layers and weight. 

As I read and researched, my question really was how popular were the voluminous garments?  I was just sure that only the very fashion-conscious, higher society folk were wearing them – certainly no one who worked for a living or did their own cleaning would own one, it just wasn’t practical and we know that poor people are always practical, right?  Wrong.  These new crinolines were very economical, allowing all classes of women to afford them.  The invention of the sewing machine in 1851 and the development of commercial weaving through the nineteenth century further allowed less expensive clothing that more women could have access to.

There are no statistics that register how many women in each socio-economic classes bought crinoline cages, so I have to derive popularity from other factors.  One article noted that every week there was a newspaper notice about a fire starting when someone’s skirts overturned a candle.  Additionally, the mills and factories established policies that crinolines were not to be worn to work.  These two stories certainly indicate to me that truly all classes of women were enjoying the hooped skirts.  We should certainly note that for the lady of class, who wore several different dresses each day, the crinoline was not usually worn with her work dress.  This lady would wear a small crinoline with her day dress which she wore after her chores were completed, then larger hoops in the evening with her evening or ball gown.

Certainly the urban environments were more driven by fashion trends.  Rural folks changed their styles far less often and definitely dominated the group requiring serviceable clothing.  Moreover, factory-made cloth was still less available in the country where spinning and weaving were still being done in the home well into the 20th century in Appalachia.  However, periodicals were readily available even in rural America and while there were no glossy photographs with close-ups of details, the details of the fashions were described.  For women skilled with needle and thread, that is all that would be necessary for them to sew very fashionable clothing for their families.  These seamstresses would be able even to alter hand-me-downs or last year’s dress to tailor the previously-puffed sleeves, smooth the front of a full skirt and add a bustle or remove the lace collar that is no longer desired.

And now I am reminded why I have to continually research – the twenty-first century invariably affects my perception of history.  If I intend to paint a reasonably accurate word-picture of the ladies in my books, I have to start with the right image in mind.  So when I picture the hard working, often impoverished women of rural Appalachia in the mid-nineteenth century I know their clothing reflected a necessarily practical way of life but I must also remember that they took pride in their appearance and when they had the opportunity to go to church, a wedding or a party, their clothing would mirror the description presented in last month’s edition of Godey’s Lady’s Book, the letter from a second cousin who visited the big city or what was in the pattern books at the general store.