Larry Anderson - Families and Individuals
Notes
Edwin James HIATT
Taken from HH Book. Page 434.
(1864.) EDWIN JAMES HIATT (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 23-12mo-1865, near Martinsville, Clinton Co., Ohio; living l950, in Wilmington; m. (lst).17-6mo-1886, to HARRIETT CHARITY MILLS, d/o Levi and Ruth (Whinery). (McMillan). Mils; b. c1868; d. 9-6mo-l938; m. (2nd). 6-3mo-l940, to VERNA WHINERY.
CH: (By first wife ). (3764.) Burritt Mills; (3765.) Harold Clarkson.
Newberry Mo. Mtg., Clinton Co., Ohio:
21-3mo-1881 - Eddie Hiatt received by request.
18-10mo-1886- Edwin J. Hiatt granted a certificate to Wilmington Mo. Mtg., O.
Wilmington Mo. Mtg., Clinton Co., Ohio:
11-12mo-1886 - Edwin J. Hiatt received on certificate from Newberry Mo. Mtg., Ohio, dated 4-12mo-1886.
Miami Mo. Mtg., Warren Co., Ohio:
21-l0mo-1885 - Edwin Hiatt released by request. (Hicksite). (R57).
“Edwin James Hiatt - Vice-President and Director of The Clinton County National Bank and Trust Co., was born December 23, 1865, near Martinsville, Ohio, the son of Clarkson and Jane (Hollingsworth). Hiatt. He was educated in the Cottage Grove Country School (near Martinsville, Ohio). 1870-79, Martinsville High School (1879-80)., and Wilmington College (1883-84)., from which he received the honorary degree of LL.D. in l924, for work in finance. On June l7, 1886, he married Harriet Charity Mills, who died June 9, l938. They had two sons: Burrit Mills, and Harold Clarkson. On March 6, l940, he married Verna Whinery. Mr. Hiatt began his career in 188l as a Country School Teacher, serving until 1885. He was Deputy Clerk of the Common Pleas Court, Clinton County, Ohio, from July 4, 1885, to December 31, 1889. He has been identified with The Clinton County National Bank and Trust Co. since January 2, 1890, when he started as individual bookkeeper. He was made a Teller in 189l, Acting Cashier in 1898, and Cashier in 1899. He was Director and Cashier from 1899 to l925, and was elected to his present position of Vice-President on May l, l925. He is also associated with The Irwin Auger Bit Co., of which he became Treasurer on November 23, l9l6. He has been Treasurer, Vice-President and Director since January, l934. He is one of the organizers of the Farguhar Furnace Co., and was appointed Director and Treasurer on April 23, l908, serving until l935. He has been Vice-President since January, l935. He was Director and Treasurer of The Union Loan and Savings Co., Wilmington, Ohio, from 1893 to l940. He served as Treasurer of the Wilmington Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). from August, 1892, to l918. His Clubs are the Snow Hill Country and Wilmington Masonic. He is especially interested in the activities of Wilmington College, of which he was a Trustee from l902 and Treasurer from l9l4 to April 4, l942; he is now an honorary member of the Board of Trustees. Residence: 527 N. South St. Office: Wilmington, Ohio,” (From a reprint from Business Executives of America (R84).
Edwin J. Hiatt's Writings
January 7th, 1910
Miss Pearl Peelle Bryn Mawr, Pa.
My Dear Pearl:
I have had descriptions of the New York Pilgrimage with shadings that run from the pathos of Ellis Island to the airy heights of the World Building and beyond, all of which are of deep interest to me, especially the "beyond".
When I heard of some of the "carryings-on" I forgot to express myself or even to think, until I caught my breath a few days after, at the audacity of our eldest. Along with the great pleasure that I feel and pride in his choice is a deep feeling of the greatness that lies before both of you and the rich material that the present affords for forming a useful and happy life together. It affords me much happiness.
With many best wishes I remain
Very sincerely
E. J. Hiatt
January 7, 1910
Mr. Burritt M. Hiatt Cambridge, Mass.
My Dear Burritt:
The New York trip certainly was not an uninteresting one to you if reports come to me straight. I am -writing Pearl expressing my pride in your selection and hereby and now extend to you my heartiest approval of "them there doins'. I think she is a jewel and needs but the contemplated setting to show her at her best.
I suppose I should cover my hair with ashes, stretch the corners of my mouth down, hiss 'you young rascal" and pound the floor with my heavy stick as I rush about, but we will omit that now. Let the future be governed by your best judgement and I hope the way will open for the consumation of your plans.
With love,
Pop
My Dear Friend:
Your request to write you all about the Grand Canyon is received by me with a little suspicion of merriment on your part in laying s burden of such immense proportions upon my shoulders. I shall try, but I have no more idea of how I am going to describe it than you have. So here goes just for a talk and a common Country-Jake's impression of the Grand Canyon.
They tell me that no one has ever had the audacity to try to describe it and still try to retain the respect of their fellow men. They tell me that great artists with a big expanse of canvas have set them down to do it or die. Discretion comes after a few strokes of their sketching pencil and they have folded up the broad expanse of canvas and retreated. I have seen the pictures
of the Grand Canyon which the Santa Fe Railroad displays on immense billboards. Before I saw the Canyon they impressed me very much. Since I have seen the Canyon, I stand and laugh at them. They are not only laughable caricatures, but pitiful efforts.
My good wife joined me at Williams. Friday morning, June 181 at 5:40 a.m. we boarded the train for the Canyon, sixty-five miles away. We reached there at 8:15 and lost no time upon our arrival in ascending the three or four flights of steps which land us at the El Tovar Hotel and at the brink of the wonder of the natural world.
Immediately in front of the hotel, extending all told probably an eighth of a mile there is a railing and much of the way a board walk just back of the railing. As we walked down the board walk, although the railing prevented any dizzy ones from falling, Mrs. Hiatt and I fell immediately into the habit of grabbing at each other every time we took a look. We had not seen the guides and cowboys sitting on the railing with their backs to the Canyon swapping stories while they half-dozed, suspended over a sheer drop of 3,000 feet. We took a three-seated wagon ride along the brink or rim to Hopi Point where there is a wonderful view for quite a long distance to both the east and the west. While pushing out to this point to get a better view of the scene, the grabbing business became more intense. We were not yet used to the great height and had not shaken off that creepy feeling that you have felt when looking from a great height.
After returning to the hotel from Hopi Point we put in two days looking. It takes time to get your "Canyon eyes". My very first impression of the Canyon was, What a grand pucker! The different stratas of rock of different colors composing the great cathedrals, battles ships, mosques and plateaus run in tilted directions like the figures in cut glass. To get away from this cut glass effect I must give you some dimensions:
Length of Canyon, 217 miles; average width, 11 miles; width opposite hotel, 13 miles; hotel to river (perpendicular), 1 mile; hotel to river on Bright Angel Trail, 7 miles.
Did I go down the trail to the river? I did, thanks to "Mollie" the celebrated mule that Mr. Irvin Cobb once rode and told about in the Saturday Evening Post. Mollie had some idiosyncrasies. She had a great sense of humor. I don't know the usual length of a mule, ears included, but suppose Mollie was about nine feet long. The question I am asking myself is how could she walk out to the edge of a precipice with ears, neck and shoulders extended over the yawning abyss for eight feet when she was really only nine feet long. I can't help but think a mule laughs at night. Nothing could look as solemn as Mollie did all day and not laugh some time. She could easily have had a chuckle at my expense in going down the Devil's Cork Screw. She went one step too far on a turn and her right foot went into the loose material at the brink of a drop of probably 3,000 feet. The stone lay on the edge and was pushed off as she withdrew her foot and recovered her equilibrium. It was not, I suppose, perilous as a mule is quick to recover itself from a mistake, but it made the hairs rise on my head. While Mollie bore me with grace and dignity she also forbore her mirth at my lack of absolute faith in a mule carrying 220 pounds and still remaining true to her natural instincts of self-preservation.
No artist ever has or ever will truly picture the Grand Canyon. It cannot be described. It cannot be painted. My allusion to cut glass to represent the effect upon the eye at first glance is much like showing you a salt shaker to give an idea of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The eye cannot even comprehend until you have spent days getting your vision enlarged. It is to His people the open, beneficent and peaceful countenance of God, and the unbelieving stand face to face-
with the Almighty Who hath already judged them.
The Speech on the Occasion of the Celebration of His Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary
Behold what a great matter a little fire kindleth!
The story of this whole business begins with the first days I spent at
Wilmington College. It was then I met a certain young lady who to me appeared
to be very distant and cold like marble,
Having heard that "Every block of marble held a Venus, I sensed
This block of marble held a Venus
with nothing but chipped stone: between us."
It was only natural that I began chipping and chiseling which continues for
some two or three years. In my diary of that time I find this:
"I looked with a rapt gaze of wild delight
For ne'er saw I so fair a sight."
Times that had been going from good to better continued to open up and
extend our horizens, As the duties of parenthood engaged us, the years sped
along, and life unfolded, It has been expressed that
"Joy's recollection is no longer joy
But sorrow's memory is sorrow still."
We learned that if a person had one hour of joy and then one hour of sorrow,
it did not equalize. Joy trips past with fleeting feet that leave no imprint.
The deep wounds that sorrow make may heal, but the scar remains forever.
"Let not our memory run like a tomb-searcher lifting each shroud that time
has cast o'er buried hope", but let us "be up and doing with a heart for the
fate".
Now for the poem which is far less than a page. The author is Pope. I
think it gives the solution of why the matrimonial machinery ran so smoothly
for Milton and Laurenna, Joe and Bertha, Frank and Francis and thus runs for
Matt and Veda, Lee and Lena, Howard and Georgianna, Burritt and Pearl and all of
us. It is a volume in a single line. Here it is:
"Belinda smiled and the world was gay."
Her name just happened to be Belinda instead of Harriet, Katherine, Lena,
Veda, Georgianna, ?earl and Bertha or some other name.
"The. Lord of creation men we call
And they think they rule the whole
But they're much mistaken after all
For they're under woman's control."
When the good wife smiles then all the world is gay. So endeth this; our
fiftieth wedding day.
Levi MILLS
when Albert Baily died Father and I had a talk about funerals. He told me exactly how he wanted his to be. He wanted no weeping and wailing, no whispering around, no black mourning clothes.
Levi Mills, son of Jonathan and Charity Cook Mills, was born in Warren County, Ohio, March 14, 1844. He lived on his father's farm on Caesar's Creek until he was twenty years of age. In 1864 he, with his young bride, Ruth Whinery McMillan, came to Wilmington, Ohio to establish a home. He began the study of law, attending lectures at the Cincinnati Law School. In 1868 he was admitted to the bar. When he reached the age of twenty-one he became a Minister of the Society of Friends. For many years he preached in the Friends Church in Wilmington and acted as its pastor without financial remuneration, supporting himself and his family by his law practice, in reality doing the work of two men. He later gave up the law to devote himself entirely to church work, being minister of the Friends Meeting in Oskaloosa, Iowa and in Whittier, California. In the fall of 1905 he returned to Clinton County to spend the rest of his days with his children, his grandchildren and his life-long friends. After this he held no regular pastorate, but responded to the many requests for his services, giving lovingly of his tine and strength to the work of the Church. He was elected to the office of Judge of the Probate Court of Clinton. County and held that position at the time of his death, February 7, 1917.
These are the: salient facts in the life of Levi Mills, but the relation of them does not give an adequate picture of this man whose personality had so many facets. In appearance he was tall and thin, with something of the Abraham Lincoln type of physique. His head was rather small for his height and his hair in his younger days was dark and wavy. His eyes were very blue and were set deep under projecting brows. His mouth was large and flexible. His countenance was intelligent and kindly. His voice was clear and ringing, with great carrying power. When he was moved by deep emotion it had a rhythmic rise and fall like that of music. His laugh was irresistible, clear and unafraid, a big hearty laugh that warmed the soul.
He had great native ability. His formal education was meager--a few years of country school and a few months of college. He deeply regretted the lack of an advanced education and perhaps for this very reason was a most ardent supporter of educational institutions. He took pride in the fact that, in the three places where he did most of his preaching, Quaker colleges were located. His efforts in behalf of Wilmington, Penn and Whittier Colleges were unfailing. In his mind education and religion were not at variance, but were entirely harmonious.
Notwithstanding his somewhat limited educational training, he was remarkable as a public speaker. In his law practice it was conceded by his fellows that no lawyer in the county round about had so great an influence with a jury. In his political speeches, of which he made many, he could arouse his audiences to highest enthusiasm. He told stories well and has a wealth of them at his command, almost all of them being happenings taken from his own experiences, for he had a fine sense of humor and could see the amusing elements of any situation. In speaking, his transitions from humor to pathos were frequent and accomplished with unconscious skill. He had a great fund of common sense, but with it an
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artistic imagination. This rare combination of attributes gave his utterances a quality of vivid wholesomeness that was most unusual and most engaging.
As a man he was very human. He had great sympathy. His love was extended not only to his own kindred, but reached out to the poor, the lonely. and the down-trodden. The people of the colored race adored him. Children held up their arms to him. In his family he was all that a husband and father should be. Ruth, his wife, was his constant companion, most discriminating friend and his greatest sorrow, indescribably pathetic, when in her later years, her once brilliant mind became clouded. Solicitudes for her comfort and welfare was then his abiding thought. He was the right kind of father to his children, always believing the best of them and always inspiring in then desires for right living. He found no sacrifice too great to make if it would contribute to their well-being. He felt himself amply repaid by their love and devotion.
His ministry! He never doubted that he belonged to God. When he prayed it was as if he held the hand of his Heavenly Father. The passion that swept his soul at the time of his conversion never left him. He felt that he was sent to preach Christ and Him Crucified. The power of his ministry was not altogether in what he said. Through some divine magic one became aware that he had seen a country that never was on land or sea, a country which he intensely desired, but to which he knew no human paths directly led. It seemed that at these rare moments when these flashes of vision came to him, transfiguring life, his mind was set free from considering what was the best thing to say. He was aware that only one thing was worth saying and that it had ceased to be hard to say. There was no counting of gain or loss, but a compelling call to speak the vision that flamed up inside of him. After the glory had faded he never doubted its authenticity. The light had gone out and again he was picking his way through the twilight of physical exhaustion that followed the effort. But he knew that he had been for an instant ennobled. How little we know of the steps of his development of this Quality! As a farm lad some new world must have opened before him. He must have been entranced by an experience that was to hold him forever in its spell.
The last day of his earthly life was a full day, spent at worthwhile tasks. After a night of peaceful sleep, death came quietly to him with the sunrise. His life was a sermon on immortality. Death could not destroy a soul so vital and so glowing.
Ruth Whinery MCMILLAN
A note in the charts by Belle Johnson of Wyoming has this Ruth, maybe out of line to Burritt McMillan, as dying April 28, 1919.
Mary MILLS
Mary Mills Writings
An Incidental Education
On the evening before I started to school an early September evening in 1879, my mother sat at the side of my bed reading me to sleep. I interrupted her to ask if I might go to school early the next morning.
"No, she answered. "Thee is not to leave our yard until the first bell rings."
I did not beg her to change her mind. Mother was a woman of few words. To supplement her instructions she used her eyes which could be tender and. serene, but could be lamps of warning, danger signals of displeasure.
The next morning, long before the first bell rang, I stood at the front gate with one foot in our yard and the other on the pavement of Locust Street. I had a feeling that my horizon was on the morn of expanding. My world already included two stores, my father's office and the Meeting House. Now it would also include the public school where one carried a slate and wrote with the right hand.
Room I
At the first recess a boy in my room ran up to me and said he was going to kiss me. I had never before been brought face to face with such a situation. Why had I been singled out from the other girls? I never thought I was what you might call pretty, but 'I must have been sort of cute. My reaction was to run and that was one of my first mistakes. Why, oh why, didn't I say -- "Come right ahead!"
He chased me through the girls' basement, then through the boy's basement, then out into the open of the immense playground. I sped down the long cinder path. But, alas, he was a stout-hearted runner. He followed me. He caught me and completed his romantic threat.
The incident gave me a too sanguine expectation concerning men, for alas, no man has since run so determined a race for my caresses, even if I make clear that today, I would put up only a token resistance.
Room II
On my first day in the second grade my teacher thought that the clock in the room was out of order so she sent me out into the hall to consult the master clock. I had never learned to tell time, but I could not confess this for fear the students would laugh at me. I went out in the hall hoping that someone would come along to help me out. No one's So I commenced to count on my hands the spaces on the clock. It came to ten and one over, so I went into the room and told the teacher that it was eleven o'clock. The teacher said, "But it can't be!" I said, "But it is!" The teacher dismissed us. Outside on the walk the pupils congratulated me on my Quick thinking which had liberated them a half hour early.
Room VI
The reputation of a pupil is like his shadow for it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him. Sometimes it is longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.
When I left number five to go to the next room I stepped down the hall talking to schoolmates about the new teacher. I had stuck my report card in the band of my sailor hat and forgotten it was there. Our teacher was standing in the door to size up the incoming class. When she saw me she jerked me out of line. "Oh here you are," she shouted, shaking me vigorously. "I've heard about you. you can't pull any of your monkyshines on me."
Consequently, I gave up any idea of gaining the favor of my teacher and turned instead to cultivating the approval of my schoolmates. So far as the teacher was concerned, I tried to show her that her clearly expressed estimate of me was entirely correct. I said to myself, "She's dug her own grave!"
The weather in the spring was unusually warm. A number of girls in my class started the fad of coming to school bare-footed and wearing calico sunbonnets. My mother did not like the idea and said, "Thee has shoes and thee might as well wear them. Thee has a hat and thee might as well wear it."
I begged hard for several days. At last, to my surprise, she gave up. When, next day, I ran to school rejoicing in my bare feet aid my sun bonnet, I found my school mates were arrayed in their best Sunday clothes, complete with shoes and hat. It seems that a former school superintendent had died and had been brought here to be buried in Sugar Grove. The school board had decided it would be a fitting courtesy for the pupils to go in a body to the church to view him in his coffin. By some unlucky chance I had not heard any announcement of the plan. We all marched to the church and moved slowly down the endless aisle. To hide my bare feet I scrouged down so that my short dress almost touched the floor and pulled my sun bonnet forward toward my chin. Poor little dwarfess! When I reached the coffin 1 was not tall enough to see over the side, but I did not abandon my crouch. After this fruitless trip down the aisle I turned and waddled back up the passage again keeping the same posture.
When I told Mother the woeful story of my awful humiliation, she was nice about it. "I think Mary, she said kindly, "that if thee would stop trying so hard to be like thy playmates and work at being thyself, thee would get along better."
As for father he laughed and said with a twinkle in his eyes, "I bet thee got more attention just creeping along that the other girls got standing straight. Always remember that thee is thyself and pretty worthwhile at that."
Room VII
By this time I had become clothes conscious and was especially critical of my teacher's dress. It was a bilious green checked number which she wore every day with no variation. We learned later that her husband stayed home and washed the dishes. She was the sole financial supporter of the family.
Whether or not it was on account of some secret sorrow or some great frustration, she felt a mighty religious concern for all souls that she judged to be in danger of everlasting punishment. When our music teacher, a man whom the pupils adored, came into the room our teacher uttered urgent petitions for his salvation which he heard with patience and good humor.
One evening she kept five of us girls after school and asked us to promise that we would never marry. Three girls gave her their word. Another said she had not, as yet, made up her mind. I told her that I would marry if I got a suitable chance. That eliminated me from the next step of her appeal. She wanted the three who had promised to remain single to become missionaries. She favored Africa as the best field for service.
The unreality of the situation may be judged by the fact that all five of us broke our promises. The girl who had not made up her mind soon eloped. The three who promised all had elaborate church weddings. I, who was set on marrying at my first chance, sad to relate, broke my promise too.
Room VIII
This year we had a man teacher whose name was Humble. He was a nervous, jumpy little man and in the school room he always carried a punishing ruler. One odd thing about his behavior was that when he reached the emotional stage when the urge to punish was on him, he did riot take time 'Lo reach the offender, but whacked down on the pupil who was nearest him. In contrast with his speed with the ruler, he was slow on the trigger with other corrections. On every morning program was the singing of a hymn. There were four of us with carrying voices who at the same time that our classmates were singing the hymn would sing some song of our choice. The resulting pandemonium mould go unchallenged.
One day in the intermission between two sections of an arithmetic examination thought it would. be fun to play charades. I decided to act out the word maniac. In my frenzy I snatched the examination papers that were not yet inspected and tore them to shreds. when our teacher asked me why I performed this act of vandalism, I told him that I had gone so far out of my mind in my portrayal of the word "maniac" that I couldn't control my actions. The real truth was that this was a slip-up quiz and we girls had not worn our aprons. We always got better grades when wore our aprons under which we could smuggle our text books. You will be glad to learn that the kind teacher understood and gave my slight indiscretion.
In this last grade in school our most effective instruction came from a man who was not supposed to teach us at all. He was our janitor. Every evening he washed the blackboard and would write on it a memory gem. My favorite gem was
"Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it each day until it becomes so strong we can not break it."' - Horace Mann.
Strange to relate we had a teacher who was a crackbrain and a janitor who was not only sane, but very wise.
Campaign Songs of 1884
In my eleventh year, 1884, Grover Cleveland was running against James G. Blaine for President of the United States. In those days the politics of your family had a bearing on your social standing in the community. I felt my Republican background admitted me to the elite group of Wilmingtonians. The political division even went to the extent of determining your playmates. This was especially true while you were still students in the lower grades. When I grew older I was astonished to learn that the little Democratic girls felt sorry for the snooty Republican lassies.
In this campaign of 1884, four Republican girls of my age formed a quartette to sing at the political gatherings of the community. We usually opened our program with this illuminating number:
"There was a man named Grover
Who was very fat all over,
And his neck was twenty inches, people say.
His neck was twenty inches, twenty inches, twenty inches.
And he even finished on Decoration day!"
This last line, which we sang with great scorn, was an effective argument against him at gatherings of the Grand Army of the Republic.
I was anxious to sing anything that would incite the listeners to vigorous applause. Some young Cleveland partisans in the gallery began to yell for their candidate. Plainly the situation called for a song that would put a stop to the opposition in the gallery. We had our ammunition ready:
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"Ma, ma, where's my pa?
Oh ma, ma, where's my pa?
He's heading for the White House.
haw, haw, haw."
We sang the first two lines in a piping childish treble and the last two in a deep, taunting shocked bass. This evidently was not a suitable theme for young girls to be singing about, but it silenced the gallery and therefore delighted the elders in our audience. This ribald stanza probably made votes for Cleveland because his followers made much of his courage in admitting his youthful indiscretion.
The political atmosphere of 1884 was an emotional orgy of trivialities which distracted attention from the real issues. How paltry and even trashy were the issues we emphasized in our songs and speeches. As a young girl I never dreamed that in my lifetime the fate of us as individuals would be inseparable from that of the peoples of Europe or that the destiny of our children would be involved in the events taking place in Asia. Both those who were victorious in 1884 and those who were mastered are forgotten and the issues over which they contested are not remembered. All that remains are some verses in the minds of girls who were too young to understand the words they sang.
February 6, 1917. Wednesday morning Father seemed to be in good health and good spirits although he said he was going to have an exceptionally full day. At noon he seemed to me to be somewhat depressed, so, although I was in a hurry, I waited to walk to town with him. He told me that since his first term as Probate Judge would expire Monday, he was trying to arrange with the Common Pleas Judge, Frank Clevenger, to take over the Juvenile Court work. He was very doubtful about Mr. Clevenger's consenting.
In the afternoon after my work at the college was over, I went to Father's office to see if he was in better spirits. He told me he had talked with Judge Clevenger and felt somewhat more hopeful. In the evening when he came home for supper he seemed much more cheerful. He told me that in case Mr. Clevenger would not consent to take the extra work he would continue with it and would be happy either way.
After Father had gone to bed I went to his room to tuck an extra blanket about him and I kissed him good night for the second time. He said he was feeling all right and seemed peaceful in his mind. He was pleased that I had brought him the blanket and smiled as he said, "Thee is so good to me." It was a very fatherly smile and beautiful:
Thursday morning I slept later than usual and did not waken until the clock struck six. I was immediately startled at the quiet in the house, since Father is always up and stirring a little after five. I sprang out of bed and. ran upstairs thinking I should find him ill, but the minute I saw him I knew he was dead, He was still warm. his eyes were closed and he was curled up into a comfy little ball the way he always slept. his pillow was unrumpled and the bedclothes perfectly smooth. The kindest look was on his face, so reassuring, that I was not afraid.
I ran down to the telephone and called Edwin Hiatt. Then I called Irene, then Dr. Wire. When I couldn't get him, Dr. Peelle. the doctor said there was absolutely nothing to be done, that Father never knew when he died.
In a half hour the house was full of people. How they found out about it I don't know. From that time on until the funeral on Saturday the house was filled
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all the time with everybody---people that I knew and people that I didn't know. Many poor people and many colored folks were among them. I saw and talked with them all. I knew Father would want me to welcome them all. During the three days we all ate at Edwin's and had many friends with us at mealtimes. Everyone was infinitely kind.
When Albert Baily died Father and I had a talk about funerals. He told me exactly how he wanted his to be. He wanted no weeping and wailing, no whispering around, no black mourning clothes.
Levi Mills, son of Jonathan and Charity Cook Mills, was born in Warren County, Ohio, March 14, 1844. He lived on his father's farm on Caesar's Creek until he was twenty years of age. In 1864 he, with his young bride, Ruth Whinery McMillan, came to Wilmington, Ohio to establish a home. He began the study of law, attending lectures at the Cincinnati Law School. In 1868 he was admitted to the bar. When he reached the age of twenty-one he became a Minister of the Society of Friends. For many years he preached in the Friends Church in Wilmington and acted as its pastor without financial remuneration, supporting himself and his family by his law practice, in reality doing the work of two men. He later gave up the law to devote himself entirely to church work, being minister of the Friends Meeting in Oskaloosa, Iowa and in Whittier, California. In the fall of 1905 he returned to Clinton County to spend the rest of his days with his children, his grandchildren and his life-long friends. After this he held no regular pastorate, but responded to the many requests for his services, giving lovingly of his tine and strength to the work of the Church. He was elected to the office of Judge of the Probate Court of Clinton. County and held that position at the time of his death, February 7, 1917.
These are the: salient facts in the life of Levi Mills, but the relation of them does not give an adequate picture of this man whose personality had so many facets. In appearance he was tall and thin, with something of the Abraham Lincoln type of physique. His head was rather small for his height and his hair in his younger days was dark and wavy. His eyes were very blue and were set deep under projecting brows. His mouth was large and flexible. His countenance was intelligent and kindly. His voice was clear and ringing, with great carrying power. When he was moved by deep emotion it had a rhythmic rise and fall like that of music. His laugh was irresistible, clear and unafraid, a big hearty laugh that warmed the soul.
He had great native ability. His formal education was meager--a few years of country school and a few months of college. He deeply regretted the lack of an advanced education and perhaps for this very reason was a most ardent supporter of educational institutions. He took pride in the fact that, in the three places where he did most of his preaching, Quaker colleges were located. His efforts in behalf of Wilmington, Penn and Whittier Colleges were unfailing. In his mind education and religion were not at variance, but were entirely harmonious.
Notwithstanding his somewhat limited educational training, he was remarkable as a public speaker. In his law practice it was conceded by his fellows that no lawyer in the county round about had so great an influence with a jury. In his political speeches, of which he made many, he could arouse his audiences to highest enthusiasm. He told stories well and has a wealth of them at his command, almost all of them being happenings taken from his own experiences, for he had a fine sense of humor and could see the amusing elements of any situation. In speaking, his transitions from humor to pathos were frequent and accomplished with unconscious skill. He had a great fund of common sense, but with it an artistic imagination. This rare combination of attributes gave his utterances a quality of vivid wholesomeness that was most unusual and most engaging.
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As a man he was very human. He had great sympathy. His love was extended not only to his own kindred, but reached out to the poor, the lonely. and the down-trodden. The people of the colored race adored him. Children held up their arms to him. In his family he was all that a husband and father should be. Ruth, his wife, was his constant companion, most discriminating friend and his greatest sorrow, indescribably pathetic, when in her later years, her once brilliant mind became clouded. Solicitudes for her comfort and welfare was then his abiding thought. He was the right kind of father to his children, always believing the best of them and always inspiring in then desires for right living. He found no sacrifice too great to make if it would contribute to their well-being. He felt himself amply repaid by their love and devotion.
His ministry! He never doubted that he belonged to God. When he prayed it was as if he held the hand of his Heavenly Father. The passion that swept his soul at the time of his conversion never left him. He felt that he was sent to preach Christ and Him Crucified. The power of his ministry was not altogether in what he said. Through some divine magic one became aware that he had seen a country that never was on land or sea, a country which he intensely desired, but to which he knew no human paths directly led. It seemed that at these rare moments when these flashes of vision came to him, transfiguring life, his mind was set free from considering what was the best thing to say. He was aware that only one thing was worth saying and that it had ceased to be hard to say. There was no counting of gain or loss, but a compelling call to speak the vision that flamed up inside of him. After the glory had faded he never doubted its authenticity. The light had gone out and again he was picking his way through the twilight of physical exhaustion that followed the effort. But he knew that he had been for an instant ennobled. How little we know of the steps of his development of this Quality! As a farm lad some new world must have opened before him. He must have been entranced by an experience that was to hold him forever in its spell.
The last day of his earthly life was a full day, spent at worthwhile tasks. After a night of peaceful sleep, death came quietly to him with the sunrise. His life was a sermon on immortality. Death could not destroy a soul so vital and so glowing.
'April 28, 1919. Well, it is all over --- Mother is dead! It is such a pitiful story. The awful bed-sores increased in number and dreadfulness. The family grew almost afraid for me to bathe Mother and dress the sores, but I did to the very end. Her appetite seemed to be growing less and she slept more, especially toward the last. Her hands were so soft and weak and tired and would cling to me so helplessly.
On Thursday evening she fell into a kind of stupor. If she had been in her right mind one would have said that she became unconscious. The doctor said on Friday that he felt she could not live long. On Sunday he felt confident she could not live through the day for after Friday evening she ate nothing and it was difficult for her to drink. On Monday her breathing was labored, but she did not awaken. All Tuesday morning I lay by her side, listening to her to see if life had left her. About ten minutes after two she began to breath faster and fainter. At 2:15 she was dead. We were all about her and I was kneeling by her side, holding her hand. Her last moments were very calm and peaceful.
Hattie, Irene and I prepared her body for burial. I washed her myself as I have done for months and dressed her poor thin sore body for the last time. She wore a black silk dress that always looked lovely on her. We put beautiful lace at the neck and sleeves. I made some pink satin rose buds that I tucked away beneath the lace to give the bit of color that Mother wore best. Her hair was soft and white and silky. She looked, after a while, much younger and so dignified, and aristocratic.
We decided to have the funeral on Thursday morning at ten o'clock at the house. We put Mother in the library by the south window with flowers banked all about her. The relatives sat in there with her. I was at the foot of the coffin. There were a great many of her old friends. Nancy Leonard read a Scripture passage. Jennie Carey prayed. Clement Brann sang. Mr. Purdy's sermon was very personal and very touching. The service was beautiful. Mother's grave was lined with evergreens.
The first thing I did when I got home from the cemetery was to walk right up to mother's room to see if she was all right. That seems impossible, but it is true. For so long my first act on entering the house has been to go to her room. I went involuntarily. Since then, many times 1 have found myself planning for her and arranging for her comfort. I just can't realize she is dead.
I feel that it would be wicked to grieve over Mother, but I am very lonesome without her. She has been to me not only mother, but also child, for she depended on me for everything. My hands feel empty. I had thought that I would be afraid for her to die. I feared she would not know the way to Heaven alone, but the minute she was dead I knew that she was with Father and I was comforted.
I am asking Harriett (Irene's daughter) and Richard to take charge of the distribution of my possessions. I have been distraught in the struggle to select for each one, the suitable things. The choices I have made do not indicate
degrees of affection. Trade with each other if you like.
It is hard for me to leave Easy Tree Lodge! A heavenly mansion could not be more to my liking. Here I have been comfortable and serene. No other old woman has had the kind attention that 1 have received. Hattie used to say that when she got to Heaven she wanted to make a rift in the clouds so she could look down aril; see what we were all doing. I shall join her at her observation post. No future, however engrossing, can check my interest in each of you---descendents and in-laws of Levi and Ruth Mills. May God love you all!
Attention: Harriett and Richard. The articles of jewelry not mentioned in "my will" please distribute as you think most proper. If I have failed to mention someone through an oversight, please make it right in some way. I certainly have worked over these bequests. In payment for your distribution work I give each of you one of the little low McMillan chairs and also my thanks.
Additional Notes. Special love to all the men left giftless --- Clem, John, Bud, Howard, Carl, Malcom. You have all been very dear to me. Thanks for everything. I cannot enumerate your kindnesses. When I estimate what I have to give I find very few things suitable for men. Don't think I don't love you too. Men have always been my specialty.
Please sell my diamond ring at its market value and use the proceeds in buying books for Wilmington College Library. Ask Gerald to select the books for me, using his own judgment,
All else of mien not heretofore named and not wanted by the family, please sell and use the proceeds to help pay for a very simple funeral---and I do mean simple.
I do hate to leave you all. You have given me the great gift of your generous care. And so ---to bed! Good night.
Mary
123.
Why I Exaggerate
I know that exaggeration is a truth that has lost its composure. I know that truth is communicated better by slow contagion than by dressing it up, and yet I A impatient for attention. Too few people, it seems to me, penetrate our humdrum outline and recognize the droll situations of our commonplace lives unless we glamorized the incidents.
As a young girl in a group where people were talking I was impatient until I in on it. I tried to call attention to myself by looking animated and sort of 1 the wing, as it were. This attitude was influenced, I think by the group of Exceptional girls with whom I started to school, for several of them were also
a quenchable conversationalists. I remember one youthful party where finally there as a slight pause and I gleefully began "My idea is," but no one listened. At the next pause I remarked "I always say," again I was drowned out. Someone told a funny story and when the laughter was beginning to die down, I came up with "I often think," It looking around the room I could meet no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating. I discovered that conversation is the one thing in the world in which all man beings are competitors. A little later there was an unexpected pause in the abble, and I jumped into the gap without the slightest idea of what I was going to
Thus I got the habit of speaking before I was aiming at a target. Like a small copy with a B-B gun I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger for the pleasure of hearing the words go off.
I learned early that in every group there are listeners who automatically turn their heads toward the speaker who gets going first. "Beat the others to it," became r motto, and I sat fidgeting on the edge of my chair eager to get under way at the Last possible moment. My initial topic might be the weather. If that failed to gain attention I waited until my rival came up for air. Then I plunged in with some mildly averting question such as "Have any of you seen a boa constrictor this morning?"
Thus alas, did the habit of exaggeration fasten upon me because of my desire for all leadership!
There was another type of competition in our group that corrupted my sense of let. We tried to cap each other's claims. For instance there would be a squabble out who had the best watchdog or whose family horse could make the best time. I could make my assertions which would be shouted down by the mob. At this point in the contest my sisters, near at hand would prod me on to make still more extravagant assertions. Thus I was led to attribute to our fat family nag,
Lucy, incredible speed -- racing from Farquhar's grocery to Dover Springs in almost flat.
Not only my sisters but some of my loyal friends encouraged my departure from actualities. Among them was Fan, whose advice was, "Don't let a conversation lag for want of facts." In time I formed the woeful habit of "gilding the lily." My motto is "fling on any faggot rather than let the fire die out" so I flung, and I flung, id I flung,
Later, when I was about twelve years old I was in attendance at Quaker Quarterly setting and became much interested in the business discussions. In the course of the deliberations there was a proposal against which father made a vigorous protest. I immediately rose and spoke in favor of it. After the session a friend said to me in disapproving tones "You'll catch it when you get home." But when Pa saw me he was ailing. "I was very proud of thee today, Mary; thee has a right to thy opinion and want thee always to feel free to express it." That was father for you:
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Page 2 -- Why I Exaggerate!
As for me, his approval made me feel that some of my impulsive patter might have some sense in it after all. Nearly everyone is interesting if one can only have insight to discover what he really thinks and feels. My friend Eva, was interested in people and their secret thoughts to the extent that she had respect for the opinions that she did not share. She was willing to gnaw on an unpromising bone for friendship's sake. Many persons after talking with her, felt that they have expressed themselves better than they had ever been able to do before. She demonstrated that there can be a piquancy in the deference between two people whose minds are of opposite types.
The unfettered type of conversation popular in my youth was influenced by the spirit of the times which was an age of confidence and security with tolerance for leisurely anecdotes and tall tales. To converse today means quick work. Compared with that of yesterday it is like taking a squirrel on your lap after holding a purring kitten! People then liked their facts filtered through personalities. They had just lived through the pioneer period when they had been isolated on lonesome farms. People in those days hitched up and drove to town ostensibly to buy a lamp wick or a jug of-vinegar. But in reality their motive was to savor the quality of personal communion and to enjoy the flavor of self-expression. They talked because it was fun to talk, and. because it linked the participants together and made them realize that they belonged to a community. On Sunday when two or more families met together they shared in a celebration of being united in a comfortable fellowship. I remember one occasion when the Barretts visited Wilmington after a long absence. They drove up to the house-we were all lined up on the porch to welcome them. For a time the talk was incoherent and we sounded like a flock of crows. We each wished to discover instantly if time and distance had ruptured the community of spirit that had animated our earlier. days together. What joy it was to find that we could begin again where we left off. The real function of a conversation is as free and easy as wild geese honking to each other on their communal flight. With our old friends we used conversation as an ant uses antennae. The words were feelers to inform us of the situation of our fellows. It was a third eye for looking into the minds of those we had not seen for too long a period. Conversation is like an echoing mountain that sends back love for love or hate for hate. Some improvement in the clipped conversation of today is as important as improvement in transportation or television. There is a sense of pressure among people, a nervousness that makes them wish to be mere spectators rather than participants. Where a personal expansiveness is thwarted in an individual something blighting happens; and his frustrated energy goes underground into moodiness and destructiveness.
Come dear friends, come old-timers, got us get together some enchanted evening and feel free to exaggerate to our hearts content.
Mary Mills
3/29/1953
Late Autumn
To be interested in Late Autumn When you behaved that age, is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with Spring. There is no trick to crocheting physically; anyone can do it who has time enough. The difficult feat is to suit your way of reasoning to the stages of maturity that creep so sneakily upon you.
I still depend for attention on devices that are immature. For instance I have found that carrying a cane and tottering a bit are good social introductions. I approach the Mulberry Street entrance to the General Denver Hotel leaning heavily on my cane. The chairs in the lobby are all occupied. I stand inside the door with a smile of bravely endured suffering on my face, but weaving a little on my feet. This air of bearing great pain with a patient attitude always works. Men spring from their chairs and lead me to the place of greatest comfort.
Often a cane not only gets you a chair but also a conversation. One of the men in the lobby, evidently much interested in the state of my health, asked me in a voice much too audible, "Mary, how are your legs nowadays?
In my youth, the fact that a woman had legs was a deep, dark secrets as terribly shocked, and my first inclination was to faint in the old Victorian manner. But I decided against this procedure, and replied in my most sophisticated tone, "They are about as well as usual, thank you." Then it came over me with telling forces that this was not the attitude that mother would have wanted me to take. She would have advised me to draw myself up with great dignity and say "Sir, remember you are addressing a lady." She would have felt he could have at least have said limbs!
One icy day I stood on the Hotel corner wondering if it would be safe for me to cross the street. An unknown man, seeing my hesitation, asked if he could be of any service. I have a well established theory that people like you better if you accept their kindly offers of help, so I clutched his arm and we started over the perilous path. I found it difficult to keep step with my companion's eccentric gait, and I smelled a strong whiff of alcohol l hang personality tended toward the four points of the compass with my cane forming the center of gravity, we made our goal/goal goal I thanked and he seemed very proud of himself for being so much a thoughtful gentleman. He said in a blurry voice--"It was nothing at all, Madam, I had a mother once!
In youth we think that our legs are identical with ourselves, and have the same interests that we have. But we discover later that they are faithless companions who have been accidently yoked with us. These legs are likely, in old age, to betray us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of heartless traitors!
128.
Another influence that postpones suiting my reasoning to my stage of life stems from the circumstance that I live in a town rather than a city, and too, in a small place that has always been my home. Some of the children of my early companions are here and naturally keep up the associations that their parents had. You will find, if you live long enough, that these inherited ties delay your Late Autumnal candle-light.
Every morning when I wake I can almost taste the delight I feel that I can once more see the beauty of a new day. How wonderful it would be if those still young could appreciate the happiness of just being alive.
On March First I opened my eyes on a world ethereally beautiful--a fairyland of snow. The softest snow I have ever seen covered every twig of the shrubbery just outside my windows. The loveliness was almost more than one could bear. The sheer beauty made one's heart sing!
But what about the turmoil now in the world? In Late Autumn you feel as if you were up in a balloon where you could still see clearly what was happening on earth beneath. You could even see that two opposing forces would inevitably clash but you could also feel that very little of the worlds calamity could affect you now. We who in our youth demanded cures now resign ourselves to searching for remedies. The Late Autumn is not the time for self-pity or for empty sentiment. Superb conclusions face, you. What must be endured cannot be ignored. The language of Late Autumn is more explicit and final than the tongue of youth. It requires a more positive phrasing. It is more severe.
But if one can speak the language of Late Autumn it is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with
Spring.
Have-you learned Autumn yet? For I have not. It is of all, the hardest language to learn but I am resolved at length to master it.
I must!
Mary Mills
March 1954
206 North Wood St. Wilmington, Ohio
Mary Mills Writings
An Incidental Education
On the evening before I started to school an early September evening in 1879, my mother sat at the side of my bed reading me to sleep. I interrupted her to ask if I might go to school early the next morning.
"No, she answered. "Thee is not to leave our yard until the first bell rings."
I did not beg her to change her mind. Mother was a woman of few words. To supplement her instructions she used her eyes which could be tender and. serene, but could be lamps of warning, danger signals of displeasure.
The next morning, long before the first bell rang, I stood at the front gate with one foot in our yard and the other on the pavement of Locust Street. I had a feeling that my horizon was on the morn of expanding. My world already included two stores, my father's office and the Meeting House. Now it would also include the public school where one carried a slate and wrote with the right hand.
Room I
At the first recess a boy in my room ran up to me and said he was going to kiss me. I had never before been brought face to face with such a situation. Why had I been singled out from the other girls? I never thought I was what you might call pretty, but 'I must have been sort of cute. My reaction was to run and that was one of my first mistakes. Why, oh why, didn't I say -- "Come right ahead!"
He chased me through the girls' basement, then through the boy's basement, then out into the open of the immense playground. I sped down the long cinder path. But, alas, he was a stout-hearted runner. He followed me. He caught me and completed his romantic threat.
The incident gave me a too sanguine expectation concerning men, for alas, no man has since run so determined a race for my caresses, even if I make clear that today, I would put up only a token resistance.
Room II
On my first day in the second grade my teacher thought that the clock in the room was out of order so she sent me out into the hall to consult the master clock. I had never learned to tell time, but I could not confess this for fear the students would laugh at me. I went out in the hall hoping that someone would come along to help me out. No one's So I commenced to count on my hands the spaces on the clock. It came to ten and one over, so I went into the room and told the teacher that it was eleven o'clock. The teacher said, "But it can't be!" I said, "But it is!" The teacher dismissed us. Outside on the walk the pupils congratulated me on my Quick thinking which had liberated them a half hour early.
Room VI
The reputation of a pupil is like his shadow for it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him. Sometimes it is longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.
When I left number five to go to the next room I stepped down the hall talking to schoolmates about the new teacher. I had stuck my report card in the band of my sailor hat and forgotten it was there. Our teacher was standing in the door to size up the incoming class. When she saw me she jerked me out of line. "Oh here you are," she shouted, shaking me vigorously. "I've heard about you. you can't pull any of your monkyshines on me."
Consequently, I gave up any idea of gaining the favor of my teacher and turned instead to cultivating the approval of my schoolmates. So far as the teacher was concerned, I tried to show her that her clearly expressed estimate of me was entirely correct. I said to myself, "She's dug her own grave!"
The weather in the spring was unusually warm. A number of girls in my class started the fad of coming to school bare-footed and wearing calico sunbonnets. My mother did not like the idea and said, "Thee has shoes and thee might as well wear them. Thee has a hat and thee might as well wear it."
I begged hard for several days. At last, to my surprise, she gave up. When, next day, I ran to school rejoicing in my bare feet aid my sun bonnet, I found my school mates were arrayed in their best Sunday clothes, complete with shoes and hat. It seems that a former school superintendent had died and had been brought here to be buried in Sugar Grove. The school board had decided it would be a fitting courtesy for the pupils to go in a body to the church to view him in his coffin. By some unlucky chance I had not heard any announcement of the plan. We all marched to the church and moved slowly down the endless aisle. To hide my bare feet I scrouged down so that my short dress almost touched the floor and pulled my sun bonnet forward toward my chin. Poor little dwarfess! When I reached the coffin 1 was not tall enough to see over the side, but I did not abandon my crouch. After this fruitless trip down the aisle I turned and waddled back up the passage again keeping the same posture.
When I told Mother the woeful story of my awful humiliation, she was nice about it. "I think Mary, she said kindly, "that if thee would stop trying so hard to be like thy playmates and work at being thyself, thee would get along better."
As for father he laughed and said with a twinkle in his eyes, "I bet thee got more attention just creeping along that the other girls got standing straight. Always remember that thee is thyself and pretty worthwhile at that."
Room VII
By this time I had become clothes conscious and was especially critical of my teacher's dress. It was a bilious green checked number which she wore every day with no variation. We learned later that her husband stayed home and washed the dishes. She was the sole financial supporter of the family.
Whether or not it was on account of some secret sorrow or some great frustration, she felt a mighty religious concern for all souls that she judged to be in danger of everlasting punishment. When our music teacher, a man whom the pupils adored, came into the room our teacher uttered urgent petitions for his salvation which he heard with patience and good humor.
One evening she kept five of us girls after school and asked us to promise that we would never marry. Three girls gave her their word. Another said she had not, as yet, made up her mind. I told her that I would marry if I got a suitable chance. That eliminated me from the next step of her appeal. She wanted the three who had promised to remain single to become missionaries. She favored Africa as the best field for service.
The unreality of the situation may be judged by the fact that all five of us broke our promises. The girl who had not made up her mind soon eloped. The three who promised all had elaborate church weddings. I, who was set on marrying at my first chance, sad to relate, broke my promise too.
Room VIII
This year we had a man teacher whose name was Humble. He was a nervous, jumpy little man and in the school room he always carried a punishing ruler. One odd thing about his behavior was that when he reached the emotional stage when the urge to punish was on him, he did riot take time 'Lo reach the offender, but whacked down on the pupil who was nearest him. In contrast with his speed with the ruler, he was slow on the trigger with other corrections. On every morning program was the singing of a hymn. There were four of us with carrying voices who at the same time that our classmates were singing the hymn would sing some song of our choice. The resulting pandemonium mould go unchallenged.
One day in the intermission between two sections of an arithmetic examination thought it would. be fun to play charades. I decided to act out the word maniac. In my frenzy I snatched the examination papers that were not yet inspected and tore them to shreds. when our teacher asked me why I performed this act of vandalism, I told him that I had gone so far out of my mind in my portrayal of the word "maniac" that I couldn't control my actions. The real truth was that this was a slip-up quiz and we girls had not worn our aprons. We always got better grades when wore our aprons under which we could smuggle our text books. You will be glad to learn that the kind teacher understood and gave my slight indiscretion.
In this last grade in school our most effective instruction came from a man who was not supposed to teach us at all. He was our janitor. Every evening he washed the blackboard and would write on it a memory gem. My favorite gem was
"Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it each day until it becomes so strong we can not break it."' - Horace Mann.
Strange to relate we had a teacher who was a crackbrain and a janitor who was not only sane, but very wise.
Campaign Songs of 1884
In my eleventh year, 1884, Grover Cleveland was running against James G. Blaine for President of the United States. In those days the politics of your family had a bearing on your social standing in the community. I felt my Republican background admitted me to the elite group of Wilmingtonians. The political division even went to the extent of determining your playmates. This was especially true while you were still students in the lower grades. When I grew older I was astonished to learn that the little Democratic girls felt sorry for the snooty Republican lassies.
In this campaign of 1884, four Republican girls of my age formed a quartette to sing at the political gatherings of the community. We usually opened our program with this illuminating number:
"There was a man named Grover
Who was very fat all over,
And his neck was twenty inches, people say.
His neck was twenty inches, twenty inches, twenty inches.
And he even finished on Decoration day!"
This last line, which we sang with great scorn, was an effective argument against him at gatherings of the Grand Army of the Republic.
I was anxious to sing anything that would incite the listeners to vigorous applause. Some young Cleveland partisans in the gallery began to yell for their candidate. Plainly the situation called for a song that would put a stop to the opposition in the gallery. We had our ammunition ready:
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"Ma, ma, where's my pa?
Oh ma, ma, where's my pa?
He's heading for the White House.
haw, haw, haw."
We sang the first two lines in a piping childish treble and the last two in a deep, taunting shocked bass. This evidently was not a suitable theme for young girls to be singing about, but it silenced the gallery and therefore delighted the elders in our audience. This ribald stanza probably made votes for Cleveland because his followers made much of his courage in admitting his youthful indiscretion.
The political atmosphere of 1884 was an emotional orgy of trivialities which distracted attention from the real issues. How paltry and even trashy were the issues we emphasized in our songs and speeches. As a young girl I never dreamed that in my lifetime the fate of us as individuals would be inseparable from that of the peoples of Europe or that the destiny of our children would be involved in the events taking place in Asia. Both those who were victorious in 1884 and those who were mastered are forgotten and the issues over which they contested are not remembered. All that remains are some verses in the minds of girls who were too young to understand the words they sang.
February 6, 1917. Wednesday morning Father seemed to be in good health and good spirits although he said he was going to have an exceptionally full day. At noon he seemed to me to be somewhat depressed, so, although I was in a hurry, I waited to walk to town with him. He told me that since his first term as Probate Judge would expire Monday, he was trying to arrange with the Common Pleas Judge, Frank Clevenger, to take over the Juvenile Court work. He was very doubtful about Mr. Clevenger's consenting.
In the afternoon after my work at the college was over, I went to Father's office to see if he was in better spirits. He told me he had talked with Judge Clevenger and felt somewhat more hopeful. In the evening when he came home for supper he seemed much more cheerful. He told me that in case Mr. Clevenger would not consent to take the extra work he would continue with it and would be happy either way.
After Father had gone to bed I went to his room to tuck an extra blanket about him and I kissed him good night for the second time. He said he was feeling all right and seemed peaceful in his mind. He was pleased that I had brought him the blanket and smiled as he said, "Thee is so good to me." It was a very fatherly smile and beautiful:
Thursday morning I slept later than usual and did not waken until the clock struck six. I was immediately startled at the quiet in the house, since Father is always up and stirring a little after five. I sprang out of bed and. ran upstairs thinking I should find him ill, but the minute I saw him I knew he was dead, He was still warm. his eyes were closed and he was curled up into a comfy little ball the way he always slept. his pillow was unrumpled and the bedclothes perfectly smooth. The kindest look was on his face, so reassuring, that I was not afraid.
I ran down to the telephone and called Edwin Hiatt. Then I called Irene, then Dr. Wire. When I couldn't get him, Dr. Peelle. the doctor said there was absolutely nothing to be done, that Father never knew when he died.
In a half hour the house was full of people. How they found out about it I don't know. From that time on until the funeral on Saturday the house was filled
5
all the time with everybody---people that I knew and people that I didn't know. Many poor people and many colored folks were among them. I saw and talked with them all. I knew Father would want me to welcome them all. During the three days we all ate at Edwin's and had many friends with us at mealtimes. Everyone was infinitely kind.
When Albert Baily died Father and I had a talk about funerals. He told me exactly how he wanted his to be. He wanted no weeping and wailing, no whispering around, no black mourning clothes.
Levi Mills, son of Jonathan and Charity Cook Mills, was born in Warren County, Ohio, March 14, 1844. He lived on his father's farm on Caesar's Creek until he was twenty years of age. In 1864 he, with his young bride, Ruth Whinery McMillan, came to Wilmington, Ohio to establish a home. He began the study of law, attending lectures at the Cincinnati Law School. In 1868 he was admitted to the bar. When he reached the age of twenty-one he became a Minister of the Society of Friends. For many years he preached in the Friends Church in Wilmington and acted as its pastor without financial remuneration, supporting himself and his family by his law practice, in reality doing the work of two men. He later gave up the law to devote himself entirely to church work, being minister of the Friends Meeting in Oskaloosa, Iowa and in Whittier, California. In the fall of 1905 he returned to Clinton County to spend the rest of his days with his children, his grandchildren and his life-long friends. After this he held no regular pastorate, but responded to the many requests for his services, giving lovingly of his tine and strength to the work of the Church. He was elected to the office of Judge of the Probate Court of Clinton. County and held that position at the time of his death, February 7, 1917.
These are the: salient facts in the life of Levi Mills, but the relation of them does not give an adequate picture of this man whose personality had so many facets. In appearance he was tall and thin, with something of the Abraham Lincoln type of physique. His head was rather small for his height and his hair in his younger days was dark and wavy. His eyes were very blue and were set deep under projecting brows. His mouth was large and flexible. His countenance was intelligent and kindly. His voice was clear and ringing, with great carrying power. When he was moved by deep emotion it had a rhythmic rise and fall like that of music. His laugh was irresistible, clear and unafraid, a big hearty laugh that warmed the soul.
He had great native ability. His formal education was meager--a few years of country school and a few months of college. He deeply regretted the lack of an advanced education and perhaps for this very reason was a most ardent supporter of educational institutions. He took pride in the fact that, in the three places where he did most of his preaching, Quaker colleges were located. His efforts in behalf of Wilmington, Penn and Whittier Colleges were unfailing. In his mind education and religion were not at variance, but were entirely harmonious.
Notwithstanding his somewhat limited educational training, he was remarkable as a public speaker. In his law practice it was conceded by his fellows that no lawyer in the county round about had so great an influence with a jury. In his political speeches, of which he made many, he could arouse his audiences to highest enthusiasm. He told stories well and has a wealth of them at his command, almost all of them being happenings taken from his own experiences, for he had a fine sense of humor and could see the amusing elements of any situation. In speaking, his transitions from humor to pathos were frequent and accomplished with unconscious skill. He had a great fund of common sense, but with it an artistic imagination. This rare combination of attributes gave his utterances a quality of vivid wholesomeness that was most unusual and most engaging.
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As a man he was very human. He had great sympathy. His love was extended not only to his own kindred, but reached out to the poor, the lonely. and the down-trodden. The people of the colored race adored him. Children held up their arms to him. In his family he was all that a husband and father should be. Ruth, his wife, was his constant companion, most discriminating friend and his greatest sorrow, indescribably pathetic, when in her later years, her once brilliant mind became clouded. Solicitudes for her comfort and welfare was then his abiding thought. He was the right kind of father to his children, always believing the best of them and always inspiring in then desires for right living. He found no sacrifice too great to make if it would contribute to their well-being. He felt himself amply repaid by their love and devotion.
His ministry! He never doubted that he belonged to God. When he prayed it was as if he held the hand of his Heavenly Father. The passion that swept his soul at the time of his conversion never left him. He felt that he was sent to preach Christ and Him Crucified. The power of his ministry was not altogether in what he said. Through some divine magic one became aware that he had seen a country that never was on land or sea, a country which he intensely desired, but to which he knew no human paths directly led. It seemed that at these rare moments when these flashes of vision came to him, transfiguring life, his mind was set free from considering what was the best thing to say. He was aware that only one thing was worth saying and that it had ceased to be hard to say. There was no counting of gain or loss, but a compelling call to speak the vision that flamed up inside of him. After the glory had faded he never doubted its authenticity. The light had gone out and again he was picking his way through the twilight of physical exhaustion that followed the effort. But he knew that he had been for an instant ennobled. How little we know of the steps of his development of this Quality! As a farm lad some new world must have opened before him. He must have been entranced by an experience that was to hold him forever in its spell.
The last day of his earthly life was a full day, spent at worthwhile tasks. After a night of peaceful sleep, death came quietly to him with the sunrise. His life was a sermon on immortality. Death could not destroy a soul so vital and so glowing.
'April 28, 1919. Well, it is all over --- Mother is dead! It is such a pitiful story. The awful bed-sores increased in number and dreadfulness. The family grew almost afraid for me to bathe Mother and dress the sores, but I did to the very end. Her appetite seemed to be growing less and she slept more, especially toward the last. Her hands were so soft and weak and tired and would cling to me so helplessly.
On Thursday evening she fell into a kind of stupor. If she had been in her right mind one would have said that she became unconscious. The doctor said on Friday that he felt she could not live long. On Sunday he felt confident she could not live through the day for after Friday evening she ate nothing and it was difficult for her to drink. On Monday her breathing was labored, but she did not awaken. All Tuesday morning I lay by her side, listening to her to see if life had left her. About ten minutes after two she began to breath faster and fainter. At 2:15 she was dead. We were all about her and I was kneeling by her side, holding her hand. Her last moments were very calm and peaceful.
Hattie, Irene and I prepared her body for burial. I washed her myself as I have done for months and dressed her poor thin sore body for the last time. She wore a black silk dress that always looked lovely on her. We put beautiful lace at the neck and sleeves. I made some pink satin rose buds that I tucked away beneath the lace to give the bit of color that Mother wore best. Her hair was soft and white and silky. She looked, after a while, much younger and so dignified, and aristocratic.
We decided to have the funeral on Thursday morning at ten o'clock at the house. We put Mother in the library by the south window with flowers banked all about her. The relatives sat in there with her. I was at the foot of the coffin. There were a great many of her old friends. Nancy Leonard read a Scripture passage. Jennie Carey prayed. Clement Brann sang. Mr. Purdy's sermon was very personal and very touching. The service was beautiful. Mother's grave was lined with evergreens.
The first thing I did when I got home from the cemetery was to walk right up to mother's room to see if she was all right. That seems impossible, but it is true. For so long my first act on entering the house has been to go to her room. I went involuntarily. Since then, many times 1 have found myself planning for her and arranging for her comfort. I just can't realize she is dead.
I feel that it would be wicked to grieve over Mother, but I am very lonesome without her. She has been to me not only mother, but also child, for she depended on me for everything. My hands feel empty. I had thought that I would be afraid for her to die. I feared she would not know the way to Heaven alone, but the minute she was dead I knew that she was with Father and I was comforted.
I am asking Harriett (Irene's daughter) and Richard to take charge of the distribution of my possessions. I have been distraught in the struggle to select for each one, the suitable things. The choices I have made do not indicate
degrees of affection. Trade with each other if you like.
It is hard for me to leave Easy Tree Lodge! A heavenly mansion could not be more to my liking. Here I have been comfortable and serene. No other old woman has had the kind attention that 1 have received. Hattie used to say that when she got to Heaven she wanted to make a rift in the clouds so she could look down aril; see what we were all doing. I shall join her at her observation post. No future, however engrossing, can check my interest in each of you---descendents and in-laws of Levi and Ruth Mills. May God love you all!
Attention: Harriett and Richard. The articles of jewelry not mentioned in "my will" please distribute as you think most proper. If I have failed to mention someone through an oversight, please make it right in some way. I certainly have worked over these bequests. In payment for your distribution work I give each of you one of the little low McMillan chairs and also my thanks.
Additional Notes. Special love to all the men left giftless --- Clem, John, Bud, Howard, Carl, Malcom. You have all been very dear to me. Thanks for everything. I cannot enumerate your kindnesses. When I estimate what I have to give I find very few things suitable for men. Don't think I don't love you too. Men have always been my specialty.
Please sell my diamond ring at its market value and use the proceeds in buying books for Wilmington College Library. Ask Gerald to select the books for me, using his own judgment,
All else of mien not heretofore named and not wanted by the family, please sell and use the proceeds to help pay for a very simple funeral---and I do mean simple.
I do hate to leave you all. You have given me the great gift of your generous care. And so ---to bed! Good night.
Mary
123.
Why I Exaggerate
I know that exaggeration is a truth that has lost its composure. I know that truth is communicated better by slow contagion than by dressing it up, and yet I A impatient for attention. Too few people, it seems to me, penetrate our humdrum outline and recognize the droll situations of our commonplace lives unless we glamorized the incidents.
As a young girl in a group where people were talking I was impatient until I in on it. I tried to call attention to myself by looking animated and sort of 1 the wing, as it were. This attitude was influenced, I think by the group of Exceptional girls with whom I started to school, for several of them were also
a quenchable conversationalists. I remember one youthful party where finally there as a slight pause and I gleefully began "My idea is," but no one listened. At the next pause I remarked "I always say," again I was drowned out. Someone told a funny story and when the laughter was beginning to die down, I came up with "I often think," It looking around the room I could meet no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating. I discovered that conversation is the one thing in the world in which all man beings are competitors. A little later there was an unexpected pause in the abble, and I jumped into the gap without the slightest idea of what I was going to
Thus I got the habit of speaking before I was aiming at a target. Like a small copy with a B-B gun I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger for the pleasure of hearing the words go off.
I learned early that in every group there are listeners who automatically turn their heads toward the speaker who gets going first. "Beat the others to it," became r motto, and I sat fidgeting on the edge of my chair eager to get under way at the Last possible moment. My initial topic might be the weather. If that failed to gain attention I waited until my rival came up for air. Then I plunged in with some mildly averting question such as "Have any of you seen a boa constrictor this morning?"
Thus alas, did the habit of exaggeration fasten upon me because of my desire for all leadership!
There was another type of competition in our group that corrupted my sense of let. We tried to cap each other's claims. For instance there would be a squabble out who had the best watchdog or whose family horse could make the best time. I could make my assertions which would be shouted down by the mob. At this point in the contest my sisters, near at hand would prod me on to make still more extravagant assertions. Thus I was led to attribute to our fat family nag,
Lucy, incredible speed -- racing from Farquhar's grocery to Dover Springs in almost flat.
Not only my sisters but some of my loyal friends encouraged my departure from actualities. Among them was Fan, whose advice was, "Don't let a conversation lag for want of facts." In time I formed the woeful habit of "gilding the lily." My motto is "fling on any faggot rather than let the fire die out" so I flung, and I flung, id I flung,
Later, when I was about twelve years old I was in attendance at Quaker Quarterly setting and became much interested in the business discussions. In the course of the deliberations there was a proposal against which father made a vigorous protest. I immediately rose and spoke in favor of it. After the session a friend said to me in disapproving tones "You'll catch it when you get home." But when Pa saw me he was ailing. "I was very proud of thee today, Mary; thee has a right to thy opinion and want thee always to feel free to express it." That was father for you:
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Page 2 -- Why I Exaggerate!
As for me, his approval made me feel that some of my impulsive patter might have some sense in it after all. Nearly everyone is interesting if one can only have insight to discover what he really thinks and feels. My friend Eva, was interested in people and their secret thoughts to the extent that she had respect for the opinions that she did not share. She was willing to gnaw on an unpromising bone for friendship's sake. Many persons after talking with her, felt that they have expressed themselves better than they had ever been able to do before. She demonstrated that there can be a piquancy in the deference between two people whose minds are of opposite types.
The unfettered type of conversation popular in my youth was influenced by the spirit of the times which was an age of confidence and security with tolerance for leisurely anecdotes and tall tales. To converse today means quick work. Compared with that of yesterday it is like taking a squirrel on your lap after holding a purring kitten! People then liked their facts filtered through personalities. They had just lived through the pioneer period when they had been isolated on lonesome farms. People in those days hitched up and drove to town ostensibly to buy a lamp wick or a jug of-vinegar. But in reality their motive was to savor the quality of personal communion and to enjoy the flavor of self-expression. They talked because it was fun to talk, and. because it linked the participants together and made them realize that they belonged to a community. On Sunday when two or more families met together they shared in a celebration of being united in a comfortable fellowship. I remember one occasion when the Barretts visited Wilmington after a long absence. They drove up to the house-we were all lined up on the porch to welcome them. For a time the talk was incoherent and we sounded like a flock of crows. We each wished to discover instantly if time and distance had ruptured the community of spirit that had animated our earlier. days together. What joy it was to find that we could begin again where we left off. The real function of a conversation is as free and easy as wild geese honking to each other on their communal flight. With our old friends we used conversation as an ant uses antennae. The words were feelers to inform us of the situation of our fellows. It was a third eye for looking into the minds of those we had not seen for too long a period. Conversation is like an echoing mountain that sends back love for love or hate for hate. Some improvement in the clipped conversation of today is as important as improvement in transportation or television. There is a sense of pressure among people, a nervousness that makes them wish to be mere spectators rather than participants. Where a personal expansiveness is thwarted in an individual something blighting happens; and his frustrated energy goes underground into moodiness and destructiveness.
Come dear friends, come old-timers, got us get together some enchanted evening and feel free to exaggerate to our hearts content.
Mary Mills
3/29/1953
Late Autumn
To be interested in Late Autumn When you behaved that age, is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with Spring. There is no trick to crocheting physically; anyone can do it who has time enough. The difficult feat is to suit your way of reasoning to the stages of maturity that creep so sneakily upon you.
I still depend for attention on devices that are immature. For instance I have found that carrying a cane and tottering a bit are good social introductions. I approach the Mulberry Street entrance to the General Denver Hotel leaning heavily on my cane. The chairs in the lobby are all occupied. I stand inside the door with a smile of bravely endured suffering on my face, but weaving a little on my feet. This air of bearing great pain with a patient attitude always works. Men spring from their chairs and lead me to the place of greatest comfort.
Often a cane not only gets you a chair but also a conversation. One of the men in the lobby, evidently much interested in the state of my health, asked me in a voice much too audible, "Mary, how are your legs nowadays?
In my youth, the fact that a woman had legs was a deep, dark secrets as terribly shocked, and my first inclination was to faint in the old Victorian manner. But I decided against this procedure, and replied in my most sophisticated tone, "They are about as well as usual, thank you." Then it came over me with telling forces that this was not the attitude that mother would have wanted me to take. She would have advised me to draw myself up with great dignity and say "Sir, remember you are addressing a lady." She would have felt he could have at least have said limbs!
One icy day I stood on the Hotel corner wondering if it would be safe for me to cross the street. An unknown man, seeing my hesitation, asked if he could be of any service. I have a well established theory that people like you better if you accept their kindly offers of help, so I clutched his arm and we started over the perilous path. I found it difficult to keep step with my companion's eccentric gait, and I smelled a strong whiff of alcohol l hang personality tended toward the four points of the compass with my cane forming the center of gravity, we made our goal/goal goal I thanked and he seemed very proud of himself for being so much a thoughtful gentleman. He said in a blurry voice--"It was nothing at all, Madam, I had a mother once!
In youth we think that our legs are identical with ourselves, and have the same interests that we have. But we discover later that they are faithless companions who have been accidently yoked with us. These legs are likely, in old age, to betray us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of heartless traitors!
128.
Another influence that postpones suiting my reasoning to my stage of life stems from the circumstance that I live in a town rather than a city, and too, in a small place that has always been my home. Some of the children of my early companions are here and naturally keep up the associations that their parents had. You will find, if you live long enough, that these inherited ties delay your Late Autumnal candle-light.
Every morning when I wake I can almost taste the delight I feel that I can once more see the beauty of a new day. How wonderful it would be if those still young could appreciate the happiness of just being alive.
On March First I opened my eyes on a world ethereally beautiful--a fairyland of snow. The softest snow I have ever seen covered every twig of the shrubbery just outside my windows. The loveliness was almost more than one could bear. The sheer beauty made one's heart sing!
But what about the turmoil now in the world? In Late Autumn you feel as if you were up in a balloon where you could still see clearly what was happening on earth beneath. You could even see that two opposing forces would inevitably clash but you could also feel that very little of the worlds calamity could affect you now. We who in our youth demanded cures now resign ourselves to searching for remedies. The Late Autumn is not the time for self-pity or for empty sentiment. Superb conclusions face, you. What must be endured cannot be ignored. The language of Late Autumn is more explicit and final than the tongue of youth. It requires a more positive phrasing. It is more severe.
But if one can speak the language of Late Autumn it is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with
Spring.
Have-you learned Autumn yet? For I have not. It is of all, the hardest language to learn but I am resolved at length to master it.
I must!
Mary Mills
March 1954
206 North Wood St. Wilmington, Ohio
Mary Mills Writings
An Incidental Education
On the evening before I started to school an early September evening in 1879, my mother sat at the side of my bed reading me to sleep. I interrupted her to ask if I might go to school early the next morning.
"No, she answered. "Thee is not to leave our yard until the first bell rings."
I did not beg her to change her mind. Mother was a woman of few words. To supplement her instructions she used her eyes which could be tender and. serene, but could be lamps of warning, danger signals of displeasure.
The next morning, long before the first bell rang, I stood at the front gate with one foot in our yard and the other on the pavement of Locust Street. I had a feeling that my horizon was on the morn of expanding. My world already included two stores, my father's office and the Meeting House. Now it would also include the public school where one carried a slate and wrote with the right hand.
Room I
At the first recess a boy in my room ran up to me and said he was going to kiss me. I had never before been brought face to face with such a situation. Why had I been singled out from the other girls? I never thought I was what you might call pretty, but 'I must have been sort of cute. My reaction was to run and that was one of my first mistakes. Why, oh why, didn't I say -- "Come right ahead!"
He chased me through the girls' basement, then through the boy's basement, then out into the open of the immense playground. I sped down the long cinder path. But, alas, he was a stout-hearted runner. He followed me. He caught me and completed his romantic threat.
The incident gave me a too sanguine expectation concerning men, for alas, no man has since run so determined a race for my caresses, even if I make clear that today, I would put up only a token resistance.
Room II
On my first day in the second grade my teacher thought that the clock in the room was out of order so she sent me out into the hall to consult the master clock. I had never learned to tell time, but I could not confess this for fear the students would laugh at me. I went out in the hall hoping that someone would come along to help me out. No one's So I commenced to count on my hands the spaces on the clock. It came to ten and one over, so I went into the room and told the teacher that it was eleven o'clock. The teacher said, "But it can't be!" I said, "But it is!" The teacher dismissed us. Outside on the walk the pupils congratulated me on my Quick thinking which had liberated them a half hour early.
Room VI
The reputation of a pupil is like his shadow for it sometimes follows and sometimes precedes him. Sometimes it is longer and sometimes shorter than his natural size.
When I left number five to go to the next room I stepped down the hall talking to schoolmates about the new teacher. I had stuck my report card in the band of my sailor hat and forgotten it was there. Our teacher was standing in the door to size up the incoming class. When she saw me she jerked me out of line. "Oh here you are," she shouted, shaking me vigorously. "I've heard about you.
candidate. Plainly the situation called for a song that would put a stop to the
You can't pull any of your monkeyshines on me."
Consequently, I gave up any idea of gaining the favor of my teacher and turned instead to cultivating the approval of my schoolmates. So far as the teacher was concerned, I tried to show her that her clearly expressed estimate of me was entirely correct. I said to myself, "She's dug her own grave!"
The weather in the spring was unusually warm. A number of girls in my class started the fad of coming to school bare-footed and wearing calico sunbonnets. My mother did not like the idea and said, "Thee has shoes and thee might as well wear them. Thee has a hat and thee might as well wear it."
I begged hard for several days. At last, to my surprise, she gave up. When, next day, I ran to school rejoicing in my bare feet aid my sun bonnet, I found my school mates were arrayed in their best Sunday clothes, complete with shoes and hat. It seems that a former school superintendent had died and had been brought here to be buried in Sugar Grove. The school board had decided it would be a fitting courtesy for the pupils to go in a body to the church to view him in his coffin. By some unlucky chance I had not heard any announcement of the plan. We all marched to the church and moved slowly down the endless aisle. To hide my bare feet I scrouged down so that my short dress almost touched the floor and pulled my sun bonnet forward toward my chin. Poor little dwarfess! When I reached the coffin 1 was not tall enough to see over the side, but I did not abandon my crouch. After this fruitless trip down the aisle I turned and waddled back up the passage again keeping the same posture.
When I told Mother the woeful story of my awful humiliation, she was nice about it. "I think Mary, she said kindly, "that if thee would stop trying so hard to be like thy playmates and work at being thyself, thee would get along better."
As for father he laughed and said with a twinkle in his eyes, "I bet thee got more attention just creeping along that the other girls got standing straight. Always remember that thee is thyself and pretty worthwhile at that."
Room VII
By this time I had become clothes conscious and was especially critical of my teacher's dress. It was a bilious green checked number which she wore every day with no variation. We learned later that her husband stayed home and washed the dishes. She was the sole financial supporter of the family.
Whether or not it was on account of some secret sorrow or some great frustration, she felt a mighty religious concern for all souls that she judged to be in danger of everlasting punishment. When our music teacher, a man whom the pupils adored, came into the room our teacher uttered urgent petitions for his salvation which he heard with patience and good humor.
One evening she kept five of us girls after school and asked us to promise that we would never marry. Three girls gave her their word. Another said she had not, as yet, made up her mind. I told her that I would marry if I got a suitable chance. That eliminated me from the next step of her appeal. She wanted the three who had promised to remain single to become missionaries. She favored Africa as the best field for service.
The unreality of the situation may be judged by the fact that all five of us broke our promises. The girl who had not made up her mind soon eloped. The three who promised all had elaborate church weddings. I, who was set on marrying at my first chance, sad to relate, broke my promise too.
Room VIVIII
This year we had a man teacher whose name was Humble. He was a nervous, jumpy little man and in the school room he always carried a punishing ruler. One odd thing about his behavior was that when he reached the emotional stage when the urge to punish was on him, he did riot take time 'Lo reach the offender, but whacked down on the pupil who was nearest him. In contrast with his speed with the ruler, he was slow on the trigger with other corrections. On every morning program was the singing of a hymn. There were four of us with carrying voices who at the same time that our classmates were singing the hymn would sing some song of our choice. The resulting pandemonium mould go unchallenged.
One day in the intermission between two sections of an arithmetic examination thought it would. be fun to play charades. I decided to act out the word maniac. In my frenzy I snatched the examination papers that were not yet inspected and tore them to shreds. when our teacher asked me why I performed this act of vandalism, I told him that I had gone so far out of my mind in my portrayal of the word "maniac" that I couldn't control my actions. The real truth was that this was a slip-up quiz and we girls had not worn our aprons. We always got better grades when wore our aprons under which we could smuggle our text books. You will be glad to learn that the kind teacher understood and gave my slight indiscretion.
In this last grade in school our most effective instruction came from a man who was not supposed to teach us at all. He was our janitor. Every evening he washed the blackboard and would write on it a memory gem. My favorite gem was
"Habit is a cable. We weave a thread of it each day until it becomes so strong we can not break it."' - Horace Mann.
Strange to relate we had a teacher who was a crackbrain and a janitor who was not only sane, but very wise.
Campaign Songs of 1884
In my eleventh year, 1884, Grover Cleveland was running against James G. Blaine for President of the United States. In those days the politics of your family had a bearing on your social standing in the community. I felt my Republican background admitted me to the elite group of Wilmingtonians. The political division even went to the extent of determining your playmates. This was especially true while you were still students in the lower grades. When I grew older I was astonished to learn that the little Democratic girls felt sorry for the snooty Republican lassies.
In this campaign of 1884, four Republican girls of my age formed a quartette to sing at the political gatherings of the community. We usually opened our program with this illuminating number:
"There was a man named Grover
Who was very fat all over,
And his neck was twenty inches, people say.
His neck was twenty inches, twenty inches, twenty inches. And he even finished on Decoration day!"
This last line, which we sang with great scorn, was an effective argument against him at gatherings of the Grand Army of the Republic.
I was anxious to sing anything that would incite the listeners to vigorous applause. Some young Cleveland partisans in the gallery began to yell for their candidate. Plainly the situation called for a song that would put a stop to the
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opposition in the gallery. We had our ammunition ready:
"Ma, ma, where's my pa?
Oh ma, ma, where's my pa?
He's heading for the White House.
haw, haw, haw."
We sang the first two lines in a piping childish treble and the last two in a deep, taunting shocked bass. This evidently was not a suitable theme for young girls to be singing about, but it silenced the gallery and therefore delighted the elders in our audience. This ribald stanza probably made votes for Cleveland because his followers made much of his courage in admitting his youthful indiscretion.
The political atmosphere of 1884 was an emotional orgy of trivialities which distracted attention from the real issues. How paltry and even trashy were the issues we emphasized in our songs and speeches. As a young girl I never dreamed that in my lifetime the fate of us as individuals would be inseparable from that of the peoples of Europe or that the destiny of our children would be involved in the events taking place in Asia. Both those who were victorious in 1884 and those who were mastered are forgotten and the issues over which they contested are not remembered. All that remains are some verses in the minds of girls who were too young to understand the words they sang.
February 6, 1917. Wednesday morning Father seemed to be in good health and good spirits although he said he was going to have an exceptionally full day. At noon he seemed to me to be somewhat depressed, so, although I was in a hurry, I waited to walk to town with him. He told me that since his first term as Probate Judge would expire Monday, he was trying to arrange with the Common Pleas Judge, Frank Clevenger, to take over the Juvenile Court work. He was very doubtful about Mr. Clevenger's consenting.
In the afternoon after my work at the college was over, I went to Father's office to see if he was in better spirits. He told me he had talked with Judge Clevenger and felt somewhat more hopeful. In the evening when he came home for supper he seemed much more cheerful. He told me that in case Mr. Clevenger would not consent to take the extra work he would continue with it and would be happy either way.
After Father had gone to bed I went to his room to tuck an extra blanket about him and I kissed him good night for the second time. He said he was feeling all right and seemed peaceful in his mind. He was pleased that I had brought him the blanket and smiled as he said, "Thee is so good to me." It was a very fatherly smile and beautiful:
Thursday morning I slept later than usual and did not waken until the clock struck six. I was immediately startled at the quiet in the house, since Father is always up and stirring a little after five. I sprang out of bed and. ran upstairs thinking I should find him ill, but the minute I saw him I knew he was dead, He was still warm. his eyes were closed and he was curled up into a comfy little ball the way he always slept. his pillow was unrumpled and the bedclothes perfectly smooth. The kindest look was on his face, so reassuring, that I was not afraid.
I ran down to the telephone and called Edwin Hiatt. Then I called Irene, then Dr. Wire. When I couldn't get him, Dr. Peelle. the doctor said there was absolutely nothing to be done, that Father never knew when he died.
In a half hour the house was full of people. How they found out about it I don't know. From that time on until the funeral on Saturday the house was filled
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all the time with everybody---people that I knew and people that I didn't know. Many poor people and many colored folks were among them. I saw and talked with them all. I knew Father would want me to welcome them all. During the three days we all ate at Edwin's and had many friends with us at mealtimes. Everyone was infinitely kind.
when Albert Baily died Father and I had a talk about funerals. He told me exactly how he wanted his to be. He wanted no weeping and wailing, no whispering around, no black mourning clothes.
Levi Mills, son of Jonathan and Charity Cook Mills, was born in Warren County, Ohio, March 14, 1844. He lived on his father's farm on Caesar's Creek until he was twenty years of age. In 1864 he, with his young bride, Ruth Whinery McMillan, came to Wilmington, Ohio to establish a home. He began the study of law, attending lectures at the Cincinnati Law School. In 1868 he was admitted to the bar. When he reached the age of twenty-one he became a Minister of the Society of Friends. For many years he preached in the Friends Church in Wilmington and acted as its pastor without financial remuneration, supporting himself and his family by his law practice, in reality doing the work of two men. He later gave up the law to devote himself entirely to church work, being minister of the Friends Meeting in Oskaloosa, Iowa and in Whittier, California. In the fall of 1905 he returned to Clinton County to spend the rest of his days with his children, his grandchildren and his life-long friends. After this he held no regular pastorate, but responded to the many requests for his services, giving lovingly of his tine and strength to the work of the Church. He was elected to the office of Judge of the Probate Court of Clinton. County and held that position at the time of his death, February 7, 1917.
These are the: salient facts in the life of Levi Mills, but the relation of them does not give an adequate picture of this man whose personality had so many facets. In appearance he was tall and thin, with something of the Abraham Lincoln type of physique. His head was rather small for his height and his hair in his younger days was dark and wavy. His eyes were very blue and were set deep under projecting brows. His mouth was large and flexible. His countenance was intelligent and kindly. His voice was clear and ringing, with great carrying power. When he was moved by deep emotion it had a rhythmic rise and fall like that of music. His laugh was irresistible, clear and unafraid, a big hearty laugh that warmed the soul.
He had great native ability. His formal education was meager--a few years of country school and a few months of college. He deeply regretted the lack of an advanced education and perhaps for this very reason was a most ardent supporter of educational institutions. He took pride in the fact that, in the three places where he did most of his preaching, Quaker colleges were located. His efforts in behalf of Wilmington, Penn and Whittier Colleges were unfailing. In his mind education and religion were not at variance, but were entirely harmonious.
Notwithstanding his somewhat limited educational training, he was remarkable as a public speaker. In his law practice it was conceded by his fellows that no lawyer in the county round about had so great an influence with a jury. In his political speeches, of which he made many, he could arouse his audiences to highest enthusiasm. He told stories well and has a wealth of them at his command, almost all of them being happenings taken from his own experiences, for he had a fine sense of humor and could see the amusing elements of any situation. In speaking, his transitions from humor to pathos were frequent and accomplished with unconscious skill. He had a great fund of common sense, but with it an
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artistic imagination. This rare combination of attributes gave his utterances a quality of vivid wholesomeness that was most unusual and most engaging.
As a man he was very human. He had great sympathy. His love was extended not only to his own kindred, but reached out to the poor, the lonely. and the down-trodden. The people of the colored race adored him. Children held up their arms to him. In his family he was all that a husband and father should be. Ruth, his wife, was his constant companion, most discriminating friend and his greatest sorrow, indescribably pathetic, when in her later years, her once brilliant mind became clouded. Solicitudes for her comfort and welfare was then his abiding thought. He was the right kind of father to his children, always believing the best of them and always inspiring in then desires for right living. He found no sacrifice too great to make if it would contribute to their well-being. He felt himself amply repaid by their love and devotion.
His ministry! He never doubted that he belonged to God. When he prayed it was as if he held the hand of his Heavenly Father. The passion that swept his soul at the time of his conversion never left him. He felt that he was sent to preach Christ and Him Crucified. The power of his ministry was not altogether in what he said. Through some divine magic one became aware that he had seen a country that never was on land or sea, a country which he intensely desired, but to which he knew no human paths directly led. It seemed that at these rare moments when these flashes of vision came to him, transfiguring life, his mind was set free from considering what was the best thing to say. He was aware that only one thing was worth saying and that it had ceased to be hard to say. There was no counting of gain or loss, but a compelling call to speak the vision that flamed up inside of him. After the glory had faded he never doubted its authenticity. The light had gone out and again he was picking his way through the twilight of physical exhaustion that followed the effort. But he knew that he had been for an instant ennobled. How little we know of the steps of his development of this Quality! As a farm lad some new world must have opened before him. He must have been entranced by an experience that was to hold him forever in its spell.
The last day of his earthly life was a full day, spent at worthwhile tasks. After a night of peaceful sleep, death came quietly to him with the sunrise. His life was a sermon on immortality. Death could not destroy a soul so vital and so glowing.
'April 28, 1919. Well, it is all over --- Mother is dead! It is such a pitiful story. The awful bed-sores increased in number and dreadfulness. The family grew almost afraid for me to bathe Mother and dress the sores, but I did to the very end. Her appetite seemed to be growing less and she slept more, especially toward the last. Her hands were so soft and weak and tired and would cling to me so helplessly.
On Thursday evening she fell into a kind of stupor. If she had been in her right mind one would have said that she became unconscious. The doctor said on Friday that he felt she could not live long. On Sunday he felt confident she could not live through the day for after Friday evening she ate nothing and it was difficult for her to drink. On Monday her breathing was labored, but she did not awaken. All Tuesday morning I lay by her side, listening to her to see if life had left her. About ten minutes after two she began to breath faster and fainter. At 2:15 she was dead. We were all about her and I was kneeling by her side, holding her hand. Her last moments were very calm and peaceful.
Hattie, Irene and I prepared her body for burial. I washed her myself as I
have done for months and dressed her poor thin sore body for the last time.
she wore a black silk dress that always looked lovely on her. We put beautiful lace at the neck and sleeves. I made some pink satin rose buds that I tucked away beneath the lace to give the bit of color that Mother wore best. Her hair was soft and white and silky. She looked, after a while, much younger and so dignified, and aristocratic.
We decided to have the funeral on Thursday morning at ten o'clock at the house. We put Mother in the library by the south window with flowers banked all about her. The relatives sat in there with her. I was at the foot of the coffin. There were a great many of her old friends. Nancy Leonard read a Scripture passage. Jennie Carey prayed. Clement Brann sang. Mr. Purdy's sermon was very personal and very touching. The service was beautiful. Mother's grave was lined with evergreens.
The first thing I did when I got home from the cemetery was to walk right up to mother's room to see if she was all right. That seems impossible, but it is true. For so long my first act on entering the house has been to go to her room. I went involuntarily. Since then, many times 1 have found myself planning for • her and arranging for her comfort. I just can't realize she is dead.
I feel that it would be wicked to grieve over Mother, but I am very lonesome without her. She has been to me not only mother, but also child, for she depended on me for everything. My hands feel empty. I had thought that I would be afraid for her to die. I feared she would not know the way to heaven alone, but the minute she was dead I knew that she was with Father and I was comforted.
I am asking Harriett (Irene's daughter) and Richard to take charge of the distribution of my possessions. I have been distraught in the struggle to select for each one, the suitable things. The choices I have made do not indicate
degrees of affection. Trade with each other if you like.
It is hard for me to leave Easy Tree Lodge! A heavenly mansion could not be more to my liking. Here I have been comfortable and serene. No other old woman has had the kind attention that 1 have received. Hattie used to say that when she got to Heaven she wanted to make a rift in the clouds so she could look down aril; see what we were all doing. I shall join her at her observation post. No future, however engrossing, can check my interest in each of you---descendents and in-laws of Levi and Ruth Mills. May God love you all!
Attention: Harriett and Richard. The articles of jewelry not mentioned in
"my will" please distribute as you think most proper. If I have failed to mention someone through an oversight, please make it right in some way. I certainly have worked over these bequests. In payment for your distribution work I give each of you one of the little low McMillan chairs and also my thanks.
Additional Notes. Special love to all the men left giftless --- Clem, John, Bud, Howard, Carl, Malcom. You have all been very dear to me. Thanks for everything. I cannot enumerate your kindnesses. When I estimate what I have to give I find very few things suitable for men. Don't think I don't love you too. Men have always been my specialty.
Please sell my diamond ring at its market value and use the proceeds in buying books for Wilmington College Library. Ask Gerald to select the books for me, using his own judgment,
All else of mien not heretofore named and not wanted by the family, please sell and use the proceeds to help pay for a very simple funeral---and I do mean simile.
I do hate to leave you all. You have given me the great gift of your generous care. And so ---to bed! Good night.
Mary
123.
Why I Exaggerate
I know that exaggeration is a truth that has lost its composure. I know that truth is communicated better by slow contagion than by dressing it up, and yet I A impatient for attention. Too few people, it seems to me, penetrate our humdrum outline and recognize the droll situations of our commonplace lives unless we glamorized the incidents.
As a young girl in a group where people were talking I was impatient until I in on it. I tried to call attention to myself by looking animated and sort of 1 the wing, as it were. This attitude was influenced, I think by the group of Exceptional girls with whom I started to school, for several of them were also
a quenchable conversationalists. I remember one youthful party where finally there as a slight pause and I gleefully began "My idea is," but no one listened. At the next pause I remarked "I always say," again I was drowned out. Someone told a funny story and when the laughter was beginning to die down, I came up with "I often think," It looking around the room I could meet no friendly or attentive eye. It was humiliating. I discovered that conversation is the one thing in the world in which all man beings are competitors. A little later there was an unexpected pause in the abble, and I jumped into the gap without the slightest idea of what I was going to
Thus I got the habit of speaking before I was aiming at a target. Like a small copy with a B-B gun I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger for the pleasure of hearing the words go off.
I learned early that in every group there are listeners who automatically turn their heads toward the speaker who gets going first. "Beat the others to it," became r motto, and I sat fidgeting on the edge of my chair eager to get under way at the Last possible moment. My initial topic might be the weather. If that failed to gain attention I waited until my rival came up for air. Then I plunged in with some mildly averting question such as "Have any of you seen a boa constrictor this morning?"
Thus alas, did the habit of exaggeration fasten upon me because of my desire for all leadership!
There was another type of competition in our group that corrupted my sense of let. We tried to cap each other's claims. For instance there would be a squabble out who had the best watchdog or whose family horse could make the best time. I could make my assertions which would be shouted down by the mob. At this point in the contest my sisters, near at hand would prod me on to make still more extravagant assertions. Thus I was led to attribute to our fat family nag, Lucy, incredible speed -- racing from Farquhar's grocery to Dover Springs in almost flat.
Not only my sisters but some of my loyal friends encouraged my departure from actualities. Among them was Fan, whose advice was, "Don't let a conversation lag for want of facts." In time I formed the woeful habit of "gilding the lily." My motto is "fling on any faggot rather than let the fire die out" so I flung, and I flung, id I flung,
Later, when I was about twelve years old I was in attendance at Quaker Quarterly setting and became much interested in the business discussions. In the course of the deliberations there was a proposal against which father made a vigorous protest. I immediately rose and spoke in favor of it. After the session a friend said to me in disapproving tones "You'll catch it when you get home." But when Pa saw me he was ailing. "I was very proud of thee today, Mary; thee has a right to thy opinion and want thee always to feel free to express it." That was father for you:
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Page 2 -- Why I Exaggerate!
As for me, his approval made me feel that some of my impulsive patter might have some sense in it after all. Nearly everyone is interesting if one can only have insight to discover what he really thinks and feels. My friend Eva, was interested in people and their secret thoughts to the extent that she had respect for the opinions that she did not share. She was willing to gnaw on an unpromising bone for friendship's sake. Many persons after talking with her, felt that they have expressed themselves better than they had ever been able to do before. She demonstrated that there can be a piquancy in the deference between two people whose minds are of opposite types.
The unfettered type of conversation popular in my youth was influenced by the spirit of the times which was an age of confidence and security with tolerance for leisurely anecdotes and tall tales. To converse today means quick work. Compared with that of yesterday it is like taking a squirrel on your lap after holding a purring kitten! People then liked their facts filtered through personalities. They had just lived through the pioneer period when they had been isolated on lonesome farms. People in those days hitched up and drove to town ostensibly to buy a lamp wick or a jug of-vinegar. But in reality their motive was to savor the quality of personal communion and to enjoy the flavor of self-expression. They talked because it was fun to talk, and. because it linked the participants together and made them realize that they belonged to a community. On Sunday when two or more families met together they shared in a celebration of being united in a comfortable fellowship. I remember one occasion when the Barretts visited Wilmington after a long absence. They drove up to the house-we were all lined up on the porch to welcome them. For a time the talk was incoherent and we sounded like a flock of crows. We each wished to discover instantly if time and distance had ruptured the community of spirit that had animated our earlier. days together. What joy it was to find that we could begin again where we left off. The real function of a conversation is as free and easy as wild geese honking to each other on their communal flight. With our old friends we used conversation as an ant uses antennae. The words were feelers to inform us of the situation of our fellows. It was a third eye for looking into the minds of those we had not seen for too long a period. Conversation is like an echoing mountain that sends back love for love or hate for hate. Some improvement in the clipped conversation of today is as important as improvement in transportation or television. There is a sense of pressure among people, a nervousness that makes them wish to be mere spectators rather than participants. Where a personal expansiveness is thwarted in an individual something blighting happens; and his frustrated energy goes underground into moodiness and destructiveness.
Come dear friends, come old-timers, got us get together some enchanted evening and feel free to exaggerate to our hearts content.
Mary Mills
3/29/1953
Late Autumn
To be interested in Late Autumn When you behaved that age, is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with Spring. There is no trick to crocheting physically; anyone can do it who has time enough. The difficult feat is to suit your way of reasoning to the stages of maturity that creep so sneakily upon you.
I still depend for attention on devices that are immature. For instance I have found that carrying a cane and tottering a bit are good social introductions. I approach the Mulberry Street entrance to the General Denver Hotel leaning heavily on my cane. The chairs in the lobby are all occupied. I stand inside the door with a smile of bravely endured suffering on my face, but weaving a little on my feet. This air of bearing great pain with a patient attitude always works. Men spring from their chairs and lead me to the place of greatest comfort.
Often a cane not only gets you a chair but also a conversation. One of the men in the lobby, evidently much interested in the state of my health, asked me in a voice much too audible, "Mary, how are your legs nowadays?
In my youth, the fact that a woman had legs was a deep, dark secrets as terribly shocked, and my first inclination was to faint in the old Victorian manner. But I decided against this procedure, and replied in my most sophisticated tone, "They are about as well as usual, thank you." Then it came over me with telling forces that this was not the attitude that mother would have wanted me to take. She would have advised me to draw myself up with great dignity and say "Sir, remember you are addressing a lady." She would have felt he could have at least have said limbs!
One icy day I stood on the Hotel corner wondering if it would be safe for me to cross the street. An unknown man, seeing my hesitation, asked if he could be of any service. I have a well established theory that people like you better if you accept their kindly offers of help, so I clutched his arm and we started over the perilous path. I found it difficult to keep step with my companion's eccentric gait,
and I smelled a strong whiff of alcohol l hang personality tended toward the four points of the compass with my cane forming the center of gravity, we made our goal/goal goal I thanked and he seemed very proud of himself for being so much a thoughtful gentleman. He said in a blurry voice--"It was nothing at all, Madam, I had a mother once!
In youth we think that our legs are identical with ourselves, and have the
same interests that we have. But we discover later that they are faithless companions who have been accidently yoked with us. These legs are likely, in old age, to betray us with less mercy than we would have received at the hands of heartless traitors!
128.
Another influence that postpones suiting my reasoning to my stage of life stems from the circumstance that I live in a town rather than a city, and too, in a small place that has always been my home. Some of the children of my early companions are here and naturally keep up the associations that their parents had. You will find, if you live long enough, that these inherited ties delay your Late Autumnal candle-light.
Every morning when I wake I can almost taste the delight I feel that I can once more see the beauty of a new day. How wonderful it would be if those still young could appreciate the happiness of just being alive.
On March First I opened my eyes on a world ethereally beautiful--a fairyland of snow. The softest snow I have ever seen covered every twig of the shrubbery just outside my windows. The loveliness was almost more than one could bear. The sheer beauty made one's heart sing!
But what about the turmoil now in the world? In Late Autumn you feel as if you were up in a balloon where you could still see clearly what was happening on earth beneath. You could even see that two opposing forces would inevitably clash but you could also feel that very little of the worlds calamity could affect you now. We who in our youth demanded cures now resign ourselves to searching for remedies. The Late Autumn is not the time for self-pity or for empty sentiment. Superb conclusions face, you. What must be endured cannot be ignored. The language of Late Autumn is more explicit and final than the tongue of youth. It requires a more positive phrasing. It is more severe.
But if one can speak the language of Late Autumn it is a happier state of mind than to be still hopelessly in love with Spring.
Have-you learned Autumn yet? For I have not. It is of all, the hardest language to learn but I am resolved at length to master it.
I must!
Mary Mills
March 1954
206 North Wood St. Wilmington, OhioMary Mills Interviewed
In 1945, a lady reporter for the Dayton Daily News came to Wilmington College seeking a feature for the Sunday edition. She asked President Watson for the name of a faculty member who could give her material. He sent her to a former teacher,. Mary Mills. The interview follows in part.
President Watson told me that I would recognize her home on Wood St. by its smallness and by a tree in the yard whose branches hung down low enough for children to climb. A sign on the lawn said "Easy Tree Lodge". There was no one at home. An unseen voice from the big house next door offered me information as though it were accustomed to repeating it to visitors.
"She is uptown. She has white hair, a blue lace dress and a cane. She will be sitting in a Dodge coupe parked in the center of town and she will be talking to somebody."
I went to main street and saw a Dodge coupe in which sat a white haired woman in a blue dress. She was talking with a drab looking man who was displaying his samples of soap, ointments and patent medicines. In a high cracked voice he was giving a sales talk about a bottle of Elixer. When he saw that I was waiting to talk to Mary Mills he bowed and withdrew.
She called after him cheerfully, "Goodbye Danny", and motioned for me to sit beside her in the coupe.
"Danny, she said, "delights in picking up new medical words such as "arthritis". A little bit ago I declined to buy a bottle of his patent elixer and he remarked that I suffered from arthritis of the joints of the purse instead of the joints of the knees. Danny is a person who does not ride upon the wings of other people's wit, but soars independently as his fancy leads him."
"Have you had experience in acting?" I asked.
She replied, "On this very street I once had a part in a movie film intended to advertise our town. The movie was taken on Saturday afternoon when main street was crowded with shoppers from the country. In order to give the scene more action the director told me to run down the street and in pursuit would come the whole Wilmington police force. I ran as fast as my tottery old legs would carry me and turned a corner to go to the B & 0 railroad station because this was the traditional path of escape for criminals. The train came in and I made an effort to board it, but the pursuing police seized me. My brother-in-law had been out of town for a week and was just returning on that train. When he saw me being pulled out of the coach by the law, he exclaimed, "Merciful Heavens! What crime has Mary committed this time?"
"I came here to ask your opinions about college teaching and your ideas on methods in the class-room."
"In regard to literature I have two remarkably opposite attitudes. You might call them day-time and night-time attitudes. By day I encourage students to read the English classics, but at night when the shades are drawn I turn to western tales.
"In the daylight there I sit
Amid rare volumes richly bound
A mind of cleverness and wit
From authors everywhere renowned.
At night their words seem flat and stale Their weakness fills me with disgust I take the crude hard-fisted tale Where seven red-skins bite the dust."
"You have never married?" I asked.
"That is a great surprise and regret to me. I was intended to have a devoted husband and fine children. I have not despaired about the husband yet, but my expectation of children is weakening. Being an old maid is like death by freezing in a snowdrift. It is a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle."
I made ready to go and I asked her if there were any facts of her life or any biographical details that. I might put down.
She said, "If you write anything, say that I am seventy-four years of age. People often do not like to hear their age mentioned and employ their later years in suppressing references to it. As a postponement this is remarkably ineffective. Growing old does not seem so bad when you consider the alternatives."
Burritt Mills HIATT
See also the Journal of Burritt Hiatt, his writings and story of Internment, WWII. September 28, 2005, I just purchased from a lady over the Internet a set of pictures that, to my utter surprise, was of Burritt Hiatt and his brother, Harold. The pictures are from the early 1890's, most are of the two of them playing together and of their house, address. W. Main St., Wilmington, OH 45177 1890-1891.
There are a couple of pictures with their pony, Prince. There is a special picture of Burritt and Phoebe Hudson, by Stephens Studio, Wilmington, OH, a picture that appears as Harold and Phoebe as perhaps like a ring bearer? Dressed very nicely. On the back it says: Harrold Hiatt & Phoebe Hudsen, they annointed the Water for Ruth Esther Brann & Bud Thompson's wedding.
Harolds suit white, Phoebe Bright ?Hue with a tiny pink rose had mother Hiatt made Phoebes dress. There is another picture of Edwin James Hiatt, 6/22/1913 taken at Grand Canyon, CO. Looks like a group on mules going along the Bright Angle Trail, elevation on sign says 6866 June 22, 1913 , photo by Kolob Brothers.
Burritt Mills Hiatt was born 23 May 1887, to Edwin J. and Harriet Charity Mills Hiatt. Formerly a member of the faculty of Wilmington College, he lived in Wilmington, Ohio. His account of the experiences of James M. Haworth as an Indian agent is based largely on unpublished letters in private hands. It provides a corrective to certain misrepresentations of Agent Haworth found in Wilbur S. Nye’s Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill (Norman, Oklahoma, 1937). Further references to James M. Haworth’s work among the Indians will be found in Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (Philadelphia, 1899) and in Thomas C. Battey, The Life and Adventures of a Quaker among the Indians (Boston, 1875).
Burritt Mills Hiatt died 11 Nov 1971, in Fayette, Ohio.
Burritt Hiatt writings
May 2, 1893. Today was my sixth birthday. It showered in the morning, but as soon as it cleared up my grandfather led out a spotted Shetland pony. He was full of anticipation of my pleasure because a pony was one of the things that he had been denied as a boy.
I was placed in the saddle and my grandfather turned the pony's head loose. I was not strong enough to hold the pony, especially when he trotted and bounced me around. Consequently, I slid off into a fresh mud puddle.
We called the pony Prince. He was smarter for his age than I was and it was some years before I caught up with him.
Our camp on the river was not far from Fort Ancient. Near there was a road going up the hill and it was used to test the climbing abilities of automobiles. Several manufacturers vied with each other in hill-climbing and the Cincinnati Automobile club conducted a hill-climbing contest annually at Fort Ancient.
The attraction of the contest was sufficient to induce the other campers to go see it. They left Pearl and me at the camp---alone from about ten in the morning to late afternoon. Why the chaperones would do this I cannot explain.
Pearl got lunch which we ate together. Then when the dishes were washed she sat in the hammock while I sat on the river bank looking at the stream. Suddenly, I asked her to marry me.
Friday, December 29, 1911. This is our first wedding anniversary and we have a son in the house, twenty days old. As an anniversary present I gave Pearl a copper chafing dish. She had always wanted one in college to use for cooking in her room. Now she has more use for one than ever with a baby on her hands.
Sunday, December 31, 1911. This is our first New Years Eve and tomorrow is a holiday. By some coincidence all the other holidays of the year seem to have fallen on weekends so that it did not shorten the days of teaching. Even Edwin was born on a Saturday night so that I was at school bright and early on Monday morning.
It snowed last night and then rained all day so that outside it has been dreary, but inside everything has been cozy. Edwin has observed his schedule with great regularity and has not cried. This evening I poured alcohol into the chafing dish and tried my hand at cocking.
The main events of the year have, of course, been establishing a home and the birth of a son. The most serious time was during Pearl's illness in May, June and July when she had no appetite and got so thin and weak that some worried about what the outcome might be.
June 12, 1915. On account of the heat of the sick-room and also perhaps on account of his fever, Harold said that he would like the taste of the water from Leonard's spring. His requests had been so few that we immediately drove in the Cadillac to the bridge over Todd's Fork near Center Church. From there it was necessary to walk across two fields carrying the jug. The path descends by a sudden drop into a narrow ravine where a little spring flows out of some limestone and falls into a pool in strata of blue clay which gives the water a light sparkling appearance. While the thin stream was trickling into the jug, I looked
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up at the huge sugar tree which overhangs the spring with its somber foliage. There was a wind which made a roar in the tree and caused it to sway slightly. Through the branches I could see the clouds coursing rapidly past in hurrying masses, and I thought how soothing this cool, wild ravine would have been to my brother who had often come here as a boy and who now thirsted again for a drink of this water.
The lady about whom I write I have seen with my own eyes although she was ninety years of age and I was very young. Her name was Esther Cadwallader and she was born near Lynchburg, Virginia on January 25, 1800. At that time Lynchburg was a town of 500 citizens on the James River. Fifty years before Esther was born a little group of settlers had come to this neighborhood. At first they came in small groups, but eventually a wave of Friends came. They were called the South River Quakers because their log meeting house lay south of the James River. Their log meeting house was built in 1757. A stone meeting house was built in 1798.
The trek of the Quakers from the South River Meeting to Ohio began about 1800, the year of Esther Cadwallader birth. Her older brother, Jabez, left for Ohio in 1813. Some felt that they could no longer live in peace with their conscience in a community that was becoming ecomonically more and more dependent upon slavery. In addition, there is a record of some young men of the family being fined for not joining the militia. In the record of South River Meeting for 1811-1813 Esther's brother, Mahlon, had cash detained by William Robinson, Deputy Sheriff, for muster fines.
The Cadwallader family had originated near Philadelphia. The grandfather, Moses, had lived in Chester Go., Penna. where in 1756 he married Elizabeth Malin. Their fourth child, Thomas, had come to south River, Va. where in 1786 he married Jane Daniel, daughter of William and Esther Daniel of London Co., Va. It was this couple that started their wagon journey to Ohio in September 1816.
Thomas Cadwallader, Jr. and his wife, Jane, on August 10, 1816 requested a letter of removal to Ohio for themselves and their children. This request was granted on September 14, 1816 for their removal to Miami Monthly Meeting at Waynesville, Ohio. The four younger children were Esther, Abner, Joseph and David. The five older children were Elizabeth, who married Enoch Lewis in
Va. Mahlon applied for a certificate to Ohio in May 1809. Jonah went to Ohio earlier. Israel died at the age of thirteen in 1800. Thomas, Jr. was not given a certificate from the meeting because of some infraction of discipline.
The trip to the west began in time for the nuts in the woods to be ripe and Esther Cadwallader spoke of gathering nuts on the way. They traveled the path called the Wilderness Road and seldom came across a house more pretentious than a log cabin thatched with straw. In October they passed through Kentucky. When they got to the Ohio River they saw on the opposite side a few primitive buildings which were Cincinnati. They crossed on a flatboat ferry and went to Waynesville.
Esther's father, Thomas Cadwallader, chose some land overlooking the Little Miami River a few miles upstream from Morrow in Warren County. It was close to a settlement called Rochester. On the 17th of Oct. 1816 James and Mahlon Roach sold an acre of land in Rochester to the Society of Friends for a meeting house.
The two older daughters of Thomas Cadwallader did not wait for the new meeting house to be completed. They both got married in the Waynesville Meeting on December 4, 1817. The older girl, Naomi, married Elijah Thomas. The younger daughter, Esther, married James Hollingsworth.
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In 1829 at the time of the division in the Society of Friends, Esther Cadwallader Hollingsworth was disowned by Miami Monthly Meeting on account of her sympathy with Elias Hicks. At the same time her husband, James, her brother, Joseph and her mother, Rachel were disowned for the same reason.
After this disownment, there is no record of Esther in the minutes except for the birth of her ten children from 1820 to 1846. Her third child, Jane, was born August 5, 1826. At the age of 21, Jane was married at the Hopewell Meeting to Clarkson Hiatt of Martinsville, Ohio, aged 22 on march 4, 1845. When Jane was forty, her seventh child and fifth son, Edwin J. Hiatt was born. Edwin was married to Harriet C. Mills in 1886,
My own memories of my great grandmother, Esther, are of her Quaker garb, her quick movements and her insistence on helping with the household work. When I was young she had a constant desire to feed me scraped apple. I took the treatment with pleasure.
TO EUROPE ON A CATTLE BOAT Dated 1908
I arrived at Ballerns' Shipping Agency on Commercial Street, Boston at eight in the morning. About fifty men were standing about the place. Most of those in the waiting group wore velveteens and red handkerchiefs. They spoke in a foreign tongue and carried their worldly goods in bags swung over their shoulders.
Among these applicants were two Englishmen, one Very tail and one very short. The stubby one managed to jostle against me and apologized. Then he beckened to his partner who joined us and they talked about the necessity of our sticking together during the voyage. A signal was given for the crowd to move to the dock. The foreigners shouldered their bags and the two Englishmen kept close to me, repeating that we should all stand together.
The question of whether I should try to work my way to Liverpool on the cattle boat was more complicated than 1 had thought it would be. I had come from Ohio with the expectation of hunting up my Uncle Charlie in Liverpool. A cousin of ours in Scotland had written my mother that he had seen Uncle Charlie in a pawn shop in Liverpool. Uncle Charlie had not recognized him and the cousin had not wished to renew aquaintance with such a black sheep of the family. My mother wished to recover from Uncle Charlie some family heirlooms. She particularly wanted one volume of a diary kept by their mother about the life in the village of Moorehouse, Scotland. At my grandmother's death one volume of the diary had been given to my mother, one to my uncle Charlie and one to my aunt Anne who had died and left her volume to a Scottish historical society. My mother had received an offer from the historical society for the other two volumes of the diary that would complete the set.
From my home in a small town in Ohio it looked feasible to go to Liverpool and find Uncle Charlie, but 'in Boston the crowds in the shipping office were much larger than I had expected. In Liverpool the crowds might be even greater and I would be looking for a needle in a hay stack.
I decided to ask my two newly-found English acquaintances about the chances of success. I showed them the picture of Uncle Charlie that my mother had given me. They both looked at it and shook their heads. They did not recognize him.
"Do you think that I could ever find him in Liverpool?", I asked.
"Well, said the short one, "I bet we three together could find him. You ask the shipping agent to let us go along with you and we will locate your uncle Charlie."
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No sooner was this said than Ballern entered the shop. The men raised their voices and stampeded toward him beseeching him for passage abroad. Ballern was deaf to all their entreaties and motioned for the crowd to follow him to the docks. There we got on a ferry boat. Our ferry stopped at the dock of the Leyland Line. We went into a big building where drays were hauling supplies to the boats, We were herded into the inspector's office.
When my turn came, the official took my name, weight, color of eyes, color of hair and warned me that I would be compelled to stand hard work. He gave me a red ticket and pointed out a place for me to wait. After the inspector had finished his examination of the men he opened the office door and called out the names of the candidates elected. Only four men were chosen out of the fifty that Ballern had sent over in our group. I was one of them.
As I started up the gangplank someone twitched my arm. It was the shorter one of the Englishmen who had been so friendly in Ballern's office. He said that agent didn't treat them fairly. His chum, the tall one, had tears in his eyes and said that he and his chum would join me in Liverpool by the boat next week and that they would help me find my uncle.
I hurried onto the boat and climbed the stairs until I reached a passage leading to the second cabin. An official in a blue coat ordered me out of the galley and to the forecastle. It seemed that this steamship, The Canadian, carried two extremes of people with no intermediate group. All of the passengers were first class. At the other end of the scale, all the cattlemen were supposed to keep out of sight. According to the officer's instructions, I went down to the forecastle where the cattlemen were required to stay. It was a dark little cubby-hole in the prow of the ship with narrow bunks one on top of the other. The forecastle had a musty smell. Some of the cattlemen who had already taken possession there did not look as if they could be trusted with baggage lying about. I changed into my work clothes and left my bags with a member of the crew, a lamp-timer by title, who looked reliable.
The cattle in the ship were all tied by the head to heavy planks fastened between the braces of the ship. Thus they stood in even rows with their heads out. There were three decks of cattle and I was told that there were 1117 total on board.
At nine in the morning our ship cast off from the dock. At noon we were issued our eating equipment. This consisted of a tin pan, tin cup, knife, fork, and spoon. There was no table for cattlemen. We were divided into groups of four, One from each group was delegated to go to the galley and get the dishpan full of food for all of his group. When he came back, the quartet sat down any place and dipped into the pan. The pan held some meat, potatoes and vegetables floating in a thin gravy. In my excitement I had eaten no breakfast that morning and very little supper the night before. Yet in spite of my hunger I couldn't eat for the food had a greasy taste about it that made it unpalatable.
At three we were called together for our first work. Our job was to get some bales of hay up from the hold with a winch and then scatter the hay to the cattle in the section assigned to us. After haying we fed shelled corn to the cattle. We were finished with our work by seven.
After supper they issued blankets to us and a sack of straw apiece. I went down into the open hatch where the hay was kept to look for a place to sleep. It was sepulchral down there in the dark passageway. There was also the same smell of cheap disinfectant that filled the forecastle. I came up on the deck where the cattle were tethered. Near an opening was an empty stall which I decided was to be my bed.
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One day at noon I peeped behind some bales of hay and saw Freddie eating plum duff out of a tin. I had eaten only a little skouse for four days and was weak from hunger. The sight of the plum duff started a pang in my stomach, Freddie saw me and attempted to hide the empty tin can behind him.
"Where did you get it?" I asked him.
"From the second cook," he replied.
"How do you get to the second cook?" I demanded excitedly.
"There is an iron stairway that goes up around the smokestack, he whispered.
I climbed up the stair until I was opposite a little door that I calculated
led to a passageway and immediately recognized the delicious smell of food in the air. When I stepped into the passageway a loud voice commanded, "Get down there:" A red-faced officer in a blue uniform pointed to a sign and cried, "Don't you see that sign?" The sign said that "Cattlemen are not allowed on this deck."
The aroma of food had increased the gnawing in my stomach and nude me try another door one deck below the first. This led into a deserted passageway with three doors on each side. I tried each brass knob carefully, but found all of them locked except the last one. Within this door was a long room with a stove at the end. A hunch-backed cook, head adorned by a white cap, was dancing about in front of the stove. To me he paid no attention. I was not eager to see him for the second cook was the one that Freddie had dealt with. I stepped into the room and asked the little cook for something to eat.
"Too busy," he snapped without turning around to look. "See the second cook."
I looked around and saw a red-headed boy sitting in the pantry peeling potatoes. I asked him if he was the second cook and he pointed his knife to a little room in the rear. I went in and found a short man leaning against a block on which there were two big fish.
"Can I get something to eat?" I begged.
"Got a bob or two?" he said.
I gave him a quarter and whispered, "Plum duff."
He went to a stone jar, ladled a big spoonfull of plum duff into a tin cup
and gave it to me. "Now skip," he ordered. "The second steward might come in."
The next morning after work I slipped into the parts of the vessel forbidden to cattlemen to seek out the second cook again. I put a quarter in his pocket. He winked and asked me to wait awhile. I sat down with the galley boy and peeled some potatoes. Presently, the second cook looked over me into the passage and then handed me some cold chicken.' I Ate this and immediately felt better. This stable source of food made me feel the problem of survival was solved.
The ocean tossed more and more the next morning. The cattle stood with feet wide apart bracing themselves against the swinging of the ship. Down the aisle a steer lost his foothold on the slippery floor and went down on his. side. There he lay and kicked until he had knocked the pins from under his two neighbors. For an instant the floor seemed only a confusion of hoofs and horns, but in another moment the steers had all scrambled to their feet and stood with heaving sides and lolling tongues.
In addition to my regular work of feeding I was put on duty as a day watchman. I would walk through all of the cattle aisles every half hour and see that none of the cattle had broken their halters or tangled their feet in the tie ropes.
A little before four one morning, just as I was preparing to get up, I heard a gull crying on the mast above the boat. The cattle seemed to be in a different mood. They would paw the decks and grumble deep in their chests. someone said
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that it was a sign we were approaching
Toward noon the fog lifted. By eight we got our first glimpse of England. There were three electric lights in a tall tower at a beach resort near Liverpool. We could see a merry-go-round as it turned. A little later on the sky overhead was a glow that must have been the lights of Liverpool.
We couldn't watch for long because we were ordered to go below and make the steers ready for unloading. We had to spread ashes on the passageways so that the cattle would not slip. We untied the hard knots on each halter and left the ropes so that they could be easily loosened. Then we worked on the partitions between the cattle sections so that we could lift them easily and quickly.
At midnight we were still working. The tide was in so that the tug boats could push the Canadian slowly up to the docks. We looked over the edge of the ship and watched her being tied up. When the ship was made fast a huge chute was hoisted to the cattle deck for the unloading of cattle.
It was a weird place of sights and sounds. All through the night there was the bawling of cattle. The restless steers were aware that some movement was taking place. Some of the steers lost their balance in the chute and rolled along the dock.
At two in the morning the last steer was off the boat and the last bale unloaded. We were all ordered to get back aboard the ship. The gang planks were lifted, the ropes cast off and we drifted into the middle of the basin. Here the boat stayed motionless like a dozing duck.
I went back to the cattle stall where I had been sleeping, but I could' not spend the remainder of the night there because all of the hay and straw was gone. Finally, I found a place in a coil of rope. The ropes became visible against the lightening sky like spider webs, a net-work of ratlines and crisscross lines against the dawn. I sat up and could see the grey buildings of Liverpool in the distance.
At eight in the morning the good ship Canadian was tugged over to the passenger dock and we went ashore.
June 11, 1931.
Dear Mother:
To pass away the time I have been turning my thoughts to a delightful kind of mental deep-sea fishing. It is interesting to look down into the unplumbed depths and see shadowy forms there. It gives you the feeling that every impression you have received since earliest infancy lies in the deep places if you could only bring it up into your consciousness. I see occasional flashes of shining fish on the bottom of my memory and I enjoy bringing these submerged fragments of the past to the surface and presenting then.
A scene comes in my mind now that took place years ago in our sitting room on Wood Street. We were sitting by the fireplace and some company was there. Father said that he would read us something. From the bookcase he drew a red book with black title patch on the back - "Mathew Arnold's Poems".
He read: "I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts for fear that if revealed,"
I was outwardly calm, but deeply excited. I felt a heightened pulse and deeper breathing. I felt I could enter with more sympathy into people's lives and understand their feelings better.
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"There rises an unspeakable desire" he continued.
The whole adventure of mankind on the earth gained in dignity and living became a grander affair.
"The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes,'
I had the sense of being in the presence of powerful possibilities. The doors of delight were beginning to open in front of me and some new knowledge seemed to be approaching. I felt that some new enlightenment still unreceived was on its way to me. Before it came and all too soon the poem ended. There was some silence and then a discussion about the poem which I do riot remember because I was slowly settling to earth. Parents who have guests that can be entertained in this way leave a valuable inheritance to children.
The sportsman who is temporarily away from his regular occupation sees
nature from an appreciative angle. His interest is in initmate association with nature.
Especially is this true of the fisherman. To him the brook and the river are more than the home of the trout and the bass. They are the vestibules through which he returns to nature itself. He likes to watch the quiet eddies of the pool in half reverie as the water beetles and surface bubbles go round in little whirls. He becomes very observant of small things. Away from the more violent noises of cities he learns to step his hearing down so that in the quiet the buzzing of an insect or the failing of the ripple of the water once more gets full attention. The trees under which he finds his way are something to be studied in reference to the casting of his line. Away from occupations and automobiles he settles down to fellowship with nature.
One who has once entered the deep woods can never forget the sense of loneliness, yet of companionship, which it gives. Here is no noise of the streets, but the murmur of the wind high above the tree tops. Adventuring into the wilds of nature has its effect upon the human spirit. One feels it as the darkness falls even if you are by a fire. There is an immediate presence of mystery. The stars, which one can rarely see from the city streets, seem clearer, It is the world men knew before labor and commerce and manufacturing had made nature the bond-servant of human needs.
In this experience we become aware of a reality which is rich and deep and which seems to stand behind nature. It is not anything we see. It is not anything in fancy. It is something profound and fundamental. Through nature we become aware of this background of reality. It gives you a feeling of awe, a sense of the immeasurable, an all-sustaining working.
To his mother, November 1931:
The only time I was in the Canadian woods .L enjoyed, more than anything else, a long walk I took alone in the forest. I followed a log trail, but the road had not been used for so long that the trees had fallen across it and underbrush grown up in it. Still it could be distinctly seen between the high trees on either side.
The only moving creatures I saw were the tiny birds---little warblers and fly-catchers that crawl about in the high trees, sometimes head downward. They live upstairs and never pay any attention to the first floor tenants anyway, whether man or beast.
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The wind swept through the tops of the trees with an unearthy moan. In a brush pile I hear a rustle and finally see a small weasel. With his nose to the ground he is making nervous leaps through the brush, evidently tracking some bird. To me he pays no attention and I let him pass on.
Taking cautious steps in the soft pine needles I walk forward. I peer to the right and see the glitter of water in a small pond barely visible under the limbs of the trees. A startled partridge rises from near my feet and I am more frightened than he is.
Further on I see over my head some tender limbs of a birch tree that have been broken off and partly eaten by moose. In an opening of the road are some blueberry bushes and unmistakeable bear tracks among them. The trees again become tall on each side, so tall that the sound of the wind is dimmed, and the silence of the deep lonesome forest is more appalling than the wind.
The old log lumber camp is now in view, the roof fallen in. I enter the open doors and find deer tracks on the dirt floors. Near the camp runs a little stream that empties into a swamp. On the water in the distance are two black ducks. The dusk is descending and I start the backward journey. It has been an experience of value because it gives a fresh impression of the beauty, terror and pitilessness of nature, the solemnity of her power. I wish that I could again walk in a woods big enough to give me that feeling of caution and fear.
INTERCOLLEGIATE FOOTBALL November 9, 1901
As a boy of fourteen I accompanied the Wilmington College football team to Yellow Springs to play Antioch College. On account of the distance of twenty-six miles it was necessary to start at daylight. There were fourteen men in the hack. The football clothes and balls were stowed under the two benches that ran down the sides of the hack. In order that the players could sit comfortably, I rode standing on the back step.
We arrived at Yellow Springs at two in the afternoon. The players changed clothes in one of the classrooms. The playing field was simply a section of the campus which was not even smooth. There was no grandstand and the speculators wandered over the field at will.
As the game progressed it became evident that the Antioch players were more experienced than our men. They could hardly have been less experienced because several of our players had never been in a game before. Some of them had never even seen a game played. During the first half, Antioch scored two touchdowns principally by teamwork. Some of the individual play of our men was superior. Our left end sprained his ankle on the rough ground. There was no substitute. He continued to play hopping around on one leg. There was no coach to take out a player who was hurt. Between halves the players took off his shoe and could find no broken bones so he went back into the game.
The second half was a repitition of the first with Antioch making two touchdowns. The final score was Antioch 23, Wilmington O. After the game there were no showers. Nothing could be done for the bruises and the strains of the players.
Ahead of us was a drive of seven or eight hours. Darkness soon descended. There was a gleam once in a while of a coal oil lamp in a farmhouse along the road, but otherwise everything was dark. The iron tires of the wheels grated on the gravel road. We could tell when we were going up hill or down, but we could see nothing. The time was passed by songs and stories. Toward the end
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of the journey some of the boys slept. We arrived in Wilmington about midnight. Some of the boys had to drive horses home six or seven miles from Wilmington after that.
BABY RIGHT
One frosty fall evening in October 1905 when I was nineteen, my father drove into the yard with a mare he had bought unexpectedly at a sale. The snowflakes clung to her hair which was long and not in good condition. The name of the horse was Baby Right which was a registered name and she had a pedigree.
I was familiar with some of the history of Baby Right. She had finished second in the "B" class trotting race at the local fair ground matinee. She had been raced through town on the snow by her owner. Baby Right had cooled off too quickly and had never recovered her speed.
We put her into a box stall in our barn and fed her the best oats and hay. Each day I would curry her. Her coat turned smoother as she gained weight.
She became a favorite buggy horse. There was a rivalry between me and my brother, Harold, about who should use her on Sunday. One Sunday I had curried Baby Right before I went to church so that I could hitch her up when I got home. In the meantime, Harold had decided to use her and had her partly hitched to the buggy when I came into the yard. Neither of our parents were home to umpire the dispute between us. Only Verne Roberts, a college student, was there. Harold and I had loud words. Then it came to blows and finally we were on the ground wrestling. We became more and more savage and enraged. Finally, Verne separated us. Before we got cleaned up our parents came home from church. my father unhitched Baby Right and put her back in her stall. We never had another disagreement about: which one of us should drive the horse.
I bought a volume of horse registrations and traced the pedigree of Baby Right. Her ancestry contained a few horses of distinction. I thought she might become the mother of a horse of distinction. We subscribed to a horse paper that contained advertisement of stallions. The fee of the young tried sires was smaller than the fee of the stallions whose colts had brought them reputation. I
selected a young seven-year-old stallion named Todd who was stationed at Lexington, Kentucky.
I asked my father's consent to take Baby Right to Lexington and he gave me permissions. On the first of June 1906, I ordered a boxcar set on the railroad tracks. That evening Baby Right and I, housed in a boxcar, were waiting on B&O switch for the engine to pick us up. I had built a stall for Baby Right in one end of the car and in the other end had arranged my lantern, lunch, buckets of water, bales of hay and sacks of feed. It was dark before the engine came and when it hit our car, it did so with an unexpected violence. The instant that the train hit our car everything went black on account of the lantern upsetting. Not only was the feed and water upset, but Baby Right was jolted right through her stall and mixed up with the debris in the other end of the car. I spoke to her as calmly as I could and put out my hand toward her. Lucky, I touched her shoulder. Soon her quivering and stamping quieted and I led her in the darkness to the other end of the car. when I had tied her there I lit the lantern and straightened the things up, but the water was all gone.
On account of the heat of the evening I rode with the doors of the boxcar half-way open. About midnight of the next day we were marooned in the freight yards at Paris, Kentucky. I looked out into the darkness and saw a row of large
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tobacco warehouses. I took a bucket and climbed the fence to search for water. At the corner of one warehouse was a wooden barrel. When I stuck my hand in it I felt water about half-way down. I did not know whether it was stale and full of wiggle-tails or not. I carried a bucket of this water to Baby Right. She drank it eagerly. I went back and carried another bucket full to her.
The next morning at Lexington, our boxcar was placed beside an unloading platform used especially for horses. I left Baby Right munching grass contentedly in a bluegrass pasture about three miles from Lexington.
I went back to town to get some sleep. A telephone message from the owner of the farm awakened me. He said that Baby Right, being a stranger among the other horses, had tried to win her place by fighting and had been dangerously kicked. He suggested that I call a veterinary and see her at once. One of the famous horse doctors of Lexington took me with him out to the farm. We found that a sharp hoof had laid out a long gash on her hip. The doctor said that all he could do was to treat it with disinfectant. Then he drove me back to town.
I returned to Wilmington on the train after making arrangements. for Baby Right to board for a year at the Hickory wood Farm. Each month we would receive .a bill for the pasturage and a statement about the health of the mare. On the fifteenth of June in 1907, we received a letter that said she had foaled a male colt and that both were doing well.
In two weeks .L had a chance to go to Lexington and stopped late at night at the Reed Hotel which is near the race track. At two in the morning I was wide awake and the hotel was hot. I decided to walk to the race track and try to get some sleep on the grass. There was a welcome breeze across the grass. Towards daybreak the trees began to loom up out of the darkness and there was a twitter of birds especially meadowlarks. I dozed off and awoke refreshed and hungry. I walked back to the Reed Hotel for my breakfast.
I took a traction car out to Hickory Wood Farm, which was larger than I expected. It contained four hundred acres and had three pastures of brood mares. The house was far back from the road. When I knocked on the door I learned that the proprietor was in town and would not be at home for several hours. I thought that I could recognize Baby Right by myself and I climbed the gate into the field.
The first mare that I saw looked something like Baby Right, but her neck was too thick, her fore-top was too long and her thighs too muscular. She did not permit other horses to approach her colt which was lying on the ground asleep. This jealousy would not be characteristic of Baby Right. In the next pasture I looked at all of the mares without finding her. Then I went to the barn where I asked the help of the colored hostler. He walked with me through a big woods where there were thirty brood mares. Then we went through two additional pastures without finding our mare. I returned to the first pasture to examine more closely the mare I thought looked like Baby Right. On her hip I discovered the scar of the kick she had got when 1 brought her to Kentucky.
I looked at the colt. Before I knew it was her colt I had thought that he was a pretty good prospect, but at that time he was lying down. Now he got up and stretched like a hound dog. The shoulders and fore-legs were high and set on straight with a thick fore-arm. The back was short and round-ribbed. I chased him a little in the field to get some idea of his gait. When he walked rapidly he seemed on the point of breaking into a pace, pressed faster he breaks into a trot. I was satisfied with his movement. He seemed large and well-developed for a colt only two weeks of age.
I returned to Wilmington and reported what I had seen. The family decided to leave Baby Right at the Hickory Wood Farm another year. We had talked and speculated about the colt. When he was weaned in the fall it became necessary to
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choose a name for him. We decided to name the colt Leavitt Todd.
The colt wintered well and the next spring we decided to have him trained by an expert in training colts. My father had a telegram from him saying that he had a prospective buyer for the colt.
My father went down to Lexington to see Leavitt Todd trot a short trial. The colt was only a yearling and had been in training only a few weeks. Therefore the trainer did not push him hard except in the last quarter of the mile which he trotted in 35 1/2 seconds. This was good enough to warrent a price of $1,200. My father received a check for this amount from a man in Iowa. Later an offer of $300 came from Iowa for Baby Right and was accepted. Baby Right died suddenly the next year in Iowa.
The reason for selling out our registered horses was that I needed the $1,500 to go to Harvard University in the fall of 1908.
APPALACHIA I
At the age of twenty in July 1907, I arrived in Simpson, Kentucky on a coal-road train. The town of Simpson consisted of one house, one railroad station and a side-track. I went to the house and met a boy who told me that Cash's Mill lay over the hill and pointed out the path.
It was about a mile up a steep grade to. the top of the hill. I rested for a While and looked down into the Morg Valley. As far as I could see the hills were wooded except for little clearings around an occasional cabin along the creek. The path followed a little stream down into the valley. I finally saw the smoke stack of a mill. I found that the workmen had gone for the day. The machinery was not yet in place and there was no roof over the mill.
I inquired of a child about a place to board and was directed down Morg Creek to the house of Reverend Breck Flincham. The cabin perched on a little plateau about twenty feet above the creek. The Flincham house is not hard to describe. It is one storey with two rooms in front and a shed on the back which is used as a kitchen. The roof shingles are thick and irregular and were riveted by hand. The weatherboarding is unpainted. when you go in the plain wooden front door you enter the room to the right. It has one window in which is wavy glass. There are three iron beds in the room, one against each of the walls opposite the door. On account of the house being built on a slope, there is much more space under the front part of the house than under the rear. The pup has carried bones, a piece of an old shoe and other objects under there.
On a bench in front of the house sat three people, a middle-aged man, a young fellow of my age and a half-grown girl. I went up to introduce myself and ask for lodging. Breck Flincham, the middle-aged man was a small, wiry man who seemed to be a kindly, polite person. The young man was Algan Derrickson, who was also a boarder there. He was helping to put up the mill and would be a sawyer. The half-grown girl was Julia Flincham, the orphan niece of Breck. The older man said supper would .be ready in a little while.
A voice from inside the house called us to supper. I followed the others around to a shed that leaned against the back of the house and served as a kitchen and dining room. On a shelf outside the door was a bucket, a dipper, a wash-pan, a soap dish and a flour sack towel. when we had cleaned up we went in and sat in split-bottom chairs around the table.
The ceiling of the kitchen had absorbed smoke and grease for so many years that it was shiny black. The oil-cloth on the table was flecking away. The cups and plates were not of the same size or pattern. In the middle of the table was
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an unlighted coal oil lamp. The mean was green string beans and corn bread. After we ate I was shown to my bed which was in the same room where
Algan slept. The Flinchams slept in the other room. Before Algan went to bed we sat for a while with Breck Flincham on the bench in front of the house.
In the morning I woke before daylight. I could hear through the half-inch partition that Cynthia Flincham was getting up in the other room. She walked into the kitchen and lighted the coal oil lamp. She put some kindling in the stove and started a fire. The coffee was set on the stove. The meat left from last night was reheated and also the green beans.
After breakfast I walked up Morg Creek to the mill with Algan who introduced me to the owner, Tom Cash. I asked him for a job and he assigned me to help with the oxen. The oxen dragged behind them a heavy log chain. My job was to fasten the chain around the logs. The oxen were to drag the logs to the brow of the hill over-looking the mill. There we would unlock the chain and let the logs roll down to the valley below. I had never worked with oxen. I was surprised by their deliberateness and power. They were slow in getting into motion, but when they had started their pressure would cause logs of immense size to move, through the brush to the brow of the hill.
After I had met the people with whom I was to be associated I became aware that I was under close observation. In a sense, I could be regarded as a spy among them. The natives had heard that I was a college student and nineteen years of age. Many of them had not had enough school opportunities to be able to read. They had been cheated by nearly every educated man who had come into their secluded valley. There had been factions and private justice and unreported crimes among them about which they were trained not to speak to outsiders. I did not know what degree of trust they would extend to. me in their closely guarded community life.
he are all dependent on the sawmill for our wages which makes me wonder how the people had any income before the mill was built. They have garden patches near their homes, but there is scant room for crops. It raises the question of the depth of poverty in which these people live. I pay five dollars a week for my room and board at the Flinchams. This gives Cynthia an income of ten dollars a week. I get $1.25 a day. Some of the men at the mill get more. They can get
from p32 to a month which is much more income than they had before.
I was glad that the next day was Sunday because I was tired and stiff from my unaccustomed work with the six oxen. In the morning when Breck invited me to ride with him to the Seven Oaks Meeting I was glad to accept. Our path lay along the creek bed most of the way. The going was rough for miles. Breck would kick his mule and complain that the creek bed was getting stonier every year. The bony back of the mule I was riding took my mind from the wooded hills on both sides of the creek. I asked Breck how much farther it was to Seven Oaks. He thought we would get there before the funeral.
This was the first I had heard of a funeral. It seemed that the two Fletcher boys got killed in a store fight during the winter and were buried without a funeral. The circuit preacher would be coming through this summer and the funeral would be held then. This is the service that we were now going to attend.
In a little while we emerged from the deep valley on a little cape. In the midst of this was a plot of cleared ground surrounded by a fence of rails. On the top rail sat four bearded men in black coats. An old man with a white beard seemed to be the leader. He would put his hands over his ears, look up in the sky and wail in a plaintive sing-song tone. There would be a low response-like mail from the people who knelt around the grave. This continued in rising crescendo until the whole group broke into a hymn. The preacher prayed for the dead
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Then the people began to shake hands and turn the meeting into a social gathering.
After supper, two of the preachers came to the Flincham house to stay for the night. The man with the fuzzy white whiskers was assigned to sleep with me. He observed all the courtesies in going to bed, such as turning his back on anyone who was undressing, but I slept restlessly. Every time he would turn over I had the unreasonable fear that I would inhale some of those silky white whiskers.
The next Sunday Derrickson and I went to the church to hear Breck Flincham preach. The meeting was held in a new building of freshly-sawed boards. The seats were without backs made from the same rough lumber as the walls. The meeting began with a song and a prayer. Then Rev. Flincham began to speak. He was surprisingly eloquent and moving. One pathetic feature of his speaking was that he had been dependent upon his wife who could read. He had memorized, from her reading, passages in the scripture, but this did not detract from the effect of his sermon.
It happened that in my travelling bag was a volume of Shakespeare's plays. One evening Breck asked me some questions about the morality of Shakespeare. He could not read and he• would get the drift only from the pictures. There was an illustration of the clothes basket from the "Merry Wives of Windsor". Also, there was an illustration of Falstaff in a tavern with Dame Qugley on his knee, I did not realize that he had judged the morals of Shakespeare from the steel engravings which illustrated the volume. I never thought what a racy sample of Shakespeare these illustrations were and what an impression they would create on the mind of Breck Flincham.
One evening when I went to the house after work there was a new boy sitting on the bench in front of the house. His name was W. Fred Hargrave. He had come to apply for the job of teaching at the schoolhouse. He stayed at Flincham's for supper and slept in the room with Derrickson and me.
The talk at the supper table indicated that the attendance at school had been very poor. Most of the teachers had been women who were too young to have any authority. There is a habit in the valley of keeping the children home from school for field work or house work. There are always chores for the children to do in regard to crops, firewood or clothing. Some of the children lose between a third and a half of each school year by staying at home to work.
After supper Fred Hargrave sat on a bench in front of the house. We had our usual evening talkfest and cooling out before going to bed. His conversation showed that he was one of the valley people, but with the difference that he had for been in the outside world. He was very diplomatic in his answers to Breck's questions. Flincham took a look at the moon and asked, "Do you teach that the moon goes around the earth or that the earth goes around the moon?" Hargrave approached his answer warily. He stressed the fact that the moon drew after it by the law of gravity the waters of the ocean and this was what made the tides rise and fall on the sea shore. This idea was so far from Flincham's experience that he did not pursue his questioning. After Mr. Flincham had gone in the house I stayed outside with Hargrave. He admitted that the moon moved around the earth, but he did not want to offend Mr. Flincham.
Now that the mill was turning out lumber, Shelby Fletcher and I were moved to working on the road over which the lumber was to be taken to the railroad siding. While shoveling dirt I watched a cabin on a hillside near us. ,It belonged to Chester Young who about my age and worked in the mill. On the porch sat his wife watching us and rocking a baby in her arms. Two small children played in the dirt below the porch. His wife could not have been more than twenty. Her arms were thin. Her eyes were hollow and her cheeks were spotted pink as if she had a fever. Frequently she had a coughing spell. She looked to
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me like a girl who had been trapped into life that would soon make an old woman out of her. Chester Young had some sisters and he talked to me about the fact that I was twenty and not married. I did not make any effort to understand his point.
As Algan Derrickson and I became better acquainted with the conditions in the Flincham home we ceased to call Mrs. Flincham Cynthia, and reduced the name to "Sin" on account of her cruelty to the little Julia, who was a small girl for her age. Her legs were slender and her dress was soiled. Her hair was tangled and dirty. The only affection she received in life was from her pup. Julia seemed to us a very shy, polite girl.
Algan Derrickson and I had been suffering from a form of dysentery for some time. We had the opinion that we caught if from some of the food that Sin Flincham prepared. Derrickson finally came to the opinion that the trouble came from the basswood bowl in which she mixed her corn bread. When she was out of the house he examined the bowl and found old and very big cracks in it. In some of these cracks meal had collected for a long time and had turned green. He washed the bowl, gleaned the cracks and we had no further difficulty after that,
I felt that this enviroment was unjust to a young man who was as capable as Algan Derrickson. He was a sawyer at the mill. Although he was only about twenty, his judgement was sought on all questions connected with the business. I wrote about him to my father in Ohio, who was on the board of Wilmington College. He wrote back and said that he could get a scholarship for Algan. I was going to the same college and urged Derrickson to go back to Ohio with me, but he felt that he could not go to college. He knew all the intricacies of calculating the amount of lumber and all of the intricacies of a steam engine, but he was convinced that he did not have enough general education.
On the last day of August 1907, I carried my suitcase to the top of the
mountain to the railroad station As I passed the cabins some of the people came out and waved to me. The one that I left with the most emotion was Algan Derrickson because he was mature beyond his age and had a good head. If he marries here he will get tied down in this way of life forever.
APPALACHIA II
This is November 10, 1935. I have an opportunity to drive south from Ohio across Kentucky. Twenty-eight years ago as a young man under twenty, I spent a summer in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. I worked for Tom Cash who also came from Ohio and was an acquaintance of my father.
While my wife and I were driving through Winchester and Jackson, Kentucky, I told her of my recollections of my summer in these mountains in 1907. We turned from the main road and wound down the mountains to a place called Kilhurst. There had been a railroad station there 28 years ago, but now the rails had been removed and the station boarded up. While we were parked there a man came up and advised us not to try to drive up the railroad right of way but to drive on the dirt road that ran over the hill.
After several miles we met an old man with long hair. I asked him if he knew Algan Derrickson. He said that he did because Algan's first wife was the widow Hampton who had died. I asked him if Algan had married again. He replied that Algan had married a Sweeny girl. He gave us directions to the Derrickson home. We followed his directions for some miles and then we felt lost. We stopped at a cabin where an old lady instructed us how to go back and turn in at a
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dirt road. We retraced our steps and turned into a hilly field where a road was barely visible. It ran up a creek bed. We followed it with our axle sometimes scraping the stones and at other times sinking into the mud.
At one turn in the road we met two men. One came on. The other ran back. When we got around the cliff we found that he had run back to get a mule team hitched to a wagon of sugar cane. We followed him a little while. Then he found a place where he could pull out of our way. We went up a steep hill then down an equally steep grade. We passed a house where little kids ran away from our automobile. There was a spring-hole with a log in it. I did not see it. I got stuck in the mud.
I walked on down the road and saw far above me on the mountainside a team of mules. I heard voices. I walked on to the house. I saw a shed with four dirty little children playing there. I went to the back porch of the house and a woman came to the door. I told her who I was. She said that she was Mrs. Derrickson and that she had heard Algan talk about me. I told her that our car was stuck in the mud. She said that Algan and the boys were shucking corn up on the mountainside.
I was out of breath when I got up there and saw two mules and a wagon and two boys on the mountain above throwing down corn. Algan looked at me. At first he had thought .L was his brother-in-law. I told him I could not tell him who I was till I got my breath. When I spoke he began to recognize me and seemed glad to see me. He told me that he had a headache today and could hardly see.,
After some talk 1 told him about our car being stuck. He unhitched his mules and sent one of the boys to the house for a log chain. We got down to the car and I introduced my wife. By that time the men with the load of sugar cane had arrived on the other side of the car. The boys brought the chain and they pulled us out. Algan and some of the children that were standing around got into the car and rode down to the house with us. We parked in front of the road so we could get out and went into the house.
By this time Mrs. Derrickson had washed her face, changed her dress and cleaned up some of the children. She is a rather slender woman about forty with a small oval face and a quick smile. Algan is forty-nine and exactly a day and one year older than I am.
There turned out to be ten children, but only nine were there. The oldest girl was with her aunt in town getting a high school education. There were five boys and four girls at home. Two of the smaller ones were twins, a boy and a girl. There was a boy still younger than the twins. They had a little girl about two. She was riot weaned yet on account of it being her second summer. She
ran around with a slip on and that was all.
Pearl remembered that she had some candy in the car. I went out to get it. The children crowded around her. I gave three of the boys dimes. Then a girl about fifteen appeared, who had been in the field helping her father with the corn, but had come down to change her clothes and see us. Her neck was scratched with the corn stalks.
Algan asked about my father and the people at the bank. He said the bank paid him for his work on Tom Cash's estate. I asked about the Flinchams, Breck and Cynthia. They are both dead. Their niece, Julia, married a Gillan and has ten children.
Privately Algan wanted to explain to me why he had not taken advantage of my father's offer to get him started in college. He had been too proud to explain why he had not accepted it at the time. He had his parents to support. Then, too, he had worked hard at too early an age in the sawmill without proper food. This had given him an acid stomach and ruined his health.
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Algan has over 200 acres. He and his wife were anxious to show us the front of the house, the porch, the little orchard and the barn with tobacco in it. The house looked well kept. They urged us several times to stay for supper, but we declined.
Pearl was afraid that it would rain and she dreaded the road out even in the driest of weather. So about three we left.
When I went out to the car I found it full of kids with candy on their fingers. Algan drove them out of the car, but I invited them in and took them on a short ride down to the barnyard where I had to go to turn around. Algan got in to ride out with us and see that nothing happened. The boys followed with the mules. We got carefully over the mud hole where we had stuck before. Algan sent the boys back home with the mules. They must have hurried because we had not gone very far until two boys came running after us to say that their mother wanted them to go to the store to get some flour and sugar. we went back over the ruts, hazards and rocks, down the creek bed and back on the railroad right of way. Here Algan bade us good-bye. I pressed into one of the boy's hands some money to be distributed to the other children.
Before we left Algan told us that they had decided they were about as
content as they could be. In talking about his wife, Algan said, "No use to say that we never had a quick word, but we have very few of them..." It was a rough country and their children would probably have to make their own way, just as their parents had done, but they were giving them what education they could.
(retyped, prepared by Larry Anderson last dtd 23 Jan 2014)
while in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, Philippines
Burritt Hiatt writings
May 2, 1893. Today was my sixth birthday. It showered in the morning, but as soon as it cleared up my grandfather led out a spotted Shetland pony. He was full of anticipation of my pleasure because a pony was one of the things that he had been denied as a boy.
I was placed in the saddle and my grandfather turned the pony's head loose. I was not strong enough to hold the pony, especially when he trotted and bounced me around. Consequently, I slid off into a fresh mud puddle.
We called the pony Prince. He was smarter for his age than I was and it was some years before I caught up with him.
Our camp on the river was not far from Fort Ancient. Near there was a road going up the hill and it was used to test the climbing abilities of automobiles. Several manufacturers vied with each other in hill-climbing and the Cincinnati Automobile club conducted a hill-climbing contest annually at Fort Ancient.
The attraction of the contest was sufficient to induce the other campers to go see it. They left Pearl and me at the camp---alone from about ten in the morning to late afternoon. Why the chaperones would do this I cannot explain.
Pearl got lunch which we ate together. Then when the dishes were washed she sat in the hammock while I sat on the river bank looking at the stream. Suddenly, I asked her to marry me.
Friday, December 29, 1911. This is our first wedding anniversary and we have a son in the house, twenty days old. As an anniversary present I gave Pearl a copper chafing dish. She had always wanted one in college to use for cooking in her room. Now she has more use for one than ever with a baby on her hands.
Sunday, December 31, 1911. This is our first New Years Eve and tomorrow is a holiday. By some coincidence all the other holidays of the year seem to have fallen on weekends so that it did not shorten the days of teaching. Even Edwin was born on a Saturday night so that I was at school bright and early on Monday morning.
It snowed last night and then rained all day so that outside it has been dreary, but inside everything has been cozy. Edwin has observed his schedule with great regularity and has not cried. This evening I poured alcohol into the chafing dish and tried my hand at cocking.
The main events of the year have, of course, been establishing a home and the birth of a son. The most serious time was during Pearl's illness in May, June and July when she had no appetite and got so thin and weak that some worried about what the outcome might be.
June 12, 1915. On account of the heat of the sick-room and also perhaps on account of his fever, Harold said that he would like the taste of the water from Leonard's spring. His requests had been so few that we immediately drove in the Cadillac to the bridge over Todd's Fork near Center Church. From there it was necessary to walk across two fields carrying the jug. The path descends by a sudden drop into a narrow ravine where a little spring flows out of some limestone and falls into a pool in strata of blue clay which gives the water a light sparkling appearance. While the thin stream was trickling into the jug, I looked
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up at the huge sugar tree which overhangs the spring with its somber foliage. There was a wind which made a roar in the tree and caused it to sway slightly. Through the branches I could see the clouds coursing rapidly past in hurrying masses, and I thought how soothing this cool, wild ravine would have been to my brother who had often come here as a boy and who now thirsted again for a drink of this water.
The lady about whom I write I have seen with my own eyes although she was ninety years of age and I was very young. Her name was Esther Cadwallader and she was born near Lynchburg, Virginia on January 25, 1800. At that time Lynchburg was a town of 500 citizens on the James River. Fifty years before Esther was born a little group of settlers had come to this neighborhood. At first they came in small groups, but eventually a wave of Friends came. They were called the South River Quakers because their log meeting house lay south of the James River. Their log meeting house was built in 1757. A stone meeting house was built in 1798.
The trek of the Quakers from the South River Meeting to Ohio began about 1800, the year of Esther Cadwallader birth. Her older brother, Jabez, left for Ohio in 1813. Some felt that they could no longer live in peace with their conscience in a community that was becoming ecomonically more and more dependent upon slavery. In addition, there is a record of some young men of the family being fined for not joining the militia. In the record of South River Meeting for 1811-1813 Esther's brother, Mahlon, had cash detained by William Robinson, Deputy Sheriff, for muster fines.
The Cadwallader family had originated near Philadelphia. The grandfather, Moses, had lived in Chester Go., Penna. where in 1756 he married Elizabeth Malin. Their fourth child, Thomas, had come to south River, Va. where in 1786 he married Jane Daniel, daughter of William and Esther Daniel of London Co., Va. It was this couple that started their wagon journey to Ohio in September 1816.
Thomas Cadwallader, Jr. and his wife, Jane, on August 10, 1816 requested a letter of removal to Ohio for themselves and their children. This request was granted on September 14, 1816 for their removal to Miami Monthly Meeting at Waynesville, Ohio. The four younger children were Esther, Abner, Joseph and David. The five older children were Elizabeth, who married Enoch Lewis in
Va. Mahlon applied for a certificate to Ohio in May 1809. Jonah went to Ohio earlier. Israel died at the age of thirteen in 1800. Thomas, Jr. was not given a certificate from the meeting because of some infraction of discipline.
The trip to the west began in time for the nuts in the woods to be ripe and Esther Cadwallader spoke of gathering nuts on the way. They traveled the path called the Wilderness Road and seldom came across a house more pretentious than a log cabin thatched with straw. In October they passed through Kentucky. When they got to the Ohio River they saw on the opposite side a few primitive buildings which were Cincinnati. They crossed on a flatboat ferry and went to Waynesville.
Esther's father, Thomas Cadwallader, chose some land overlooking the Little Miami River a few miles upstream from Morrow in Warren County. It was close to a settlement called Rochester. On the 17th of Oct. 1816 James and Mahlon Roach sold an acre of land in Rochester to the Society of Friends for a meeting house.
The two older daughters of Thomas Cadwallader did not wait for the new meeting house to be completed. They both got married in the Waynesville Meeting on December 4, 1817. The older girl, Naomi, married Elijah Thomas. The younger daughter, Esther, married James Hollingsworth.
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In 1829 at the time of the division in the Society of Friends, Esther Cadwallader Hollingsworth was disowned by Miami Monthly Meeting on account of her sympathy with Elias Hicks. At the same time her husband, James, her brother, Joseph and her mother, Rachel were disowned for the same reason.
After this disownment, there is no record of Esther in the minutes except for the birth of her ten children from 1820 to 1846. Her third child, Jane, was born August 5, 1826. At the age of 21, Jane was married at the Hopewell Meeting to Clarkson Hiatt of Martinsville, Ohio, aged 22 on march 4, 1845. When Jane was forty, her seventh child and fifth son, Edwin J. Hiatt was born. Edwin was married to Harriet C. Mills in 1886,
My own memories of my great grandmother, Esther, are of her Quaker garb, her quick movements and her insistence on helping with the household work. When I was young she had a constant desire to feed me scraped apple. I took the treatment with pleasure.
TO EUROPE ON A CATTLE BOAT Dated 1908
I arrived at Ballerns' Shipping Agency on Commercial Street, Boston at eight in the morning. About fifty men were standing about the place. Most of those in the waiting group wore velveteens and red handkerchiefs. They spoke in a foreign tongue and carried their worldly goods in bags swung over their shoulders.
Among these applicants were two Englishmen, one Very tail and one very short. The stubby one managed to jostle against me and apologized. Then he beckened to his partner who joined us and they talked about the necessity of our sticking together during the voyage. A signal was given for the crowd to move to the dock. The foreigners shouldered their bags and the two Englishmen kept close to me, repeating that we should all stand together.
The question of whether I should try to work my way to Liverpool on the cattle boat was more complicated than 1 had thought it would be. I had come from Ohio with the expectation of hunting up my Uncle Charlie in Liverpool. A cousin of ours in Scotland had written my mother that he had seen Uncle Charlie in a pawn shop in Liverpool. Uncle Charlie had not recognized him and the cousin had not wished to renew aquaintance with such a black sheep of the family. My mother wished to recover from Uncle Charlie some family heirlooms. She particularly wanted one volume of a diary kept by their mother about the life in the village of Moorehouse, Scotland. At my grandmother's death one volume of the diary had been given to my mother, one to my uncle Charlie and one to my aunt Anne who had died and left her volume to a Scottish historical society. My mother had received an offer from the historical society for the other two volumes of the diary that would complete the set.
From my home in a small town in Ohio it looked feasible to go to Liverpool and find Uncle Charlie, but 'in Boston the crowds in the shipping office were much larger than I had expected. In Liverpool the crowds might be even greater and I would be looking for a needle in a hay stack.
I decided to ask my two newly-found English acquaintances about the chances of success. I showed them the picture of Uncle Charlie that my mother had given me. They both looked at it and shook their heads. They did not recognize him.
"Do you think that I could ever find him in Liverpool?", I asked.
"Well, said the short one, "I bet we three together could find him. You ask the shipping agent to let us go along with you and we will locate your uncle Charlie."
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No sooner was this said than Ballern entered the shop. The men raised their voices and stampeded toward him beseeching him for passage abroad. Ballern was deaf to all their entreaties and motioned for the crowd to follow him to the docks. There we got on a ferry boat. Our ferry stopped at the dock of the Leyland Line. We went into a big building where drays were hauling supplies to the boats, We were herded into the inspector's office.
When my turn came, the official took my name, weight, color of eyes, color of hair and warned me that I would be compelled to stand hard work. He gave me a red ticket and pointed out a place for me to wait. After the inspector had finished his examination of the men he opened the office door and called out the names of the candidates elected. Only four men were chosen out of the fifty that Ballern had sent over in our group. I was one of them.
As I started up the gangplank someone twitched my arm. It was the shorter one of the Englishmen who had been so friendly in Ballern's office. He said that agent didn't treat them fairly. His chum, the tall one, had tears in his eyes and said that he and his chum would join me in Liverpool by the boat next week and that they would help me find my uncle.
I hurried onto the boat and climbed the stairs until I reached a passage leading to the second cabin. An official in a blue coat ordered me out of the galley and to the forecastle. It seemed that this steamship, The Canadian, carried two extremes of people with no intermediate group. All of the passengers were first class. At the other end of the scale, all the cattlemen were supposed to keep out of sight. According to the officer's instructions, I went down to the forecastle where the cattlemen were required to stay. It was a dark little cubby-hole in the prow of the ship with narrow bunks one on top of the other. The forecastle had a musty smell. Some of the cattlemen who had already taken possession there did not look as if they could be trusted with baggage lying about. I changed into my work clothes and left my bags with a member of the crew, a lamp-timer by title, who looked reliable.
The cattle in the ship were all tied by the head to heavy planks fastened between the braces of the ship. Thus they stood in even rows with their heads out. There were three decks of cattle and I was told that there were 1117 total on board.
At nine in the morning our ship cast off from the dock. At noon we were issued our eating equipment. This consisted of a tin pan, tin cup, knife, fork, and spoon. There was no table for cattlemen. We were divided into groups of four, One from each group was delegated to go to the galley and get the dishpan full of food for all of his group. When he came back, the quartet sat down any place and dipped into the pan. The pan held some meat, potatoes and vegetables floating in a thin gravy. In my excitement I had eaten no breakfast that morning and very little supper the night before. Yet in spite of my hunger I couldn't eat for the food had a greasy taste about it that made it unpalatable.
At three we were called together for our first work. Our job was to get some bales of hay up from the hold with a winch and then scatter the hay to the cattle in the section assigned to us. After haying we fed shelled corn to the cattle. We were finished with our work by seven.
After supper they issued blankets to us and a sack of straw apiece. I went down into the open hatch where the hay was kept to look for a place to sleep. It was sepulchral down there in the dark passageway. There was also the same smell of cheap disinfectant that filled the forecastle. I came up on the deck where the cattle were tethered. Near an opening was an empty stall which I decided was to be my bed.
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One day at noon I peeped behind some bales of hay and saw Freddie eating plum duff out of a tin. I had eaten only a little skouse for four days and was weak from hunger. The sight of the plum duff started a pang in my stomach, Freddie saw me and attempted to hide the empty tin can behind him.
"Where did you get it?" I asked him.
"From the second cook," he replied.
"How do you get to the second cook?" I demanded excitedly.
"There is an iron stairway that goes up around the smokestack, he whispered.
I climbed up the stair until I was opposite a little door that I calculated
led to a passageway and immediately recognized the delicious smell of food in the air. When I stepped into the passageway a loud voice commanded, "Get down there:" A red-faced officer in a blue uniform pointed to a sign and cried, "Don't you see that sign?" The sign said that "Cattlemen are not allowed on this deck."
The aroma of food had increased the gnawing in my stomach and nude me try another door one deck below the first. This led into a deserted passageway with three doors on each side. I tried each brass knob carefully, but found all of them locked except the last one. Within this door was a long room with a stove at the end. A hunch-backed cook, head adorned by a white cap, was dancing about in front of the stove. To me he paid no attention. I was not eager to see him for the second cook was the one that Freddie had dealt with. I stepped into the room and asked the little cook for something to eat.
"Too busy," he snapped without turning around to look. "See the second cook."
I looked around and saw a red-headed boy sitting in the pantry peeling potatoes. I asked him if he was the second cook and he pointed his knife to a little room in the rear. I went in and found a short man leaning against a block on which there were two big fish.
"Can I get something to eat?" I begged.
"Got a bob or two?" he said.
I gave him a quarter and whispered, "Plum duff."
He went to a stone jar, ladled a big spoonfull of plum duff into a tin cup
and gave it to me. "Now skip," he ordered. "The second steward might come in."
The next morning after work I slipped into the parts of the vessel forbidden to cattlemen to seek out the second cook again. I put a quarter in his pocket. He winked and asked me to wait awhile. I sat down with the galley boy and peeled some potatoes. Presently, the second cook looked over me into the passage and then handed me some cold chicken.' I Ate this and immediately felt better. This stable source of food made me feel the problem of survival was solved.
The ocean tossed more and more the next morning. The cattle stood with feet wide apart bracing themselves against the swinging of the ship. Down the aisle a steer lost his foothold on the slippery floor and went down on his. side. There he lay and kicked until he had knocked the pins from under his two neighbors. For an instant the floor seemed only a confusion of hoofs and horns, but in another moment the steers had all scrambled to their feet and stood with heaving sides and lolling tongues.
In addition to my regular work of feeding I was put on duty as a day watchman. I would walk through all of the cattle aisles every half hour and see that none of the cattle had broken their halters or tangled their feet in the tie ropes.
A little before four one morning, just as I was preparing to get up, I heard a gull crying on the mast above the boat. The cattle seemed to be in a different mood. They would paw the decks and grumble deep in their chests. someone said
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that it was a sign we were approaching
Toward noon the fog lifted. By eight we got our first glimpse of England. There were three electric lights in a tall tower at a beach resort near Liverpool. We could see a merry-go-round as it turned. A little later on the sky overhead was a glow that must have been the lights of Liverpool.
We couldn't watch for long because we were ordered to go below and make the steers ready for unloading. We had to spread ashes on the passageways so that the cattle would not slip. We untied the hard knots on each halter and left the ropes so that they could be easily loosened. Then we worked on the partitions between the cattle sections so that we could lift them easily and quickly.
At midnight we were still working. The tide was in so that the tug boats could push the Canadian slowly up to the docks. We looked over the edge of the ship and watched her being tied up. When the ship was made fast a huge chute was hoisted to the cattle deck for the unloading of cattle.
It was a weird place of sights and sounds. All through the night there was the bawling of cattle. The restless steers were aware that some movement was taking place. Some of the steers lost their balance in the chute and rolled along the dock.
At two in the morning the last steer was off the boat and the last bale unloaded. We were all ordered to get back aboard the ship. The gang planks were lifted, the ropes cast off and we drifted into the middle of the basin. Here the boat stayed motionless like a dozing duck.
I went back to the cattle stall where I had been sleeping, but I could' not spend the remainder of the night there because all of the hay and straw was gone. Finally, I found a place in a coil of rope. The ropes became visible against the lightening sky like spider webs, a net-work of ratlines and crisscross lines against the dawn. I sat up and could see the grey buildings of Liverpool in the distance.
At eight in the morning the good ship Canadian was tugged over to the passenger dock and we went ashore.
June 11, 1931.
Dear Mother:
To pass away the time I have been turning my thoughts to a delightful kind of mental deep-sea fishing. It is interesting to look down into the unplumbed depths and see shadowy forms there. It gives you the feeling that every impression you have received since earliest infancy lies in the deep places if you could only bring it up into your consciousness. I see occasional flashes of shining fish on the bottom of my memory and I enjoy bringing these submerged fragments of the past to the surface and presenting then.
A scene comes in my mind now that took place years ago in our sitting room on Wood Street. We were sitting by the fireplace and some company was there. Father said that he would read us something. From the bookcase he drew a red book with black title patch on the back - "Mathew Arnold's Poems".
He read: "I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts for fear that if revealed,"
I was outwardly calm, but deeply excited. I felt a heightened pulse and deeper breathing. I felt I could enter with more sympathy into people's lives and understand their feelings better.
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"There rises an unspeakable desire" he continued.
The whole adventure of mankind on the earth gained in dignity and living became a grander affair.
"The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes,'
I had the sense of being in the presence of powerful possibilities. The doors of delight were beginning to open in front of me and some new knowledge seemed to be approaching. I felt that some new enlightenment still unreceived was on its way to me. Before it came and all too soon the poem ended. There was some silence and then a discussion about the poem which I do riot remember because I was slowly settling to earth. Parents who have guests that can be entertained in this way leave a valuable inheritance to children.
The sportsman who is temporarily away from his regular occupation sees
nature from an appreciative angle. His interest is in initmate association with nature.
Especially is this true of the fisherman. To him the brook and the river are more than the home of the trout and the bass. They are the vestibules through which he returns to nature itself. He likes to watch the quiet eddies of the pool in half reverie as the water beetles and surface bubbles go round in little whirls. He becomes very observant of small things. Away from the more violent noises of cities he learns to step his hearing down so that in the quiet the buzzing of an insect or the failing of the ripple of the water once more gets full attention. The trees under which he finds his way are something to be studied in reference to the casting of his line. Away from occupations and automobiles he settles down to fellowship with nature.
One who has once entered the deep woods can never forget the sense of loneliness, yet of companionship, which it gives. Here is no noise of the streets, but the murmur of the wind high above the tree tops. Adventuring into the wilds of nature has its effect upon the human spirit. One feels it as the darkness falls even if you are by a fire. There is an immediate presence of mystery. The stars, which one can rarely see from the city streets, seem clearer, It is the world men knew before labor and commerce and manufacturing had made nature the bond-servant of human needs.
In this experience we become aware of a reality which is rich and deep and which seems to stand behind nature. It is not anything we see. It is not anything in fancy. It is something profound and fundamental. Through nature we become aware of this background of reality. It gives you a feeling of awe, a sense of the immeasurable, an all-sustaining working.
To his mother, November 1931:
The only time I was in the Canadian woods .L enjoyed, more than anything else, a long walk I took alone in the forest. I followed a log trail, but the road had not been used for so long that the trees had fallen across it and underbrush grown up in it. Still it could be distinctly seen between the high trees on either side.
The only moving creatures I saw were the tiny birds---little warblers and fly-catchers that crawl about in the high trees, sometimes head downward. They live upstairs and never pay any attention to the first floor tenants anyway, whether man or beast.
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The wind swept through the tops of the trees with an unearthy moan. In a brush pile I hear a rustle and finally see a small weasel. With his nose to the ground he is making nervous leaps through the brush, evidently tracking some bird. To me he pays no attention and I let him pass on.
Taking cautious steps in the soft pine needles I walk forward. I peer to the right and see the glitter of water in a small pond barely visible under the limbs of the trees. A startled partridge rises from near my feet and I am more frightened than he is.
Further on I see over my head some tender limbs of a birch tree that have been broken off and partly eaten by moose. In an opening of the road are some blueberry bushes and unmistakeable bear tracks among them. The trees again become tall on each side, so tall that the sound of the wind is dimmed, and the silence of the deep lonesome forest is more appalling than the wind.
The old log lumber camp is now in view, the roof fallen in. I enter the open doors and find deer tracks on the dirt floors. Near the camp runs a little stream that empties into a swamp. On the water in the distance are two black ducks. The dusk is descending and I start the backward journey. It has been an experience of value because it gives a fresh impression of the beauty, terror and pitilessness of nature, the solemnity of her power. I wish that I could again walk in a woods big enough to give me that feeling of caution and fear.
INTERCOLLEGIATE FOOTBALL November 9, 1901
As a boy of fourteen I accompanied the Wilmington College football team to Yellow Springs to play Antioch College. On account of the distance of twenty-six miles it was necessary to start at daylight. There were fourteen men in the hack. The football clothes and balls were stowed under the two benches that ran down the sides of the hack. In order that the players could sit comfortably, I rode standing on the back step.
We arrived at Yellow Springs at two in the afternoon. The players changed clothes in one of the classrooms. The playing field was simply a section of the campus which was not even smooth. There was no grandstand and the speculators wandered over the field at will.
As the game progressed it became evident that the Antioch players were more experienced than our men. They could hardly have been less experienced because several of our players had never been in a game before. Some of them had never even seen a game played. During the first half, Antioch scored two touchdowns principally by teamwork. Some of the individual play of our men was superior. Our left end sprained his ankle on the rough ground. There was no substitute. He continued to play hopping around on one leg. There was no coach to take out a player who was hurt. Between halves the players took off his shoe and could find no broken bones so he went back into the game.
The second half was a repitition of the first with Antioch making two touchdowns. The final score was Antioch 23, Wilmington O. After the game there were no showers. Nothing could be done for the bruises and the strains of the players.
Ahead of us was a drive of seven or eight hours. Darkness soon descended. There was a gleam once in a while of a coal oil lamp in a farmhouse along the road, but otherwise everything was dark. The iron tires of the wheels grated on the gravel road. We could tell when we were going up hill or down, but we could see nothing. The time was passed by songs and stories. Toward the end
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of the journey some of the boys slept. We arrived in Wilmington about midnight. Some of the boys had to drive horses home six or seven miles from Wilmington after that.
BABY RIGHT
One frosty fall evening in October 1905 when I was nineteen, my father drove into the yard with a mare he had bought unexpectedly at a sale. The snowflakes clung to her hair which was long and not in good condition. The name of the horse was Baby Right which was a registered name and she had a pedigree.
I was familiar with some of the history of Baby Right. She had finished second in the "B" class trotting race at the local fair ground matinee. She had been raced through town on the snow by her owner. Baby Right had cooled off too quickly and had never recovered her speed.
We put her into a box stall in our barn and fed her the best oats and hay. Each day I would curry her. Her coat turned smoother as she gained weight.
She became a favorite buggy horse. There was a rivalry between me and my brother, Harold, about who should use her on Sunday. One Sunday I had curried Baby Right before I went to church so that I could hitch her up when I got home. In the meantime, Harold had decided to use her and had her partly hitched to the buggy when I came into the yard. Neither of our parents were home to umpire the dispute between us. Only Verne Roberts, a college student, was there. Harold and I had loud words. Then it came to blows and finally we were on the ground wrestling. We became more and more savage and enraged. Finally, Verne separated us. Before we got cleaned up our parents came home from church. my father unhitched Baby Right and put her back in her stall. We never had another disagreement about: which one of us should drive the horse.
I bought a volume of horse registrations and traced the pedigree of Baby Right. Her ancestry contained a few horses of distinction. I thought she might become the mother of a horse of distinction. We subscribed to a horse paper that contained advertisement of stallions. The fee of the young tried sires was smaller than the fee of the stallions whose colts had brought them reputation. I
selected a young seven-year-old stallion named Todd who was stationed at Lexington, Kentucky.
I asked my father's consent to take Baby Right to Lexington and he gave me permissions. On the first of June 1906, I ordered a boxcar set on the railroad tracks. That evening Baby Right and I, housed in a boxcar, were waiting on B&O switch for the engine to pick us up. I had built a stall for Baby Right in one end of the car and in the other end had arranged my lantern, lunch, buckets of water, bales of hay and sacks of feed. It was dark before the engine came and when it hit our car, it did so with an unexpected violence. The instant that the train hit our car everything went black on account of the lantern upsetting. Not only was the feed and water upset, but Baby Right was jolted right through her stall and mixed up with the debris in the other end of the car. I spoke to her as calmly as I could and put out my hand toward her. Lucky, I touched her shoulder. Soon her quivering and stamping quieted and I led her in the darkness to the other end of the car. when I had tied her there I lit the lantern and straightened the things up, but the water was all gone.
On account of the heat of the evening I rode with the doors of the boxcar half-way open. About midnight of the next day we were marooned in the freight yards at Paris, Kentucky. I looked out into the darkness and saw a row of large
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tobacco warehouses. I took a bucket and climbed the fence to search for water. At the corner of one warehouse was a wooden barrel. When I stuck my hand in it I felt water about half-way down. I did not know whether it was stale and full of wiggle-tails or not. I carried a bucket of this water to Baby Right. She drank it eagerly. I went back and carried another bucket full to her.
The next morning at Lexington, our boxcar was placed beside an unloading platform used especially for horses. I left Baby Right munching grass contentedly in a bluegrass pasture about three miles from Lexington.
I went back to town to get some sleep. A telephone message from the owner of the farm awakened me. He said that Baby Right, being a stranger among the other horses, had tried to win her place by fighting and had been dangerously kicked. He suggested that I call a veterinary and see her at once. One of the famous horse doctors of Lexington took me with him out to the farm. We found that a sharp hoof had laid out a long gash on her hip. The doctor said that all he could do was to treat it with disinfectant. Then he drove me back to town.
I returned to Wilmington on the train after making arrangements. for Baby Right to board for a year at the Hickory wood Farm. Each month we would receive .a bill for the pasturage and a statement about the health of the mare. On the fifteenth of June in 1907, we received a letter that said she had foaled a male colt and that both were doing well.
In two weeks .L had a chance to go to Lexington and stopped late at night at the Reed Hotel which is near the race track. At two in the morning I was wide awake and the hotel was hot. I decided to walk to the race track and try to get some sleep on the grass. There was a welcome breeze across the grass. Towards daybreak the trees began to loom up out of the darkness and there was a twitter of birds especially meadowlarks. I dozed off and awoke refreshed and hungry. I walked back to the Reed Hotel for my breakfast.
I took a traction car out to Hickory Wood Farm, which was larger than I expected. It contained four hundred acres and had three pastures of brood mares. The house was far back from the road. When I knocked on the door I learned that the proprietor was in town and would not be at home for several hours. I thought that I could recognize Baby Right by myself and I climbed the gate into the field.
The first mare that I saw looked something like Baby Right, but her neck was too thick, her fore-top was too long and her thighs too muscular. She did not permit other horses to approach her colt which was lying on the ground asleep. This jealousy would not be characteristic of Baby Right. In the next pasture I looked at all of the mares without finding her. Then I went to the barn where I asked the help of the colored hostler. He walked with me through a big woods where there were thirty brood mares. Then we went through two additional pastures without finding our mare. I returned to the first pasture to examine more closely the mare I thought looked like Baby Right. On her hip I discovered the scar of the kick she had got when 1 brought her to Kentucky.
I looked at the colt. Before I knew it was her colt I had thought that he was a pretty good prospect, but at that time he was lying down. Now he got up and stretched like a hound dog. The shoulders and fore-legs were high and set on straight with a thick fore-arm. The back was short and round-ribbed. I chased him a little in the field to get some idea of his gait. When he walked rapidly he seemed on the point of breaking into a pace, pressed faster he breaks into a trot. I was satisfied with his movement. He seemed large and well-developed for a colt only two weeks of age.
I returned to Wilmington and reported what I had seen. The family decided to leave Baby Right at the Hickory Wood Farm another year. We had talked and speculated about the colt. When he was weaned in the fall it became necessary to
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choose a name for him. We decided to name the colt Leavitt Todd.
The colt wintered well and the next spring we decided to have him trained by an expert in training colts. My father had a telegram from him saying that he had a prospective buyer for the colt.
My father went down to Lexington to see Leavitt Todd trot a short trial. The colt was only a yearling and had been in training only a few weeks. Therefore the trainer did not push him hard except in the last quarter of the mile which he trotted in 35 1/2 seconds. This was good enough to warrent a price of $1,200. My father received a check for this amount from a man in Iowa. Later an offer of $300 came from Iowa for Baby Right and was accepted. Baby Right died suddenly the next year in Iowa.
The reason for selling out our registered horses was that I needed the $1,500 to go to Harvard University in the fall of 1908.
APPALACHIA I
At the age of twenty in July 1907, I arrived in Simpson, Kentucky on a coal-road train. The town of Simpson consisted of one house, one railroad station and a side-track. I went to the house and met a boy who told me that Cash's Mill lay over the hill and pointed out the path.
It was about a mile up a steep grade to. the top of the hill. I rested for a While and looked down into the Morg Valley. As far as I could see the hills were wooded except for little clearings around an occasional cabin along the creek. The path followed a little stream down into the valley. I finally saw the smoke stack of a mill. I found that the workmen had gone for the day. The machinery was not yet in place and there was no roof over the mill.
I inquired of a child about a place to board and was directed down Morg Creek to the house of Reverend Breck Flincham. The cabin perched on a little plateau about twenty feet above the creek. The Flincham house is not hard to describe. It is one storey with two rooms in front and a shed on the back which is used as a kitchen. The roof shingles are thick and irregular and were riveted by hand. The weatherboarding is unpainted. when you go in the plain wooden front door you enter the room to the right. It has one window in which is wavy glass. There are three iron beds in the room, one against each of the walls opposite the door. On account of the house being built on a slope, there is much more space under the front part of the house than under the rear. The pup has carried bones, a piece of an old shoe and other objects under there.
On a bench in front of the house sat three people, a middle-aged man, a young fellow of my age and a half-grown girl. I went up to introduce myself and ask for lodging. Breck Flincham, the middle-aged man was a small, wiry man who seemed to be a kindly, polite person. The young man was Algan Derrickson, who was also a boarder there. He was helping to put up the mill and would be a sawyer. The half-grown girl was Julia Flincham, the orphan niece of Breck. The older man said supper would .be ready in a little while.
A voice from inside the house called us to supper. I followed the others around to a shed that leaned against the back of the house and served as a kitchen and dining room. On a shelf outside the door was a bucket, a dipper, a wash-pan, a soap dish and a flour sack towel. when we had cleaned up we went in and sat in split-bottom chairs around the table.
The ceiling of the kitchen had absorbed smoke and grease for so many years that it was shiny black. The oil-cloth on the table was flecking away. The cups and plates were not of the same size or pattern. In the middle of the table was
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an unlighted coal oil lamp. The mean was green string beans and corn bread. After we ate I was shown to my bed which was in the same room where
Algan slept. The Flinchams slept in the other room. Before Algan went to bed we sat for a while with Breck Flincham on the bench in front of the house.
In the morning I woke before daylight. I could hear through the half-inch partition that Cynthia Flincham was getting up in the other room. She walked into the kitchen and lighted the coal oil lamp. She put some kindling in the stove and started a fire. The coffee was set on the stove. The meat left from last night was reheated and also the green beans.
After breakfast I walked up Morg Creek to the mill with Algan who introduced me to the owner, Tom Cash. I asked him for a job and he assigned me to help with the oxen. The oxen dragged behind them a heavy log chain. My job was to fasten the chain around the logs. The oxen were to drag the logs to the brow of the hill over-looking the mill. There we would unlock the chain and let the logs roll down to the valley below. I had never worked with oxen. I was surprised by their deliberateness and power. They were slow in getting into motion, but when they had started their pressure would cause logs of immense size to move, through the brush to the brow of the hill.
After I had met the people with whom I was to be associated I became aware that I was under close observation. In a sense, I could be regarded as a spy among them. The natives had heard that I was a college student and nineteen years of age. Many of them had not had enough school opportunities to be able to read. They had been cheated by nearly every educated man who had come into their secluded valley. There had been factions and private justice and unreported crimes among them about which they were trained not to speak to outsiders. I did not know what degree of trust they would extend to. me in their closely guarded community life.
he are all dependent on the sawmill for our wages which makes me wonder how the people had any income before the mill was built. They have garden patches near their homes, but there is scant room for crops. It raises the question of the depth of poverty in which these people live. I pay five dollars a week for my room and board at the Flinchams. This gives Cynthia an income of ten dollars a week. I get $1.25 a day. Some of the men at the mill get more. They can get
from p32 to a month which is much more income than they had before.
I was glad that the next day was Sunday because I was tired and stiff from my unaccustomed work with the six oxen. In the morning when Breck invited me to ride with him to the Seven Oaks Meeting I was glad to accept. Our path lay along the creek bed most of the way. The going was rough for miles. Breck would kick his mule and complain that the creek bed was getting stonier every year. The bony back of the mule I was riding took my mind from the wooded hills on both sides of the creek. I asked Breck how much farther it was to Seven Oaks. He thought we would get there before the funeral.
This was the first I had heard of a funeral. It seemed that the two Fletcher boys got killed in a store fight during the winter and were buried without a funeral. The circuit preacher would be coming through this summer and the funeral would be held then. This is the service that we were now going to attend.
In a little while we emerged from the deep valley on a little cape. In the midst of this was a plot of cleared ground surrounded by a fence of rails. On the top rail sat four bearded men in black coats. An old man with a white beard seemed to be the leader. He would put his hands over his ears, look up in the sky and wail in a plaintive sing-song tone. There would be a low response-like mail from the people who knelt around the grave. This continued in rising crescendo until the whole group broke into a hymn. The preacher prayed for the dead
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Then the people began to shake hands and turn the meeting into a social gathering.
After supper, two of the preachers came to the Flincham house to stay for the night. The man with the fuzzy white whiskers was assigned to sleep with me. He observed all the courtesies in going to bed, such as turning his back on anyone who was undressing, but I slept restlessly. Every time he would turn over I had the unreasonable fear that I would inhale some of those silky white whiskers.
The next Sunday Derrickson and I went to the church to hear Breck Flincham preach. The meeting was held in a new building of freshly-sawed boards. The seats were without backs made from the same rough lumber as the walls. The meeting began with a song and a prayer. Then Rev. Flincham began to speak. He was surprisingly eloquent and moving. One pathetic feature of his speaking was that he had been dependent upon his wife who could read. He had memorized, from her reading, passages in the scripture, but this did not detract from the effect of his sermon.
It happened that in my travelling bag was a volume of Shakespeare's plays. One evening Breck asked me some questions about the morality of Shakespeare. He could not read and he• would get the drift only from the pictures. There was an illustration of the clothes basket from the "Merry Wives of Windsor". Also, there was an illustration of Falstaff in a tavern with Dame Qugley on his knee, I did not realize that he had judged the morals of Shakespeare from the steel engravings which illustrated the volume. I never thought what a racy sample of Shakespeare these illustrations were and what an impression they would create on the mind of Breck Flincham.
One evening when I went to the house after work there was a new boy sitting on the bench in front of the house. His name was W. Fred Hargrave. He had come to apply for the job of teaching at the schoolhouse. He stayed at Flincham's for supper and slept in the room with Derrickson and me.
The talk at the supper table indicated that the attendance at school had been very poor. Most of the teachers had been women who were too young to have any authority. There is a habit in the valley of keeping the children home from school for field work or house work. There are always chores for the children to do in regard to crops, firewood or clothing. Some of the children lose between a third and a half of each school year by staying at home to work.
After supper Fred Hargrave sat on a bench in front of the house. We had our usual evening talkfest and cooling out before going to bed. His conversation showed that he was one of the valley people, but with the difference that he had for been in the outside world. He was very diplomatic in his answers to Breck's questions. Flincham took a look at the moon and asked, "Do you teach that the moon goes around the earth or that the earth goes around the moon?" Hargrave approached his answer warily. He stressed the fact that the moon drew after it by the law of gravity the waters of the ocean and this was what made the tides rise and fall on the sea shore. This idea was so far from Flincham's experience that he did not pursue his questioning. After Mr. Flincham had gone in the house I stayed outside with Hargrave. He admitted that the moon moved around the earth, but he did not want to offend Mr. Flincham.
Now that the mill was turning out lumber, Shelby Fletcher and I were moved to working on the road over which the lumber was to be taken to the railroad siding. While shoveling dirt I watched a cabin on a hillside near us. ,It belonged to Chester Young who about my age and worked in the mill. On the porch sat his wife watching us and rocking a baby in her arms. Two small children played in the dirt below the porch. His wife could not have been more than twenty. Her arms were thin. Her eyes were hollow and her cheeks were spotted pink as if she had a fever. Frequently she had a coughing spell. She looked to
34
me like a girl who had been trapped into life that would soon make an old woman out of her. Chester Young had some sisters and he talked to me about the fact that I was twenty and not married. I did not make any effort to understand his point.
As Algan Derrickson and I became better acquainted with the conditions in the Flincham home we ceased to call Mrs. Flincham Cynthia, and reduced the name to "Sin" on account of her cruelty to the little Julia, who was a small girl for her age. Her legs were slender and her dress was soiled. Her hair was tangled and dirty. The only affection she received in life was from her pup. Julia seemed to us a very shy, polite girl.
Algan Derrickson and I had been suffering from a form of dysentery for some time. We had the opinion that we caught if from some of the food that Sin Flincham prepared. Derrickson finally came to the opinion that the trouble came from the basswood bowl in which she mixed her corn bread. When she was out of the house he examined the bowl and found old and very big cracks in it. In some of these cracks meal had collected for a long time and had turned green. He washed the bowl, gleaned the cracks and we had no further difficulty after that,
I felt that this enviroment was unjust to a young man who was as capable as Algan Derrickson. He was a sawyer at the mill. Although he was only about twenty, his judgement was sought on all questions connected with the business. I wrote about him to my father in Ohio, who was on the board of Wilmington College. He wrote back and said that he could get a scholarship for Algan. I was going to the same college and urged Derrickson to go back to Ohio with me, but he felt that he could not go to college. He knew all the intricacies of calculating the amount of lumber and all of the intricacies of a steam engine, but he was convinced that he did not have enough general education.
On the last day of August 1907, I carried my suitcase to the top of the
mountain to the railroad station As I passed the cabins some of the people came out and waved to me. The one that I left with the most emotion was Algan Derrickson because he was mature beyond his age and had a good head. If he marries here he will get tied down in this way of life forever.
APPALACHIA II
This is November 10, 1935. I have an opportunity to drive south from Ohio across Kentucky. Twenty-eight years ago as a young man under twenty, I spent a summer in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. I worked for Tom Cash who also came from Ohio and was an acquaintance of my father.
While my wife and I were driving through Winchester and Jackson, Kentucky, I told her of my recollections of my summer in these mountains in 1907. We turned from the main road and wound down the mountains to a place called Kilhurst. There had been a railroad station there 28 years ago, but now the rails had been removed and the station boarded up. While we were parked there a man came up and advised us not to try to drive up the railroad right of way but to drive on the dirt road that ran over the hill.
After several miles we met an old man with long hair. I asked him if he knew Algan Derrickson. He said that he did because Algan's first wife was the widow Hampton who had died. I asked him if Algan had married again. He replied that Algan had married a Sweeny girl. He gave us directions to the Derrickson home. We followed his directions for some miles and then we felt lost. We stopped at a cabin where an old lady instructed us how to go back and turn in at a
15
dirt road. We retraced our steps and turned into a hilly field where a road was barely visible. It ran up a creek bed. We followed it with our axle sometimes scraping the stones and at other times sinking into the mud.
At one turn in the road we met two men. One came on. The other ran back. When we got around the cliff we found that he had run back to get a mule team hitched to a wagon of sugar cane. We followed him a little while. Then he found a place where he could pull out of our way. We went up a steep hill then down an equally steep grade. We passed a house where little kids ran away from our automobile. There was a spring-hole with a log in it. I did not see it. I got stuck in the mud.
I walked on down the road and saw far above me on the mountainside a team of mules. I heard voices. I walked on to the house. I saw a shed with four dirty little children playing there. I went to the back porch of the house and a woman came to the door. I told her who I was. She said that she was Mrs. Derrickson and that she had heard Algan talk about me. I told her that our car was stuck in the mud. She said that Algan and the boys were shucking corn up on the mountainside.
I was out of breath when I got up there and saw two mules and a wagon and two boys on the mountain above throwing down corn. Algan looked at me. At first he had thought .L was his brother-in-law. I told him I could not tell him who I was till I got my breath. When I spoke he began to recognize me and seemed glad to see me. He told me that he had a headache today and could hardly see.,
After some talk 1 told him about our car being stuck. He unhitched his mules and sent one of the boys to the house for a log chain. We got down to the car and I introduced my wife. By that time the men with the load of sugar cane had arrived on the other side of the car. The boys brought the chain and they pulled us out. Algan and some of the children that were standing around got into the car and rode down to the house with us. We parked in front of the road so we could get out and went into the house.
By this time Mrs. Derrickson had washed her face, changed her dress and cleaned up some of the children. She is a rather slender woman about forty with a small oval face and a quick smile. Algan is forty-nine and exactly a day and one year older than I am.
There turned out to be ten children, but only nine were there. The oldest girl was with her aunt in town getting a high school education. There were five boys and four girls at home. Two of the smaller ones were twins, a boy and a girl. There was a boy still younger than the twins. They had a little girl about two. She was riot weaned yet on account of it being her second summer. She
ran around with a slip on and that was all.
Pearl remembered that she had some candy in the car. I went out to get it. The children crowded around her. I gave three of the boys dimes. Then a girl about fifteen appeared, who had been in the field helping her father with the corn, but had come down to change her clothes and see us. Her neck was scratched with the corn stalks.
Algan asked about my father and the people at the bank. He said the bank paid him for his work on Tom Cash's estate. I asked about the Flinchams, Breck and Cynthia. They are both dead. Their niece, Julia, married a Gillan and has ten children.
Privately Algan wanted to explain to me why he had not taken advantage of my father's offer to get him started in college. He had been too proud to explain why he had not accepted it at the time. He had his parents to support. Then, too, he had worked hard at too early an age in the sawmill without proper food. This had given him an acid stomach and ruined his health.
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Algan has over 200 acres. He and his wife were anxious to show us the front of the house, the porch, the little orchard and the barn with tobacco in it. The house looked well kept. They urged us several times to stay for supper, but we declined.
Pearl was afraid that it would rain and she dreaded the road out even in the driest of weather. So about three we left.
When I went out to the car I found it full of kids with candy on their fingers. Algan drove them out of the car, but I invited them in and took them on a short ride down to the barnyard where I had to go to turn around. Algan got in to ride out with us and see that nothing happened. The boys followed with the mules. We got carefully over the mud hole where we had stuck before. Algan sent the boys back home with the mules. They must have hurried because we had not gone very far until two boys came running after us to say that their mother wanted them to go to the store to get some flour and sugar. we went back over the ruts, hazards and rocks, down the creek bed and back on the railroad right of way. Here Algan bade us good-bye. I pressed into one of the boy's hands some money to be distributed to the other children.
Before we left Algan told us that they had decided they were about as
content as they could be. In talking about his wife, Algan said, "No use to say that we never had a quick word, but we have very few of them..." It was a rough country and their children would probably have to make their own way, just as their parents had done, but they were giving them what education they could.
NEWSPAPER ITEMS
From the Wilmington paper:
"November 19, 1917. Burritt Hiatt Injured Badly While Hunting. Advertising Manager of the Irwin Auger Bit Company victim of accidental discharge of shotgun Saturday afternoon. Burritt Hiatt, only son of E. J. Hiatt, Cashier of the Clinton County National Bank, was injured seriously, but not fatally in a hunting accident Saturday afternoon about 4 O'clock. A shotgun was accidentally discharged, the wound being in his right side aryl' arm.
The party consisted of S. A. Mitchell, Mr. Hiatt, Russell Bab and Roger Johnson. They had gone for the hunt to the part of the county southeast of Wilmington on the Cuba Pike. The men who accompanied Mr. Hiatt say that a dog that he had taken with him had been lost, At the time of the accident he had separated himself from the other men and was out in the road seeing if he could locate the dog.
It seems that Mr. Hiatt had set the gun down on the floor of the bridge over Silver Creek. Returning to pick up the gun, it somehow slipped from his hands and whirling as it fell struck the stones of the bridge abutments, causing the discharge.
The boys on the hill thought that Mr. Mitchell had shot a rabbit down in the cornfield and decided to turn and see what luck he had had, but they heard Mr., Hiatt's shouts for help and they reached his side quickly.
They stripped the clothing from his right side and examined the wound which seemed a fearful one and to them was necessarily a fatal one. Their first
thought was getting Mr. Hiatt to the hospital, but the boys were told by Mr. Hiatt that he could not ride in the car. They telephoned C. A. Holladay for his ambulance.
Dr, Peelle, before the arrival of the specialist, treated the wound, but did not dress it. That work was delayed until Sunday morning when Dr. Carothers,assisted by Dr. Peelle, made a thorough job of dressing the injured parts.
It is believed that a few shot from the shell penetrated his lungs, but not a great many. The major part of the load after grazing his right side and digging a path more than an inch deep and several inches wide, buried itself in the armpit and upper arm. It was necessary to cut away all the wounded flesh and thoroughly cleanse the injured parts. The physicians say that should not complications in the way of pneumonia or blood -poisoning set in, the chance for the young man's recovery are splendid.
August 7, 1933
HIATT'S WIN IN SWIMMING MEET
Blanchester Second In Pool Events Sponsored By County A, A. U.
The Hiatt boys, Edwin, Richard, Robert and Harold are Clinton County's new champion swimmers. They won this honor by virtue of their win in the Clinton County A. A. U. swimming meet held in the Blanchester pool, Sunday. Their aggregate score was 3h points while Blanchester, their nearest competitor, was able to compile only 17.
BURRITT MILLS HIATT
Burritt Mills Hiatt has been a friend of Wilmington College all his life. Himself an alumnus (A.B., 1908), he came from a family also Wilmington trained. His mother, father, two aunts, wife, four sons, and three cousins also attended Wilmington College, and his father served on its Board of Trustees from 1902 to 1942
as its treasurer from 1914 to 1942. As a journalist (with the Educational Bureau of Good Housekeeping Magazine),as an industrialist (with Irwin Auger Bit), as a teacher (of English at Wilmington College) , as a leader of the Society of Friends (Clerk of Wilmington Yearly Meeting, Friends World Committee, Executive Council of Friends United Meeting), he has given his life to service. While serving with the American Friends Service Committee Milk Feeding Program for French Children in 1942, he was interned by the Germans in Occupied France. This experience furthered his determination to enlist in the ranks of the educators and to further examine his own motives and ideas. With an M. A. from Harvard in English, he taught English at Wilmington College until his retirement in 1952, holding up to his students a shining light of critical integrity in thought and action. His sharp wit, his profound questioning mind, and his warm but keen sense of humor have given flavor to his associations with men. He says he is five feet, five inches tall, weighs 150 pounds, and wears a size 7-3/4 hat. That latter size, for all its amplitude, has not changed, despite all his leadership, service, and contributions to his Alma Mater.
Wilmington College is delighted to honor its Alumnus and long-time professor of English, Burritt Mills Hiatt, with the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
(3764.) BURRITT MILLS HIATT (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 2-5mo-1887; m. 29-12mo-1910, to PEARL PEELLE; living at 196 North Wood, Wilmington, OH.
CH: (5776.) Edwin Peelle; (5777.) Richard Mills; (5778.) Robert Burritt; (5779.) Harold. (R84).
B.M. Hiatt was head of “Friends Relief” in unoccupied France during World War II. Both he and his father are interested in genealogy, and they contributed much data on their branch of Hiatts of inclusion in this volume-editor.
(NOTE: I, Larry Anderson, copies of the Hiatt History and of Interment in WWII by Burruitt Hiatt available on CD, typed and prepared which is very interesting and excellent historical as well as novelistic format. 6 July 2005.)
C.D Burritt Mills Hiatt Diary
196 N. Wood St.
Wilmington, Ohio 45177
August 30, 1980
THE ATTITUDE AND DECLARED INTENT OF THE ESTATE OF BURRITT MILLS CONCERNING THE USE BY DOROTHY LANG HIATT OF B.M. HIATT NOTES AND MANUSCRIPTS RELATIVE TO HIS EXPERIENCES IN FRANCE 1942-44.
In October of 1942 Burritt Mills Hiatt flew to France as a relief agent for the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). He was placed in charge of the on-going Marsielles office of Quaker relief in unoccupied Vichy France. This relief was in the form of food, shelter, clothing, and counseling for displaced persons and people in German custody.
Burritt Hiatt had had wide experience as a businessman and active Quaker but he had never before seen service as a foreign relief agent. His notes and diaries are in essence a revelation of the dedication and involvement which he thought to what he looked upon as a great opportunity. His hopes and desires were tremendous and all consuming as he plunged into the work.
The daily tasks of the relief staff and their helpers were demanding. But the main goal in mind was the upcoming evacuation of hundreds of children from Vichy France by means of a special train which would pass through the area but once picking up the children along the way and taking them to Portugal for embarkation on the Gripsholm and eventual sanctuary in the United States.
Not only did this train never make its run but the situation was so rigged and the cross purposes of war were so destined that it was doomed even while it was being planned. The invasion of North Africa by U. S. forces in November 1942 triggered the Nazi occupation of Vichy France and a halt to all such freedom. Burritt Hiatt could never quite adjust to the fortunes of war which dictated that children and relief workers should be allowed to forward their plans of hope when it was probably never possible that these plans could materialize.
Thus we have in the story of one man the heights of humanitarian expectations embodied in his one chance at middle age to help engineer a piece of work which would afford him satisfaction for the rest of his days. This followed swiftly by withering disappointment and subsequent interment.
In trying to set forth his story in the 1950’s Burritt Hiatt was assisted by his daughter-in-law Dorothy Land Hiatt. Not only did she do voluminous typing for him but she assisted in selection and editing. She encouraged him to bring his work to fruition in his later years but he was never satisfied that the situation was ripe or the manuscript properly balanced. Since Burritt Hiatt’s death in 1971 Dorothy Land Hiatt has worked with the material and now she has a book whose time has come. It is the story contained in the Burritt Hiatt notes and diaries and the story he tried to tell in his manuscript. But where he was hesitant out of sensitivity of feeling, she has forged ahead with the narrative. What Burritt Hiatt could not say with clarity because of uncertainty of acceptance, Dorothy Hiatt has placed before the reader in clear form and left the overtones and emotions to work in the mind of the reader. The drama and tragedy and his story are all there. But the one essential element that is there is the plaintive plight of a Quaker family man from Ohio trying to cope with a world gone mad.
The story is the Burritt Hiatt story but it is the Dorothy Land Hiatt book. She could not do it until she had freed herself from the obstacles that frustrated Burritt Hiatt. It is truly a collaboration of the living with the dead.
C.D Burritt Hisotry
Genealogy of Dana, John and Heather Hiatt
When your father, Christopher, was a young boy he asked me one day, Mother, don't I have any relatives besides the Hiatt and Millses?" I laughed, but I understood why he asked that.
When he was little the place we visited most often was Wilmington, Ohio, the home of his grandparents, Pearl and Burritt Hiatt, where his father, Edwin grew up, and where he got acquainted with all their relatives. Because Burritt was a keeper of family history and records and because Burritt's Aunt Mary Mills was a great talker Chris heard a lot about Hiatt and Millses. There were a lot of Peelles, but there wasn't so much talk about them. They were Pearl's family.
I explained to little Chris that he had lots of ancestors besides those he heard about so much in Wilmington, that half his ancestors came from my family, but I didn't know much about them except that the Langs came from Switzerland and my mother told me once that Grandpa Lang's folks were Pennsylvania Dutch. She didn't know much about her own family because when she was eight years old she was sent away by her mother because her father had died and there were five children and no money, so my mother went to live with a family named Cooper in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, near Chicago. She wasn't allowed to keep in touch with her real family and I grew up thinking to Coopers were my real kin.
When I retired I decided I would see what I could find out about my own ancestors and have been working on it ever since. I was astonished to find half of her ancestors also came first to Ohio, not far from where the first Hiatt settled. The problem --- how to make it interesting to you and not just a list of names and dates. I have decided to start with the Quakers even though they are not my own ancestors because I inherited a lot of material that was Burritt's and because the Quakers kept better records than most of the others and therefore information is easier to find. I will deal later with the Germans and then with the English.
Mary Pearl PEELLE
Mary Pearl Peelle Hiatt's Writings
Burritt rented the house at 111 Petrie Avenue, Rosemont, Pa., from Mrs. DeCoursey for $30 per month. It was already furnished with couch and chair with slip covers that had pink flowers on them. Steel engravings covered the walls, some of which we put on the third floor later.
We arrived on January 30, 1911, a Friday. The hard coal fire had gone 00. Burritt spent much time in the basement trying to start the fire, and finally got some heat toward evening. We sat in the front room near the register that evening and talked of our life together. I thought Burritt had the highest ideals of any one man I had ever heard of, and I was pleased.
Saturday we got up late and started the fire again. After lunch we walked about five miles. The next day we had planned to go to Meeting, but got up late and spent the day fixing and playing.
On Monday morning Burritt had a rush for the train. When he was shaving I asked him how soon he would be down to breakfast. He replied, "Right away." I put things on the table and stood and waited for thirty minutes before he appeared. I learned it took him about an hour to dress. I think I was peeved again because I hadn't learned he didn't like hot stuff for breakfast.
Burritt would come home from Friends School and run a half a mile or so, then take a bath and eat what was prepared for him. I studied menus so that we could eat proper food on little money. We bought oysters by the dozen and often. I used butter --- not oleo-margarine, beef --- no pork, fruit, cheese, shredded wheat biscuits, nuts, rice, hard crackers, raisons, olive oil dressing, dried fruit, eggs, karo syrup, marmalade, bacon and lots of vegetables.
I walked someplace every day, often to Bryn Mawr College -- not always just for the walk, but for the atmosphere of the place which did something for me. For some time Burritt read aloud about the married life of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, written by him after his wife's "death. It was very inspiring because we did not want to live short of the ideal. We also wanted to form the meeting habit and for some time talked of using the "plain language". Occasionally Burritt called MB Mary because he didn't like the name Pearl. We wanted to be well read so I would browse around the Bryn Mawr Library and bring home books each week and later took a course there during the evening.
On Saturday evening, February 25th, we went to hear Mary Garden (a famous opera and concert singer) at the Metropolitan Opera House sing Natoma in English with music by Victor Herbert and libretto by Joseph D. Redding. We sat in a high box and got such a thrill out of it. I was very short of breath before we reached this high box. On the way home. I felt queer in my stomach. This feeling never left me till the last of May when I began to feel better.
By April llth I was so ill that Burritt felt I needed to see a doctor so while he was at school I went to Dr. Branson, who gave me a prescription that did not do any good at all. I then wrote to Dr. Frank, who recommended something that did not do any good either, but his letter helped my spirits. Later I asked my next-door neighbor about a doctor and a nurse. She told me about Dr. Powell and Mrs. Hughes. I liked them both.
Burritt was most attentive and sympathetic. Sometimes he would come home early and we would walk in the woods and down some beautiful country lanes to the duck pond. I was so ill part of the time that I couldn't get up and eat. I craved radishes and salt crackers, which Burritt would fix on a tray before he left in the morning. He would spend Saturday and Sunday trying to fix something for me to eat. One Saturday he spent a lot of time working on a meat pie, which I suppose was good, but it made me sick every time I thought of it for weeks.
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Later I craved walnuts and he walked miles in the rain and brought home a big sack full. I used to go the basement where they were kept and at lunch time make a meal of them.
Burritt and I started home to Wilmington for summer vacation on June 9, and I was so happy to be at Mother's, where Maggie Hargrove could do the cooking. I'll always bless her for the good food I had that summer. I can taste her hot apple pie right now.
All summer we talked of a girl's name. -Burritt wanted to name our first boy after his father and I said all right---if we also give him the middle name Peelle for my family. I really preferred the name Burritt, Jr., but he wouldn't hear of it. Said it sounded like a girl's name.
Mother came to Rosemont on November 12th and stayed till December 30th. She wanted to be sure to be at the "party" (Ed's birth), but got rather impatient when I didn't perform when expected. I figure I went over my time about two weeks. Every night she would say, "This is the night, Pearl. I must go home soon." This overtime made me very nervous and sensitive.
I took a hot sitz bath every evening and Burritt was never impatient having to help me with this and with so many other things; He always wished that he could be the mother---and I also wished he could, too, and have a good dose of
nausea.
Mary Pearl Peelle Hiatt's Writings
Burritt rented the house at 111 Petrie Avenue, Rosemont, Pa., from Mrs. DeCoursey for $30 per month. It was already furnished with couch and chair with slip covers that had pink flowers on them. Steel engravings covered the walls, some of which we put on the third floor later.
We arrived on January 30, 1911, a Friday. The hard coal fire had gone 00. Burritt spent much time in the basement trying to start the fire, and finally got some heat toward evening. We sat in the front room near the register that evening and talked of our life together. I thought Burritt had the highest ideals of any one man I had ever heard of, and I was pleased.
Saturday we got up late and started the fire again. After lunch we walked about five miles. The next day we had planned to go to Meeting, but got up late and spent the day fixing and playing.
On Monday morning Burritt had a rush for the train. When he was shaving I asked him how soon he would be down to breakfast. He replied, "Right away." I put things on the table and stood and waited for thirty minutes before he appeared. I learned it took him about an hour to dress. I think I was peeved again because I hadn't learned he didn't like hot stuff for breakfast.
Burritt would come home from Friends School and run a half a mile or so, then take a bath and eat what was prepared for him. I studied menus so that we could eat proper food on little money. We bought oysters by the dozen and often. I used butter---not oleo-margarine, beef---no pork, fruit, cheese, shredded wheat biscuits, nuts, rice, hard crackers, raisons, olive oil dressing, dried fruit, eggs, karo syrup, marmalade, bacon and lots of vegetables.
I walked someplace every day, often to Bryn Mawr College--not always just for the walk, but for the atmosphere of the place which did something for me. For some time Burritt read aloud about the married life of Mr. and Mrs. Palmer, written by him after his wife's "death. It was very inspiring because we did not want to live short of the ideal. We also wanted to form the meeting habit and for some time talked of using the "plain language". Occasionally Burritt called MB Mary because he didn't like the name Pearl. We wanted to be well read so I would browse around the Bryn Mawr Library and bring home books each week and later took a course there during the evening.
On Saturday evening, February 25th, we went to hear Mary Garden (a famous opera and concert singer) at the Metropolitan Opera House sing Natoma in English with music by Victor Herbert and libretto by Joseph D. Redding. We sat in a high box and got such a thrill out of it. I was very short of breath before we reached this high box. On the way home. I felt queer in my stomach. This feeling never left me till the last of May when I began to feel better.
By April llth I was so ill that Burritt felt I needed to see a doctor so while he was at school I went to Dr. Branson, who gave me a prescription that did not do any good at all. I then wrote to Dr. Frank, who recommended something that did not do any good either, but his letter helped my spirits. Later I asked my next-door neighbor about a doctor and a nurse. She told me about Dr. Powell and Mrs. Hughes. I liked them both.
Burritt was most attentive and sympathetic. Sometimes he would come home early and we would walk in the woods and down some beautiful country lanes to the duck pond. I was so ill part of the time that I couldn't get up and eat. I craved radishes and salt crackers, which Burritt would fix on a tray before he left in the morning. He would spend Saturday and Sunday trying to fix something for me to eat. One Saturday he spent a lot of time working on a meat pie, which I suppose was good, but it made me sick every time I thought of it for weeks.
2
Later I craved walnuts and he walked miles in the rain and brought home a big sack full. I used to go the basement where they were kept and at lunch time make a meal of them.
Burritt and I started home to Wilmington for summer vacation on June 9, and I was so happy to be at Mother's, where Maggie Hargrove could do the cooking. I'll always bless her for the good food I had that summer. I can taste her hot apple pie right now.
All summer we talked of a girl's name. -Burritt wanted to name our first boy after his father and I said all right---if we also give him the middle name Peelle for my family. I really preferred the name Burritt, Jr., but he wouldn't hear of it. Said it sounded like a girl's name.
Mother came to Rosemont on November 12th and stayed till December 30th. She wanted to be sure to be at the "party" (Ed's birth), but got rather impatient when I didn't perform when expected. I figure I went over my time about two weeks. Every night she would say, "This is the night, Pearl. I must go home soon." This overtime made me very nervous and sensitive.
I took a hot sitz bath every evening and Burritt was never impatient having to help me with this and with so many other things; He always wished that he could be the mother---and I also wished he could, too, and have a good dose of nausea.
Burritt Mills HIATT
See also the Journal of Burritt Hiatt, his writings and story of Internment, WWII. September 28, 2005, I just purchased from a lady over the Internet a set of pictures that, to my utter surprise, was of Burritt Hiatt and his brother, Harold. The pictures are from the early 1890's, most are of the two of them playing together and of their house, address. W. Main St., Wilmington, OH 45177 1890-1891.
There are a couple of pictures with their pony, Prince. There is a special picture of Burritt and Phoebe Hudson, by Stephens Studio, Wilmington, OH, a picture that appears as Harold and Phoebe as perhaps like a ring bearer? Dressed very nicely. On the back it says: Harrold Hiatt & Phoebe Hudsen, they annointed the Water for Ruth Esther Brann & Bud Thompson's wedding.
Harolds suit white, Phoebe Bright ?Hue with a tiny pink rose had mother Hiatt made Phoebes dress. There is another picture of Edwin James Hiatt, 6/22/1913 taken at Grand Canyon, CO. Looks like a group on mules going along the Bright Angle Trail, elevation on sign says 6866 June 22, 1913 , photo by Kolob Brothers.
Burritt Mills Hiatt was born 23 May 1887, to Edwin J. and Harriet Charity Mills Hiatt. Formerly a member of the faculty of Wilmington College, he lived in Wilmington, Ohio. His account of the experiences of James M. Haworth as an Indian agent is based largely on unpublished letters in private hands. It provides a corrective to certain misrepresentations of Agent Haworth found in Wilbur S. Nye’s Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill (Norman, Oklahoma, 1937). Further references to James M. Haworth’s work among the Indians will be found in Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (Philadelphia, 1899) and in Thomas C. Battey, The Life and Adventures of a Quaker among the Indians (Boston, 1875).
Burritt Mills Hiatt died 11 Nov 1971, in Fayette, Ohio.
Burritt Hiatt writings
May 2, 1893. Today was my sixth birthday. It showered in the morning, but as soon as it cleared up my grandfather led out a spotted Shetland pony. He was full of anticipation of my pleasure because a pony was one of the things that he had been denied as a boy.
I was placed in the saddle and my grandfather turned the pony's head loose. I was not strong enough to hold the pony, especially when he trotted and bounced me around. Consequently, I slid off into a fresh mud puddle.
We called the pony Prince. He was smarter for his age than I was and it was some years before I caught up with him.
Our camp on the river was not far from Fort Ancient. Near there was a road going up the hill and it was used to test the climbing abilities of automobiles. Several manufacturers vied with each other in hill-climbing and the Cincinnati Automobile club conducted a hill-climbing contest annually at Fort Ancient.
The attraction of the contest was sufficient to induce the other campers to go see it. They left Pearl and me at the camp---alone from about ten in the morning to late afternoon. Why the chaperones would do this I cannot explain.
Pearl got lunch which we ate together. Then when the dishes were washed she sat in the hammock while I sat on the river bank looking at the stream. Suddenly, I asked her to marry me.
Friday, December 29, 1911. This is our first wedding anniversary and we have a son in the house, twenty days old. As an anniversary present I gave Pearl a copper chafing dish. She had always wanted one in college to use for cooking in her room. Now she has more use for one than ever with a baby on her hands.
Sunday, December 31, 1911. This is our first New Years Eve and tomorrow is a holiday. By some coincidence all the other holidays of the year seem to have fallen on weekends so that it did not shorten the days of teaching. Even Edwin was born on a Saturday night so that I was at school bright and early on Monday morning.
It snowed last night and then rained all day so that outside it has been dreary, but inside everything has been cozy. Edwin has observed his schedule with great regularity and has not cried. This evening I poured alcohol into the chafing dish and tried my hand at cocking.
The main events of the year have, of course, been establishing a home and the birth of a son. The most serious time was during Pearl's illness in May, June and July when she had no appetite and got so thin and weak that some worried about what the outcome might be.
June 12, 1915. On account of the heat of the sick-room and also perhaps on account of his fever, Harold said that he would like the taste of the water from Leonard's spring. His requests had been so few that we immediately drove in the Cadillac to the bridge over Todd's Fork near Center Church. From there it was necessary to walk across two fields carrying the jug. The path descends by a sudden drop into a narrow ravine where a little spring flows out of some limestone and falls into a pool in strata of blue clay which gives the water a light sparkling appearance. While the thin stream was trickling into the jug, I looked
2
up at the huge sugar tree which overhangs the spring with its somber foliage. There was a wind which made a roar in the tree and caused it to sway slightly. Through the branches I could see the clouds coursing rapidly past in hurrying masses, and I thought how soothing this cool, wild ravine would have been to my brother who had often come here as a boy and who now thirsted again for a drink of this water.
The lady about whom I write I have seen with my own eyes although she was ninety years of age and I was very young. Her name was Esther Cadwallader and she was born near Lynchburg, Virginia on January 25, 1800. At that time Lynchburg was a town of 500 citizens on the James River. Fifty years before Esther was born a little group of settlers had come to this neighborhood. At first they came in small groups, but eventually a wave of Friends came. They were called the South River Quakers because their log meeting house lay south of the James River. Their log meeting house was built in 1757. A stone meeting house was built in 1798.
The trek of the Quakers from the South River Meeting to Ohio began about 1800, the year of Esther Cadwallader birth. Her older brother, Jabez, left for Ohio in 1813. Some felt that they could no longer live in peace with their conscience in a community that was becoming ecomonically more and more dependent upon slavery. In addition, there is a record of some young men of the family being fined for not joining the militia. In the record of South River Meeting for 1811-1813 Esther's brother, Mahlon, had cash detained by William Robinson, Deputy Sheriff, for muster fines.
The Cadwallader family had originated near Philadelphia. The grandfather, Moses, had lived in Chester Go., Penna. where in 1756 he married Elizabeth Malin. Their fourth child, Thomas, had come to south River, Va. where in 1786 he married Jane Daniel, daughter of William and Esther Daniel of London Co., Va. It was this couple that started their wagon journey to Ohio in September 1816.
Thomas Cadwallader, Jr. and his wife, Jane, on August 10, 1816 requested a letter of removal to Ohio for themselves and their children. This request was granted on September 14, 1816 for their removal to Miami Monthly Meeting at Waynesville, Ohio. The four younger children were Esther, Abner, Joseph and David. The five older children were Elizabeth, who married Enoch Lewis in
Va. Mahlon applied for a certificate to Ohio in May 1809. Jonah went to Ohio earlier. Israel died at the age of thirteen in 1800. Thomas, Jr. was not given a certificate from the meeting because of some infraction of discipline.
The trip to the west began in time for the nuts in the woods to be ripe and Esther Cadwallader spoke of gathering nuts on the way. They traveled the path called the Wilderness Road and seldom came across a house more pretentious than a log cabin thatched with straw. In October they passed through Kentucky. When they got to the Ohio River they saw on the opposite side a few primitive buildings which were Cincinnati. They crossed on a flatboat ferry and went to Waynesville.
Esther's father, Thomas Cadwallader, chose some land overlooking the Little Miami River a few miles upstream from Morrow in Warren County. It was close to a settlement called Rochester. On the 17th of Oct. 1816 James and Mahlon Roach sold an acre of land in Rochester to the Society of Friends for a meeting house.
The two older daughters of Thomas Cadwallader did not wait for the new meeting house to be completed. They both got married in the Waynesville Meeting on December 4, 1817. The older girl, Naomi, married Elijah Thomas. The younger daughter, Esther, married James Hollingsworth.
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In 1829 at the time of the division in the Society of Friends, Esther Cadwallader Hollingsworth was disowned by Miami Monthly Meeting on account of her sympathy with Elias Hicks. At the same time her husband, James, her brother, Joseph and her mother, Rachel were disowned for the same reason.
After this disownment, there is no record of Esther in the minutes except for the birth of her ten children from 1820 to 1846. Her third child, Jane, was born August 5, 1826. At the age of 21, Jane was married at the Hopewell Meeting to Clarkson Hiatt of Martinsville, Ohio, aged 22 on march 4, 1845. When Jane was forty, her seventh child and fifth son, Edwin J. Hiatt was born. Edwin was married to Harriet C. Mills in 1886,
My own memories of my great grandmother, Esther, are of her Quaker garb, her quick movements and her insistence on helping with the household work. When I was young she had a constant desire to feed me scraped apple. I took the treatment with pleasure.
TO EUROPE ON A CATTLE BOAT Dated 1908
I arrived at Ballerns' Shipping Agency on Commercial Street, Boston at eight in the morning. About fifty men were standing about the place. Most of those in the waiting group wore velveteens and red handkerchiefs. They spoke in a foreign tongue and carried their worldly goods in bags swung over their shoulders.
Among these applicants were two Englishmen, one Very tail and one very short. The stubby one managed to jostle against me and apologized. Then he beckened to his partner who joined us and they talked about the necessity of our sticking together during the voyage. A signal was given for the crowd to move to the dock. The foreigners shouldered their bags and the two Englishmen kept close to me, repeating that we should all stand together.
The question of whether I should try to work my way to Liverpool on the cattle boat was more complicated than 1 had thought it would be. I had come from Ohio with the expectation of hunting up my Uncle Charlie in Liverpool. A cousin of ours in Scotland had written my mother that he had seen Uncle Charlie in a pawn shop in Liverpool. Uncle Charlie had not recognized him and the cousin had not wished to renew aquaintance with such a black sheep of the family. My mother wished to recover from Uncle Charlie some family heirlooms. She particularly wanted one volume of a diary kept by their mother about the life in the village of Moorehouse, Scotland. At my grandmother's death one volume of the diary had been given to my mother, one to my uncle Charlie and one to my aunt Anne who had died and left her volume to a Scottish historical society. My mother had received an offer from the historical society for the other two volumes of the diary that would complete the set.
From my home in a small town in Ohio it looked feasible to go to Liverpool and find Uncle Charlie, but 'in Boston the crowds in the shipping office were much larger than I had expected. In Liverpool the crowds might be even greater and I would be looking for a needle in a hay stack.
I decided to ask my two newly-found English acquaintances about the chances of success. I showed them the picture of Uncle Charlie that my mother had given me. They both looked at it and shook their heads. They did not recognize him.
"Do you think that I could ever find him in Liverpool?", I asked.
"Well, said the short one, "I bet we three together could find him. You ask the shipping agent to let us go along with you and we will locate your uncle Charlie."
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No sooner was this said than Ballern entered the shop. The men raised their voices and stampeded toward him beseeching him for passage abroad. Ballern was deaf to all their entreaties and motioned for the crowd to follow him to the docks. There we got on a ferry boat. Our ferry stopped at the dock of the Leyland Line. We went into a big building where drays were hauling supplies to the boats, We were herded into the inspector's office.
When my turn came, the official took my name, weight, color of eyes, color of hair and warned me that I would be compelled to stand hard work. He gave me a red ticket and pointed out a place for me to wait. After the inspector had finished his examination of the men he opened the office door and called out the names of the candidates elected. Only four men were chosen out of the fifty that Ballern had sent over in our group. I was one of them.
As I started up the gangplank someone twitched my arm. It was the shorter one of the Englishmen who had been so friendly in Ballern's office. He said that agent didn't treat them fairly. His chum, the tall one, had tears in his eyes and said that he and his chum would join me in Liverpool by the boat next week and that they would help me find my uncle.
I hurried onto the boat and climbed the stairs until I reached a passage leading to the second cabin. An official in a blue coat ordered me out of the galley and to the forecastle. It seemed that this steamship, The Canadian, carried two extremes of people with no intermediate group. All of the passengers were first class. At the other end of the scale, all the cattlemen were supposed to keep out of sight. According to the officer's instructions, I went down to the forecastle where the cattlemen were required to stay. It was a dark little cubby-hole in the prow of the ship with narrow bunks one on top of the other. The forecastle had a musty smell. Some of the cattlemen who had already taken possession there did not look as if they could be trusted with baggage lying about. I changed into my work clothes and left my bags with a member of the crew, a lamp-timer by title, who looked reliable.
The cattle in the ship were all tied by the head to heavy planks fastened between the braces of the ship. Thus they stood in even rows with their heads out. There were three decks of cattle and I was told that there were 1117 total on board.
At nine in the morning our ship cast off from the dock. At noon we were issued our eating equipment. This consisted of a tin pan, tin cup, knife, fork, and spoon. There was no table for cattlemen. We were divided into groups of four, One from each group was delegated to go to the galley and get the dishpan full of food for all of his group. When he came back, the quartet sat down any place and dipped into the pan. The pan held some meat, potatoes and vegetables floating in a thin gravy. In my excitement I had eaten no breakfast that morning and very little supper the night before. Yet in spite of my hunger I couldn't eat for the food had a greasy taste about it that made it unpalatable.
At three we were called together for our first work. Our job was to get some bales of hay up from the hold with a winch and then scatter the hay to the cattle in the section assigned to us. After haying we fed shelled corn to the cattle. We were finished with our work by seven.
After supper they issued blankets to us and a sack of straw apiece. I went down into the open hatch where the hay was kept to look for a place to sleep. It was sepulchral down there in the dark passageway. There was also the same smell of cheap disinfectant that filled the forecastle. I came up on the deck where the cattle were tethered. Near an opening was an empty stall which I decided was to be my bed.
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One day at noon I peeped behind some bales of hay and saw Freddie eating plum duff out of a tin. I had eaten only a little skouse for four days and was weak from hunger. The sight of the plum duff started a pang in my stomach, Freddie saw me and attempted to hide the empty tin can behind him.
"Where did you get it?" I asked him.
"From the second cook," he replied.
"How do you get to the second cook?" I demanded excitedly.
"There is an iron stairway that goes up around the smokestack, he whispered.
I climbed up the stair until I was opposite a little door that I calculated
led to a passageway and immediately recognized the delicious smell of food in the air. When I stepped into the passageway a loud voice commanded, "Get down there:" A red-faced officer in a blue uniform pointed to a sign and cried, "Don't you see that sign?" The sign said that "Cattlemen are not allowed on this deck."
The aroma of food had increased the gnawing in my stomach and nude me try another door one deck below the first. This led into a deserted passageway with three doors on each side. I tried each brass knob carefully, but found all of them locked except the last one. Within this door was a long room with a stove at the end. A hunch-backed cook, head adorned by a white cap, was dancing about in front of the stove. To me he paid no attention. I was not eager to see him for the second cook was the one that Freddie had dealt with. I stepped into the room and asked the little cook for something to eat.
"Too busy," he snapped without turning around to look. "See the second cook."
I looked around and saw a red-headed boy sitting in the pantry peeling potatoes. I asked him if he was the second cook and he pointed his knife to a little room in the rear. I went in and found a short man leaning against a block on which there were two big fish.
"Can I get something to eat?" I begged.
"Got a bob or two?" he said.
I gave him a quarter and whispered, "Plum duff."
He went to a stone jar, ladled a big spoonfull of plum duff into a tin cup
and gave it to me. "Now skip," he ordered. "The second steward might come in."
The next morning after work I slipped into the parts of the vessel forbidden to cattlemen to seek out the second cook again. I put a quarter in his pocket. He winked and asked me to wait awhile. I sat down with the galley boy and peeled some potatoes. Presently, the second cook looked over me into the passage and then handed me some cold chicken.' I Ate this and immediately felt better. This stable source of food made me feel the problem of survival was solved.
The ocean tossed more and more the next morning. The cattle stood with feet wide apart bracing themselves against the swinging of the ship. Down the aisle a steer lost his foothold on the slippery floor and went down on his. side. There he lay and kicked until he had knocked the pins from under his two neighbors. For an instant the floor seemed only a confusion of hoofs and horns, but in another moment the steers had all scrambled to their feet and stood with heaving sides and lolling tongues.
In addition to my regular work of feeding I was put on duty as a day watchman. I would walk through all of the cattle aisles every half hour and see that none of the cattle had broken their halters or tangled their feet in the tie ropes.
A little before four one morning, just as I was preparing to get up, I heard a gull crying on the mast above the boat. The cattle seemed to be in a different mood. They would paw the decks and grumble deep in their chests. someone said
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that it was a sign we were approaching
Toward noon the fog lifted. By eight we got our first glimpse of England. There were three electric lights in a tall tower at a beach resort near Liverpool. We could see a merry-go-round as it turned. A little later on the sky overhead was a glow that must have been the lights of Liverpool.
We couldn't watch for long because we were ordered to go below and make the steers ready for unloading. We had to spread ashes on the passageways so that the cattle would not slip. We untied the hard knots on each halter and left the ropes so that they could be easily loosened. Then we worked on the partitions between the cattle sections so that we could lift them easily and quickly.
At midnight we were still working. The tide was in so that the tug boats could push the Canadian slowly up to the docks. We looked over the edge of the ship and watched her being tied up. When the ship was made fast a huge chute was hoisted to the cattle deck for the unloading of cattle.
It was a weird place of sights and sounds. All through the night there was the bawling of cattle. The restless steers were aware that some movement was taking place. Some of the steers lost their balance in the chute and rolled along the dock.
At two in the morning the last steer was off the boat and the last bale unloaded. We were all ordered to get back aboard the ship. The gang planks were lifted, the ropes cast off and we drifted into the middle of the basin. Here the boat stayed motionless like a dozing duck.
I went back to the cattle stall where I had been sleeping, but I could' not spend the remainder of the night there because all of the hay and straw was gone. Finally, I found a place in a coil of rope. The ropes became visible against the lightening sky like spider webs, a net-work of ratlines and crisscross lines against the dawn. I sat up and could see the grey buildings of Liverpool in the distance.
At eight in the morning the good ship Canadian was tugged over to the passenger dock and we went ashore.
June 11, 1931.
Dear Mother:
To pass away the time I have been turning my thoughts to a delightful kind of mental deep-sea fishing. It is interesting to look down into the unplumbed depths and see shadowy forms there. It gives you the feeling that every impression you have received since earliest infancy lies in the deep places if you could only bring it up into your consciousness. I see occasional flashes of shining fish on the bottom of my memory and I enjoy bringing these submerged fragments of the past to the surface and presenting then.
A scene comes in my mind now that took place years ago in our sitting room on Wood Street. We were sitting by the fireplace and some company was there. Father said that he would read us something. From the bookcase he drew a red book with black title patch on the back - "Mathew Arnold's Poems".
He read: "I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts for fear that if revealed,"
I was outwardly calm, but deeply excited. I felt a heightened pulse and deeper breathing. I felt I could enter with more sympathy into people's lives and understand their feelings better.
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"There rises an unspeakable desire" he continued.
The whole adventure of mankind on the earth gained in dignity and living became a grander affair.
"The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes,'
I had the sense of being in the presence of powerful possibilities. The doors of delight were beginning to open in front of me and some new knowledge seemed to be approaching. I felt that some new enlightenment still unreceived was on its way to me. Before it came and all too soon the poem ended. There was some silence and then a discussion about the poem which I do riot remember because I was slowly settling to earth. Parents who have guests that can be entertained in this way leave a valuable inheritance to children.
The sportsman who is temporarily away from his regular occupation sees
nature from an appreciative angle. His interest is in initmate association with nature.
Especially is this true of the fisherman. To him the brook and the river are more than the home of the trout and the bass. They are the vestibules through which he returns to nature itself. He likes to watch the quiet eddies of the pool in half reverie as the water beetles and surface bubbles go round in little whirls. He becomes very observant of small things. Away from the more violent noises of cities he learns to step his hearing down so that in the quiet the buzzing of an insect or the failing of the ripple of the water once more gets full attention. The trees under which he finds his way are something to be studied in reference to the casting of his line. Away from occupations and automobiles he settles down to fellowship with nature.
One who has once entered the deep woods can never forget the sense of loneliness, yet of companionship, which it gives. Here is no noise of the streets, but the murmur of the wind high above the tree tops. Adventuring into the wilds of nature has its effect upon the human spirit. One feels it as the darkness falls even if you are by a fire. There is an immediate presence of mystery. The stars, which one can rarely see from the city streets, seem clearer, It is the world men knew before labor and commerce and manufacturing had made nature the bond-servant of human needs.
In this experience we become aware of a reality which is rich and deep and which seems to stand behind nature. It is not anything we see. It is not anything in fancy. It is something profound and fundamental. Through nature we become aware of this background of reality. It gives you a feeling of awe, a sense of the immeasurable, an all-sustaining working.
To his mother, November 1931:
The only time I was in the Canadian woods .L enjoyed, more than anything else, a long walk I took alone in the forest. I followed a log trail, but the road had not been used for so long that the trees had fallen across it and underbrush grown up in it. Still it could be distinctly seen between the high trees on either side.
The only moving creatures I saw were the tiny birds---little warblers and fly-catchers that crawl about in the high trees, sometimes head downward. They live upstairs and never pay any attention to the first floor tenants anyway, whether man or beast.
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The wind swept through the tops of the trees with an unearthy moan. In a brush pile I hear a rustle and finally see a small weasel. With his nose to the ground he is making nervous leaps through the brush, evidently tracking some bird. To me he pays no attention and I let him pass on.
Taking cautious steps in the soft pine needles I walk forward. I peer to the right and see the glitter of water in a small pond barely visible under the limbs of the trees. A startled partridge rises from near my feet and I am more frightened than he is.
Further on I see over my head some tender limbs of a birch tree that have been broken off and partly eaten by moose. In an opening of the road are some blueberry bushes and unmistakeable bear tracks among them. The trees again become tall on each side, so tall that the sound of the wind is dimmed, and the silence of the deep lonesome forest is more appalling than the wind.
The old log lumber camp is now in view, the roof fallen in. I enter the open doors and find deer tracks on the dirt floors. Near the camp runs a little stream that empties into a swamp. On the water in the distance are two black ducks. The dusk is descending and I start the backward journey. It has been an experience of value because it gives a fresh impression of the beauty, terror and pitilessness of nature, the solemnity of her power. I wish that I could again walk in a woods big enough to give me that feeling of caution and fear.
INTERCOLLEGIATE FOOTBALL November 9, 1901
As a boy of fourteen I accompanied the Wilmington College football team to Yellow Springs to play Antioch College. On account of the distance of twenty-six miles it was necessary to start at daylight. There were fourteen men in the hack. The football clothes and balls were stowed under the two benches that ran down the sides of the hack. In order that the players could sit comfortably, I rode standing on the back step.
We arrived at Yellow Springs at two in the afternoon. The players changed clothes in one of the classrooms. The playing field was simply a section of the campus which was not even smooth. There was no grandstand and the speculators wandered over the field at will.
As the game progressed it became evident that the Antioch players were more experienced than our men. They could hardly have been less experienced because several of our players had never been in a game before. Some of them had never even seen a game played. During the first half, Antioch scored two touchdowns principally by teamwork. Some of the individual play of our men was superior. Our left end sprained his ankle on the rough ground. There was no substitute. He continued to play hopping around on one leg. There was no coach to take out a player who was hurt. Between halves the players took off his shoe and could find no broken bones so he went back into the game.
The second half was a repitition of the first with Antioch making two touchdowns. The final score was Antioch 23, Wilmington O. After the game there were no showers. Nothing could be done for the bruises and the strains of the players.
Ahead of us was a drive of seven or eight hours. Darkness soon descended. There was a gleam once in a while of a coal oil lamp in a farmhouse along the road, but otherwise everything was dark. The iron tires of the wheels grated on the gravel road. We could tell when we were going up hill or down, but we could see nothing. The time was passed by songs and stories. Toward the end
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of the journey some of the boys slept. We arrived in Wilmington about midnight. Some of the boys had to drive horses home six or seven miles from Wilmington after that.
BABY RIGHT
One frosty fall evening in October 1905 when I was nineteen, my father drove into the yard with a mare he had bought unexpectedly at a sale. The snowflakes clung to her hair which was long and not in good condition. The name of the horse was Baby Right which was a registered name and she had a pedigree.
I was familiar with some of the history of Baby Right. She had finished second in the "B" class trotting race at the local fair ground matinee. She had been raced through town on the snow by her owner. Baby Right had cooled off too quickly and had never recovered her speed.
We put her into a box stall in our barn and fed her the best oats and hay. Each day I would curry her. Her coat turned smoother as she gained weight.
She became a favorite buggy horse. There was a rivalry between me and my brother, Harold, about who should use her on Sunday. One Sunday I had curried Baby Right before I went to church so that I could hitch her up when I got home. In the meantime, Harold had decided to use her and had her partly hitched to the buggy when I came into the yard. Neither of our parents were home to umpire the dispute between us. Only Verne Roberts, a college student, was there. Harold and I had loud words. Then it came to blows and finally we were on the ground wrestling. We became more and more savage and enraged. Finally, Verne separated us. Before we got cleaned up our parents came home from church. my father unhitched Baby Right and put her back in her stall. We never had another disagreement about: which one of us should drive the horse.
I bought a volume of horse registrations and traced the pedigree of Baby Right. Her ancestry contained a few horses of distinction. I thought she might become the mother of a horse of distinction. We subscribed to a horse paper that contained advertisement of stallions. The fee of the young tried sires was smaller than the fee of the stallions whose colts had brought them reputation. I
selected a young seven-year-old stallion named Todd who was stationed at Lexington, Kentucky.
I asked my father's consent to take Baby Right to Lexington and he gave me permissions. On the first of June 1906, I ordered a boxcar set on the railroad tracks. That evening Baby Right and I, housed in a boxcar, were waiting on B&O switch for the engine to pick us up. I had built a stall for Baby Right in one end of the car and in the other end had arranged my lantern, lunch, buckets of water, bales of hay and sacks of feed. It was dark before the engine came and when it hit our car, it did so with an unexpected violence. The instant that the train hit our car everything went black on account of the lantern upsetting. Not only was the feed and water upset, but Baby Right was jolted right through her stall and mixed up with the debris in the other end of the car. I spoke to her as calmly as I could and put out my hand toward her. Lucky, I touched her shoulder. Soon her quivering and stamping quieted and I led her in the darkness to the other end of the car. when I had tied her there I lit the lantern and straightened the things up, but the water was all gone.
On account of the heat of the evening I rode with the doors of the boxcar half-way open. About midnight of the next day we were marooned in the freight yards at Paris, Kentucky. I looked out into the darkness and saw a row of large
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tobacco warehouses. I took a bucket and climbed the fence to search for water. At the corner of one warehouse was a wooden barrel. When I stuck my hand in it I felt water about half-way down. I did not know whether it was stale and full of wiggle-tails or not. I carried a bucket of this water to Baby Right. She drank it eagerly. I went back and carried another bucket full to her.
The next morning at Lexington, our boxcar was placed beside an unloading platform used especially for horses. I left Baby Right munching grass contentedly in a bluegrass pasture about three miles from Lexington.
I went back to town to get some sleep. A telephone message from the owner of the farm awakened me. He said that Baby Right, being a stranger among the other horses, had tried to win her place by fighting and had been dangerously kicked. He suggested that I call a veterinary and see her at once. One of the famous horse doctors of Lexington took me with him out to the farm. We found that a sharp hoof had laid out a long gash on her hip. The doctor said that all he could do was to treat it with disinfectant. Then he drove me back to town.
I returned to Wilmington on the train after making arrangements. for Baby Right to board for a year at the Hickory wood Farm. Each month we would receive .a bill for the pasturage and a statement about the health of the mare. On the fifteenth of June in 1907, we received a letter that said she had foaled a male colt and that both were doing well.
In two weeks .L had a chance to go to Lexington and stopped late at night at the Reed Hotel which is near the race track. At two in the morning I was wide awake and the hotel was hot. I decided to walk to the race track and try to get some sleep on the grass. There was a welcome breeze across the grass. Towards daybreak the trees began to loom up out of the darkness and there was a twitter of birds especially meadowlarks. I dozed off and awoke refreshed and hungry. I walked back to the Reed Hotel for my breakfast.
I took a traction car out to Hickory Wood Farm, which was larger than I expected. It contained four hundred acres and had three pastures of brood mares. The house was far back from the road. When I knocked on the door I learned that the proprietor was in town and would not be at home for several hours. I thought that I could recognize Baby Right by myself and I climbed the gate into the field.
The first mare that I saw looked something like Baby Right, but her neck was too thick, her fore-top was too long and her thighs too muscular. She did not permit other horses to approach her colt which was lying on the ground asleep. This jealousy would not be characteristic of Baby Right. In the next pasture I looked at all of the mares without finding her. Then I went to the barn where I asked the help of the colored hostler. He walked with me through a big woods where there were thirty brood mares. Then we went through two additional pastures without finding our mare. I returned to the first pasture to examine more closely the mare I thought looked like Baby Right. On her hip I discovered the scar of the kick she had got when 1 brought her to Kentucky.
I looked at the colt. Before I knew it was her colt I had thought that he was a pretty good prospect, but at that time he was lying down. Now he got up and stretched like a hound dog. The shoulders and fore-legs were high and set on straight with a thick fore-arm. The back was short and round-ribbed. I chased him a little in the field to get some idea of his gait. When he walked rapidly he seemed on the point of breaking into a pace, pressed faster he breaks into a trot. I was satisfied with his movement. He seemed large and well-developed for a colt only two weeks of age.
I returned to Wilmington and reported what I had seen. The family decided to leave Baby Right at the Hickory Wood Farm another year. We had talked and speculated about the colt. When he was weaned in the fall it became necessary to
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choose a name for him. We decided to name the colt Leavitt Todd.
The colt wintered well and the next spring we decided to have him trained by an expert in training colts. My father had a telegram from him saying that he had a prospective buyer for the colt.
My father went down to Lexington to see Leavitt Todd trot a short trial. The colt was only a yearling and had been in training only a few weeks. Therefore the trainer did not push him hard except in the last quarter of the mile which he trotted in 35 1/2 seconds. This was good enough to warrent a price of $1,200. My father received a check for this amount from a man in Iowa. Later an offer of $300 came from Iowa for Baby Right and was accepted. Baby Right died suddenly the next year in Iowa.
The reason for selling out our registered horses was that I needed the $1,500 to go to Harvard University in the fall of 1908.
APPALACHIA I
At the age of twenty in July 1907, I arrived in Simpson, Kentucky on a coal-road train. The town of Simpson consisted of one house, one railroad station and a side-track. I went to the house and met a boy who told me that Cash's Mill lay over the hill and pointed out the path.
It was about a mile up a steep grade to. the top of the hill. I rested for a While and looked down into the Morg Valley. As far as I could see the hills were wooded except for little clearings around an occasional cabin along the creek. The path followed a little stream down into the valley. I finally saw the smoke stack of a mill. I found that the workmen had gone for the day. The machinery was not yet in place and there was no roof over the mill.
I inquired of a child about a place to board and was directed down Morg Creek to the house of Reverend Breck Flincham. The cabin perched on a little plateau about twenty feet above the creek. The Flincham house is not hard to describe. It is one storey with two rooms in front and a shed on the back which is used as a kitchen. The roof shingles are thick and irregular and were riveted by hand. The weatherboarding is unpainted. when you go in the plain wooden front door you enter the room to the right. It has one window in which is wavy glass. There are three iron beds in the room, one against each of the walls opposite the door. On account of the house being built on a slope, there is much more space under the front part of the house than under the rear. The pup has carried bones, a piece of an old shoe and other objects under there.
On a bench in front of the house sat three people, a middle-aged man, a young fellow of my age and a half-grown girl. I went up to introduce myself and ask for lodging. Breck Flincham, the middle-aged man was a small, wiry man who seemed to be a kindly, polite person. The young man was Algan Derrickson, who was also a boarder there. He was helping to put up the mill and would be a sawyer. The half-grown girl was Julia Flincham, the orphan niece of Breck. The older man said supper would .be ready in a little while.
A voice from inside the house called us to supper. I followed the others around to a shed that leaned against the back of the house and served as a kitchen and dining room. On a shelf outside the door was a bucket, a dipper, a wash-pan, a soap dish and a flour sack towel. when we had cleaned up we went in and sat in split-bottom chairs around the table.
The ceiling of the kitchen had absorbed smoke and grease for so many years that it was shiny black. The oil-cloth on the table was flecking away. The cups and plates were not of the same size or pattern. In the middle of the table was
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an unlighted coal oil lamp. The mean was green string beans and corn bread. After we ate I was shown to my bed which was in the same room where
Algan slept. The Flinchams slept in the other room. Before Algan went to bed we sat for a while with Breck Flincham on the bench in front of the house.
In the morning I woke before daylight. I could hear through the half-inch partition that Cynthia Flincham was getting up in the other room. She walked into the kitchen and lighted the coal oil lamp. She put some kindling in the stove and started a fire. The coffee was set on the stove. The meat left from last night was reheated and also the green beans.
After breakfast I walked up Morg Creek to the mill with Algan who introduced me to the owner, Tom Cash. I asked him for a job and he assigned me to help with the oxen. The oxen dragged behind them a heavy log chain. My job was to fasten the chain around the logs. The oxen were to drag the logs to the brow of the hill over-looking the mill. There we would unlock the chain and let the logs roll down to the valley below. I had never worked with oxen. I was surprised by their deliberateness and power. They were slow in getting into motion, but when they had started their pressure would cause logs of immense size to move, through the brush to the brow of the hill.
After I had met the people with whom I was to be associated I became aware that I was under close observation. In a sense, I could be regarded as a spy among them. The natives had heard that I was a college student and nineteen years of age. Many of them had not had enough school opportunities to be able to read. They had been cheated by nearly every educated man who had come into their secluded valley. There had been factions and private justice and unreported crimes among them about which they were trained not to speak to outsiders. I did not know what degree of trust they would extend to. me in their closely guarded community life.
he are all dependent on the sawmill for our wages which makes me wonder how the people had any income before the mill was built. They have garden patches near their homes, but there is scant room for crops. It raises the question of the depth of poverty in which these people live. I pay five dollars a week for my room and board at the Flinchams. This gives Cynthia an income of ten dollars a week. I get $1.25 a day. Some of the men at the mill get more. They can get
from p32 to a month which is much more income than they had before.
I was glad that the next day was Sunday because I was tired and stiff from my unaccustomed work with the six oxen. In the morning when Breck invited me to ride with him to the Seven Oaks Meeting I was glad to accept. Our path lay along the creek bed most of the way. The going was rough for miles. Breck would kick his mule and complain that the creek bed was getting stonier every year. The bony back of the mule I was riding took my mind from the wooded hills on both sides of the creek. I asked Breck how much farther it was to Seven Oaks. He thought we would get there before the funeral.
This was the first I had heard of a funeral. It seemed that the two Fletcher boys got killed in a store fight during the winter and were buried without a funeral. The circuit preacher would be coming through this summer and the funeral would be held then. This is the service that we were now going to attend.
In a little while we emerged from the deep valley on a little cape. In the midst of this was a plot of cleared ground surrounded by a fence of rails. On the top rail sat four bearded men in black coats. An old man with a white beard seemed to be the leader. He would put his hands over his ears, look up in the sky and wail in a plaintive sing-song tone. There would be a low response-like mail from the people who knelt around the grave. This continued in rising crescendo until the whole group broke into a hymn. The preacher prayed for the dead
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Then the people began to shake hands and turn the meeting into a social gathering.
After supper, two of the preachers came to the Flincham house to stay for the night. The man with the fuzzy white whiskers was assigned to sleep with me. He observed all the courtesies in going to bed, such as turning his back on anyone who was undressing, but I slept restlessly. Every time he would turn over I had the unreasonable fear that I would inhale some of those silky white whiskers.
The next Sunday Derrickson and I went to the church to hear Breck Flincham preach. The meeting was held in a new building of freshly-sawed boards. The seats were without backs made from the same rough lumber as the walls. The meeting began with a song and a prayer. Then Rev. Flincham began to speak. He was surprisingly eloquent and moving. One pathetic feature of his speaking was that he had been dependent upon his wife who could read. He had memorized, from her reading, passages in the scripture, but this did not detract from the effect of his sermon.
It happened that in my travelling bag was a volume of Shakespeare's plays. One evening Breck asked me some questions about the morality of Shakespeare. He could not read and he• would get the drift only from the pictures. There was an illustration of the clothes basket from the "Merry Wives of Windsor". Also, there was an illustration of Falstaff in a tavern with Dame Qugley on his knee, I did not realize that he had judged the morals of Shakespeare from the steel engravings which illustrated the volume. I never thought what a racy sample of Shakespeare these illustrations were and what an impression they would create on the mind of Breck Flincham.
One evening when I went to the house after work there was a new boy sitting on the bench in front of the house. His name was W. Fred Hargrave. He had come to apply for the job of teaching at the schoolhouse. He stayed at Flincham's for supper and slept in the room with Derrickson and me.
The talk at the supper table indicated that the attendance at school had been very poor. Most of the teachers had been women who were too young to have any authority. There is a habit in the valley of keeping the children home from school for field work or house work. There are always chores for the children to do in regard to crops, firewood or clothing. Some of the children lose between a third and a half of each school year by staying at home to work.
After supper Fred Hargrave sat on a bench in front of the house. We had our usual evening talkfest and cooling out before going to bed. His conversation showed that he was one of the valley people, but with the difference that he had for been in the outside world. He was very diplomatic in his answers to Breck's questions. Flincham took a look at the moon and asked, "Do you teach that the moon goes around the earth or that the earth goes around the moon?" Hargrave approached his answer warily. He stressed the fact that the moon drew after it by the law of gravity the waters of the ocean and this was what made the tides rise and fall on the sea shore. This idea was so far from Flincham's experience that he did not pursue his questioning. After Mr. Flincham had gone in the house I stayed outside with Hargrave. He admitted that the moon moved around the earth, but he did not want to offend Mr. Flincham.
Now that the mill was turning out lumber, Shelby Fletcher and I were moved to working on the road over which the lumber was to be taken to the railroad siding. While shoveling dirt I watched a cabin on a hillside near us. ,It belonged to Chester Young who about my age and worked in the mill. On the porch sat his wife watching us and rocking a baby in her arms. Two small children played in the dirt below the porch. His wife could not have been more than twenty. Her arms were thin. Her eyes were hollow and her cheeks were spotted pink as if she had a fever. Frequently she had a coughing spell. She looked to
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me like a girl who had been trapped into life that would soon make an old woman out of her. Chester Young had some sisters and he talked to me about the fact that I was twenty and not married. I did not make any effort to understand his point.
As Algan Derrickson and I became better acquainted with the conditions in the Flincham home we ceased to call Mrs. Flincham Cynthia, and reduced the name to "Sin" on account of her cruelty to the little Julia, who was a small girl for her age. Her legs were slender and her dress was soiled. Her hair was tangled and dirty. The only affection she received in life was from her pup. Julia seemed to us a very shy, polite girl.
Algan Derrickson and I had been suffering from a form of dysentery for some time. We had the opinion that we caught if from some of the food that Sin Flincham prepared. Derrickson finally came to the opinion that the trouble came from the basswood bowl in which she mixed her corn bread. When she was out of the house he examined the bowl and found old and very big cracks in it. In some of these cracks meal had collected for a long time and had turned green. He washed the bowl, gleaned the cracks and we had no further difficulty after that,
I felt that this enviroment was unjust to a young man who was as capable as Algan Derrickson. He was a sawyer at the mill. Although he was only about twenty, his judgement was sought on all questions connected with the business. I wrote about him to my father in Ohio, who was on the board of Wilmington College. He wrote back and said that he could get a scholarship for Algan. I was going to the same college and urged Derrickson to go back to Ohio with me, but he felt that he could not go to college. He knew all the intricacies of calculating the amount of lumber and all of the intricacies of a steam engine, but he was convinced that he did not have enough general education.
On the last day of August 1907, I carried my suitcase to the top of the
mountain to the railroad station As I passed the cabins some of the people came out and waved to me. The one that I left with the most emotion was Algan Derrickson because he was mature beyond his age and had a good head. If he marries here he will get tied down in this way of life forever.
APPALACHIA II
This is November 10, 1935. I have an opportunity to drive south from Ohio across Kentucky. Twenty-eight years ago as a young man under twenty, I spent a summer in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. I worked for Tom Cash who also came from Ohio and was an acquaintance of my father.
While my wife and I were driving through Winchester and Jackson, Kentucky, I told her of my recollections of my summer in these mountains in 1907. We turned from the main road and wound down the mountains to a place called Kilhurst. There had been a railroad station there 28 years ago, but now the rails had been removed and the station boarded up. While we were parked there a man came up and advised us not to try to drive up the railroad right of way but to drive on the dirt road that ran over the hill.
After several miles we met an old man with long hair. I asked him if he knew Algan Derrickson. He said that he did because Algan's first wife was the widow Hampton who had died. I asked him if Algan had married again. He replied that Algan had married a Sweeny girl. He gave us directions to the Derrickson home. We followed his directions for some miles and then we felt lost. We stopped at a cabin where an old lady instructed us how to go back and turn in at a
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dirt road. We retraced our steps and turned into a hilly field where a road was barely visible. It ran up a creek bed. We followed it with our axle sometimes scraping the stones and at other times sinking into the mud.
At one turn in the road we met two men. One came on. The other ran back. When we got around the cliff we found that he had run back to get a mule team hitched to a wagon of sugar cane. We followed him a little while. Then he found a place where he could pull out of our way. We went up a steep hill then down an equally steep grade. We passed a house where little kids ran away from our automobile. There was a spring-hole with a log in it. I did not see it. I got stuck in the mud.
I walked on down the road and saw far above me on the mountainside a team of mules. I heard voices. I walked on to the house. I saw a shed with four dirty little children playing there. I went to the back porch of the house and a woman came to the door. I told her who I was. She said that she was Mrs. Derrickson and that she had heard Algan talk about me. I told her that our car was stuck in the mud. She said that Algan and the boys were shucking corn up on the mountainside.
I was out of breath when I got up there and saw two mules and a wagon and two boys on the mountain above throwing down corn. Algan looked at me. At first he had thought .L was his brother-in-law. I told him I could not tell him who I was till I got my breath. When I spoke he began to recognize me and seemed glad to see me. He told me that he had a headache today and could hardly see.,
After some talk 1 told him about our car being stuck. He unhitched his mules and sent one of the boys to the house for a log chain. We got down to the car and I introduced my wife. By that time the men with the load of sugar cane had arrived on the other side of the car. The boys brought the chain and they pulled us out. Algan and some of the children that were standing around got into the car and rode down to the house with us. We parked in front of the road so we could get out and went into the house.
By this time Mrs. Derrickson had washed her face, changed her dress and cleaned up some of the children. She is a rather slender woman about forty with a small oval face and a quick smile. Algan is forty-nine and exactly a day and one year older than I am.
There turned out to be ten children, but only nine were there. The oldest girl was with her aunt in town getting a high school education. There were five boys and four girls at home. Two of the smaller ones were twins, a boy and a girl. There was a boy still younger than the twins. They had a little girl about two. She was riot weaned yet on account of it being her second summer. She
ran around with a slip on and that was all.
Pearl remembered that she had some candy in the car. I went out to get it. The children crowded around her. I gave three of the boys dimes. Then a girl about fifteen appeared, who had been in the field helping her father with the corn, but had come down to change her clothes and see us. Her neck was scratched with the corn stalks.
Algan asked about my father and the people at the bank. He said the bank paid him for his work on Tom Cash's estate. I asked about the Flinchams, Breck and Cynthia. They are both dead. Their niece, Julia, married a Gillan and has ten children.
Privately Algan wanted to explain to me why he had not taken advantage of my father's offer to get him started in college. He had been too proud to explain why he had not accepted it at the time. He had his parents to support. Then, too, he had worked hard at too early an age in the sawmill without proper food. This had given him an acid stomach and ruined his health.
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Algan has over 200 acres. He and his wife were anxious to show us the front of the house, the porch, the little orchard and the barn with tobacco in it. The house looked well kept. They urged us several times to stay for supper, but we declined.
Pearl was afraid that it would rain and she dreaded the road out even in the driest of weather. So about three we left.
When I went out to the car I found it full of kids with candy on their fingers. Algan drove them out of the car, but I invited them in and took them on a short ride down to the barnyard where I had to go to turn around. Algan got in to ride out with us and see that nothing happened. The boys followed with the mules. We got carefully over the mud hole where we had stuck before. Algan sent the boys back home with the mules. They must have hurried because we had not gone very far until two boys came running after us to say that their mother wanted them to go to the store to get some flour and sugar. we went back over the ruts, hazards and rocks, down the creek bed and back on the railroad right of way. Here Algan bade us good-bye. I pressed into one of the boy's hands some money to be distributed to the other children.
Before we left Algan told us that they had decided they were about as
content as they could be. In talking about his wife, Algan said, "No use to say that we never had a quick word, but we have very few of them..." It was a rough country and their children would probably have to make their own way, just as their parents had done, but they were giving them what education they could.
(retyped, prepared by Larry Anderson last dtd 23 Jan 2014)
while in Tagbilaran City, Bohol, Philippines
Burritt Hiatt writings
May 2, 1893. Today was my sixth birthday. It showered in the morning, but as soon as it cleared up my grandfather led out a spotted Shetland pony. He was full of anticipation of my pleasure because a pony was one of the things that he had been denied as a boy.
I was placed in the saddle and my grandfather turned the pony's head loose. I was not strong enough to hold the pony, especially when he trotted and bounced me around. Consequently, I slid off into a fresh mud puddle.
We called the pony Prince. He was smarter for his age than I was and it was some years before I caught up with him.
Our camp on the river was not far from Fort Ancient. Near there was a road going up the hill and it was used to test the climbing abilities of automobiles. Several manufacturers vied with each other in hill-climbing and the Cincinnati Automobile club conducted a hill-climbing contest annually at Fort Ancient.
The attraction of the contest was sufficient to induce the other campers to go see it. They left Pearl and me at the camp---alone from about ten in the morning to late afternoon. Why the chaperones would do this I cannot explain.
Pearl got lunch which we ate together. Then when the dishes were washed she sat in the hammock while I sat on the river bank looking at the stream. Suddenly, I asked her to marry me.
Friday, December 29, 1911. This is our first wedding anniversary and we have a son in the house, twenty days old. As an anniversary present I gave Pearl a copper chafing dish. She had always wanted one in college to use for cooking in her room. Now she has more use for one than ever with a baby on her hands.
Sunday, December 31, 1911. This is our first New Years Eve and tomorrow is a holiday. By some coincidence all the other holidays of the year seem to have fallen on weekends so that it did not shorten the days of teaching. Even Edwin was born on a Saturday night so that I was at school bright and early on Monday morning.
It snowed last night and then rained all day so that outside it has been dreary, but inside everything has been cozy. Edwin has observed his schedule with great regularity and has not cried. This evening I poured alcohol into the chafing dish and tried my hand at cocking.
The main events of the year have, of course, been establishing a home and the birth of a son. The most serious time was during Pearl's illness in May, June and July when she had no appetite and got so thin and weak that some worried about what the outcome might be.
June 12, 1915. On account of the heat of the sick-room and also perhaps on account of his fever, Harold said that he would like the taste of the water from Leonard's spring. His requests had been so few that we immediately drove in the Cadillac to the bridge over Todd's Fork near Center Church. From there it was necessary to walk across two fields carrying the jug. The path descends by a sudden drop into a narrow ravine where a little spring flows out of some limestone and falls into a pool in strata of blue clay which gives the water a light sparkling appearance. While the thin stream was trickling into the jug, I looked
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up at the huge sugar tree which overhangs the spring with its somber foliage. There was a wind which made a roar in the tree and caused it to sway slightly. Through the branches I could see the clouds coursing rapidly past in hurrying masses, and I thought how soothing this cool, wild ravine would have been to my brother who had often come here as a boy and who now thirsted again for a drink of this water.
The lady about whom I write I have seen with my own eyes although she was ninety years of age and I was very young. Her name was Esther Cadwallader and she was born near Lynchburg, Virginia on January 25, 1800. At that time Lynchburg was a town of 500 citizens on the James River. Fifty years before Esther was born a little group of settlers had come to this neighborhood. At first they came in small groups, but eventually a wave of Friends came. They were called the South River Quakers because their log meeting house lay south of the James River. Their log meeting house was built in 1757. A stone meeting house was built in 1798.
The trek of the Quakers from the South River Meeting to Ohio began about 1800, the year of Esther Cadwallader birth. Her older brother, Jabez, left for Ohio in 1813. Some felt that they could no longer live in peace with their conscience in a community that was becoming ecomonically more and more dependent upon slavery. In addition, there is a record of some young men of the family being fined for not joining the militia. In the record of South River Meeting for 1811-1813 Esther's brother, Mahlon, had cash detained by William Robinson, Deputy Sheriff, for muster fines.
The Cadwallader family had originated near Philadelphia. The grandfather, Moses, had lived in Chester Go., Penna. where in 1756 he married Elizabeth Malin. Their fourth child, Thomas, had come to south River, Va. where in 1786 he married Jane Daniel, daughter of William and Esther Daniel of London Co., Va. It was this couple that started their wagon journey to Ohio in September 1816.
Thomas Cadwallader, Jr. and his wife, Jane, on August 10, 1816 requested a letter of removal to Ohio for themselves and their children. This request was granted on September 14, 1816 for their removal to Miami Monthly Meeting at Waynesville, Ohio. The four younger children were Esther, Abner, Joseph and David. The five older children were Elizabeth, who married Enoch Lewis in
Va. Mahlon applied for a certificate to Ohio in May 1809. Jonah went to Ohio earlier. Israel died at the age of thirteen in 1800. Thomas, Jr. was not given a certificate from the meeting because of some infraction of discipline.
The trip to the west began in time for the nuts in the woods to be ripe and Esther Cadwallader spoke of gathering nuts on the way. They traveled the path called the Wilderness Road and seldom came across a house more pretentious than a log cabin thatched with straw. In October they passed through Kentucky. When they got to the Ohio River they saw on the opposite side a few primitive buildings which were Cincinnati. They crossed on a flatboat ferry and went to Waynesville.
Esther's father, Thomas Cadwallader, chose some land overlooking the Little Miami River a few miles upstream from Morrow in Warren County. It was close to a settlement called Rochester. On the 17th of Oct. 1816 James and Mahlon Roach sold an acre of land in Rochester to the Society of Friends for a meeting house.
The two older daughters of Thomas Cadwallader did not wait for the new meeting house to be completed. They both got married in the Waynesville Meeting on December 4, 1817. The older girl, Naomi, married Elijah Thomas. The younger daughter, Esther, married James Hollingsworth.
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In 1829 at the time of the division in the Society of Friends, Esther Cadwallader Hollingsworth was disowned by Miami Monthly Meeting on account of her sympathy with Elias Hicks. At the same time her husband, James, her brother, Joseph and her mother, Rachel were disowned for the same reason.
After this disownment, there is no record of Esther in the minutes except for the birth of her ten children from 1820 to 1846. Her third child, Jane, was born August 5, 1826. At the age of 21, Jane was married at the Hopewell Meeting to Clarkson Hiatt of Martinsville, Ohio, aged 22 on march 4, 1845. When Jane was forty, her seventh child and fifth son, Edwin J. Hiatt was born. Edwin was married to Harriet C. Mills in 1886,
My own memories of my great grandmother, Esther, are of her Quaker garb, her quick movements and her insistence on helping with the household work. When I was young she had a constant desire to feed me scraped apple. I took the treatment with pleasure.
TO EUROPE ON A CATTLE BOAT Dated 1908
I arrived at Ballerns' Shipping Agency on Commercial Street, Boston at eight in the morning. About fifty men were standing about the place. Most of those in the waiting group wore velveteens and red handkerchiefs. They spoke in a foreign tongue and carried their worldly goods in bags swung over their shoulders.
Among these applicants were two Englishmen, one Very tail and one very short. The stubby one managed to jostle against me and apologized. Then he beckened to his partner who joined us and they talked about the necessity of our sticking together during the voyage. A signal was given for the crowd to move to the dock. The foreigners shouldered their bags and the two Englishmen kept close to me, repeating that we should all stand together.
The question of whether I should try to work my way to Liverpool on the cattle boat was more complicated than 1 had thought it would be. I had come from Ohio with the expectation of hunting up my Uncle Charlie in Liverpool. A cousin of ours in Scotland had written my mother that he had seen Uncle Charlie in a pawn shop in Liverpool. Uncle Charlie had not recognized him and the cousin had not wished to renew aquaintance with such a black sheep of the family. My mother wished to recover from Uncle Charlie some family heirlooms. She particularly wanted one volume of a diary kept by their mother about the life in the village of Moorehouse, Scotland. At my grandmother's death one volume of the diary had been given to my mother, one to my uncle Charlie and one to my aunt Anne who had died and left her volume to a Scottish historical society. My mother had received an offer from the historical society for the other two volumes of the diary that would complete the set.
From my home in a small town in Ohio it looked feasible to go to Liverpool and find Uncle Charlie, but 'in Boston the crowds in the shipping office were much larger than I had expected. In Liverpool the crowds might be even greater and I would be looking for a needle in a hay stack.
I decided to ask my two newly-found English acquaintances about the chances of success. I showed them the picture of Uncle Charlie that my mother had given me. They both looked at it and shook their heads. They did not recognize him.
"Do you think that I could ever find him in Liverpool?", I asked.
"Well, said the short one, "I bet we three together could find him. You ask the shipping agent to let us go along with you and we will locate your uncle Charlie."
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No sooner was this said than Ballern entered the shop. The men raised their voices and stampeded toward him beseeching him for passage abroad. Ballern was deaf to all their entreaties and motioned for the crowd to follow him to the docks. There we got on a ferry boat. Our ferry stopped at the dock of the Leyland Line. We went into a big building where drays were hauling supplies to the boats, We were herded into the inspector's office.
When my turn came, the official took my name, weight, color of eyes, color of hair and warned me that I would be compelled to stand hard work. He gave me a red ticket and pointed out a place for me to wait. After the inspector had finished his examination of the men he opened the office door and called out the names of the candidates elected. Only four men were chosen out of the fifty that Ballern had sent over in our group. I was one of them.
As I started up the gangplank someone twitched my arm. It was the shorter one of the Englishmen who had been so friendly in Ballern's office. He said that agent didn't treat them fairly. His chum, the tall one, had tears in his eyes and said that he and his chum would join me in Liverpool by the boat next week and that they would help me find my uncle.
I hurried onto the boat and climbed the stairs until I reached a passage leading to the second cabin. An official in a blue coat ordered me out of the galley and to the forecastle. It seemed that this steamship, The Canadian, carried two extremes of people with no intermediate group. All of the passengers were first class. At the other end of the scale, all the cattlemen were supposed to keep out of sight. According to the officer's instructions, I went down to the forecastle where the cattlemen were required to stay. It was a dark little cubby-hole in the prow of the ship with narrow bunks one on top of the other. The forecastle had a musty smell. Some of the cattlemen who had already taken possession there did not look as if they could be trusted with baggage lying about. I changed into my work clothes and left my bags with a member of the crew, a lamp-timer by title, who looked reliable.
The cattle in the ship were all tied by the head to heavy planks fastened between the braces of the ship. Thus they stood in even rows with their heads out. There were three decks of cattle and I was told that there were 1117 total on board.
At nine in the morning our ship cast off from the dock. At noon we were issued our eating equipment. This consisted of a tin pan, tin cup, knife, fork, and spoon. There was no table for cattlemen. We were divided into groups of four, One from each group was delegated to go to the galley and get the dishpan full of food for all of his group. When he came back, the quartet sat down any place and dipped into the pan. The pan held some meat, potatoes and vegetables floating in a thin gravy. In my excitement I had eaten no breakfast that morning and very little supper the night before. Yet in spite of my hunger I couldn't eat for the food had a greasy taste about it that made it unpalatable.
At three we were called together for our first work. Our job was to get some bales of hay up from the hold with a winch and then scatter the hay to the cattle in the section assigned to us. After haying we fed shelled corn to the cattle. We were finished with our work by seven.
After supper they issued blankets to us and a sack of straw apiece. I went down into the open hatch where the hay was kept to look for a place to sleep. It was sepulchral down there in the dark passageway. There was also the same smell of cheap disinfectant that filled the forecastle. I came up on the deck where the cattle were tethered. Near an opening was an empty stall which I decided was to be my bed.
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One day at noon I peeped behind some bales of hay and saw Freddie eating plum duff out of a tin. I had eaten only a little skouse for four days and was weak from hunger. The sight of the plum duff started a pang in my stomach, Freddie saw me and attempted to hide the empty tin can behind him.
"Where did you get it?" I asked him.
"From the second cook," he replied.
"How do you get to the second cook?" I demanded excitedly.
"There is an iron stairway that goes up around the smokestack, he whispered.
I climbed up the stair until I was opposite a little door that I calculated
led to a passageway and immediately recognized the delicious smell of food in the air. When I stepped into the passageway a loud voice commanded, "Get down there:" A red-faced officer in a blue uniform pointed to a sign and cried, "Don't you see that sign?" The sign said that "Cattlemen are not allowed on this deck."
The aroma of food had increased the gnawing in my stomach and nude me try another door one deck below the first. This led into a deserted passageway with three doors on each side. I tried each brass knob carefully, but found all of them locked except the last one. Within this door was a long room with a stove at the end. A hunch-backed cook, head adorned by a white cap, was dancing about in front of the stove. To me he paid no attention. I was not eager to see him for the second cook was the one that Freddie had dealt with. I stepped into the room and asked the little cook for something to eat.
"Too busy," he snapped without turning around to look. "See the second cook."
I looked around and saw a red-headed boy sitting in the pantry peeling potatoes. I asked him if he was the second cook and he pointed his knife to a little room in the rear. I went in and found a short man leaning against a block on which there were two big fish.
"Can I get something to eat?" I begged.
"Got a bob or two?" he said.
I gave him a quarter and whispered, "Plum duff."
He went to a stone jar, ladled a big spoonfull of plum duff into a tin cup
and gave it to me. "Now skip," he ordered. "The second steward might come in."
The next morning after work I slipped into the parts of the vessel forbidden to cattlemen to seek out the second cook again. I put a quarter in his pocket. He winked and asked me to wait awhile. I sat down with the galley boy and peeled some potatoes. Presently, the second cook looked over me into the passage and then handed me some cold chicken.' I Ate this and immediately felt better. This stable source of food made me feel the problem of survival was solved.
The ocean tossed more and more the next morning. The cattle stood with feet wide apart bracing themselves against the swinging of the ship. Down the aisle a steer lost his foothold on the slippery floor and went down on his. side. There he lay and kicked until he had knocked the pins from under his two neighbors. For an instant the floor seemed only a confusion of hoofs and horns, but in another moment the steers had all scrambled to their feet and stood with heaving sides and lolling tongues.
In addition to my regular work of feeding I was put on duty as a day watchman. I would walk through all of the cattle aisles every half hour and see that none of the cattle had broken their halters or tangled their feet in the tie ropes.
A little before four one morning, just as I was preparing to get up, I heard a gull crying on the mast above the boat. The cattle seemed to be in a different mood. They would paw the decks and grumble deep in their chests. someone said
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that it was a sign we were approaching
Toward noon the fog lifted. By eight we got our first glimpse of England. There were three electric lights in a tall tower at a beach resort near Liverpool. We could see a merry-go-round as it turned. A little later on the sky overhead was a glow that must have been the lights of Liverpool.
We couldn't watch for long because we were ordered to go below and make the steers ready for unloading. We had to spread ashes on the passageways so that the cattle would not slip. We untied the hard knots on each halter and left the ropes so that they could be easily loosened. Then we worked on the partitions between the cattle sections so that we could lift them easily and quickly.
At midnight we were still working. The tide was in so that the tug boats could push the Canadian slowly up to the docks. We looked over the edge of the ship and watched her being tied up. When the ship was made fast a huge chute was hoisted to the cattle deck for the unloading of cattle.
It was a weird place of sights and sounds. All through the night there was the bawling of cattle. The restless steers were aware that some movement was taking place. Some of the steers lost their balance in the chute and rolled along the dock.
At two in the morning the last steer was off the boat and the last bale unloaded. We were all ordered to get back aboard the ship. The gang planks were lifted, the ropes cast off and we drifted into the middle of the basin. Here the boat stayed motionless like a dozing duck.
I went back to the cattle stall where I had been sleeping, but I could' not spend the remainder of the night there because all of the hay and straw was gone. Finally, I found a place in a coil of rope. The ropes became visible against the lightening sky like spider webs, a net-work of ratlines and crisscross lines against the dawn. I sat up and could see the grey buildings of Liverpool in the distance.
At eight in the morning the good ship Canadian was tugged over to the passenger dock and we went ashore.
June 11, 1931.
Dear Mother:
To pass away the time I have been turning my thoughts to a delightful kind of mental deep-sea fishing. It is interesting to look down into the unplumbed depths and see shadowy forms there. It gives you the feeling that every impression you have received since earliest infancy lies in the deep places if you could only bring it up into your consciousness. I see occasional flashes of shining fish on the bottom of my memory and I enjoy bringing these submerged fragments of the past to the surface and presenting then.
A scene comes in my mind now that took place years ago in our sitting room on Wood Street. We were sitting by the fireplace and some company was there. Father said that he would read us something. From the bookcase he drew a red book with black title patch on the back - "Mathew Arnold's Poems".
He read: "I knew the mass of men concealed
Their thoughts for fear that if revealed,"
I was outwardly calm, but deeply excited. I felt a heightened pulse and deeper breathing. I felt I could enter with more sympathy into people's lives and understand their feelings better.
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"There rises an unspeakable desire" he continued.
The whole adventure of mankind on the earth gained in dignity and living became a grander affair.
"The hills where his life rose
And the sea where it goes,'
I had the sense of being in the presence of powerful possibilities. The doors of delight were beginning to open in front of me and some new knowledge seemed to be approaching. I felt that some new enlightenment still unreceived was on its way to me. Before it came and all too soon the poem ended. There was some silence and then a discussion about the poem which I do riot remember because I was slowly settling to earth. Parents who have guests that can be entertained in this way leave a valuable inheritance to children.
The sportsman who is temporarily away from his regular occupation sees
nature from an appreciative angle. His interest is in initmate association with nature.
Especially is this true of the fisherman. To him the brook and the river are more than the home of the trout and the bass. They are the vestibules through which he returns to nature itself. He likes to watch the quiet eddies of the pool in half reverie as the water beetles and surface bubbles go round in little whirls. He becomes very observant of small things. Away from the more violent noises of cities he learns to step his hearing down so that in the quiet the buzzing of an insect or the failing of the ripple of the water once more gets full attention. The trees under which he finds his way are something to be studied in reference to the casting of his line. Away from occupations and automobiles he settles down to fellowship with nature.
One who has once entered the deep woods can never forget the sense of loneliness, yet of companionship, which it gives. Here is no noise of the streets, but the murmur of the wind high above the tree tops. Adventuring into the wilds of nature has its effect upon the human spirit. One feels it as the darkness falls even if you are by a fire. There is an immediate presence of mystery. The stars, which one can rarely see from the city streets, seem clearer, It is the world men knew before labor and commerce and manufacturing had made nature the bond-servant of human needs.
In this experience we become aware of a reality which is rich and deep and which seems to stand behind nature. It is not anything we see. It is not anything in fancy. It is something profound and fundamental. Through nature we become aware of this background of reality. It gives you a feeling of awe, a sense of the immeasurable, an all-sustaining working.
To his mother, November 1931:
The only time I was in the Canadian woods .L enjoyed, more than anything else, a long walk I took alone in the forest. I followed a log trail, but the road had not been used for so long that the trees had fallen across it and underbrush grown up in it. Still it could be distinctly seen between the high trees on either side.
The only moving creatures I saw were the tiny birds---little warblers and fly-catchers that crawl about in the high trees, sometimes head downward. They live upstairs and never pay any attention to the first floor tenants anyway, whether man or beast.
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The wind swept through the tops of the trees with an unearthy moan. In a brush pile I hear a rustle and finally see a small weasel. With his nose to the ground he is making nervous leaps through the brush, evidently tracking some bird. To me he pays no attention and I let him pass on.
Taking cautious steps in the soft pine needles I walk forward. I peer to the right and see the glitter of water in a small pond barely visible under the limbs of the trees. A startled partridge rises from near my feet and I am more frightened than he is.
Further on I see over my head some tender limbs of a birch tree that have been broken off and partly eaten by moose. In an opening of the road are some blueberry bushes and unmistakeable bear tracks among them. The trees again become tall on each side, so tall that the sound of the wind is dimmed, and the silence of the deep lonesome forest is more appalling than the wind.
The old log lumber camp is now in view, the roof fallen in. I enter the open doors and find deer tracks on the dirt floors. Near the camp runs a little stream that empties into a swamp. On the water in the distance are two black ducks. The dusk is descending and I start the backward journey. It has been an experience of value because it gives a fresh impression of the beauty, terror and pitilessness of nature, the solemnity of her power. I wish that I could again walk in a woods big enough to give me that feeling of caution and fear.
INTERCOLLEGIATE FOOTBALL November 9, 1901
As a boy of fourteen I accompanied the Wilmington College football team to Yellow Springs to play Antioch College. On account of the distance of twenty-six miles it was necessary to start at daylight. There were fourteen men in the hack. The football clothes and balls were stowed under the two benches that ran down the sides of the hack. In order that the players could sit comfortably, I rode standing on the back step.
We arrived at Yellow Springs at two in the afternoon. The players changed clothes in one of the classrooms. The playing field was simply a section of the campus which was not even smooth. There was no grandstand and the speculators wandered over the field at will.
As the game progressed it became evident that the Antioch players were more experienced than our men. They could hardly have been less experienced because several of our players had never been in a game before. Some of them had never even seen a game played. During the first half, Antioch scored two touchdowns principally by teamwork. Some of the individual play of our men was superior. Our left end sprained his ankle on the rough ground. There was no substitute. He continued to play hopping around on one leg. There was no coach to take out a player who was hurt. Between halves the players took off his shoe and could find no broken bones so he went back into the game.
The second half was a repitition of the first with Antioch making two touchdowns. The final score was Antioch 23, Wilmington O. After the game there were no showers. Nothing could be done for the bruises and the strains of the players.
Ahead of us was a drive of seven or eight hours. Darkness soon descended. There was a gleam once in a while of a coal oil lamp in a farmhouse along the road, but otherwise everything was dark. The iron tires of the wheels grated on the gravel road. We could tell when we were going up hill or down, but we could see nothing. The time was passed by songs and stories. Toward the end
9
of the journey some of the boys slept. We arrived in Wilmington about midnight. Some of the boys had to drive horses home six or seven miles from Wilmington after that.
BABY RIGHT
One frosty fall evening in October 1905 when I was nineteen, my father drove into the yard with a mare he had bought unexpectedly at a sale. The snowflakes clung to her hair which was long and not in good condition. The name of the horse was Baby Right which was a registered name and she had a pedigree.
I was familiar with some of the history of Baby Right. She had finished second in the "B" class trotting race at the local fair ground matinee. She had been raced through town on the snow by her owner. Baby Right had cooled off too quickly and had never recovered her speed.
We put her into a box stall in our barn and fed her the best oats and hay. Each day I would curry her. Her coat turned smoother as she gained weight.
She became a favorite buggy horse. There was a rivalry between me and my brother, Harold, about who should use her on Sunday. One Sunday I had curried Baby Right before I went to church so that I could hitch her up when I got home. In the meantime, Harold had decided to use her and had her partly hitched to the buggy when I came into the yard. Neither of our parents were home to umpire the dispute between us. Only Verne Roberts, a college student, was there. Harold and I had loud words. Then it came to blows and finally we were on the ground wrestling. We became more and more savage and enraged. Finally, Verne separated us. Before we got cleaned up our parents came home from church. my father unhitched Baby Right and put her back in her stall. We never had another disagreement about: which one of us should drive the horse.
I bought a volume of horse registrations and traced the pedigree of Baby Right. Her ancestry contained a few horses of distinction. I thought she might become the mother of a horse of distinction. We subscribed to a horse paper that contained advertisement of stallions. The fee of the young tried sires was smaller than the fee of the stallions whose colts had brought them reputation. I
selected a young seven-year-old stallion named Todd who was stationed at Lexington, Kentucky.
I asked my father's consent to take Baby Right to Lexington and he gave me permissions. On the first of June 1906, I ordered a boxcar set on the railroad tracks. That evening Baby Right and I, housed in a boxcar, were waiting on B&O switch for the engine to pick us up. I had built a stall for Baby Right in one end of the car and in the other end had arranged my lantern, lunch, buckets of water, bales of hay and sacks of feed. It was dark before the engine came and when it hit our car, it did so with an unexpected violence. The instant that the train hit our car everything went black on account of the lantern upsetting. Not only was the feed and water upset, but Baby Right was jolted right through her stall and mixed up with the debris in the other end of the car. I spoke to her as calmly as I could and put out my hand toward her. Lucky, I touched her shoulder. Soon her quivering and stamping quieted and I led her in the darkness to the other end of the car. when I had tied her there I lit the lantern and straightened the things up, but the water was all gone.
On account of the heat of the evening I rode with the doors of the boxcar half-way open. About midnight of the next day we were marooned in the freight yards at Paris, Kentucky. I looked out into the darkness and saw a row of large
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tobacco warehouses. I took a bucket and climbed the fence to search for water. At the corner of one warehouse was a wooden barrel. When I stuck my hand in it I felt water about half-way down. I did not know whether it was stale and full of wiggle-tails or not. I carried a bucket of this water to Baby Right. She drank it eagerly. I went back and carried another bucket full to her.
The next morning at Lexington, our boxcar was placed beside an unloading platform used especially for horses. I left Baby Right munching grass contentedly in a bluegrass pasture about three miles from Lexington.
I went back to town to get some sleep. A telephone message from the owner of the farm awakened me. He said that Baby Right, being a stranger among the other horses, had tried to win her place by fighting and had been dangerously kicked. He suggested that I call a veterinary and see her at once. One of the famous horse doctors of Lexington took me with him out to the farm. We found that a sharp hoof had laid out a long gash on her hip. The doctor said that all he could do was to treat it with disinfectant. Then he drove me back to town.
I returned to Wilmington on the train after making arrangements. for Baby Right to board for a year at the Hickory wood Farm. Each month we would receive .a bill for the pasturage and a statement about the health of the mare. On the fifteenth of June in 1907, we received a letter that said she had foaled a male colt and that both were doing well.
In two weeks .L had a chance to go to Lexington and stopped late at night at the Reed Hotel which is near the race track. At two in the morning I was wide awake and the hotel was hot. I decided to walk to the race track and try to get some sleep on the grass. There was a welcome breeze across the grass. Towards daybreak the trees began to loom up out of the darkness and there was a twitter of birds especially meadowlarks. I dozed off and awoke refreshed and hungry. I walked back to the Reed Hotel for my breakfast.
I took a traction car out to Hickory Wood Farm, which was larger than I expected. It contained four hundred acres and had three pastures of brood mares. The house was far back from the road. When I knocked on the door I learned that the proprietor was in town and would not be at home for several hours. I thought that I could recognize Baby Right by myself and I climbed the gate into the field.
The first mare that I saw looked something like Baby Right, but her neck was too thick, her fore-top was too long and her thighs too muscular. She did not permit other horses to approach her colt which was lying on the ground asleep. This jealousy would not be characteristic of Baby Right. In the next pasture I looked at all of the mares without finding her. Then I went to the barn where I asked the help of the colored hostler. He walked with me through a big woods where there were thirty brood mares. Then we went through two additional pastures without finding our mare. I returned to the first pasture to examine more closely the mare I thought looked like Baby Right. On her hip I discovered the scar of the kick she had got when 1 brought her to Kentucky.
I looked at the colt. Before I knew it was her colt I had thought that he was a pretty good prospect, but at that time he was lying down. Now he got up and stretched like a hound dog. The shoulders and fore-legs were high and set on straight with a thick fore-arm. The back was short and round-ribbed. I chased him a little in the field to get some idea of his gait. When he walked rapidly he seemed on the point of breaking into a pace, pressed faster he breaks into a trot. I was satisfied with his movement. He seemed large and well-developed for a colt only two weeks of age.
I returned to Wilmington and reported what I had seen. The family decided to leave Baby Right at the Hickory Wood Farm another year. We had talked and speculated about the colt. When he was weaned in the fall it became necessary to
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choose a name for him. We decided to name the colt Leavitt Todd.
The colt wintered well and the next spring we decided to have him trained by an expert in training colts. My father had a telegram from him saying that he had a prospective buyer for the colt.
My father went down to Lexington to see Leavitt Todd trot a short trial. The colt was only a yearling and had been in training only a few weeks. Therefore the trainer did not push him hard except in the last quarter of the mile which he trotted in 35 1/2 seconds. This was good enough to warrent a price of $1,200. My father received a check for this amount from a man in Iowa. Later an offer of $300 came from Iowa for Baby Right and was accepted. Baby Right died suddenly the next year in Iowa.
The reason for selling out our registered horses was that I needed the $1,500 to go to Harvard University in the fall of 1908.
APPALACHIA I
At the age of twenty in July 1907, I arrived in Simpson, Kentucky on a coal-road train. The town of Simpson consisted of one house, one railroad station and a side-track. I went to the house and met a boy who told me that Cash's Mill lay over the hill and pointed out the path.
It was about a mile up a steep grade to. the top of the hill. I rested for a While and looked down into the Morg Valley. As far as I could see the hills were wooded except for little clearings around an occasional cabin along the creek. The path followed a little stream down into the valley. I finally saw the smoke stack of a mill. I found that the workmen had gone for the day. The machinery was not yet in place and there was no roof over the mill.
I inquired of a child about a place to board and was directed down Morg Creek to the house of Reverend Breck Flincham. The cabin perched on a little plateau about twenty feet above the creek. The Flincham house is not hard to describe. It is one storey with two rooms in front and a shed on the back which is used as a kitchen. The roof shingles are thick and irregular and were riveted by hand. The weatherboarding is unpainted. when you go in the plain wooden front door you enter the room to the right. It has one window in which is wavy glass. There are three iron beds in the room, one against each of the walls opposite the door. On account of the house being built on a slope, there is much more space under the front part of the house than under the rear. The pup has carried bones, a piece of an old shoe and other objects under there.
On a bench in front of the house sat three people, a middle-aged man, a young fellow of my age and a half-grown girl. I went up to introduce myself and ask for lodging. Breck Flincham, the middle-aged man was a small, wiry man who seemed to be a kindly, polite person. The young man was Algan Derrickson, who was also a boarder there. He was helping to put up the mill and would be a sawyer. The half-grown girl was Julia Flincham, the orphan niece of Breck. The older man said supper would .be ready in a little while.
A voice from inside the house called us to supper. I followed the others around to a shed that leaned against the back of the house and served as a kitchen and dining room. On a shelf outside the door was a bucket, a dipper, a wash-pan, a soap dish and a flour sack towel. when we had cleaned up we went in and sat in split-bottom chairs around the table.
The ceiling of the kitchen had absorbed smoke and grease for so many years that it was shiny black. The oil-cloth on the table was flecking away. The cups and plates were not of the same size or pattern. In the middle of the table was
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an unlighted coal oil lamp. The mean was green string beans and corn bread. After we ate I was shown to my bed which was in the same room where
Algan slept. The Flinchams slept in the other room. Before Algan went to bed we sat for a while with Breck Flincham on the bench in front of the house.
In the morning I woke before daylight. I could hear through the half-inch partition that Cynthia Flincham was getting up in the other room. She walked into the kitchen and lighted the coal oil lamp. She put some kindling in the stove and started a fire. The coffee was set on the stove. The meat left from last night was reheated and also the green beans.
After breakfast I walked up Morg Creek to the mill with Algan who introduced me to the owner, Tom Cash. I asked him for a job and he assigned me to help with the oxen. The oxen dragged behind them a heavy log chain. My job was to fasten the chain around the logs. The oxen were to drag the logs to the brow of the hill over-looking the mill. There we would unlock the chain and let the logs roll down to the valley below. I had never worked with oxen. I was surprised by their deliberateness and power. They were slow in getting into motion, but when they had started their pressure would cause logs of immense size to move, through the brush to the brow of the hill.
After I had met the people with whom I was to be associated I became aware that I was under close observation. In a sense, I could be regarded as a spy among them. The natives had heard that I was a college student and nineteen years of age. Many of them had not had enough school opportunities to be able to read. They had been cheated by nearly every educated man who had come into their secluded valley. There had been factions and private justice and unreported crimes among them about which they were trained not to speak to outsiders. I did not know what degree of trust they would extend to. me in their closely guarded community life.
he are all dependent on the sawmill for our wages which makes me wonder how the people had any income before the mill was built. They have garden patches near their homes, but there is scant room for crops. It raises the question of the depth of poverty in which these people live. I pay five dollars a week for my room and board at the Flinchams. This gives Cynthia an income of ten dollars a week. I get $1.25 a day. Some of the men at the mill get more. They can get
from p32 to a month which is much more income than they had before.
I was glad that the next day was Sunday because I was tired and stiff from my unaccustomed work with the six oxen. In the morning when Breck invited me to ride with him to the Seven Oaks Meeting I was glad to accept. Our path lay along the creek bed most of the way. The going was rough for miles. Breck would kick his mule and complain that the creek bed was getting stonier every year. The bony back of the mule I was riding took my mind from the wooded hills on both sides of the creek. I asked Breck how much farther it was to Seven Oaks. He thought we would get there before the funeral.
This was the first I had heard of a funeral. It seemed that the two Fletcher boys got killed in a store fight during the winter and were buried without a funeral. The circuit preacher would be coming through this summer and the funeral would be held then. This is the service that we were now going to attend.
In a little while we emerged from the deep valley on a little cape. In the midst of this was a plot of cleared ground surrounded by a fence of rails. On the top rail sat four bearded men in black coats. An old man with a white beard seemed to be the leader. He would put his hands over his ears, look up in the sky and wail in a plaintive sing-song tone. There would be a low response-like mail from the people who knelt around the grave. This continued in rising crescendo until the whole group broke into a hymn. The preacher prayed for the dead
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Then the people began to shake hands and turn the meeting into a social gathering.
After supper, two of the preachers came to the Flincham house to stay for the night. The man with the fuzzy white whiskers was assigned to sleep with me. He observed all the courtesies in going to bed, such as turning his back on anyone who was undressing, but I slept restlessly. Every time he would turn over I had the unreasonable fear that I would inhale some of those silky white whiskers.
The next Sunday Derrickson and I went to the church to hear Breck Flincham preach. The meeting was held in a new building of freshly-sawed boards. The seats were without backs made from the same rough lumber as the walls. The meeting began with a song and a prayer. Then Rev. Flincham began to speak. He was surprisingly eloquent and moving. One pathetic feature of his speaking was that he had been dependent upon his wife who could read. He had memorized, from her reading, passages in the scripture, but this did not detract from the effect of his sermon.
It happened that in my travelling bag was a volume of Shakespeare's plays. One evening Breck asked me some questions about the morality of Shakespeare. He could not read and he• would get the drift only from the pictures. There was an illustration of the clothes basket from the "Merry Wives of Windsor". Also, there was an illustration of Falstaff in a tavern with Dame Qugley on his knee, I did not realize that he had judged the morals of Shakespeare from the steel engravings which illustrated the volume. I never thought what a racy sample of Shakespeare these illustrations were and what an impression they would create on the mind of Breck Flincham.
One evening when I went to the house after work there was a new boy sitting on the bench in front of the house. His name was W. Fred Hargrave. He had come to apply for the job of teaching at the schoolhouse. He stayed at Flincham's for supper and slept in the room with Derrickson and me.
The talk at the supper table indicated that the attendance at school had been very poor. Most of the teachers had been women who were too young to have any authority. There is a habit in the valley of keeping the children home from school for field work or house work. There are always chores for the children to do in regard to crops, firewood or clothing. Some of the children lose between a third and a half of each school year by staying at home to work.
After supper Fred Hargrave sat on a bench in front of the house. We had our usual evening talkfest and cooling out before going to bed. His conversation showed that he was one of the valley people, but with the difference that he had for been in the outside world. He was very diplomatic in his answers to Breck's questions. Flincham took a look at the moon and asked, "Do you teach that the moon goes around the earth or that the earth goes around the moon?" Hargrave approached his answer warily. He stressed the fact that the moon drew after it by the law of gravity the waters of the ocean and this was what made the tides rise and fall on the sea shore. This idea was so far from Flincham's experience that he did not pursue his questioning. After Mr. Flincham had gone in the house I stayed outside with Hargrave. He admitted that the moon moved around the earth, but he did not want to offend Mr. Flincham.
Now that the mill was turning out lumber, Shelby Fletcher and I were moved to working on the road over which the lumber was to be taken to the railroad siding. While shoveling dirt I watched a cabin on a hillside near us. ,It belonged to Chester Young who about my age and worked in the mill. On the porch sat his wife watching us and rocking a baby in her arms. Two small children played in the dirt below the porch. His wife could not have been more than twenty. Her arms were thin. Her eyes were hollow and her cheeks were spotted pink as if she had a fever. Frequently she had a coughing spell. She looked to
34
me like a girl who had been trapped into life that would soon make an old woman out of her. Chester Young had some sisters and he talked to me about the fact that I was twenty and not married. I did not make any effort to understand his point.
As Algan Derrickson and I became better acquainted with the conditions in the Flincham home we ceased to call Mrs. Flincham Cynthia, and reduced the name to "Sin" on account of her cruelty to the little Julia, who was a small girl for her age. Her legs were slender and her dress was soiled. Her hair was tangled and dirty. The only affection she received in life was from her pup. Julia seemed to us a very shy, polite girl.
Algan Derrickson and I had been suffering from a form of dysentery for some time. We had the opinion that we caught if from some of the food that Sin Flincham prepared. Derrickson finally came to the opinion that the trouble came from the basswood bowl in which she mixed her corn bread. When she was out of the house he examined the bowl and found old and very big cracks in it. In some of these cracks meal had collected for a long time and had turned green. He washed the bowl, gleaned the cracks and we had no further difficulty after that,
I felt that this enviroment was unjust to a young man who was as capable as Algan Derrickson. He was a sawyer at the mill. Although he was only about twenty, his judgement was sought on all questions connected with the business. I wrote about him to my father in Ohio, who was on the board of Wilmington College. He wrote back and said that he could get a scholarship for Algan. I was going to the same college and urged Derrickson to go back to Ohio with me, but he felt that he could not go to college. He knew all the intricacies of calculating the amount of lumber and all of the intricacies of a steam engine, but he was convinced that he did not have enough general education.
On the last day of August 1907, I carried my suitcase to the top of the
mountain to the railroad station As I passed the cabins some of the people came out and waved to me. The one that I left with the most emotion was Algan Derrickson because he was mature beyond his age and had a good head. If he marries here he will get tied down in this way of life forever.
APPALACHIA II
This is November 10, 1935. I have an opportunity to drive south from Ohio across Kentucky. Twenty-eight years ago as a young man under twenty, I spent a summer in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky. I worked for Tom Cash who also came from Ohio and was an acquaintance of my father.
While my wife and I were driving through Winchester and Jackson, Kentucky, I told her of my recollections of my summer in these mountains in 1907. We turned from the main road and wound down the mountains to a place called Kilhurst. There had been a railroad station there 28 years ago, but now the rails had been removed and the station boarded up. While we were parked there a man came up and advised us not to try to drive up the railroad right of way but to drive on the dirt road that ran over the hill.
After several miles we met an old man with long hair. I asked him if he knew Algan Derrickson. He said that he did because Algan's first wife was the widow Hampton who had died. I asked him if Algan had married again. He replied that Algan had married a Sweeny girl. He gave us directions to the Derrickson home. We followed his directions for some miles and then we felt lost. We stopped at a cabin where an old lady instructed us how to go back and turn in at a
15
dirt road. We retraced our steps and turned into a hilly field where a road was barely visible. It ran up a creek bed. We followed it with our axle sometimes scraping the stones and at other times sinking into the mud.
At one turn in the road we met two men. One came on. The other ran back. When we got around the cliff we found that he had run back to get a mule team hitched to a wagon of sugar cane. We followed him a little while. Then he found a place where he could pull out of our way. We went up a steep hill then down an equally steep grade. We passed a house where little kids ran away from our automobile. There was a spring-hole with a log in it. I did not see it. I got stuck in the mud.
I walked on down the road and saw far above me on the mountainside a team of mules. I heard voices. I walked on to the house. I saw a shed with four dirty little children playing there. I went to the back porch of the house and a woman came to the door. I told her who I was. She said that she was Mrs. Derrickson and that she had heard Algan talk about me. I told her that our car was stuck in the mud. She said that Algan and the boys were shucking corn up on the mountainside.
I was out of breath when I got up there and saw two mules and a wagon and two boys on the mountain above throwing down corn. Algan looked at me. At first he had thought .L was his brother-in-law. I told him I could not tell him who I was till I got my breath. When I spoke he began to recognize me and seemed glad to see me. He told me that he had a headache today and could hardly see.,
After some talk 1 told him about our car being stuck. He unhitched his mules and sent one of the boys to the house for a log chain. We got down to the car and I introduced my wife. By that time the men with the load of sugar cane had arrived on the other side of the car. The boys brought the chain and they pulled us out. Algan and some of the children that were standing around got into the car and rode down to the house with us. We parked in front of the road so we could get out and went into the house.
By this time Mrs. Derrickson had washed her face, changed her dress and cleaned up some of the children. She is a rather slender woman about forty with a small oval face and a quick smile. Algan is forty-nine and exactly a day and one year older than I am.
There turned out to be ten children, but only nine were there. The oldest girl was with her aunt in town getting a high school education. There were five boys and four girls at home. Two of the smaller ones were twins, a boy and a girl. There was a boy still younger than the twins. They had a little girl about two. She was riot weaned yet on account of it being her second summer. She
ran around with a slip on and that was all.
Pearl remembered that she had some candy in the car. I went out to get it. The children crowded around her. I gave three of the boys dimes. Then a girl about fifteen appeared, who had been in the field helping her father with the corn, but had come down to change her clothes and see us. Her neck was scratched with the corn stalks.
Algan asked about my father and the people at the bank. He said the bank paid him for his work on Tom Cash's estate. I asked about the Flinchams, Breck and Cynthia. They are both dead. Their niece, Julia, married a Gillan and has ten children.
Privately Algan wanted to explain to me why he had not taken advantage of my father's offer to get him started in college. He had been too proud to explain why he had not accepted it at the time. He had his parents to support. Then, too, he had worked hard at too early an age in the sawmill without proper food. This had given him an acid stomach and ruined his health.
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Algan has over 200 acres. He and his wife were anxious to show us the front of the house, the porch, the little orchard and the barn with tobacco in it. The house looked well kept. They urged us several times to stay for supper, but we declined.
Pearl was afraid that it would rain and she dreaded the road out even in the driest of weather. So about three we left.
When I went out to the car I found it full of kids with candy on their fingers. Algan drove them out of the car, but I invited them in and took them on a short ride down to the barnyard where I had to go to turn around. Algan got in to ride out with us and see that nothing happened. The boys followed with the mules. We got carefully over the mud hole where we had stuck before. Algan sent the boys back home with the mules. They must have hurried because we had not gone very far until two boys came running after us to say that their mother wanted them to go to the store to get some flour and sugar. we went back over the ruts, hazards and rocks, down the creek bed and back on the railroad right of way. Here Algan bade us good-bye. I pressed into one of the boy's hands some money to be distributed to the other children.
Before we left Algan told us that they had decided they were about as
content as they could be. In talking about his wife, Algan said, "No use to say that we never had a quick word, but we have very few of them..." It was a rough country and their children would probably have to make their own way, just as their parents had done, but they were giving them what education they could.
NEWSPAPER ITEMS
From the Wilmington paper:
"November 19, 1917. Burritt Hiatt Injured Badly While Hunting. Advertising Manager of the Irwin Auger Bit Company victim of accidental discharge of shotgun Saturday afternoon. Burritt Hiatt, only son of E. J. Hiatt, Cashier of the Clinton County National Bank, was injured seriously, but not fatally in a hunting accident Saturday afternoon about 4 O'clock. A shotgun was accidentally discharged, the wound being in his right side aryl' arm.
The party consisted of S. A. Mitchell, Mr. Hiatt, Russell Bab and Roger Johnson. They had gone for the hunt to the part of the county southeast of Wilmington on the Cuba Pike. The men who accompanied Mr. Hiatt say that a dog that he had taken with him had been lost, At the time of the accident he had separated himself from the other men and was out in the road seeing if he could locate the dog.
It seems that Mr. Hiatt had set the gun down on the floor of the bridge over Silver Creek. Returning to pick up the gun, it somehow slipped from his hands and whirling as it fell struck the stones of the bridge abutments, causing the discharge.
The boys on the hill thought that Mr. Mitchell had shot a rabbit down in the cornfield and decided to turn and see what luck he had had, but they heard Mr., Hiatt's shouts for help and they reached his side quickly.
They stripped the clothing from his right side and examined the wound which seemed a fearful one and to them was necessarily a fatal one. Their first
thought was getting Mr. Hiatt to the hospital, but the boys were told by Mr. Hiatt that he could not ride in the car. They telephoned C. A. Holladay for his ambulance.
Dr, Peelle, before the arrival of the specialist, treated the wound, but did not dress it. That work was delayed until Sunday morning when Dr. Carothers,assisted by Dr. Peelle, made a thorough job of dressing the injured parts.
It is believed that a few shot from the shell penetrated his lungs, but not a great many. The major part of the load after grazing his right side and digging a path more than an inch deep and several inches wide, buried itself in the armpit and upper arm. It was necessary to cut away all the wounded flesh and thoroughly cleanse the injured parts. The physicians say that should not complications in the way of pneumonia or blood -poisoning set in, the chance for the young man's recovery are splendid.
August 7, 1933
HIATT'S WIN IN SWIMMING MEET
Blanchester Second In Pool Events Sponsored By County A, A. U.
The Hiatt boys, Edwin, Richard, Robert and Harold are Clinton County's new champion swimmers. They won this honor by virtue of their win in the Clinton County A. A. U. swimming meet held in the Blanchester pool, Sunday. Their aggregate score was 3h points while Blanchester, their nearest competitor, was able to compile only 17.
BURRITT MILLS HIATT
Burritt Mills Hiatt has been a friend of Wilmington College all his life. Himself an alumnus (A.B., 1908), he came from a family also Wilmington trained. His mother, father, two aunts, wife, four sons, and three cousins also attended Wilmington College, and his father served on its Board of Trustees from 1902 to 1942
as its treasurer from 1914 to 1942. As a journalist (with the Educational Bureau of Good Housekeeping Magazine),as an industrialist (with Irwin Auger Bit), as a teacher (of English at Wilmington College) , as a leader of the Society of Friends (Clerk of Wilmington Yearly Meeting, Friends World Committee, Executive Council of Friends United Meeting), he has given his life to service. While serving with the American Friends Service Committee Milk Feeding Program for French Children in 1942, he was interned by the Germans in Occupied France. This experience furthered his determination to enlist in the ranks of the educators and to further examine his own motives and ideas. With an M. A. from Harvard in English, he taught English at Wilmington College until his retirement in 1952, holding up to his students a shining light of critical integrity in thought and action. His sharp wit, his profound questioning mind, and his warm but keen sense of humor have given flavor to his associations with men. He says he is five feet, five inches tall, weighs 150 pounds, and wears a size 7-3/4 hat. That latter size, for all its amplitude, has not changed, despite all his leadership, service, and contributions to his Alma Mater.
Wilmington College is delighted to honor its Alumnus and long-time professor of English, Burritt Mills Hiatt, with the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.
(3764.) BURRITT MILLS HIATT (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 2-5mo-1887; m. 29-12mo-1910, to PEARL PEELLE; living at 196 North Wood, Wilmington, OH.
CH: (5776.) Edwin Peelle; (5777.) Richard Mills; (5778.) Robert Burritt; (5779.) Harold. (R84).
B.M. Hiatt was head of “Friends Relief” in unoccupied France during World War II. Both he and his father are interested in genealogy, and they contributed much data on their branch of Hiatts of inclusion in this volume-editor.
(NOTE: I, Larry Anderson, copies of the Hiatt History and of Interment in WWII by Burruitt Hiatt available on CD, typed and prepared which is very interesting and excellent historical as well as novelistic format. 6 July 2005.)
C.D Burritt Mills Hiatt Diary
196 N. Wood St.
Wilmington, Ohio 45177
August 30, 1980
THE ATTITUDE AND DECLARED INTENT OF THE ESTATE OF BURRITT MILLS CONCERNING THE USE BY DOROTHY LANG HIATT OF B.M. HIATT NOTES AND MANUSCRIPTS RELATIVE TO HIS EXPERIENCES IN FRANCE 1942-44.
In October of 1942 Burritt Mills Hiatt flew to France as a relief agent for the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers). He was placed in charge of the on-going Marsielles office of Quaker relief in unoccupied Vichy France. This relief was in the form of food, shelter, clothing, and counseling for displaced persons and people in German custody.
Burritt Hiatt had had wide experience as a businessman and active Quaker but he had never before seen service as a foreign relief agent. His notes and diaries are in essence a revelation of the dedication and involvement which he thought to what he looked upon as a great opportunity. His hopes and desires were tremendous and all consuming as he plunged into the work.
The daily tasks of the relief staff and their helpers were demanding. But the main goal in mind was the upcoming evacuation of hundreds of children from Vichy France by means of a special train which would pass through the area but once picking up the children along the way and taking them to Portugal for embarkation on the Gripsholm and eventual sanctuary in the United States.
Not only did this train never make its run but the situation was so rigged and the cross purposes of war were so destined that it was doomed even while it was being planned. The invasion of North Africa by U. S. forces in November 1942 triggered the Nazi occupation of Vichy France and a halt to all such freedom. Burritt Hiatt could never quite adjust to the fortunes of war which dictated that children and relief workers should be allowed to forward their plans of hope when it was probably never possible that these plans could materialize.
Thus we have in the story of one man the heights of humanitarian expectations embodied in his one chance at middle age to help engineer a piece of work which would afford him satisfaction for the rest of his days. This followed swiftly by withering disappointment and subsequent interment.
In trying to set forth his story in the 1950’s Burritt Hiatt was assisted by his daughter-in-law Dorothy Land Hiatt. Not only did she do voluminous typing for him but she assisted in selection and editing. She encouraged him to bring his work to fruition in his later years but he was never satisfied that the situation was ripe or the manuscript properly balanced. Since Burritt Hiatt’s death in 1971 Dorothy Land Hiatt has worked with the material and now she has a book whose time has come. It is the story contained in the Burritt Hiatt notes and diaries and the story he tried to tell in his manuscript. But where he was hesitant out of sensitivity of feeling, she has forged ahead with the narrative. What Burritt Hiatt could not say with clarity because of uncertainty of acceptance, Dorothy Hiatt has placed before the reader in clear form and left the overtones and emotions to work in the mind of the reader. The drama and tragedy and his story are all there. But the one essential element that is there is the plaintive plight of a Quaker family man from Ohio trying to cope with a world gone mad.
The story is the Burritt Hiatt story but it is the Dorothy Land Hiatt book. She could not do it until she had freed herself from the obstacles that frustrated Burritt Hiatt. It is truly a collaboration of the living with the dead.
C.D Burritt Hisotry
Genealogy of Dana, John and Heather Hiatt
When your father, Christopher, was a young boy he asked me one day, Mother, don't I have any relatives besides the Hiatt and Millses?" I laughed, but I understood why he asked that.
When he was little the place we visited most often was Wilmington, Ohio, the home of his grandparents, Pearl and Burritt Hiatt, where his father, Edwin grew up, and where he got acquainted with all their relatives. Because Burritt was a keeper of family history and records and because Burritt's Aunt Mary Mills was a great talker Chris heard a lot about Hiatt and Millses. There were a lot of Peelles, but there wasn't so much talk about them. They were Pearl's family.
I explained to little Chris that he had lots of ancestors besides those he heard about so much in Wilmington, that half his ancestors came from my family, but I didn't know much about them except that the Langs came from Switzerland and my mother told me once that Grandpa Lang's folks were Pennsylvania Dutch. She didn't know much about her own family because when she was eight years old she was sent away by her mother because her father had died and there were five children and no money, so my mother went to live with a family named Cooper in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, near Chicago. She wasn't allowed to keep in touch with her real family and I grew up thinking to Coopers were my real kin.
When I retired I decided I would see what I could find out about my own ancestors and have been working on it ever since. I was astonished to find half of her ancestors also came first to Ohio, not far from where the first Hiatt settled. The problem --- how to make it interesting to you and not just a list of names and dates. I have decided to start with the Quakers even though they are not my own ancestors because I inherited a lot of material that was Burritt's and because the Quakers kept better records than most of the others and therefore information is easier to find. I will deal later with the Germans and then with the English.
Mary Lane CHARLES
From Riggs Family History, generation 4, Children: 1523, #609, Mary Lane Charles, born 26 Feb 1907, (1524) married 28 June 1966 BURRITT MILLS HIATT. (1525). They resided in 1976 in Richmond, Wayne County, Indiana, on the Arthur Homestead. In 1980 Mary Lane Hiatt donated Diary of a Quaker Hostage during World War II, written by her husband, 1943-1944, to Earlham College. (1526)
Mary Jane Riggs, was married to Arthur M. Charles, 25 Jul 1899."
1522. Obit., Palladium Item, Richomnd, Indiana, 14 Oct 1947, p. 3, col. 4, Arthur M. Charles, Earlham retired professor, age 74, transcription courtesy of Frank James (7) Gruber.
1523. David and Jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible 2,4.
1524. David and Jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible, 2, 4, "Mary Lane Charles, daughter of same, born 26 Feb, 1907."
1525. SSDI, Burritt Hiatt, born 2 May 1887, died Nov. 1971, last residence Richmond, Wayned County, Indiana, might be Burritt Mill Hiatt's father.
1526. wwww.earlham.edu/~libr/quaker/manuscripts/h.htm (accessed 9 Jun 2004) The diary is edited by Dorothy Lang Hiatt, a Friend of Wilmington, Ohio.
1527. David and Jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible 2, 4, "Katherine Elizabeth Charles, 8 Jan 1911."
1528. David and jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible 1, 2, "Jas. Robert Riggs 23 Jun 1876,; David and Jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible 2, 1, "James Robert Riggs 6-23-1876 (in blue ink in a different hand) "and 7, "James R. Riggs, male, alive, Boone Co., father of David Riggs, born Kenton Co., mother "Gennie" Humlong, born Bracken Co., KY, parents residents of Boone Co.
1529. death certificate, James R. Riggs, State of Ohio, Dept. of Health, file no. 4729, reg. no. 2181, reg. dist. no 769, primary reg. dist. no. 8346, died 22 Jun 1943, Toledo, Lucas Co., aged 67 yrs. 0 mos. 0 ds., born 23 Jun 1846, father David Riggs, mother unknown, white, male, married, spuose Agnes M. Riggs, who was informant, retired, burited 24 June 1943, Toldedo, digital copy courtesty of Frank James Gruber.
1530. David and Jennie (Humlong) Riggs Bible 2,4, "James Robert Riggs, son of David Riggs married to Agnes Brown, MacWebb, daughter of Quentin MacNabb & Marian Brown MacNabb, 11 Nov. 1903, Vigo County, Indidna. Marriages, 17:270, Agnes B. MacNabb too Robert Riggs, 11 Nov. 1903, courtesy of Frank James Gruber, citing Vigo Co., Index to Marriage Records 1840-1903
Social Security Death Index MARY L HIATT Born: 26 Feb 1907 Died: 12 Aug 2001 19348 (Kennett Square, Chester, PA) 292-30-6731
Harold Clarkson HIATT
(3765.) HAROLD CLARKSON HIATT (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 22-4mo-1889; d. 26-7mo-1915; m. 14-6mo-1911, to GEORGIANA BARRETT.
CH: (5780.) Dorothy; (5781.) Robert. (R84).
Dorothy HIATT
(5780.) DOROTHY HIATT (3765.) (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 1-4mo-1912; d. 7-4mo-1912. (R84).
Robert HIATT
(5781.) ROBERT HIATT (3765.) (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 7-9mo-1913; d. 20-9mo-1913. (R84).
Elias H. PEELLE
He was a successful hog farmer.
Elias & Aramethea Creamer Peelle
Pearl Peelle was the daughter of Elias and Aramethea Creamer Peelle.
March 28, 1909. Near Jeffersonville, Fayette County, Ohio, there once lived a Methodist class headed by a devout man named Simeon Creamer. Daily he gathered his children around the family alter desiring to bring them up, in the paths of righteousness. Into this family of Simeon and Anna Creamer, the 18th of nay 18451 came a little daughter who was given the Bible name of Aramethea. She was converted when a little girl and joined the M. E. Church at Spring Grove.
The 9th of May 1867, she was united in marriage to Elias Peelle and came to live near Sabina. Six children cane to bless this home, the second dying in infancy. The others: Dr. Frank A., Delaware C., Aduah Mae, Florence and Mary Pearl. There are three grandchildren.
About five years ago the Peelles moved from the farm to Wilmington. For several years her family realized that her health was on a decline. Sabbath morning, March 28, 1909, the death angel knocked at her door. Shortly after noon her pure spirit took its flight to the home where there is no pain or sorrow. Two half sisters survive her, Mrs. Solomon Johnson of Washington Courthouse and Mrs. Jennie Fellers of Chattanooga, Tennessee; two half brothers Jas. Gatlin of Defiance, Ohio, Michael Creamer; and one brother Simeon Creamer of Jeffersonville.
The lonely husband who has walked by her side for forty-two years and her children have the blessed memory of her self-sacrificing life, wise words, of counsel and sweet companionship of the past to cherish through a precious legacy. She was thoughtful to visit the sick, generous to the needy. Her heart and hone were always open to relatives and friends or strangers alike.
She was an Elder that knew how to watch over the flock, build up spiritual gifts and give wise encouragement. For nearly twenty-five years Aramethea Peelle and her husband have been blessed in revival work both among Friends and Methodists. In the few years that she lived in Wilmington, she never faltered in her devotion to the church at Grassy Run, because she knew they needed her in the Women's Missionary Society and W.C.T.U. and in the church and Sabbath School.
Lydia Arametha CREAMER
The Creamer line was not a Quaker line.
According to family charts by Burritt Hiatt, born in Fayette County, Ohio died near Jeffersonville, Wilmington, Ohio.
Frank A. PEELLE Dr.
Was living in Wilmighton, OH.
Delaware C. PEELLE
Lived at the old home of his parents.
Aduah Mae PEELLE
Was preparing herself to be a nurse at Battle Creek, Michigan.
Edwin Peelle HIATT
Wilmington News Journal ON-LINE (Ohio
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Dr. Edwin Peelle Hiatt)
Dr. Edwin Peelle Hiatt, 93, of Cape May Retirement Village, died Monday, June 13, 2005 at his residence. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Dorothy Lang Hiatt, and his second wife, Joanne Scruggs Hiatt.
He was born Dec. 9, 1911, in Rosemont, Pa., a son of the late Burritt Mills and Pearl Peelle Hiatt. He attended public schools in Wilmington, graduated from Wilmington College in 1933 with B.A. degrees in biology and English, an M.A. in 1934 from Haverford College, an M.D. from Duke University and a PhD. in physiology from the University of Maryland in 1941. A member of the Wilmington Friends Meeting, Mr. Hiatt taught and did research at New York University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina. In 1957 at the beginning of the man-in-space program, he moved to Wright-Patterson A.F.B. as chief of biophysics where he worked with the first group of astronauts. Between 1941 and 1951, his summers were spent at the Marine Research Labs at Woods Hole, Mass., and Mt. Desert Island, Maine. He taught several summers and during the 193637 year at Wilmington College, substituting for Prof. Frank Hazard. In 1960, he went to the Ohio State University Medical School as a professor of physiology and director of the Aerospace Physiology Laboratory. He remained there until his retirement in 1977 except for two years on leave as bioastronautics consultant for the C.I.A. He retired to his farm near Wilmington, working part time as medical director for the Irwin Co. He served as Clinton County coroner from 1977 to 1981. He held memberships in the American Medical Association, Aerospace Medical Association and the American Physiological Society.
He is survived by two sons, Dr. Christopher (Deborah) Hiatt of Eugene, Ore., and Timothy (Gloria) Hiatt of Portland, Ore.; three grandchildren, Dana (Joseph) Adams, John and Heather Hiatt; great-grandchildren Zachery and Dashell Adams, Thomas and Conner Hiatt and Max Hiatt Rusk; a mother-in-law Hazel Scruggs; sisters-in-law, Muriel Hiatt of Wilmington, Nancy Hiatt of Portland, Maine and Marjorie Motch of Cincinnati.
In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by three younger brothers, Richard, Robert and Harold Hiatt.
His family is most appreciative of the special caregivers from Cape May and Hospice and family friends Kent and Nancy Pickard.
At his request, his organs have been donated and his body has been cremated.
(5776.) EDWIN PEELE HIATT (3764.) (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 9-12mo-1911; m. 30-12mo-19--, to DOROTHY LANG.
CH: (7188.) Christopher Lang; (7189.) Timothy. (R84).
Dorothy Elizabeth LANG
Dorothy shared with me the genealogy, the stories of and by Burritt Hiatt, with his Journal of Internment and family history. She wanted me to try and make it into a book to publish but lost track of her by 1995. I was able to type and prepare the Journal and Hiatt History which is so very interesting and share that with many others who find those very interesting, historical and useful genealogical information. Larry Anderson
Edwin Peelle HIATT
Wilmington News Journal ON-LINE (Ohio
Tuesday, June 14, 2005
Dr. Edwin Peelle Hiatt)
Dr. Edwin Peelle Hiatt, 93, of Cape May Retirement Village, died Monday, June 13, 2005 at his residence. He was preceded in death by his first wife, Dorothy Lang Hiatt, and his second wife, Joanne Scruggs Hiatt.
He was born Dec. 9, 1911, in Rosemont, Pa., a son of the late Burritt Mills and Pearl Peelle Hiatt. He attended public schools in Wilmington, graduated from Wilmington College in 1933 with B.A. degrees in biology and English, an M.A. in 1934 from Haverford College, an M.D. from Duke University and a PhD. in physiology from the University of Maryland in 1941. A member of the Wilmington Friends Meeting, Mr. Hiatt taught and did research at New York University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee and the University of North Carolina. In 1957 at the beginning of the man-in-space program, he moved to Wright-Patterson A.F.B. as chief of biophysics where he worked with the first group of astronauts. Between 1941 and 1951, his summers were spent at the Marine Research Labs at Woods Hole, Mass., and Mt. Desert Island, Maine. He taught several summers and during the 193637 year at Wilmington College, substituting for Prof. Frank Hazard. In 1960, he went to the Ohio State University Medical School as a professor of physiology and director of the Aerospace Physiology Laboratory. He remained there until his retirement in 1977 except for two years on leave as bioastronautics consultant for the C.I.A. He retired to his farm near Wilmington, working part time as medical director for the Irwin Co. He served as Clinton County coroner from 1977 to 1981. He held memberships in the American Medical Association, Aerospace Medical Association and the American Physiological Society.
He is survived by two sons, Dr. Christopher (Deborah) Hiatt of Eugene, Ore., and Timothy (Gloria) Hiatt of Portland, Ore.; three grandchildren, Dana (Joseph) Adams, John and Heather Hiatt; great-grandchildren Zachery and Dashell Adams, Thomas and Conner Hiatt and Max Hiatt Rusk; a mother-in-law Hazel Scruggs; sisters-in-law, Muriel Hiatt of Wilmington, Nancy Hiatt of Portland, Maine and Marjorie Motch of Cincinnati.
In addition to his parents, he was preceded in death by three younger brothers, Richard, Robert and Harold Hiatt.
His family is most appreciative of the special caregivers from Cape May and Hospice and family friends Kent and Nancy Pickard.
At his request, his organs have been donated and his body has been cremated.
(5776.) EDWIN PEELE HIATT (3764.) (1864.) (696.) (177.) (26.) (3.) (1.):
b. 9-12mo-1911; m. 30-12mo-19--, to DOROTHY LANG.
CH: (7188.) Christopher Lang; (7189.) Timothy. (R84).
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