My Mysterious Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows

My great grandmother is a mystery to me. My mother knew her well, but she’s 93 and can’t think of much to say about her. My cousin knew her too, but she has nothing to add either. I have no photos, no diaries, no one’s memories.

Here’s what little I do know. She had thick hair that she wore in a knot at the back of her neck. When she got old it turned pure white. She had a sweet face. She called my mother “Little Joe,” though her name is Ruth. She made mackerel cakes for lunch when her daughter and family came to visit.P1000721

Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows was born on May 10, 1864 in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Page County, Virginia.

The “Magdalene” part of her name is not confirmed, but my mother tells me that was her second middle name, and I have seen “Mary M. M. Meadows” on several documents. So I’m going with it.

Mary was born during the Civil War, just about the same time her father died from it.

Not in it, mind you, but from it. The circumstances are a mystery, and there are several theories, but no evidence that would confirm any one of them.

One thing is certain: Mary grew up a fatherless child, and for this it is said she was given powers.

A girl who is born after her father dies is said to have the gift of healing a baby’s thrush. The healer has only to lean close and blow gently into the baby’s mouth.

Mary Meadows had this power, and through her life many new mothers cP1000789ounted on her healing breath. My mother says this was her only extraordinary healing power, but that it was well-used.

My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, who was Mary’s child, learned many remedies from her mother.

Put an axe under the bed of a birthing woman and it will cut the pain in two, she said.

Brew ginseng root into a tea for the flu, sassafras for a fever.

Give brandy with sugar and water to a child with a cold.

I’m sure there were other poultices and tonics, oaths and spells that were engaged when needed.

Maybe I can pluck one or two more out of my mother’s memory, but mostly they are lost to history, as much a mystery to me as Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows.

Mary Meadows married William Collier in 1884, when she was 20 years old. He was 28.Mary M. Meadows and William Durret Collier wedding photo

He went by his middle name, Durret, which, with the Blue Ridge accent, came out as “Dirt.”

They owned property in the Blue Ridge. I recall it was a little over 450 acres.

Durret and his son-in-law, my grandfather, shaved tan bark in the spring to sell to the tannery in Elkton. That land made them a decent living.

Mary raised five healthy daughters and a big, strapping son. Annie, Emmie, Florence, Maggie, Charles, and Minnie, in that order.

They all grew up and married fine spouses, built or moved into homes of their own, and started raising their families.

Then came 1925. In late July Durret died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma after a long and painful illness. He was 69.

One month later their daughter Maggie died too, far too young, and leaving a 13-year old daughter.

So at age 50 Mary took on the granddaughter Maggie left behind. P1000782Maggie’s husband Comie Watson, a handsome young man, couldn’t care for his daughter, either through grief or aptitude, or because the family decided young Elsie Mae needed a woman’s care.

Elsie was raised with care, as loved as any child could be, and doted on by her grandmother and four aunts.

All Mary’s family was dear to her, and near to her. Only one daughter moved away, to Newport News, a half day distant. The others lived within a few miles of her Jollett Hollow home, two in #2 Furnace and two in Fleeburg.

What a time there was when the daughters visited! They sat and gossiped the afternoon away as the children played wild inside and out, or quietly read or listened while the women talked.

Her second to oldest, Florence, who was my mother’s mother, took her younger children with her on these visits.

When she could, she got her son Jesse to drive them, either in the car or in the wagon. Occasionally her husband Tom came along and did the driving.

Tom always greeted Mary the same, “Afternoon, Miss Mary.” Mary always answered, “Oh, Tom!” Theirs was a true respect and affection.P1000745

If there was no one to drive them, Florence and the children walked the several miles from Fleeburg to Jollett Hollow. Or, as the community called it, “Jolly Holler.”

They commenced several miles down Fleeburg Road, past Minnie’s house, past their beloved Oak Grove Church, then across Naked Creek and left onto Naked Creek Road.

They walked up past the Merica Store, the road winding with the creek, about six miles distant, till they reached the plank footbridge that took them across to Mother Mary’s log house.

As a routine they stopped along the way at Merica’s Store to buy several cans of mackerel.

They took the mackerel to Mary and she tossed it with an egg and a little cornmeal, shaped it into patties, and fried the cakes up in lard till they were hot and crispy. These were savored by the women and children alike during those visits.

After lunch the children might leave the women alone to talk in peace.

P1000715One late fall day Elsie was asked to watch little Ruthy and Annie Merica, my future mother and her little sister, play outside after lunch.

They got down to the bridge and started across. Elsie called to the children to be careful, just as little Annie gave Ruthy a good shove and she fell in.

Elsie ran into the cold creek, grabbed up Ruthy, and raced into the house to get off the sogged wool clothes and wrap her in a warm blanket.

All that afternoon Ruthy sat by the stove and listened to the women chatter, and loved every moment of it.

I wish I had a picture of that old log house. I remember it vaguely, still standing on the hill long decades after Mary died, logs mortared with mud chinking that was now so loose that the wind leaked in, three wood steps and a stoop up to the front door, packed dirt floor inside, though the second story was fairly nice with plank floors and better walls. Only Elsie lived there now, as old and decrepit as the house, with her vast and beloved store of folk songs she had gathered through the years.

I wish I had taken a photo the last time I saw it. Better yet, I wish I had wandered through with the nostalgia that I feel now that I am older. I would have liked to feel my great grandmother in that space, for I am certain her energy still radiated. Then I could have known a little more about her, not through documents or facts or other people’s memories, but through my own senses.

But it’s too late now. And what I’ve said is all I know about my great-grandmother. Except for where she was buried after dying on November 21, 1953, five months after I was born. Mary Margaret Magdalene Meadows and William Durrett Collier rest now in the Samuels Cemetery in Jollett Hollow, where I visit them whenever I am in that part of the world.Mary & Durrett Collier headstone

She Would Follow Him Anywhere, Even Oklahoma

It turns out that Pearl Abigail Eggleston married a dreamer, much like her father, who had changed from physician to Methodist clergyman, to Unitarian clergyman, and finally to writer.Victorian couple

Pearl’s husband, Robert Berryman, would have a career as varied, and as interesting. You can read about some of his adventures here.

Soon before their marriage Robert left for a one-year assignment in the wilds of post-Spanish American War Philippine Islands.

Straight out of college, instead of all the things this athlete and academic prodigy could have done, he took a position to teach in this dangerous place, where rebels still marauded from their hideouts in the jungles.

Robert traveled from town to town by boat, around the islands instead of through them, because it was too dangerous to enter the jungles. He was instructed to always carry a gun when he left the house, and he did.

By the time he ended his one-year assignment, he had been made Superintendent of Schools for the entire chain of Philippines Islands. All this on a not-yet 25-year old man.

Pearl imagined that was his adventure, that he needed a wild experience before settling down.

Victorian woman on lakeShe waited for him. She taught school and lived with her parents in Oberlin, Ohio, where her father, Francis Otto Eggleston, was a pastor and her mother, Clara Brown Eggleston, was a successful businesswoman who owned and ran a boarding house for students.

When Robert returned, they married, and I’m sure Pearl now thought her world was perfect. A new life with a husband she was deeply in love with, the love of her parents and friends nearby, and a future laid out before her that looked as smooth and contentment-filled as what she had come to expect of life.

Now she had every reason to believe Robert would take a position as a professor or other professional. He was so smart, so interested in politics and the world, so driven in everything he did, and now, so well-educated, and with a first professional success under his belt.

She let him have his adventure, and now it was time to settle down, to settle into adulthood.

He was offered a professorship in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I assume means at the University of Michigan; the family history does not get more specific. But that was not to Robert’s taste. It was too tame.

Peg knew they might not live near her parents after marriage. That was alright, she wasn’t afraid of leaving her parents’ home, or even their town. Her father’s woVictorian couple2rk as a Methodist minister meant they moved often, and had lived in places as varied as Troy, New York and Knoxville, Tennessee, and she had boarded away from home at several schools.

Peg knew how to quickly make a new place her own. She was ready to follow Robert, if only he would choose his career now that he was back.

They were starting a new life together and could go anywhere, be anyone! Peg may have dreamed of New York, or Chicago, or maybe a quiet little college town somewhere in the Midwest.

But Robert had different plans. Once back from the Philippines he discovered he had inherited a sheep ranch in Oklahoma, and so they moved to that dry wilderness, sight unseen, to be sheep ranchers.

I’ll never understand that decision. Perhaps it was because they were bright-eyed and full of promise that they went, and because they had never seen Oklahoma. After all, they were only young adults, infallible and indestructible in their own minds, but years away from wisdom, and perhaps with no knowledge of the kind of toughness that Oklahoma demanded of its inhabitants.

How did a young couple, bright, well educated, from prosperous and prominent if not wealthy Ohio families, end up on a drought-desiccated ranch in Oklahoma? The world was wide open to them. Robert and Pearl (Peg) Eggleston Berryman had led charmed lives since birth.Couple

He was a star athlete at Oberlin College, a record holder in the two-mile run, and was a prodigy as a scholar, finishing high school in one summer and college in three years. His accomplishments brought attention, and he was offered top positions right out of college.

Peg was an adored daughter whose parents and grandparents doted on her. She was the preacher’s daughter, attended two different colleges, and had just married her college sweetheart, the man her father wrote she had “fallen deeply in love with.” The world was their oyster, and Peg was ready to take her place in society beside her gifted husband.

When her gifted husband inherited an Oklahoma sheep ranch, Peg’s plans changed. Never dreaming she would be a ranch wife, she nevertheless packed up her belongings, her silk and lace dresses and silver hair clips, a few necessities, and the young family headed into that great unknown.

They traveled across Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, through St. Louis, and then, at the end of their 1,000-mile journey, in the blistering heat of a dry Oklahoma summer, Peg Berryman opened the-stairsthe door to her one-room house on an isolated sheep ranch amid a wilderness of desolation. And there they set out to make their lives, like fish out of water.

I wonder if she cried on that first day. I wonder if she begged Robert to take her home. Or maybe she put on her bonnet and apron, rolled up her lace sleeves, and got to work making that one room house a home.

I think she cried, and then she went to work. She had to. What else could she do? Her other home, the one with her parents, was in the past. It might as well be a million miles away. This was home now.

I imagine that Pearl came here willingly, though unenthusiastically. It would be easy to say this young wife’s starry love focused her eyes only on her husband, following him anywhere he might take her, but that was never her character. Pearl Eggleston was taught to think for herself. I imagine her father taught her by Socratic method, asking questions that would encourage her to think critically, to form firm and logical conclusions, and to consciously solve any problem she encountered rather than defer to another or put off to a later time.

This was a young woman who led the pampered life of an only daughter, who dressed in white lace and played croquet and tennis on the grounds of her grandfather’s mansion. Yet faSAG65029r from frivolous, she was serious-minded, and put her considerable intelligence to use on issues and questions of the day. Women’s suffrage, racial discrimination, hunger, and war occupied her thoughts and conversations. In that she and her erudite husband were well matched.

And now, here this eager and idealistic young woman was in Oklahoma, on an isolated sheep ranch with barely a house to live in, the nearest town so small and ephemeral that it would disappear entirely in a few years, decimated by drought.

Robert, my grandfather, could withstand any degree of hardship. He once broke his leg so badly that the bone protruded from the flesh. But he braced himself against the pain and set the leg himself.

Peg, my grandmother, was no so tough. She was not delicate, but preferred life’s delicacies. Still, here she was.

Oil had just been discovered there, and the illusion of prosperity and a limitless future filled the imaginations of thousands of immigrants who flocked to the nation’s newest state to seek their fortunes. Many more came when Congress opened the Indian Lands to settlement by any who would claim and work the land.Tissot - july

The reality was starker. More than two hundred thousand farmers struggled, while oil corporations sent their wealth out of state.

Deepening drought turned family farms into tenancies, and social unrest from increasing inequality of income grew worse.

This is the landscape my grandparents inherited. I don’t know if, when they arrived at the property they had moved to sight-unseen, they sat down and wept because it was dry and lonely. Or perhaps they laughed for joy because it was theirs and they were in love.

Whatever their outlook, this was their new life.

There were no woods, no trees like there were at the homes her family had had in Ohio, Tennessee, Vermont, New York, or Virginia. After her father’s visit to the young couple, he wrote that, “There was very little wood or trees. To make wood we burned old roots and stuff we picked up.”

Then one day the house burned down, and Peg and Robert moved into the barn loft. They slept on hay, cooked in tin cans over fire, stored what few belongings they salvaged in corners, like hobos.387px-James_Tissot_-_Chrysanthemums

Peg hung in. But she cried; I know she cried. Maybe only at night, while her husband slept.

Or maybe only when washing clothes at the water pump, or in letters home to her mother and father, or to her dear friend Elizabeth, who by this time was married to Robert’s younger brother, Waldo, and starting her own family, though more comfortably.

But however openly or secretly she cried, her father came to visit, and when he saw how they were living, he made up his mind to take Peg home with him for an extended visit. She had a baby due now, and he did not want his daughter giving birth on a remote farm far from family or doctor. But first he helped Robert to rebuild a house.

The next chapter of Pearl Eggleston’s life will be published soon. To make sure you don’t miss the rest of the story, sign up to this blog at the top right of this page.

“Pearl can do without the necessities of life, as long as she has the luxuries.”

When Pearl Abigail Eggleston stepped out her front door and into the dusty, packed-dirt streets of 1900’s Chagrin Falls, Ohio, she wore white lace. Like a swan, she glided across Summit Avenue, delicately lifting the hem of her skirts just an inch and lengthening her stride to clear wheel ruts, revealing only the toes of her kid leather lace-up ankle boots, polished that morning. Her blouse, gloves, and skirts were all white as a swan’s wing, and her fine, blonde hair upswept beneath a pale green feathered hat. Embroidered vines and leaves circled her high-necked collar, and pearl buttons fastened her blouse and sleeves. No dust settled on her hem. No smudge fell upon her cuff. She glided as if over water, not dirt and gravel.

Or at least this is how I imagine her, navigating the world on her terms and doing her best to make it look effortless. That characteristic was to be tested many times in her life.

She was born in 1879 to a medical doctor and college-educated mother, an only child for 11 years until her younger brother, Paul, was born. This gave her mother, Clara Brown Eggleston, ample time to raise Pearl with all the advantages afforded a child of polite society.Pearl_Abigail_Eggleston_c.1887-MOD

Pearl did not come from a wealthy family. She was not born with a silver spoon in her mouth, though her mother no doubt found the money for one.

Even as a girl Pearl enjoyed nice clothes and good manners, a trait she shared with her mother. They were not social climbers, they were merely bred and trained in the fashion of 19th century ladies. “Pearl could do without the necessities of life as long as she has the luxuries,” her father once said.

Pearl’s father, Francis Otto Eggleston, was a commanding presence. He was an eloquent speaker who had studied the classics from a young age, and he could hold an audience. That, along with his position as a physician of Knoxville, Tennessee, placed the young Eggleston family in that town’s best society, where little Pearl would watch and learn behaviors and manners she held to her whole life, whether living in Manhattan, or in the dust bowl poverty of wild Oklahoma.

In his biography, her father wrote of baby Pearl: “She was a picture. She was the only living wax doll I ever saw, and everyone admired her.” I have a photo of her at about age five or so, a delicate white lace collar buttoned high on her neck over a wool coat, her hair pulled back tight and with a curl “just so” on either side of her forehead. She looks like a serious little girl, her cupid’s bow lips and her heavy-lidded teardrop eyes both downturned at the outer points.

Pearl_Abigail_Eggleston_and_friend_c.1885.rThis is not a child who has ants in her pants. She is not barely contained, as are many children her age in their photos. She looks, instead, like she would be content to sit in this place until her mother tells her she can move, whether that is in one minute or ten.

Her father remembered the stylish outfits her mother put together with apparent pleasure. “Pearl must have been around six or seven years of age when we made our trip to and sojourn in Boston. I recall her fuzzy coat of dark green, and the red turban with an eagle’s quill stuck slantingly in one side. (A very picturesque headpiece.) She had her blond hair cut off before we left Troy, as did all her little friends of the same age.”

That haircut, and one of her similarly-shorn friends, were immortalized in a photo soon after.

In white eyelet and lace, Pearl gazes serenely into the distance over her friend, whose head rests lightly on Pearl’s shoulder. Grandmother, for Pearl Abigail Eggleston was to be my grandmother, has that same calm look as in the previous photograph, but behind that look lay what her daughter-in-law, my mother, called “a tender heart” that expressed both joys and sorrows to great degree.

Pearl’s father, by that time, had made the switch froPearl_Abigail_Eggleston_c._1895.rm healing people’s bodies to healing their souls. “I tire of butchery as an occupation,” he wrote. He too, had a tender heart. And so he returned to school for a Doctor of Divinity degree, emerging a Methodist minister.

From that point on the family moved frequently, as an itinerant clergy is one of the practices of Methodists, and has been since the church’s beginnings, when John Westley wandered the English countryside, preaching out of doors and from town to town.

Like other Methodist clergy, when the Egglestons moved, it was not just to the other side of town. They went from Ohio to Tennessee, to Vermont, to Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and back to Ohio. Pearl and her mother were dutiful, Clara taking her place in church society and Pearl in school as soon as they landed in a town.

As a girl, she and her mother spent summers visiting Pearl’s grandparents in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, traveling from their home in New England to that “pleasant mid-western village with its shaded streets and comfortable Mid-Victorian homes,” as she wrote 60 years later.

To Pearl, that was her true home. “A feeling of peace and security immediately enveloped me; a feeling I never remember having anywhere else. Clinton Eggleston house3, Chagrin Falls, OhioRemembered delights and fascinating new experiences were before me, safely in the little white house or secure in the mansion on the hill.” They “were a gay and cheerful family,” she wrote.

Her two sets of grandparents were different from each other, but equally loved.

Her Grandparents Eggleston belonged to a world of “beauty and elegance, though bought at the expense of hard work and thrift. The great house with its huge rooms, its bay windows and fire places, porches and pantries, the stable and carriage house, the wash house and long arbor, the stone walks, so good for rope skipping; the hitching post carved to represent a small negro, guarding the stone block where one could gracefully enter or leave the waiting surrey (complete with the “fringe on top”).”Franklin Brown cheese factory, Chagrin Falls, Ohio c.1870

Her Grandparents Brown had a cheese factory, and a home that held “the greatest joy of all,” the “mysterious room, ‘grandfather’s room,’ the ‘holy of holies,’ reached by a steep, dark, winding and entirely suitable stairway,” and holding a vast collection of rocks, insects, and music boxes that Pearl could play with for hours.

Later, in her teens, Pearl was enrolled in the Lake Erie College for Women in Painesville, Ohio. Her father wrote that, “She and Elizabeth Clark attended Painesville [Lake Erie] College. I drove them over from Chardon more than once — a pair of romantics who had their dreams.”Lake Erie College for Women - Pearl Eggleston school

After their time there Pearl and her friend Elizabeth became two of the earliest American women to attend a regular four-year college, Oberlin.

That is where they both met their husbands; first Pearl, who, her father wrote, “fell for Robert Berryman when she first went to Oberlin (1901). He was a track champion and as a scholar a prodigy. Later he made the only perfect score in the N.C.B. on Wall Street.” Then, “Elizabeth Clark married Waldo,” Robert’s younger brother, “soon after Pearl married Robert.”

“Pearl,” he continued, “would have liked nothing better than to settle down and be a professor’s wife.” But that was not to be. Robert was offered a “tenure track” teaching job at Ann Arbor, Michigan, but he had other plans.

The next chapter of Pearl Eggleston’s life will be published soon. To make sure you don’t miss the rest of the story, sign up to this blog at the top right of this page.

Not a Free Spirit, Yet His Mind Wandered Free

You can see Chapters 1 and 2 of this story here, here, and here.

FRANCIS OTTO EGGLESTON: Chapter 4

Francis Eggleston spent his childhood on an Ohio farm, in an era when it was common for parents to take their children out of school after the fourth grade, or to skip sending them to school altogether.

OneRoomSchoolhouseFrancis’s family was different. For grammar school they sent their two boys to the “District School – all in one room from primer to as big as the teacher, but less learned.”

In his biography, he wrote that, “It meant a walk of more than one mile, but there was commonly company much of the way.

“The school house,” he went on, “was a frame building painted white. It was heated by a ‘box’ stove and when you were cold you held up your hand and asked if you could ‘go to the stove.’Harvey's Grammar

As with nearly every school of the time, “The curriculum consisted of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic and geography and that crazy business of grammar, in which you parsed sentences after the ideas of the teacher and ‘Harvey’s Grammar’ – sentences about as scientific as a beech and maple woods.

Still, “It was good exercise for one’s brain cells. Once in a month you ‘spoke pieces’ and so learned to use your voice. There was singing if the teacher was a singer but no organ or piano.”

Twinsburg Institute original school buildingAfter this Francis and his brother both “went away to school,” to the Twinsburg Institute, a noted college preparatory school run by education reformer Samuel Bissell.

Though he never said specifically in his biography, Francis made it clear that he was not cut out for farm workand that, “I was a book worm of sorts from early days. A reader of the poets and dramatists; of Emerson, Theo Parker, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the like.” 

He was eager for all education, and entered one of the territory’s several colleges, Oberlin College, “at 16 or 17.”After reading Emerson and Carlyle and Ruskin, the poet, the dramatists, “and the like,” he was eager for more. His own reading could take him only to a certain level, and after that he needed a teacher to help him decide what it all means, and where to go from there.

But instead of finding it a temple to mental expansion, he found the university constricting, a place where a young man’s intellectual explorations were not encouraged, but were directed toward a set of values and beliefs.Oberlin 1906.pngNot that he believed any other university would be an improvement. “The educational enterprise as conducted in colleges in those days,” he wrote, “was that of channelization of the human mind — much like the ‘breaking’ of a colt to work in harness.”

Francis was a responsible young man who bowed to duty always, yet his mind wandered free and formed its own ideas, respective of prevailing doctrine or authority. He formed his own interpretations of the world, and was not easily subdued.

“I have always been a seeker,” he wrote, “rather than a safe deposit compartment.”

It’s because of this free-spiritedness that his life was a succession of one radical change after another. But because he was also dutiful, he tried to be a free spirit within the confines of the roles his place in society dictated.

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

Francis O. Eggleston, circa 1883

As a son, a husband, and a father, his roles were clearly defined. How, then, could he find space for his spirit to soar within those defined edges?

“I readily inclined to the actor’s calling,” he wrote, “but human nature cuts many capers and we all have our own temperamental twists…. I was not so much a scholar as I was a lad for special occasions that called me out.”

He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Our moods do not believe in each other.”

After matriculation at Oberlin he taught school for several years, but, as was written in his obituary 70 years later, “the pedagogic life was not to his complete satisfaction, and he entered Western Reserve University, from which he obtained a medical degree.”

He then married the one and only sweetheart he ever courted, and ventured from Ohio to Knoxville, Kentucky to begin life as an adult.

There, Francis Eggleston started his adult life as a physician, but after practicing medicine for three years he decided against continuing on in the profession.

“As for medicine and surgery,” he wrote, “I tire of butchery as an occupation.

“You never know what you will run into, the disintegrated flesh and scattered remnants of humanity make me prefer less sensitive elements.”

Indeed, he was too sensitive to practice medicine, and so he went back to Oberlin College to study a subject through which his spirit could soar, theology. He emerged a Methodist minister, and served for many years in churches in Ohio, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Tennessee, and Virginia.

Francis Eggleston was certain in his beliefs, though those beliefs were always evolving. He constantly questioned beliefs, and especially, systems of belief, which is what brought him from Methodism to Unitarianism. He was a devoted student of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who at that time was famously Unitarian.

In his autobiography I found many references to the evolution of ideas, and of things. This must have been hard to reconcile with the life and duties of a Methodist minister, and perhaps it was part of the reason he evolved from that religion to Unitarianism.

FOE Eggleston bio page excerpt - change but cannot dieDarwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, yet it wasn’t until the 20th century that Darwin’s explanation of life was widely accepted by even the scientific community.

I don’t know if Grandfather accepted Darwin’s theory the first time he read it, or if he had to come to terms with it slowly, but at least by 1940 he was all in. He wrote:

“A changeless world could not exist — except as a dead moon. It could no have life even in its lowest forms. It may be said of all living things…. Only those who were alive before 1860 can measure the advances in many fundamental ideas and loss of fears from that remote period to 1941…. Mankind has advanced even more from the loss of superstitions than from the gains of positive elements…. I must accept this faith of human science or life will dwindle and hope perish.”

In another place, he wrote:

“Only a living world could be self-existent, or creative and progressive. The static conception of creation was of necessity mechanistic. Life is not for a moment inactive or finished. Such a world would contradict itself. In a living world man himself becomes a project: an enterprise. Society, made up of living persons, becomes a major project of measureless scope and infinite hope.

“We know now what a biologic continuum is and how it acts in our natures. Science is very explicit on this point. We do carry along germs of inheritance generation after generation — vital parts of ‘what we were before we became ourselves.'”

And in another place:

“I began life orthodox, and end a naturalist.”

“…the world is infinitely unfinished…life must be progress. The businessman may aspire to a competence and retirement from the grind of business. The student has no such wish. I have an expanding horizon, and no valued and cherished consistency.”

My great grandfather, Francis Otto Eggleston, was incredibly well read, as his biography includes references to and quotes from poets and thinkers ranging from ancient Greece to  the modern-day, all used to clarify or demonstrate his thoughts.FOE Eggleston bio excerpt - mental stimulation my need

If he had been brought up in a different place, or had he attended a different college, perhaps he would not have found such societal constriction of his spirit. Still, this was the Victorian era, and social pressure was great all across this country, in and out of its institutions.

As it is, Great Grandfather Eggleston found an outlet for his unconstricted thoughts and beliefs as a columnist and commentator for the Bergen Record, of Bergen County, New Jersey. He had free reign to speak his mind, and had a large audience with lively discussion through the readers’ responses in letters.

The Bergen Record’s obituary would have pleased Great Grandfather, with is headline” F. O. E. Of the Forum Dead; Woodcliff Lake Philosopher.” The article’s subtitle, though, reflected his constant, life-long search: “Eggleston, 90, In Turn A Teacher, Doctor, Clergyman, Writer.”FOE Eggleston obituary 1st paragraph

In the obituary, the paper wrote that,

“He was renowned for the lofty style and the finish of his communications, which were generally reminiscent of the Emersonian manner and viewpoint.

“It was a technique which many readers found absorbing. Some said they read F. O. E. before they read the day’s news.”

I’m glad Great Grandfather’s mental wanderings were finally given an appreciative audience. He wrote for the paper for 15 years, up until four months before his death at 90.

He lived those years in a happy household with his daughter and her husband, and his twin grandsons. I wrote briefly about that family nest in the post, I Have Been Talking with the Trees.

Great Grandfather Eggleston died in 1944. Two of his three grandsons were “somewhere in the Pacific,” and would not return until the war with Germany and Japan was over. He had one great grandchild, my oldest brother, one year old, with whom he spent many delightful days.

F.O. Eggleston, Tad&Ted Berryman Woodcliff Lake c1918_CU.rI never met The Old Gentleman, as he was known around town, but I feel that I know him, and for that I am richer.

The End.

 

I Have Been Talking with the Trees

Francis Otto Eggleston, my great-grandfather, lived from about 1915 to 1941 on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, a small suburb of New York with leafy green streets that wind down to the lake of the town’s name.

I grew up far from there, in coastal Southern California, but I’ve seen the house on several occasions, on visits back to visit relatives and friends still in the area.

Eggleston home, Woodcliff Lake, NJ, c.1915.rThe family that lived in that house consisted of my grandparents, Pearl and Robert Berryman, their two twin boys, Tad and Ted, who would be my uncle and father, and my great-grandparents, Clara and Francis Eggleston.

It was a large and stately home with gabled windows and broad eves. There was a curving drive leading to the house in front, and in the back were roses and lilacs, and just beyond, a brook. And of course, there were the trees. Native chestnut, sugar maple, hickory, cedar, and birch shaded the house, and their leaves carpeted the ground down to the creek.

As a child, my father, along with his twin and their younger cousin rigged a “flying boat” with pulleys to swoosh them down and into the creek. It was a massive operation for three boys, but with rope and pulley suspended and secured between two of those deep-rooted hardwood trees, their airborne adventures were ensured.

The children’s parents and grandparents didn’t pay much attention. A few cuts and scrapes, maybe a banged up forehead, were nothing to worry about in a ten or 12-year old boy.

Inside the house my grandmother would be planning one of her frequent parties of artists and political commentators. My great grandfather would be in his study, writing. My grandfather would be at his job in a bank on Wall Street. I’m not sure what Great Grandmother Eggleston would be doing. She was a homemaker all her life, not given to fun in the typical sense, but to quiet serenity.

The house and the trees still stand. The flying boat is long gone, as are my grandparents and great grandparents, my father, his twin, and their cousin.

The following poem or meditation was written by Great Grandfather Eggleston, probably when he was in his 70s or 80s and living in this house. Maybe during the day I just described.

I’m afraid it is page two, and I do not have page one. But it is worthwhile reading nonetheless.

Francis Eggleston often signed his poems and articles with simply, F.O.E., including the newspaper column he wrote for the Bergen Record, in Woodcliff Lake, from 1929 through 1941.

A transcription is below the photo.

FOE Eggleston 'I have been talking with the trees'

I have been talking with the trees

That grow outside my window.

These are my nearest neighbors –

Almost my dearest – they please

Me in so many ways and never vex my spirit.

These stately oaks are titled old grandees

Of noble birth and ancient lineage.

They gathered wisdom through long centuries

And stored it in their steadfast hearts.

Sometimes, I think I love the graceful birches best,

They seem more feminine and full of friendly gossip.

The Tulip poplar stretches friendly hands to me.

Almost to greet me at my casement.

Near to a noble oak a Whitewood stands

So straight of bole and loftily unbent

Of winds, it wears its leafy crown above the best

Of all competitors.

Such company is better sought than that of men

Whose purblind groping after phantasies

Goes on to vast bewilderment, then back again

To seek a new sensation.

How steadfast; these stand in meditation deep –

They sleep within the calm of their own shade

In cultured quietude – as those who have attained –

Who have no restless need to fume and weep

The aimless tears of human souls —

The souls of trees are surely wise and blest.

F.O.E.

Earth Day Poem, a Day Late

I just remembered a poem written by my great grandfather, Francis O. Eggleston. It is a  perfect Earth Day poem, written some time before 1900.

F.O. Eggleston poem in The Unitarian, September 1891.PNG

 

Left Behind When a Parent Dies

You can see Chapters 1 and 2 of this story here and here.

I wrote a few days ago about typhoid fever’s sad visit to the Eggleston home in 1864.

The Artist Attending the Mourning of a Young Girl circa 1847 by Sir John Everett Millais, Bt 1829-1896Two of the family’s five members died, my great-grandmother, Abigail Hickox Eggleston, and her young daughter, my great-grand aunt, Mary Eggleston.

In that post I did not project myself into the heartbreak that befell the family. It was but a simple account of an event.

Now I’m thinking of the family that was left behind.

How their brand new home felt infinitely empty, the rooms devoid of joy, the air sucked out, the sunlight an intruder on the family’s grief.

I doubt the two boys and one man remaining consoled each other.

Winslow Homer Boys in a Pasture

That branch of my family was nearly purely of English stock, whose stiff upper lips are their heritage, and further steeled by more than 200 years already on the American frontier, a hard life that could not wait for any sorrow to heal.

There was no bereavement leave on a frontier farm, or any farm. Life must go on, starting at dawn and ending well after dark.

Perhaps that was best, for to be outside at work, or at school, was to be otherwise occupied, not thinking about their sorrow.

Boy in Red Jacket.png

Then, upon entering the house at day’s end, that heaviness, that unhealable ache would once again fill their chests.

In the biography that my great-grandfather, Francis Eggleston, the youngest boy, wrote many years later he did not write of the sadness, but it is clearly there, behind his words.

He speculates in his biography about what life would have been like had she lived. “What a change there would have been in our family history,” he allowed himself to wonder from the perspective of 89 years.

In those days a family was a machine that ran household, farm, or store.

Winslow Homer Boy Holding LogsThe children tended livestock, carried wood, raked barns, cleaned house and farmyard; they helped in the garden, the fields, the smokehouse, the spring house, and the kitchen.

The mother lit the fires, cooked, cleaned, boiled water to wash clothes, made soap, kept a kitchen garden with all its hoeing and weeding, sewed clothes, canned for the winter, made jams and apple butter, fed chickens, and helped around the farmyard.

The father did the heavy lifting; he plowed fields, branded and butchered, carpentered, split rails and mended fences, bought and sold land, livestock, and crops, and sometimes had an outside job to make ends meet.

Without any one of those parts, the machine was broken. It wouldn’t work. There was too much to do already, no time or energy to take up someone else’s job duties.

Boy in fieldI don’t know if the family had hired help for the house.

They were well-to-do by farm standards, and would later own what my grandmother called “the mansion on the hill,” a massive Greek revival that exists to this day.

Maybe after the deaths they a hired woman who helped with the meals and cleaning temporarily.

But a farm could not work properly for long without a full-time mother, and so it was the practice to marry soon after a spouse’s death.

This, great-great grandfather Eggleston did, and so Francis and DeWitt were given a new mother, Mary, who was but three years older than their departed sister would have been.

Did the boys accept her readily, or did they resent her presence?

DeWitt, the oldest, was a practical boy, and later a successful businessman. He was 13 when his mother died, and would be off to college in just three years.

Eastman Johnson (American painter, 1824-1906) The Little Convalescent c 1872

Francis, my great-grandfather, was only ten when his mother died. He was a self-described “poetic and romantic boy,” who “bored my elders with problems too old for my years.”

Perhaps, because of his tender heart, my great-grandfather quietly mourned his mother, but cleaved to this new mother for what affection she offered.

Winslow Homer The Whittling Boy

She settled into the family and had two children with the boys’ father, and their marriage lasted more than 50 years before Clinton Eggleston died at 86.

My grandfather also went on to live a long life, dying far from that first home at age 89. Yet in his biography, written in his late ’80s, and even though he was just ten when his mother died, he begins with the typhoid incident on page one.

Clearly his mother’s death left a scar. I’ll never know how deep.

Boy over WallYou can read Chapter 4 of Francis Otto Eggleston’s story here.