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Not a Free Spirit, Yet His Mind Wandered Free

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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 work, and 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

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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.

Left Behind When a Parent Dies

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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.

A (Reluctant) Farm Boy’s Life in 1865

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You can see Chapter 1 of this story here.

FRANCIS EGGLESTON: CHAPTER 2

Francis Otto Eggleston, my great-grandfather, was a medical doctor first, then a Methodist minister, a Unitarian minister, and finally, in his later years, newspaper columnist.

But he didn’t consider himself a Renaissance man. He thought of himself instead as a man who made many poor choices before settling down to do something he loved.

Francis was a poor fit with his environment right from the start.

In his biography he writes that he was born, “in a new house on a farm in Aurora,” an Ohio Aurora map with Eggleston highlighted.GIFvillage founded by his forebears, who walked with their wagons hauled by teams of oxen from Connecticut across the rugged, nearly impenetrable Allegheny mountains and into the wild frontier of New Connecticut, as the Ohio territory was called, in 1807.

There they settled, “25 miles south east of the village of Cleveland,” which was no more than “a biggish village” even as late as 1853, the year he, Francis Eggleston, was born.

From a population of less than 50,000 in 1803, which was about one person per five miles square, the population of Ohio grew to about two million in just the 50 years between when the Eggleston settlers arrived and Francis Eggleston’s birth.

haying-timeSmall towns dotted the landscape, and farms stretched their borders to the edge of wilderness. It was a good time – an exciting time – to be in Ohio, with all its promise as a new state in a new country.

The mid-1800s was a time of great invention for farm machinery, too. In 1830, using the most modern equipment of the day, a farmer could expect to spend about 300 hours to produce 100 bushels of wheat. Just 20 years later, by the time Francis was born, with the invention of reapers, steel plows, thrashing and mowing machines and improved fertilizers, that time would be cut to a third, about 90 hours.

But Clinton Eggleston, Francis’s father, did not go in for modern farm machinery, and it was plenty vexing to Francis.

small_soldiers-of-the-soilI don’t know Clinton’s reasons. Francis wrote simply that his father was “conservative in methods.”

He could well afford what machinery he wanted, as he was a prosperous dairy farmer and sugar producer.

Perhaps one who is conservative in his ways simply has a romantic attachment to the old ways, enjoying a slower, quieter way of life.

Of course, it took a while for the new machinery to become widely used. The machines had to first be manufactured in quantity, and then marketed far and wide, reaching out to these “hinterlands” farmers. So Francis had to wait.

He wryly compares the era of his youth to the age when man first discovered tools, the Neolithic era, writing of his childhood, “That was back in the tool age — when a plow, harrow and one horse cultivator ridden by a boy and guided by a man” did the work.haymaking

“The machine came in about the time that kerosene (coal oil then), put the tallow candle out of business, which must have been around 1860.

Ironically, as much as Francis wished he had the advantages of modern machinery as a lad on the farm in 1870, he would change his mind by 1941, wishing for the days of horse and buggy again, because cars go too fast!

Still, you can sense his frustration with farm life when he writes,”We had a farm of something over 200 acres…. “What we did not have was labor saving machines — we always did the hard work the hard way. This did not tend to make boys like the farm.”

He lived the typical farm boy’s life, milking cows, feeding chickens, and guiding the big work horse down field rows while his father drove the plow, which was a good deal of work on a 200+ acre farm.

Though he was a scant 120 pounds and called himself more of “a dreamer” than the kind of boy who would thrive on farm work, he was expected to pull his weight.

'Habitants_with_Sleigh',_oil_painting_by_Cornelius_KrieghoffJust an adolescent, he was sent to split timber into “rails, 12 feet long and perhaps five inches square,” and to put his muscle behind “a great wood pile which was cut by horse-power and drag saw and split and corded by man and boy power.” 

What he did like, though, were the horses. The family “always had three or more horses or some extra colts growing up and sometimes a yoke of oxen.

“I was fond of ‘horse-flesh’ and ‘broke’ one colt to drive before he was a year old. He would pull me on a hand-sled and keep up with a full grown team.

“In summer I rigged up a sulky and drove him until he was full grown.”

In his biography he tells the story of his father’s “gorgeously trimmed” Rockaway canopy-top carriage.Rockaway.3.GIF

The Rockaway was a luxury model carriage, with a fully enclosed cabin, brass carriage lamps, beveled windows, or “glass curtains,” tufted leather seats, and spring axle for a smoother ride. That was quite the ride for a small Ohio farm town!

“I never knew where he got it but it lasted until a pair of colts ran away with it, broke the pole and smashed the top.

“My mother jumped out but one horse had simply landed on top of the other – being scared by a noisy rattling rig for hauling empty barrels – when the pole broke Father had to let them go until someone caught them.

“He sold them then – never drove them again. That was about 1860 as I remember. After this we had a splendid little team of dark brown Morgans – and after this I was not so familiar with the teams, but Father had good horses.”

Morgan stallionFrancis helped produce all the chief products of the farm, which were milk, butter, cheese, and sugar; and to sow, grow, hoe, and harvest the field crops, which were hay and corn to feed the cows, and oats for the horses.

The cows “ran out on pasture in summer, eating grass, and were driven in by a boy and dog morning and eve.”

This was a job he no doubt liked, though, as it gave him time to think on the ideas he read about from his “bedside books” the previous night before falling asleep, and to practice the poetry he memorized so well and quoted throughout his life.

The family’s chief occupation was dairy farming. After milking the cows, the new milk was set in tin pans that held about eight quarts each and were left to set until the cream rose to the top, which took about 24 hours. Then the cream was skimmed off with a perforated tin skimmer and used to make butter, and a small bit used in cooking.

He described the cheese making process:making cheese

“The milk in early time was heated with a steamer and worked dry in a big wooden tub. Later there was a regular cheese vat,” and “cheese was pressed in a hoop by its own weight.

“After the war (1860-64) milk was sold to cheese factories and this made less work for the housewife. Washing milk pans, pails and a churn was work, and called for plenty of hot water.

“When the factory system came in milk was strained into a tin can as large as a barrel and loaded on a wagon that had a route.”

From our perspective in 2014, all this sound like a huge amount of work, doesn’t it? Most of us in America have moved over to the “knowledge economy,” and have turned over raising our food, building our homes, and just about everything physical to others.

That’s just not how it was in the second half of the 19th century, when most of America did not live in cities.

bell-foundry-germanyI began this story saying that Francis Eggleston often found himself in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, or more specifically, the wrong thing for his temperament and interests.

Was being born and raised on a farm one of his experiences of poor fit? He seems to think so, though never says.

“As a boy,” he wrote, “I was said to be lazy. The true fact was that I was always averse to farm drudgery and dirt. I was mechanical, and always had something to make or repair – lazy I was not.”

Francis Eggleston didn’t find his identity in outdoor labor, but in his mind. The next stage of his life would fit him much better. We’ll see that when next we pick up his story in Chapter 3, here.

Francis Otto Eggleston, “A Poetic and Romantic Boy”

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F.O.E. CHAPTER 1: I never met my great-grandfather, Francis Otto Eggleston, a distinguished-looking gentleman with enormous, liquid eyes who, even at 89, stood as straight as the ladder-back chair of his that I inherited.Francis_Otto_Eggleston_c.1983.r

His nose was prominent, but matched the proportion of his eyes and mouth, and was balanced by noticeably high cheekbones.

I do not see any similarities between us, though I feel them mightily.

As a toddler he was “a chubby little chap in a pinkish dress, with a belt,” and as a young boy wore boots, “with red tops and copper toes.” Which may explain his penchant for always dressing well.

When grown he wore a white shirt and tie nearly every day of his life, usually with a suit, often three-piece, or at least with jacket.

Francis O. Eggleston c.1939As a young man, he sported mutton-chop sideburns so large that they nearly met and merged on his chin, just above a ribbon bow tie and well-starched high-collar shirt.

His hair must have been wavy, because in photos it is barely tamed across his forehead and combed as well as he could back from his ears.

By old age he had let his cotton-white hair grow longish, and swept it back from his forehead, where it fell to either side in a distinguished mane.

The family called him Grandfather, a testament to his dignity, and the formality of their time and place in history.

As for his character, Grandfather was gentle, a romantic and a dreamer.

How do I know?

Because he left his letters, poetry, lectures, and other writings, including a twenty to thirty thousand word biography, to my mother, his beloved granddaughter-in-law, and so I know him as well as his words can express. FO Eggleston scrapbook letter to Ruth Berryman

“I know that I was a poetic and romantic boy with a good bit of natural piety but little religion of the standard type. I have the same peculiarity after 80 years,” he wrote in his biography.

Fortunately, Grandfather’s was not a family that discouraged dreaming or education, and both he and his brother, DeWitt, were given ample room for study, including being sent to the best schools available.

When he was a child, Cleveland, 25 miles distant from the Eggleston farm, was no more than “a largish village,” as he described.

His mother died young of typhoid fever, as did his sister, Mary. I wrote about the epidemic that befell their home previously, here. Such tragedy was, unfortunately, not uncommon.

Francis was expected to perform the duties of a typical 1860s farm boy, helping around the farmyard, in the fields, and with the livestock, and he did so, but not with enthusiasm. “I was not by size or weight a country man, as my own weight was only about 120 pounds.”

His lack of enthusiasm caused others to think him lazy, but “the true fact was that I was always averse to farm drudgery and dirt. I was mechanical, and always had something to make or repair – lazy I was not.”

Still, he found other aspects of farm life idyllic.

“My brother and I were beauty-haunted, and lived in our own world until he went away to school in his early adolescence.”Ohio woods

There was a woods behind the farm’s barn, and Francis considered it the loveliest part of their large property.

Just seeing photos from that area of the country, I can see why he loved those woods. I’m from Southern California, where a mention of “woods” brings to mind golf clubs, and anything that’s “woody” might be just an old surf jalopy.

Grandfather’s woods were untouched by saw or road. The trees were so healthy that they practically fluoresced green in springtime, their shoots of bright new leaves tittering in the slightest breeze like tiny dancing elves.

American beech treeThere were no chestnut trees, but they had hickory trees so big around that a full-grown man could not wrap his arms around them.

And beech trees that towered to 80 or 100 feet, their root base emerging from the ground as if the tree was being ripped from the dirt in its need to grow higher still.

In fall the canopy opened and light dappled the still-crimson and gold leaf carpet below to give a hint of warmth to a wanderer.

And in winter, snow hid any path but crunched underfoot, ensuring a dreamer could find his way back as long as he was mindful of weather.

The dreamer and poet in Grandfather emerged early. Every moment he could steal away, he read and memorized poetry.

FOE Eggleston 'I have been talking with the trees'The biography he wrote in later years overflows with references to classic writers and quotes from poems both famous and obscure.

I imagine him retreating to those woods with his books, especially Emerson, to whom he was ever devoted.

Francis and DeWitt enjoyed getting out of the farmyard, where Grandfather could indulge his poetic side.

His biography notes that they, “acted the part of shepherds in spring, and in season there were raspberries to pick, and blackberries. Then there were apples to gather, and pears and cider apples – plus cider.”

Grandfather felt he didn’t fit on the farm. Yet he learned duty and discipline, tempering his “poetic and romantic” soul.

His was the best of worlds. His mind wandered free, yet he was not a free spirit. This is a description you’ll see me use often for Grandfather.

In his biography, he quoted John Greenleaf Whittier:

Life made by duty epical
and rhythmic with the truth.

Beauty and wisdom where his loftiest goals. Duty and service were his calling.

This will become clear in the rest of Francis Eggleston’s story, which you can find in Chapter 2, here.

Typhoid Falls on the Eggleston Home

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In the summer of 1865 a typhoid epidemic swept small towns throughout America.

Every member of my great-great grandfather Clinton Eggleston’s family in Aurora, Ohio, came down with the fever.Typhoid sign

It’s impossible to tell where it came from, though the highly contagious disease could have been brought by soldiers returning home from the Civil War. A war in which more than twice as many soldiers died of disease than of battle. Diarrhea was their most common killer, followed by typhoid and typhus.

Hospital, Washington DC

The Eggleston home became the family’s personal hospital, with all of them bed-ridden and neighbors sitting vigil and doing what was necessary to keep the family alive. Clinton decided professional medical help was necessary, and hired a male practical nurse to provide what meager care there was available then.

The nurse no doubt applied cold towels to keep fever down, changed sweat-soaked sheets, fed them broth, and did what he could to keep them calm through delirium and pain.

Pale girl

They lived at that time in a new home on a farm in Aurora, Ohio, only a few miles southeast of Cleveland, which was then no more than a large village that had been founded only 40-odd years previous. To the other direction, the house was about a quarter mile from Clinton’s father’s house, where he settled in 1809, building first a log cabin and then a two-story frame house.

The first of my great-great grandfather’s family to perish was Abigail Hickox Eggleston, beloved wife and mother. Seven year old DeWitt and ten year old Frances, my great-grandfather, recovered, but their older sister, Mary, did not, yet lingered a month or more longer than her mother had.

Woman deathbedRecovery for the others was complete, and my great-grandfather suffered no long-lasting ill effects from the disease, other than the tragic loss of mother and sister, who I am sure he mourned for all his life.

Born to Run

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I have lots of photos of my father’s mother. Portraits of her as a child. Portraits of her as a young woman. Portraits of her with her twin babies. Then snapshots of her with family, with friends over the years. A full chronology of my grandmother’s life.

But I can count the photos of my grandfather on one hand and still have a finger left over. He wasn’t camera shy. He just didn’t stop for the camera. In the first photo he is a boy of ten. It’s 1890 and he is with his family before their very large Ohio farmhouse (I count nine windows and four doors on just the two sides I can see). It looks to be late winter and this yard is no doubt beautiful in summer with its overhang of leafy trees and long views, but here it is a mess of mud and melting snow, a hazard for the ruffled skirts and high heel boots of his sisters. Grandaddy is in knee-high leather boots and holding the harnesses of two yearling calves, an odd prop for a family photo, and amusing given the formality of the other family members. He looks like he was just passing through and the photo’s subjects stepped aside to make way for him, he stopping for a moment before moving on. He was always headstrong, so more likely he insisted on including two calves he was raising himself. John H. Berryman Family 1890The next photo is a good 20 years later. My grandparents lived in a big two-story Colonial on Glen Road in Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey. Granddaddy commuted across the George Washington Bridge and into Manhattan each day. In the photo his suit coat is off and tie is loosened. He is holding his baby boy in the air, gazing at him as if in sheer wonder. Or perhaps sheer fear, because these new twin boys were conceived bittersweetly three years after my grandparents’ darling daughters, one six and one six months, died of then-incurable disease, my grandmother deciding she would never again have children. Her own father had to intervene to persuade her that she could love other children, but that’s another story for another time. Granddaddy waited patiently, as was really his only choice, and now I have this photo of him cautiously holding this precious bundle of baby that was my father. Or uncle. I can’t tell.RF Berryman and Baby Ted BerrymanSometime during their Woodcliff Lake period he decided to invent a better kind of running shoe. He had been a track star at Oberlin College and held the “Big Six” record for the fastest two mile. Only fragments of the running shoe story remain. The soles were made from tires, or tire rubber. To prove their superiority he ran in them from Woodcliff Lake to Passaic (20 miles) or Lima, Ohio (625 miles), I forget which. That’s all I know. There is no photo commemorating his accomplishment. In fact, I have no other photo of him until about 40 years later.

Peg and Bob Berryman, Elizabeth and Waldo Berryman, r to lIn that photo he is an elder in his 80s, standing next to his brother and behind my grandmother who finally, after a life more nomadic and in all ways unsettled than she ever wanted, was sitting in the lap of luxury at her Leucadia, California home, the gleaming Pacific to one side and an endless panorama of rolling hills to the other. Granddaddy lived in that lap of luxury too, but it was luxury he did not want and did not take to with ease. The febility of old age frustrated his need to put one foot in front of the other toward some fanciful goal.

As a boy Granddaddy was a prodigy. I have it on numerous family authorities that he flew through high school in one year and graduated from Oberlin College in two years. He was  fluent in English, Spanish, French, Greek, Latin and Portuguese. As a recent graduate he accepted a one-year position to teach school in the Philippine Islands, where he became fluent in Tagalog. On coming back he went to work for a Wall Street Bank as an interpreter. A few years later he moved his family onto a commune called The School of Living in Suffern, New York, founded by the noted utopian, Ralph Borsodi. After a few years of that he scouted the Land of California, writing home that it was “a magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.” That impressed the family, and as soon as my dad was home from WWII, off they went.

They weren’t following history, though. California’s greatest population booms followed the Great Depression and World War II. In the 1930s thousands of Americans, left destitute by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, went west in search of work. By that time my grandfather’s brother, Waldo Berryman was already moving his growing auto aftermarket company from Ohio to Palo Alto. He eventually moved it to Encinitas, California, though I don’t know if that was before or after my branch of the family moved there.

After WWII thousands more Americans moved to California after GIs had passed through there on their way to the Pacific Theater. They came home, grabbed their wives or sweethearts, and headed for the promised land of sunshine and opportunity. By the time my father was home from war the family’s bags were packed, furniture all shipped, and car gassed up and ready to head west and join Granddaddy in the Berryman family’s new-found home upon that “magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude.”

In the last photo I have of my Grandaddy he is an old man walking, stooped and gnarled by Parkinson’s, but still, as he always was, moving forward and deep in thought.

I recently went hunting for photos of him online. Surely, with all he had done, there were photos of him in some college yearbook, newspaper, or historical archive. I know he was a track star in college, so I Googled “Robert Fulton Berryman” and “two mile,” his specialty.

Nothing.

I tried the search again with “R. F. Berryman” and bingo, I landed on the Oberlin College yearbook of 1905. (Thank you www.archive.org – you always come through!) I found the yearbook photo of the Oberlin track team. But…argh! The team members were not named in order of the photo. There was no, “Named, left to right.” In fact, there were more young men in the photo than names to the side. This wasn’t going to be easy. After studying each face, looking for my grandfather’s unmistakable upside-down pear shaped head, I settled on just one possibility. He had to be the confident looking young man sitting in the bottom row, second from right. Technically he’s seated in the second row, I suppose, but also technically his is the second head from bottom right.

R.F. Berryman Oberlin 1903 team

I still don’t know for sure if this is Robert Fulton Berryman, Oberlin Class of 1905. But I’m going to believe it is. Because he was almost certainly in the track team photo and no one else is a close match. Because the head shape, ears, and eyes match the photo I have from 1960. And because the only photos I have of this man I loved so dearly are blurred, dark, or from his back or side.

R.F. Berryman 1903 and 1960I take this from these few scattered facts or semi-facts: Robert Fulton Berryman always ran towards, never from. The whole world was that magnificent panorama of unparalleled magnitude. He raced through college and then ran (not literally, I must point out) to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Spanish American War. He got an inheritance and so ran to Oklahoma to start a sheep ranch (fine occupation for an academic prodigy!). He ran from Wall Street to a commune, and from there to California. Whether he got comfortable in California and so decided not to explore further lands I don’t know. I do know that as I age, changing my life gets harder. I would like to move someplace completely different than coastal Southern California, but so many ties tether me here. After a while in one place it gets like that. But that’s another story for another time.

Grandaddy didn’t have time for cameras. But he had time for me. No camera can capture that.