J.S. ABSHER

Stepsisters in 1890: There and Back Again

4/21/2026

Photo of unknown young women by Hugh Mangum (Duke University Libraries Repository--Collection and Archives. Hugh Mangum Photographs. Permalink: https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r3pg1j69v), I have found no pictures of Octavia or Nellie, the major figures in this essay.

Years ago, I came across the memoir of Ida Crumpler Beard. I was fascinated by her determination to support herself by self-publishing and self-marketing her book, My Own Life, or A Deserted Wife (1898). Her story is set in Winston-Salem, then a pair of fast-growing industrial towns based primarily on tobacco. Ida’s main goal was to depict her ex-husband in his true colors, to use her metaphor. Along the way Ida mentions dozens of people by name, provides an interesting and useful, if wholly biased, account of the 1895 race riot, and sheds light on the moral and material culture of the time. To some extent, My Own Life reveals the culture of the Upper South into which my grandmothers were born at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

This essay focuses not on Ida, but on her younger sister, Nellie Crumpler, and her stepsister, Octavia Wellons, who together briefly ran away from home in the late autumn of 1890. I have excluded discussion of much required to understand their world, particularly racial relations on the eve of Jim Crow and the related cult of southern womanhood; those topics are addressed in the larger project of which this essay is a part. (See my annotated edition of My Own Life for more, including a picture of Ida.) The essay includes some attempts to understand what the sisters were seeking during their escapade and what choices the culture of the day provided. My sources are Ida’s memoir and newspaper articles in three states that reported on their northern trip.

*****

In 1890, without parental knowledge or consent, Octavia and Nellie left on a tour of the North. Octavia was on the eve of her eighteenth birthday; Nellie was no more than 16, and possibly as young as 14. They first went to Greensboro, where they boarded a sleeper for New York. They appear to have stopped in Washington and Baltimore en route; from New York, they headed to Bridgeport, Connecticut, then almost due west to South Bend, Indiana, and finally, south to Covington, Kentucky. There they ran out of money. After wiring home for train fare, they were reported to the police by the telegraph operator, arrested, and sent home by train. Ida wrote that Nellie had been “found in a penniless condition, and on account of being hatless [in public] was held a prisoner at the Cortenia [sic] Hotel.” [1] Octavia settled back into her life with aplomb, but Nellie seems never to have recovered from the consequences of the journey.

Since it ended with their safe return, Nellie’s and Octavia’s two-week adventure ended as a trivial story for anyone outside the family, but several newspapers covered it, including at least two out-of-state papers. One account provides a reason for the interest: the writer wondered about the young women’s “strange actions.” [2] Then, as now, the unusual attracted attention; the journey excited gossip and scandal that revealed boundaries that the young women crossed at their risk. The story helps us understand the choices available to Nellie and Octavia and the dreams they might have entertained.

Octavia and Nellie. In November 1887, when Nellie’s father married Octavia’s mother, Nellie and Octavia were the only children at home. Octavia, an only child, was fifteen, in her second year at Salem Academy (then called Salem Female Academy, or SFA), probably a day scholar rather than a boarder. Thirteen-year-old Nellie, the youngest of ten, had two living siblings, both married – Ida in Winston-Salem, Flora in Salisbury.

Octavia’s father, William Wellons, had died of a stroke in 1885. [3] The 1880 census lists him as a carpenter; the prosperity of the family after his death suggests he was a successful one. The family lived in Goldsboro, a railroad town whose population growth – more than 250% between 1870 and 1890 – must have rewarded William’s skills. After his death, the family moved to Winston-Salem, where Octavia attended Salem Academy until graduating (spring 1890).

Nellie’s mother, Louisa, had died of cancer in early 1887, when Nellie was twelve. Nellie was sickly – she had almost died from scarlet fever, a disease that left her nearly deaf in one ear. She was pampered by both parents but was particularly close to her father. [4] But less than a year after Louisa’s death, her father married Sallie Evans Wellons, widow of William.

The Crumplers lived in Salem. From 1870 to 1890, the population of Winston-Salem grew from fewer than 500 to over 10,000, spurred by the growth of tobacco factories; thirty-five factories annually produced almost ten million pounds of plug tobacco and employed thousands, mostly African-Americans. [5] The Crumplers had moved to Salem from nearby Germanton in the mid- to late 1870s, no doubt drawn by the business prospects. As a painter, James Crumpler’s services were greatly sought for residential and commercial buildings. His obituary called him “Winston’s Pioneer Painter.” [6]

The families were alike in some ways, crucially different in others. Since both James Crumpler and William Wellons were successful in the building trades, Sallie Wellons’ marriage to James did not significantly change her social situation. But the Wellons women, especially Octavia, appear to have been more conscious of status. From 1889 on, Octavia’s comings and goings were noted in the columns of the local papers. She made strategic use of the railroads to visit family and friends, and of the papers to advertise her mobility. This is how we know that Octavia visited Goldsboro and nearby Faison in August 1890, not long after she graduated from the Academy. [7] In September she returned for a visit of several weeks. [8] Before Louisa’s death, the Crumplers seem to have had little interest in making a social splash in the papers, though James did frequently advertise his professional services.

Another important difference was the children’s access to money. Octavia reportedly was “worth considerable money in her own name.” [9] Her money gave her the independence to visit friends and family in Goldsboro. Although the Crumpler children were indulged while their mother lived, none ever seemed to have any money; when Ida left her parents’ home on her eighteenth birthday to marry against their will, she took nothing but what she could carry, and this did not include cash (Life 20-31).

Nellie, the youngest of the family and often sick, was indulged by her mother; in contrast, her stepmother, Sallie, "formed a great dislike for Sister Nell, and began treating her harshly almost from the very day she entered my father's residence. Sister was not even allowed the privilege of having her friends visit her. If they did … they were ordered out of the house immediately…. She always forbade them coming back again. … Sister Nell had always been accustomed to having her own way around home, and now the place seemed more like a prison to her…." (Life 50-1).

Nellie’s father deferred to his second wife with regard to family and household matters, essentially abandoning Nellie. Ida wrote years later that her father remarried so soon after the death of his first wife to provide a mother for Nellie; if so, the plan went wrong from the beginning (“Memorial”).

The money. To pay for their trip, Octavia and Nellie obtained $200. Newspaper accounts differed as to the source. One newspaper stated that Nellie took it from money entrusted to her to deposit in her stepmother’s name [10]; another, that it was her father’s money, also stolen by her (“Which Can It Be?”). [11] Others reported that the money belonged to Octavia (“The Armstrong Sisters”). Given her frequent travels, I suspect the money was Octavia’s. The contradictory stories establish a pattern: if Octavia took the money, it was hers to take; if Nellie took it, it was theft. In 1890, $200 was not a trivial sum. According to the History of Wages in the United States from Colonial Times to 1928, it represented the wages of 444 days of work by a tobacco stripper. [12] A few years later, on Christmas Day Ida was able to buy, for twenty cents, “half a dozen eggs, a pound of sugar, one loaf of bread and a package of tea” which, along with a coconut cake provided by a cousin, gave her and her boys their first food in three days (Life 109-111).

The Instigator. In October 1890, Nellie turned sixteen. She was more desperate and needy than Octavia. As Ida describes it, her home life was intolerable, and her behavior after her return supports Ida: Nellie continued to leave home without giving notice or sharing her location. Octavia was more confident and secure. Two years older, and with her own money, she had more room to maneuver, as is evident both before and after the escapade. In the summer before, she escaped the blended family by extended visits to Goldsboro. After the escapade, she resumed the visits. The city directory for l891-1892 shows that she had moved out of the family home in Salem; she was boarding on Main Street in Winston and working as a saleslady. Before the end of 1891, she was engaged and then married to a young man from Goldsboro. [13] If Nellie was more desperate to escape, Octavia was better positioned to plan and finance the trip and to manage the logistics. But the relative sophistication of the young women and the animus of her stepmother meant that Nellie would bear the heavier cost.

A partial page from the white section of the 1891-1892 Winston-Salem directory with an entry for “Miss Octavia Wellons.” The headings and contents reveal much about the racial, political, and commercial context. For example, in 1894 J.B. Whitaker, Jr., listed near the bottom, became the editor of the Western Sentinel, a leading newspaper in the town. The paper supported secession in 1860 and after the war was an outspoken advocate for the Democratic party; the party explicitly defined “the Democracy” as rule by white men. Earlier in his career, Whitaker worked for Julian Carr, infamous for his defense of violence to maintain white supremacy.

Ida blamed Octavia for the escapade: Nellie “was persuaded away by our step-mother's daughter, Octavia Wellons. … [Her] motives were for causing all this trouble will remain a secret … until the end of time” (Life 59). A local newspaper treated Octavia as the leader, Nellie as her “companion,” and stated that the $200 was Octavia’s. [14] In the pages of The Academy, the newspaper of the Salem Academy, I have discovered a possible motivation for Octavia. In the fall of 1889, almost half of the senior class made a two-week northern excursion. As to why students went or stayed behind – Octavia stayed – I do not know. Certainly the trip was costly; students and chaperones traveled by private railway car, were escorted by representatives of the railway lines, attended plays, shook hands with the President in the White House, enjoyed a lavish banquet in Baltimore, and shopped on Fifth Avenue in New York and at Wannamaker’s in Philadelphia. Possibly the trip cost more than James and Sallie could or would pay.

Program for Salem Female Academy graduation concert, June 1890.
“Commencement, ’90,” The Academy (June 1890), 516.

The following autumn, fourteen Salem Academy seniors made a similar excursion. Students and chaperones returned on November 15, 1890, and were formally welcomed home on the evening of the seventeenth – which was, by chance or design, the night on which Octavia and Nellie departed. Probably more important, Octavia turned eighteen on the following day, the birthday marking her legal independence from her parents, The family had a precedent: her stepsister, Ida, had been able to leave home and marry against her parents’ wishes on her eighteenth birthday. It is tempting to see the escapade as Octavia’s own tour in compensation for missing her senior trip and as a sign of her independence as a newly minted adult.

In the commencement exercises that spring, Octavia had delivered a speech called “Little Troubles.” The trials of living in an ill-blended family, and perhaps disappointment over missing the student tripes, were perhaps “little troubles” that her own excursion was meant to remedy. None of her reasons seem to me particularly strange for an adolescent used to having her own way. Leaving home without informing the parents indicates, perhaps, disdain for one or both parents, or an appetite for risk that we might, perhaps without reason, find unusual in a young woman of her time and station in life. Nellie was a first-term day scholar at Salem Academy; in addition to her desire to escape an unhappy home life, she may have been caught up in the excitement of the seniors’ northern excursion and Octavia’s plans.

One newspaper surmised that the young women left home to escape James Crumpler’s “dissipation,” a euphemism for drinking and other vices. [15] Ida’s memoir betrays dissatisfaction with her father. In a dream vision, he is described as a disappointment to his own, long-dead father. But, apart from his implied failure to defend Nellie from her stepmother, Ida does not state the nature of the disappointment (Life 4). Whatever Ida felt about her father’s failures, it would have been worse for Nellie; she had no good alternatives to living at home with a hostile stepmother and ineffectual (or worse) father.

Ida wrote that the trip was, for Nellie, a “flight,” “a quite hazardous one” (Life 59). But she does not explain further. Was Nellie escaping some particular evil? If so, was it also a threat to Octavia? Ida’s silence on the point is, unfortunately, characteristic of her book. But it also suggests that the source of evil may have been within her own family. In My Own Life, Ida does not hesitate to level serious accusations against those outside her birth family: besides accusing Sallie of mistreating Nellie, she accuses her father-in-law of poisoning his wife and her husband of numerous financial, marital, and legal wrongs, including fraud, malfeasance in office, and attempted murder. When it comes to her own blood kin, however, she is quite reticent. Whatever the case, she does not speculate as to why Octavia “caus[ed] all this trouble.”

Departure. The travelers departed on the night of Monday, November 17. Perhaps because the parents were used to the bustle before Octavia’s trips, Nellie and Octavia prepared for their escape without arousing suspicions. They rounded up the money and packed; obtained train schedules, planned the itinerary, and bought tickets; and arranged to get their baggage to the station. The last task may have been simple. A few years later, on the way to her father’s house to obtain some household goods, Ida employed a passing drayman; this suggests that, like present-day taxis, men with wagons drove the streets in search of business. Or perhaps the sisters took only what they could carry.

The respectable young woman of the time required a lot of clothing to be fully dressed. In the early 1930’s, nearing seventy, Ida proudly wore the clothing of her youth – “eighteen garments” in spring, including “flannels, corset, underskirt, ad infinitum” – and nine or ten more garments in winter. [16] Did Octavia and Nellie each pack twenty-eight garments for their late fall trip into the cold North? As it happens, we have firsthand information on how a contemporary young woman could travel long distances with a single bag.

Nellie Bly embarked on her famous round-the-world trip in November 1889, a year before Nellie’s and Octavia’s journey. Bly wrote that she was able to pack into her small valise – just “sixteen inches wide and seven inches high” [17] – the following: “two traveling caps, three veils, a pair of slippers, a complete outfit of toilet articles, ink-stand, pens, pencils, and copy-paper, pins, needles and thread, a dressing gown, a tennis blazer, a small flask and a drinking cup, several complete changes of underwear, a liberal supply of handkerchiefs and fresh ruchings and most bulky and uncompromising of all, a jar of cold cream….” [18]

Nelly Bly departing for her round-the-world trip. (Source: Roma Panganiban, "Nellie Bly's 72-Day Trip Around the World," Mental Floss (September 17, 2013)

Bly took only the dress she was wearing, one special-made for the trip. “Packing that bag,” she wrote, “was the most difficult undertaking of my life.” [19] Octavia and Nellie may have adopted the same approach; it was reported that they took with them only their valises (“Armstrong Sisters”). Perhaps, indeed, their trip was inspired by Bly’s. But other possible inspirations were closer to home: a few months before, a young lady had run away from Salem. She had ended safely at her brother’s home in Philadelphia (“Sensational Escapade”); Nellie and Octavia seemed to have aimed at something more audacious. Shortly before SFA’s 1890 commencement, a prominent, long-time faculty member, Emma Lehman, published an account of her European travel in 1889. Perhaps the excitement generated by Sketches of European Travel also contributed to the sisters’ desire to see the world. [20]

Bly departed in a blaze of publicity. Like the Salem runaway, however, the stepsisters did not leave a note. This failure was cruel in effect, if not in intention. It was certainly practical, since it gave them time to get out of town, and to catch the northbound train in Greensboro, before their flight was discovered.

Itinerary and Pursuit. Detective Thomas Pfohl explained the sisters’ itinerary to a reporter: “[They] bought tickets at Greensboro, [for] New York whither they went in a sleeper. [Pfohl] lost their track in Washington, but after inquiries at the hotels and ticket offices, traced them to Baltimore where he lost track of them again, but afterward, … found them registered at the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York City as the ‘Armstrong sisters.’ They went from there to Bridgeport, Conn., but finding no work turned back and went West through Ohio and Indiana. Then they turned South and were overtaken in Cincinnati without a cent of money in their pockets. They had inquired for work at every point but seem to have failed.” (“Runaway Girls Return”)

When their departure was discovered, Chief of Police Bradford pursued them (“Sensational Escapade”). When he returned home after losing track of them in New York, the family engaged Detective Pfohl and Ida’s husband, John Beard, to resume the search. They were always a step behind Nellie and Octavia. By the time Pfohl telegraphed the Cincinnati police from South Bend, on November 29, the sisters had already been in the Cincinnati-Covington area for three or four days. [21] After the sisters telegraphed home for money, the telegrapher informed the police; on December 1 local detectives found Octavia and Nellie “penniless, at the Latonia Hotel in Covington” and sent them home (“Runaway Girls Return”; “Armstrong Sisters”). Years later, Ida wrote that Nellie was imprisoned in the Cortenia Hotel for going hatless. She remembered the hotel’s name incorrectly, but I suspect she accurately reported a humiliation suffered by Nellie (Life 59).

Ida’s memoirs give some idea of what the anxious family went through – frantic telegrams, vigils at the Western Union, stressful days, sleepless nights (Life 59). In addition to the emotional toll, the search for the young women cost the family $300. [22]

What Was the Plan? The sisters confided in friends that they planned on getting work as teachers or as assistants in a millinery shop [23]; according to one paper, “some think they have eloped to get married” or have “a craze for travelling” (“Which Can It Be?”)

The rapidity of their journey suggests to me a flight or a lark, motivated by “a craze for travel,” not a serious effort to embark on a new life. But the sisters looked for work “at every point,” according to Pfohl; they were certainly in the Cincinnati-Covington area long enough to begin a job search. Would it have been considered strange in 1890 for young women to seek work away from home? What sort of work could they hope to find?

According to the 1890 census, the number of women working outside the home increased by almost half between 1880 and 1890. [24] An 1888 study showed that 75% of the white female labor force was single. Although most young working women lived at home and gave their pay to their families, by 1900, 24% of native-born single women of native parents, aged 15-24, worked outside the home, and “fully 38 percent of all single working women over 16 years old … lived away from their parents.” [25] We can quite unscientifically estimate that 9% of young white women lived outside their parents’ homes and worked to support themselves. In Winston-Salem, I imagine the employment of young white women was frequent enough to present itself as an option to those with a hardy spirit who were eager, or obliged by circumstances, to leave home; as I wrote above, in 1891 Octavia lived on her own and worked in sales.

Even the cult of Southern womanhood had evolved to recognize that the poverty of the South required refined young women to work outside the home – not to find personal fulfillment, however, but to fulfill their familial duty. [26] If Nellie and Octavia desired to support themselves, the way they went about it stretched the boundary of approved behavior; we would hardly call it strange, but, as we have seen, a Richmond newspaperman did.

What were the sisters’ skills? Octavia could play the piano well enough to perform in school functions, probably well enough to teach beginners. At Salem Academy, a daily hour of plain needlework was compulsory; the techniques may have included “fixing the material, hemming, seaming, stitching, herringboning, felling, gathering …, buttonholes, buttons, marking, darning, and whipping.” [27] Years later, after losing her first husband, Octavia opened a millinery shop and continued to run it after her remarriage. [28] Given her training and interest, as a young woman she probably felt qualified to work in a millinery shop. Finally, many women in the nineteenth century began teaching in their mid- to late teens, suggesting that, by the standards of the day, it was not unthinkable for Nellie and, especially, Octavia to work as a teacher.

Milliners and teachers were considered respectable. In Money-Making for Ladies, Ella Rodman Church wrote that teaching was “one of the few means of money-making in which a lady may openly engage without compromising her social standing.” [29] Church did not envisage women working fulltime in the classroom, but something more genteel, teaching the “fully-grown” who lacked “early advantages” for “an hour or two of the day” (pp. 78-9). However, a biographical reference work of nineteenth-century women reveals that, for much of the nineteenth century, teaching in a formal classroom setting was quite common for women, including those as young as Nellie. At least a third of the 1470 women profiled in A Woman of the Century served as educators at some point in their lives, at all levels, from kindergarten teachers to university presidents. [30] My grandmothers, born just before the turn of the 20th century, both taught school before they married.

Church specifically recommended teaching music (p. 83). Octavia had studied piano at Salem Academy. At the concert which capped Commencement Week – a concert that included student performances of vocal, choral, and instrumental pieces by Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner – she played a piano duet. [31] Some years later, it is likely she taught her daughter, Elsie, how to play, and Elsie went on to work as a church organist and music teacher. But Octavia was not traveling with a piano, and it would have taken time for a newcomer without local contacts to recruit students who had their own instruments.

Working as milliners was a more practical possibility. Church’s book suggests two alternatives – providing millinery services to friends and acquaintances or setting up a shop (p. 72). Like Church’s other strategies, these were not well-suited for young women without means recently arrived in a new city. But there were other ways to go about it. Nellie and Octavia spent nearly a week in the Cincinnati-Covington area. The classifieds in the November 30 edition of the Cincinnati Enquirer – when Octavia and Nellie were in the city – listed only one opportunity for teaching (“a lady” to give guitar lessons in exchange for board), but three millinery positions – a milliner trimmer, two apprentice milliners at a department store – and an errand girl in a millinery store.

Other positions advertised for women included book-folder, button-hole maker, cloak- and coat-maker, cash girls, chambermaid, cooks in restaurants and homes, housekeepers, tobacco stemmers and clothes pressers, a piano accompanist, a stenographer, a copyist to address envelopes and wrappers, sewing-machine operators, “tailoress,” etc. The ads sometimes required references, obviously a problem for newcomers. [32] In her 1897 book, Occupations for Women, Frances E. Willard warned, “The city is no place to come, expecting to find employment, unless one has friends who can use influence in her behalf, and befriend her when she comes, friendless and strange, into the midst of a new life” (Occupations 25). This reality may have come as a shock to optimistic young women trying to find a refuge from home in the anonymity of a big city.

The classified ads in the Enquirer sometimes requested white or colored, but more often requested a particular white ethnicity: “Cook – Good german [sic] girl, and help was[h] and iron.” The cities of the North with their large immigrant populations presented an intimidating job market for young women from the South. The competition was fierce. Almost half of native-born single women of foreign parents worked outside the home; almost 75% of foreign-born young women did so. Jacob Riis described the New York job market for women in 1890: “at least one hundred and fifty thousand women and girls earn their own living in New York,” he wrote, not counting those who worked to contribute to their family’s earnings and were willing to work for very low wages. Competition was fierce and wages low – average pay was around sixty cents per day, [33] a rate that would require 333 working days to earn the $200 that Octavia and Nellie spent on their trip.

If Octavia and Nellie did intend to find work in the North, their approach to the task was all wrong. They needed local contacts and they needed more time. Possibly they knew they were being pursued by folks from home, hence their reluctance to stay in one place long enough to find work.

Ethel and Lucille Armstrong, stage-struck. Cincinnati (OH) Enquirer (30 Nov 1890, 12)

Stage-struck. The telegram from Detective Pfohl to the Cincinnati police chief characterized the young women as “stag-struck” [sic], suggesting they had run away to join the theater. In April 1890, a diary entry by the then-famous actor, Helena Modjeska, indicates that stage-struck “girls” were a recognizable type. Modjeska was on tour with Edwin Booth. The theater in Cedar Rapids, where she was to play Portia in The Merchant of Venice, was near a tannery. Its stench so overpowered the “pastilles, Chinese sticks, paper, and … cotton” that the crew burnt in the theater, as well as the eau de cologne they sprinkled on the stage, that Modjeska “felt positively sick” as she performed the courtroom scene. She wished that “some of the stage-struck girls” who came from comfortable homes “could have been there” to dispel their illusions. But she acknowledged that, for some young women, the alternative was homelessness. Running away to join the theater might have been their best available choice. [34]

Helena Modjeska. (Credit: Wikipedia)

The manager of a light opera company, Henry Barnabee, wrote that the illusions of the stage-struck were encouraged by music teachers who fed them fantasies of fame to secure their paid lessons. When his company toured, singers often presented themselves to receive a professional assessment of their talent. He felt “it was almost cruel to shatter the hopes of a young man or woman whose music teacher … had led them to believe that they possessed more than ordinary talent,” but he “always told the applicants, as gently as I could … that they couldn't expect to make more than a [bare] living on the stage.” [35] But a bare living was better than none.

The Salem Academy seniors who toured the north in November 1889 proved themselves to be stage-struck: “Before leaving Salem … [the principal, Rev.] Mr. Clewell made us happy by remarking: ‘If the young ladies wish to be so wicked …, then they can go to the theatres.’ Well, it is only necessary to say that we were so wicked, and enjoyed these acts of sinfulness very much.” [36]

One of the plays was seen by just four of the students, but they reenacted it for their classmates; they “were considerably ‘stage-struck’ and gave the parts with much dramatic force, if not talent” (Rollins, 503). On their way to Mt. Vernon the seniors were flattered by being mistaken for a theater company. “‘What troupe is that?’ ‘Where did they play last?’ were some of the many remarks that fell upon our amused ears.” [37]

If the stepsisters did try out for the stage – as “The Armstrong Sisters,” perhaps – how strange or socially unacceptable would that have been? Though the theater was not entertained as an option by Church, it was becoming somewhat more acceptable for respectable women to perform in public. A Woman of the Century, published just three years after Nellie’s and Octavia’s trip, features actors and other performers, including Helena Modjeska, suggesting performers on the legitimate stage could maintain respectability. The fantasies of the Salem Academy seniors suggest that theater was becoming thinkable even to young ladies of the conservative South.

Although the stage offered an option to those who, like Nellie, had no comfortable home, the chances of success were small enough to scare off all but the hardiest, those with nothing to lose, and perhaps those with reckless self-confidence. Willard lauded the talents and characters of the top performers, but she warned: “the dramatic profession is one of the most exacting …, and the most ungrateful, if the artist does not meet with every demand. No girl should undertake it unless she has unquestioned ability, and a strength of character which will place her above all influence for wrong…. There is often a glamour about it which is deceptive, and the loss of the illusion is painful. It is, oftener than not, a profession to be avoided, for, in its best phases there is much that is unpleasant about it, even to the successful actress.” (Occupations 304)

*****

Touring theatrical companies often performed at Brown’s Opera House in Winston-Salem. While we know that Ida’s husband attended at least one show, we don’t know whether the women in the Wellons-Crumpler-Beard family ever attended. But it is possible. Though a staunch Baptist, Ida was not opposed to the theater; she dreamed her memoirs would be dramatized on the New York stage (Life 4, 44-5).

The theater offered women a limited set of conventional roles, fantasy versions of the help wanted ads – “leads, ingenues, soubrettes, matrons, the predatory ‘adventuress’ or ‘woman with a past, … and comic women,” though some actors managed to create their own “more distinctive types”; for example, Mattie Vickers, who appeared in Winston-Salem in February 1890, developed the “diamond in the rough ‘hoyden.’” [38] At the beginning of 1890, the Adele Frost company presented another type of woman to Winston-Salem’s audience. Frost played Parthenia, the heroine of Ingomar the Barbarian, who through her self-sacrifice and virtuous manipulations, tames Ingomar, a barbarian chieftain, and saves her father and her city. The theme of the play, broadly speaking, was a favorite of the predominantly female theater audience – a man saved by the love of a good woman. [39] The play remained popular for fifty years. The plot requires Parthenia to leave her city on her own, but on a mission to save her father, not to escape him. As she describes her skills to Ingomar, they are not unlike Octavia’s – she can spin cloth, “weave your garments, and prepare your meals”; she is “skilled in music, and can tell brave tales, / And sing sweet songs.” [40]

The roles on stage were stereotypical, but the reality offstage was sometimes more complicated. The theater offered some women not only stardom but also, at times, control of their careers. Mattie Vickers illustrates the pattern – on-stage a carefree hoyden; offstage, after her husband’s death, the head of her company. Among the women profiled in A Woman of the Century who owned or managed their own companies or theaters were D.P. Bowers, an actor who leased and managed a theater; Lotta Crabtree, who began her career as a child performer in the gold camps of California and died worth $4 million; Mrs. John Drew, who both acted and managed the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia; Effie Ellsler, who starred in the longest-running New York play of the era, Hazel Kirke; and Jennie Kimball, who managed the Kimball Opera Company and had an interest in several theaters; and many others. Helena Modjeska was a celebrated actor who toured in her own train (she claimed to be the first actor to do so).

At the bottom, the theater offered a place for those who had no other place to go; this may have attracted Nellie. Perhaps Nellie or Octavia auditioned. Perhaps they were satisfied with attending performances.

One scene in Ida’s memoirs set around 1896 suggests Ida had seen one or more plays; it also demonstrates the family’s flair for the theatrical. After the breakup of her marriage, Ida went with a drayman to her father’s house to obtain some household goods that belonged to her:

“Mrs. Crumpler forbade the drayman going upstairs after them, and declared that she would split each piece into splinters with her hatchet as they were brought down! It was a scene long to be remembered. There I stood in one doorway, Sister Nell in another with broomstick in her hand, and our stepmother standing at the entrance of her boudoir clasping a hatchet, while father occupied the center of the hall with a paint bucket in his hand….”

James is center stage, but not dominant; Sallie, Nellie, and Ida stand stage left to stage right. Each holds a prop. James speaks his only line – “Well, I am sure Ida has a right to a few pieces of her own mother's furniture” – but it’s Nellie who decisively counters her stepmother: “Then sister spoke up and said: ‘Yes, and she shall have them, too; so walk up, mister, walk up; don't be afraid of that old woman over there.’…

“Nell mounted the stairs and began throwing things … in the room above. Finally she called the drayman to come ahead and carry down what she intended me to have, and father accompanied the boy – leaving Mrs. Crumpler and I [sic] alone. We gazed at each other for a moment, then she began calling me by all manner of names … ; said I was a beggar, and had better leave the house at once if I knew what was good for me!”

Ida responded in kind.

“By this time the furniture was nearing the lower step; so my stepmother ran to the bureau, and, after snatching the key, exclaimed: ‘Well, I guess Ida Beard will leave off locking up her valuables with this!’
“She then returned to her post, and, amid broomstick, hatchet and paint bucket, the things at last reached the dray.” (Life 166-7)

“Runaway Girls Return,” Concord Times (12 Dec 1890, 2)

“The ‘Armstrong Sisters,’” Cincinnati Enquirer (2 Dec 1890, 8)

Consequences. On their return, Nellie and Octavia were met at the depot by family and friends (Life 6; “Runaway Girls Return”). The conflicting stories about the $200 hint at the family tensions; the last account to appear in the papers, that the money was Octavia’s, was probably true, but it may have been a story concocted to save face. An assertion published in a local paper, after the sisters’ return, that they had “relatives and friends” in Covington, was almost certainly a face-saving claim; the title of the article, “The Lost Are Found,” alludes to the Parable of the Prodigal Son and suggests that the time for forgiveness had come. [41] The desire to salvage the sisters’ and family’s reputations also explains a story which appeared in both Winston and Concord papers in the hope of dispelling scandal and gossip:

“A good deal has been published, and more has been said, in reference to these young ladies…, inasmuch as they left without the knowledge or consent of their parents, and the greater portion of that which was written and … spoken has tended to injure them. …
“Miss Wellons and her companion, Miss Crumpler, decided that they would take a little trip and see something of the world. Miss Wellons had the money to pay the expenses, and, as nothing stood in the way but parental authority, they simply evaded this by leaving without asking for it.
“A detective followed after these young ladies … he was unable to discover a solitary act upon their part which savored of imprudence except the first fatal step of leaving.” (“Returned Home”)

The paper argued that the escapade would have been considered amusing and even admirable if undertaken by young men.

The family had its own accounting. Ida wrote that Octavia “broke my father's heart. He never seemed to rally…, and I think his mind was badly impaired on account of it – … he at one time told me so, and said that he did not care how soon death relieved him of his sufferings” (Life 59). But James lived another six years; his obituary states simply that he died “after a lingering illness” (“Crumpler Dead”).

Octavia’s mother blamed Nellie. She “declared that Nell should never rest in peace while the blood was warm in her head. She also said that she would never be satisfied until she saw sister laid in her casket” (Life 60). Since Nellie’s name does not appear again in the pages of The Academy, we can infer that she withdrew or was expelled. Ida offered to give her sister a home, “but father would not consent to this, so she was again placed under her cruel step-mother’s control” (Life 59). Then even Nellie and Ida became estranged for a time.

Two weeks after the death of Ida’s and Nellie’s father in 1897, Nellie traveled from some unknown location to appear at Ida’s door, ghost-like:

“One stormy night … I heard a feeble voice, as that of Sister Nell, calling to me from without. I grasped the lamp, and … wondered whether it was she in flesh and blood, or only her spirit speaking to me from the other world. With trembling footsteps I approached the door, and asked whether it was she, and whether alone. For a moment I wondered what the world would say if I opened the door. Then I said, ‘What need I care for the opinion of the cruel world; it’s my own sister who seeks shelter from the storm, and I shall invite her within!’”

Apparently, Nellie had “left the protection” of her family, as the old novels put it, and was again morally and socially suspect. Ida’s question as to whether she was alone perhaps implies that Nellie was living with someone.

Nellie “refused to enter at first; said she had only come to ascertain … father's last words. She had not heard of his death until the previous day, … she visited the cemetery and beheld the newly made grave; then knew that all was over, and she an orphan, with but one remaining sister. So had come to me for comfort.
“I would have been more than heartless to have turned her from my door. …
“On the following day she left the city, and I have never laid eyes on her since.” (Life 184-5)

Later, when Nellie wrote to ask if she could send Ida and her children a gift, Ida declined “owing to circumstances,” circumstances that she leaves undefined. It is sad that Ida should have treated her sister so unkindly, maddening that she should provide her reader so little explanation. Nellie then disappears from our view until sometime around 1912.

Afterwards. After Nellie died in 1918, Ida wrote a memorial that fills in some of the gaps in Nellie’s later life. “Nellie was twice married. Mr. Andrews, her first husband, only lived a short while after they were married. She then came to live” with Ida for the last six years of her life. When Ida’s oldest son unexpectedly died in 1916, Nellie’s presence was deeply consoling. When Nellie agreed to remarry, it was on condition that she and her husband live near Ida, apparently in the same house. Ida nursed her during her last illness. “For the last six years,” wrote Ida, “I have tried to be both mother and sister to the one I loved so dearly” (“Memorial”). Nellie died in her forty-fourth year; Ida lived till 1951, dying in the county poorhouse at the age of eighty-nine.

Octavia had three children with her first husband. He died in 1898, followed shortly by the death of a daughter and their son. She opened her millinery shop, remarried, and had three more children. Her second husband died on the cusp of the Great Depression. I lose track of Octavia until 1939, when she was living in Richmond with Elsie Foxhall, the surviving daughter of her first marriage. [42] Widowed by an older, well-to-do tobacco dealer, Elsie had worked as church organist and music teacher. Apparently using funds bequeathed by her husband, she went to college and eventually became a microbiologist for the Commonwealth of Virginia, quite an advance from the opportunities her mother had as a young woman.

Octavia lived with Elsie until she died, at eighty-one years of age, in 1953. She lived long enough to see the adventures of Lucy and Ethel on I Love Lucy. [43] If she watched their star-struck antics, did she remember that she and Nellie had once assumed the given names Lucille and Ethel as they flitted about the North as the Armstrong sisters? Did she find that amusing or sad?

From the Hugh Mangum Collection. My title: “Seeing History Through a Glass, Darkly.” My essay depends on probabilities and assumes that events close in time may be related as cause and effect or as evidence of social contagion (a particular kind of cause and effect). My guesses may be wrong sometimes, often, or all the time.

NOTES
Note 1 Ida Beard, My Own Life, Or, a Deserted Wife. Electronic Edition, 1st edition, 1997. Documenting the American South, 59. Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically. The text, with extensive annotations, is also available in my edition.

Note 2 “Which Can It Be? Are They Gone to Get Married or Just Off on a Lark?” Richmond Dispatch (20 Nov 1890, 6). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically. All newspapers were accessed via newspapers.com.

Note 3 Goldsboro Messenger (26 Jan 1885, 5); (26 Feb 1885, 5).

Note 4 Ida Beard, “A Brief Memorial of My Beloved Sister. Mrs. Nellie Crumpler Hodges.” Twin-City Sentinel (16 Jan 1918, 5). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 5 Frank V. Tursi, Winston-Salem: A History (John F. Blair, 1994), 109-110, 115-116.

Note 6 “Mr. J.M. Crumpler Dead. Winston’s Pioneer Painter – Funeral Monday Afternoon. Western Sentinel (25 Feb 1897, 3). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 7 Goldsboro Daily Argus (8 Aug 1890, 1)

Note 8 Goldsboro Headlight (1 Oct 1890, 5)

Note 9 “‘The Armstrong Sisters.’ The Arrest of Two Girls Who Were Fond of Traveling.” Cincinnati Enquirer (2 Dec 1890, 8). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 10 “A Sensational Escapade.” Western Sentinel (27 Nov 1890, 3). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 11 “The Lost Are Found.” Western Sentinel (4 Dec 1890, 3). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 12 US Government Printing Office, Washington, 1934; republished by Gale Research Company, 1966.

Note 13 Goldsboro Headlight (21 Oct 1891, 5).

Note 14 “Returned Home. Miss Octavia Wellons and Miss Nellie Crumpler.” Twin-City Daily, qtd. by The (Concord, NC) Standard (11 December 1890, 3). Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

Note 15 “Runaway Girls Return,” Concord Times (12 Dec 1890, 2). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 16 “Wears Hat 22 Years,” Greenville (SC) News (30 Apr 1931, 3); “Wears 17 Garments in Name of Modesty: Then, When Winter Comes, Mrs. Ida M. Beard Adds 10 More Garments,” Lenoir News-Topic; rpt. in Statesville Record and Landmark (26 Jun 1930, 3).

Note 17 Roma Panganiban, “Nellie Bly's 72-Day Trip Around the World.” Mental Floss (Sept 17, 2013).

Note 18 Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane), Around the World in Seventy-Two Days (The Pictorial Weeklies Company, 1890). Chapter I. A Proposal to Girdle the Earth.

Note 19 A journalistic exaggeration; Bly was then and now best known for her escape from an insane asylum into which she had had herself committed for the sake of a story.

Note 20 “Sketches of European Travel by Miss. E. Lehman.” The Union Republican (15 May 1890, 3).

Note 21 “Runaway Girls.” Cincinnati Enquirer (30 Nov 1890, 12). Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically. Pfohl is said to have been the first private detective in Winston-Salem.

Note 22 Goldsboro Headlight (10 Dec 1890, 4)

Note 23 Greensboro North State (4 Dec 1890, 6)

Note 24 Frances E. Willard, Occupations for Women: A Book of Practical Suggestions for the Material Advancement, the Mental and Physical Development, and the Moral and Spiritual Uplift of Women (The Success Company, 1897), 171. Downloaded from Internet Archive. Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 25 Claudia Goldin, “The Work and Wages of Single Women, 1870-1920,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol 40, No. 1, “The Tasks of Economic History” (March 1980). Goldin also uses a 1907 study.

Note 26 See, for example, “A True Woman.” Smithfield Herald (12 Mar 1887, 1).

Note 27 Michael Bricker, Winston-Salem: A Twin City History (History Press, 2008), 117; "Plain Needlework.” Two Threads Back: Home of the Plain Sewing Preservation Society.

Note 28 New Berne Weekly Journal (4 Apr 1902, 1).

Note 29 Ella Rodman Church, Money-Making for Ladies (Harper & Brothers, 1882), 77-8. Downloaded from Internet Archive. Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 30 Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore, eds. A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in Walks of Life (Charles Wells Moulton, 1893). Available in Wikisource.

Note 31 “Commencement, ’90,” The Academy (June 1890, 519). Issues of The Academy were downloaded from DigitalNC: North Carolina Yearbooks. It is perhaps noteworthy that her performance was not one singled out for praise in the long article in The Union Republican: “The Southern Vassar. Commencement Week at Salem Academy” (5 Jun 1890, 3).

Note 32 “Help Wanted – Female.” Cincinnati Enquirer (30 Nov 1890, 3).

Note 33 How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, Chapter XX: The Working Girls of New York.

Note 34 Helena Modjeska, Memories and Impressions: An Autobiography (The Macmillan Company, 1910), 499-500. Downloaded from Internet Archive.

Note 35 Henry Clay Barnabee, Reminiscences of Henry Clay Barbee, ed. George Leon Varney. (Boston: Chapple Publishing Co, 1913), 406. Downloaded from Internet Archive.

Note 36 Emma Rollins, “Our Theaters.” The Academy (May 1890), 502-3. Subsequent references to this source will be cited parenthetically.

Note 37 Lydie T. Irby, “Our Trip to Mt. Vernon.” The Academy (Dec 1889), 442.

Note 38 David Mayer, “Deep Theatrical Roots: Griffith and the Theater,” in Charles Keil, ed. A Companion to D. W. Griffith (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 177.

Note 39 Clayton Hamilton, “The Psychology of Theatre Audiences.” Theory of the Theatre: And Other Principles of Dramatic Criticism. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), pp. 30-58.

Note 40 Maria Lovell, [I]ngomar the Barbarian (Walter H. Baker, 1896), 25. Downloaded from Google Books

Note 41 Luke 15:11-32.

Note 42 U.S. City Directories (Beta). Author. Ancestry.com. Publisher: Online publication - Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2011.Original data: U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995 (Richmond, VA, 1939, City Directory)

Note 43 “I Love Lucy,” Wikipedia

Posted 21 April 2026. Researched and drafted during the COVID shutdown.

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