Source: Century Library 

[Voici encore de l’heure qui s’argente]

​Here again, from an hour that turns silver,
mingled with sweet evening, the pure metal
that adds to its slow beauty
a slow calm that seems musical.

The old land recovers and changes:
a pure star survives our labor.
Scattered sounds, leaving day, gather
and together return to the voice of the waters.

The first stanza has a convoluted syntax I have not been able to reproduce in English. From my timid forays into a few of Horace’s Odes ("reading" the Latin text through the lens of competent translations), I want to say the syntax is Latinesque, but of course it more likely reflects Rilke’s native German.

I find Rilke’s evocation of evening deeply attractive, hence my attempt to reproduce it in translation. The literalization (dreadful word!) of silver light as a metal is, to me, an amusing move. 

Original:
Voici encore de l’heure qui s’argente,
mêlé au doux soir, le pur métal,
et qui ajoute à la beauté lente
les lents retours d’un calme musical.

L’ancienne terre se reprend et change :
un astre pur survit à nos travaux.
Les bruits épars, quittant le jour, se rangent
et rentrent tous dans la voix des eaux.
 
​The poem is number 24 in Les Quatrain Valaisans (The Valaisian Quatrains)  published in 1926, a century ago.

Posted 2 May 2026 

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.

​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. 

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]

​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.

​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)

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?
 

 
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. 

​One of my early discoveries in French poetry was a well-known sonnet by Joachim du Bellay. “Heureux qui comme Ulysse” was written in the mid-16th century during the poet's extended visit to Rome and published in 1558 in his collection Regrets. Du Bellay was a founder of the Pléiade movement; its best-known member is Ronsard.  

Happy Was Ulysses
By Joachim du Bellay

Happy the Ulysses who finished his voyage,
happy the man who seized the fleece, and
came back home, wiser and experienced,
to live among his people into old age.

When will I, alas, in my little village
again see the smoking chimney, in which season
see again the espaliered trees of my garden,
to me a province and peaceful anchorage?

I prefer the dwelling my ancestors raised
to Roman palaces’ audacious fronts;
I like the marble less than the thin slate,

my Liré more than Tiber’s Latin flow,
the hills of home over the Palatine mount,
sea air less than the sweetness of Anjou.  

The last two lines of the second stanza are more gloss than translation. The poem is available online with a very loose 19th-century translation into French and an audio file with a recitation in French.

Heureux qui comme Ulysse
By Joachim du Bellay
 
Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy-là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d’usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son âge !
 
Quand reverrai-je, hélas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Reverrai-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m’est une province, et beaucoup davantage ?
 
Plus me plaît le séjour qu’ont bâti mes aïeux,
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux,
Plus que le marbre dur me plaît l’ardoise fine :
 
Plus mon Loire gaulois, que le Tibre latin,
Plus mon petit Liré, que le mont Palatin,
Et plus que l’air marin la doulceur angevine.


Posted 27 March 2026, edited 28 March 2026

The Kinkajou, or the Honey Bear
Loosely based on the poem by Jacques Roubaud (how loosely, I don’t recall)

Von Humboldt, smarter than me or you,
had for pal a kinkajou
so adorable and sleek
he kissed it on the cheek.

The honey bear would run
his long extrudable tongue
through the linguist’s beard
(to linguists no tongue is weird).

You’d have to pay a pretty sou
to find anything stranger
than the love of the explorer
for his little kinkajou.

Nor could anyone top
those two marvels of creation,
his female cocks of the rock,
pride of von Humboldt’s collection.

But one day the kinkajou
received a message in a
wire from Louisiana
concise as peanut or cashew

sent by his aging maman:
‘Come home, my dearest, due
to passing of ton papa,
king of the kinkajou.’

Von Humboldt got mad as the dickens
when, with surprising ease,
his darling murdered the chickens
and stuffed them in a valise.

The moral of this plot
is that the kinkajou’s not
a bear at all. No bear would ever
take the simple measure
of packing its provisions.
That isn’t in its nature. 

I’ve posted at least once before on Jacques Roubaud’s marvelous poems for children, Les animaux de personne. The poems use nonsense, onomatopoeia, fractured fairy tales, and a lot of silliness and play to delight and entertain. I don’t know whether the famous naturalist Alexander von Humboldt had a pet kinkajou, but it’s not out of the question: he explored widely and kinkajous have been adopted as pets.

I imagine the young Roubaud in his grandparents’ library exploring 19th-century folio encyclopedias of world animals. As he poured over the detailed engravings of beasts, I imagine he was enthralled by their strange names as much as by their unfamiliar shapes.

I wrote this adaptation of Roubaud’s poem several years ago and recently revised it.

​Gustave Doré (1832 - 1883), The Fables of La Fontaine: Death and the Woodcutter. Between 1866 and 1868, Doré created 300 illustrations of Fables published in sixty parts.

​Death and the Woodcutter
by Jean de la Fontaine

A poor woodcutter, covered with twigs and leaves,
Under the weight of his bundle of wood and years
Trembling and bent, was walking with heavy feet
Trying to make it to his smoky hut.
Exhausted, in too much pain to go on,
Thinking of misery, he lays his burden down.
Since he’s been in the world, what pleasure has he seen?
Is there anyone worse off in the round machine?
Sometimes no bread at all, never a rest,
His wife, his children, the soldiers, taxes,
His creditors and impressed labor--
Of every misfortune, he’s the very picture!
He calls Death. It does not tarry.
It asks him what must be done.
He says, if you could only help me
Reload this wood—it’ll take you just a second.

Death heals all—that’s no surprise.
But let’s not budge from where we stand:
Better to suffer than die,
That’s the wisdom of man.
 
I’ve thought about translating this poem for a long time, but I wrote this first draft on Saturday, 7 Feb 2026. Excluding the last four lines, it’s sort of story my father or my first father-in-law might have told. The switch from past to present tense in the first stanza is in the original.
 
La Mort et le Bûcheron
Jean de La Fontaine
 
Un pauvre Bûcheron, tout couvert de ramée,
Sous le faix du fagot aussi bien que des ans
Gémissant et courbé, marchait à pas pesants,
Et tâchait de gagner sa chaumine enfumée.
Enfin, n’en pouvant plus d’effort et de douleur,
Il met bas son fagot, il songe à son malheur,
Quel plaisir a-t-il eu depuis qu’il est au monde ?
En est-il un plus pauvre en la machine ronde ?
Point de pain quelquefois, et jamais de repos.
Sa femme, ses enfants, les soldats, les impôts,
Le créancier et la corvée
Lui font d’un malheureux la peinture achevée.
Il appelle la Mort. Elle vient sans tarder,
Lui demander ce qu’il faut faire.
« C’est, dit-il, afin de m’aider
À recharger ce bois ; tu ne tarderas guère. »
 
Le trépas vient tout guérir ;
Mais ne bougeons d’où nous sommes :
Plutôt souffrir que mourir,
C’est la devise des hommes.
 
According to the Graphic Arts Collection at Princeton Library, La Fontaine’s Fables has been popular since its first publication in the last third of the 17th century (1668 – 1694): “Princeton University Library lists 696 versions of the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695) dating from 1668 to 2018 in twenty identified languages, including both paper and online, audio, manuscript, visual, projected, and a senior thesis.” 

George Chinnery (1774 - 1852), A Man Carrying Faggots, Google Art Project. 

Anonymous, in public domain 

The writer of Hebrews 13:2 advises, “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” In this delightful poem (the eighth in the sequence « Tendres Impôts à la France » - “Tender Taxes to France”), Rilke advises us on how to act when we knowingly serve a meal to an angel. It turns out the angel is an ouvrier—a member of the working class, albeit the celestial working class—and he will model his behavior at the table by imitating the host. And what work have we commissioned? The last line reveals it.
 
8 [Reste tranquille si soudain]
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Stay calm if at your table
the Angel has suddenly decided;
quietly smooth the few wrinkles
in the tablecloth under your bread.

You will offer your food, though coarse, 
so that he in turn may taste,
that to his pure lips he may raise
a simple, everyday glass.

Artlessly, like a celestial worker,
to everything he brings a calm focus;
he eats well, mimicking your gesture,
that he may build well your house.


Original:

Reste tranquille si soudain
l’Ange à ta table se décide ;
efface doucement les quelques rides
que fait la nappe sous ton pain.

Tu offriras ta rude nourriture
pour qu’il en goute à son tour,
et qu’il soulève à sa lèvre pure
un simple verre de tous les jours.

Ingénument, en ouvrier céleste,
il prête à tout une calme attention ;
Il mange bien en imitant ton geste,
pour bien bâtir à ta maison.

​Roads in the so-called Lost Provinces in 1936. You will note that state highways 113 and 93, mentioned in the post, do not yet exist. 113 probably replaced the unimproved road (light blue dots) that led from Laurel Springs and crossed US 221 near Scottville. When the roads were regraded and paved, the road from that point to the Virginia line was designated highway 93.
Highway 16, from the crest of the Blue Ridge to Wilkesboro, is shown as a gravel road. County maps from this year show it as paved. The inconsistency suggests that this stretch of road was paved in that year.
Source: NC State Highway Map, 1936. Website: Digitized Historical Maps: Georeferenced Historical NC Maps. The repository of this map is the North Carolina State Archives.

​My parents were born in Ashe and Alleghany counties, two adjoining counties in the northwest corner of North Carolina. By the time I was aware of my grandparents—my father’s parents and my mother’s mother (her father had been killed in 1938)—they lived near each other on Federal highway 221 and ran country stores. “Federal highway” sounds grand, but it was a winding, narrow road, noticeably crown shaped, with narrow shoulders. In my small world, it was the road that connected three significant places: Sparta, the county seat of Alleghany County; Scottville, the unincorporated community straddling Alleghany and Ashe where my grandparents lived on the Alleghany side; and Jefferson, county seat of Ashe County, where my family would live for roughly 18 months when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Between Sparta and Scottville was the turnoff to a road (unpaved when I was a child) that led to my paternal grandfather’s cattle farm, tobacco allotment, and strawberry patches, and beyond to Peach Bottom Mountain. 

​My paternal grandfather Elbert (far right; 1901 – 1972, K63B-274 [1]), his sons, and one grandson at the old Duncan Place on highway 113 just northwest of its intersection with 221. This picture was taken around the time of the Korean War. My father is in the middle wearing a dark shirt and light trousers.

My maternal grandmother was Anyce (1897 –1990, K46N-3JD); in her later years everyone called her Mama Shepherd. Her store was separated from 221 by two gas pumps (she sold Shell gas) and a space alongside the highway just wide enough for a car safely to park to buy gas. Once, in a management training program, I was mentored by a retired executive from the petroleum industry. He said his claim to fame was the invention of the self-service gas station. I replied that my grandmother had invented it long before him.

“If you want gas, pump it yourself” she told new customers who stopped to gas up; her regulars didn’t have to be told. She sat in a recliner in a small living room just off the equally small storeroom. Aside from the recliner, there were a small couch, tables with begonias and violets and a table clock, and on the wall the pictures of her patron saints—FDR, her late husband Charlie (murdered in 1938), and superimposed profiles of the slain Kennedy brothers that had been pulled from an issue of Look Magazine and framed. When regular customers who had filled up came in to pay, she often told them to put the money on the counter. (This was a long time before you could pay at the pump.) She allowed the most trusted customers to make change from her cash box.

The store my father’s parents ran was bigger than Anyce’s and sold a wider variety of goods. In addition to the canned goods, sodas, and snack foods my grandmother stocked, they sold engine belts, salt blocks for cattle, sacks of feed, denim outerwear. The stock was delivered by truck, of course, over the two-lane highways. Mom turned 5 shortly after her father was killed; she befriended many of the delivery men. She once gave the Dr Pepper man a puppy, and in return he gave her a free soda every week.

Near Anyce’s store NC highway 113 crosses 221 and runs north till it merges with NC 93 and continues across the New River in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. Till I was 11, we lived in Marion, Virginia, but came to visit the grandparents virtually every weekend. I became intimately familiar with 113 and with Virginia highway 16 which connected Mouth of Wilson to Marion. Later, when we moved to Jefferson, NC, I learned that Virginia 16 became NC 16 at the state line and provided a direct route from Jefferson to Marion. When we moved to Wilkes County, to visit the grandparents we drove north on NC highway 18 to climb the Blue Ridge; in Laurel Springs, about twelve miles short of Sparta, we turned northwest on our friend NC 113 till we reached its intersection with US 221. This stretch of Highway 18 was, and is, a winding road, with a 270 degree hairpin turn. Daddy said the highway builders chose its course by following a cow on her way up the mountain.

I risk this long account of highways because, having traveled them hundreds of times in my life, they are deeply familiar and hold a place of deep affection. They were there when I came along and I found it natural to imagine they have always been there. But such is not the case. The corner of the state where my parents were born did not get reliable, all-weather roads connecting them to the foothills and piedmont of North Carolina until after 1921, when the State Highway Act became law, in part as a result of lobbying by the Good Roads movement. (Hugh Talmage Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome, North Carolina: The History of a Southern State. Revised Edition, UNC, 1963, 554; see also “Good Roads Movement.”) This was just five years before my father was born.

Until then, the roads connecting the rest of the state to the northwest corner were sketchy at best. In 1915, in his A History of Watauga County, John Preston Arthur, wrote: “The mountain can be easily passed at each of these gaps [in the Blue Ridge escarpment], and, if the roads were good, the inconvenience of crossing the mountain would be disregarded. The roads have been badly laid out; they are badly made, and the population in many parts is too weak to keep the roads in even tolerable repair.”

This essay is about the isolation of the area and how the term “Lost Provinces” came to be applied to it. The obstacles to building good roads connecting the Lost Provinces to the rest of the state were geographic, political, and economic.

Geographic. In 1924, a report issued by the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission stated: “North Carolina is in a tragic condition of being itself dismembered and of having most of the communications of its people north and south instead of east and west, and it has been made as difficult as possible for the people of the east and the people of the west to trade with each other. And thus it is that we have ‘lost provinces’ in the west and ‘lost provinces’ in the east.” (Report of the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission, 1924, 11. ECU Digital Collections)

The roads in the Lost Provinces in 1924. The roads leading down the mountain from Boone and Jefferson to Wilkesboro and from Sparta to Elkin were more trail than road. (Map: Report of the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission.) In this period, as discussed below, young Edwin Duncan would hike from Doughton to Sparta when he returned home from university in Chapel Hill because, for practical purposes, the road didn’t exist. 

​The barrier to movement to the northwest corner was the Blue Ridge escarpment. In the late 18th century, settlers and travelers—many were passing through the North Carolina mountains on the way to settle in Kentucky—discovered that the Blue Ridge could be ascended via narrow passes called gaps. (These gaps include Cook’s Gap, Phillips’ Gap, Deep Gap, Flat Gap, Daniel’s Gap, Reddies River Gap, and Mulberry Gap.) The problem was climbing up to the gaps from the lowland, especially when pulling wagons.

Once the Blue Ridge had been climbed, travelers “found to their surprise that the Blue Ridge was a ridge on the eastern side but not ridge at all on the west. They found themselves standing on the edge of a vast plateau, stretching west, southwest and northwest as far as their eyes could see. Rolling woodlands of fairly uniform height lay before them and from the woodlands rose here and there lofty mountains, four thousand to five thousand feet above sea level” (Arthur Lloyd Fletcher, Ashe County: A History, New Edition, McFarland, 1963, 2006, 61-62).

Before the roads down the mountain were graded and paved, those who lived in the mountains and had goods to buy or sell found it easier to go to the railheads in Johnson City, Tennessee; Marion, Virginia (later Troutdale, around 20 miles closer than Marion); and Galax, Virginia. In 1914, the railroad came to West Jefferson, Ashe County, but it came in from the north (“The Virginia Creeper in West Jefferson”) so still did not provide direct transportation to the rest of the state.  

As of 1890, a spur line from Winston-Salem terminated in North Wilkesboro, but according to the lore of a friend’s family, it took an oxcart a day and a half to drive the forty miles from Jefferson to Wilkesboro, and another day and a half to make the return trip (“North Carolina Railroads - North-Western North Carolina Railroad”). My father told my brother that it took three days to make the round trip to North Wilkesboro from Ashe County with a horse and wagon—one day to get there and two days to go back. Climbing the mountain was hard on the horses. (See the comment section for more.) Traveling to railheads in West Jefferson, Tennessee, and Virginia was easier and less expensive than traveling down the mountain to North Wilkesboro, but only the depot there offered direct passenger and freight service to the piedmont and eastern NC.

Political and Economic. Until the passage of the 1921 law, road building and maintenance were generally left to the counties. They were some exceptions: a turnpike was laboriously built from the Tennessee line in Ashe County to Wilkesboro using private, county, and state funds as well as tolls paid by travelers; it was “a sand-clay road, with improved grades” (Fletcher, 100). It was destroyed in the 1916 flood and then abandoned. The mountain counties were settled too sparsely to provide the manpower needed to build and maintain roads, especially in the demanding terrain of the Blue Ridge front.

(The 1916 flood also destroyed a branch railroad, the Watauga and Yadkin Valley line, that ran 24 miles from North Wilkesboro to Darby. It was built to haul timber out of the foothills. There were plans, likely unrealistic, to continue the line to Boone, about 1,600 feet higher in elevation than Darby and 2,100 feet higher than North Wilkesboro (“No ‘Alleged’ Railroad,” The North Wilkesboro Hustler, 29 July 1913). While he was in his teens, my first father-in-law, Talmadge, took the train to Darby then walked the remaining 20 miles to Boone, so he could attend summer classes at Appalachian Training School (now Appalachian State University) and qualify to teach in the public schools. The W&Y Railroad is still shown on the 1924 map above, but by then it existed only in the form of wrecked locomotives and ruined trestles. By then the dream of building railroads into the mountains had been replaced by ambitions of building all-weather roads.)

Several changes led to the Highway Act of 1921—the formation of the State Highway Commission by the legislature in 1915, the Federal Highway Act of 1916 providing funds to the states “on a matching basis to improve major interstate federal roads,” and state laws enacted in 1917 allowing the State Highway Commission to accept federal funds and to impose automobile license fees (Lefler and Newsome, 554).

Life in a Lost Province

Over the years, I’ve gathered a few stories, from my family and others—illustrating how the folks in the mountain were affected by the isolation and their transportation choices.

Dave and Lou Tisha Grubb. Dave (1870–1957, KN98-77L) and Lou Tisha (1880–1960, KN98-WHH) were my father’s maternal grandparents. Beginning around 1926, they lived near Nathan’s Creek, Ashe County, on a farm still in the family. In 1926, Dave bought the farm from Lou Tisha’s father, John Shepherd (1849 – 1926, LZ8H-XQ2), who died that year. I don’t know how long the farm had been in the family. I understand that the house was built in the 1850s by Barnett V. Idol and, so far as I know, it was already owned by the Shepherd family. (Conversation with Nancy Bare, 11/22/2020)

Great Aunt Maude (1910–1993, L8Q8-65D), my grandmother’s sister, once briefly described life on the farm in the 30s and 40s. Her mother raised wonderful peaches, she told me, clingstone varieties in June and July for pies and sweet pickles, Albertas in August and September for canning. The family milked 10 to 12 cows, and with the milk they fed the hogs, gave skim milk to the neighbors, and made butter, cottage cheese, and some solid cheese. (Conversation with Maude Lowman, 4/1/1979)

As to travel, she mentioned only that her father Dave took wheat, rye, and buckwheat by wagon to be ground by the mill in Mouth of Wilson, Virginia. The trip, about 15 miles mostly by highway 16, now takes fewer than 20 minutes by car, more than five hours on foot. To reach the mill on Wilson Creek, he had to cross the New River by ferry. When I was quite young, the river was still crossed by ferry. I don’t remember the ferry, but I do recall the narrow truss bridge that succeeded it and was not replaced with a modern suspension bridge till well into my adult years.

One of the more dramatic family stories was first told to me by my dad, but my cousin Becky, daughter of John R. Grubb, shared with me a more complete and probably more accurate version in a conversation in June 2018.

In 1920, John R. Grubb (1902–1993, KN98-WKX) rode a horse into church during service. He was 17 and his purpose was to see a young lady at the service. He had called out to her from outside, but she wouldn’t come out to see him—she was sitting by another young man. John rode in to see her. In addition to being filled with the foolishness of youth, he may well have been full of drink, or so my father heard. He got into a fight in the church, and in the melee, someone cut off his necktie just under the knot. He never wore a necktie again.

As my father told it, disturbing the peace inside a church was a serious offence. To avoid his arrest, he said, that night Dave Grubb took his son by horseback to Troutdale, Virginia, where he put him on a train for California. The depot in West Jefferson was only about half as far as Troutdale, but perhaps Dave wanted to get out of the state as soon as possible while avoiding local officers of the law.

Becky’s version is a little less dramatic and more detailed: a day or two after the event (but not the same night), Dave rode with John to the railhead in Troutdale and sent him to West Virginia to stay with family and work in the mines. The mines wouldn't hire him—he was too young—so he moved on to Macallister, Oklahoma, where he also had family. He worked for a couple of years and saved money to take the train to California.[2]

Family already in California helped him find work, and until the Depression John did well working for two men, Mr. Lewis and another man, and I believe he had his own small spread. When the Depression hit, John was married with three children, one of whom suffered from epilepsy. Eventually, his employers could no longer pay their help—poor Mr. Lewis killed himself—and for a while John and his family got by on a barn full of sweet potatoes.

​In the depths of the Depression, around 1938 (I think), John Grubb and his family returned to North Carolina permanently. It took 12 days just to cross Texas, Becky said, with her mother driving (John R. didn't have a license). One reason it took so long was the seizures frequently suffered by one of the daughters: they would stop and camp until she improved. North Carolina had few women drivers, so folks along the road would scatter when they saw Becky’s mother at the wheel.

My father said he was at the Grubb place when John and his family showed up unannounced. It was hard on him; he had become like a son to his grandfather, and now he was displaced by the real son.


Edwin Duncan, Sr. Edwin Duncan, Sr. (1905-1973, K89G-VD4) was born in Sparta, county seat of Alleghany County, in 1905. His father, Crockett (1873–1953, KF58-N16), was a farmer, businessman, and banker, having established the Bank of Sparta in 1902. In 1937, father and son established the Northwestern Bank through merger with another small bank. By the time Edwin Duncan died in 1973, it was the fourth largest bank in the state and had branches as far east as Durham. By then he was one of the leading figures in the western part of the state.

As a young man fresh out of the university, Edwin almost decided to pursue a business career in the more accessible piedmont. In a newspaper profile in 1965, Duncan said, “‘there was no road down the mountain [from Sparta]. The nearest depot was at Galax. We took our trade, such as it was, to that Virginia town.’” According to the profile, when he traveled to the University of North Carolina, “going and coming often involved long hikes up and down the mountain from Doughton to Sparta.” As a result, “he had made up his mind to go to work in the city” in the lowlands.

“‘I was in Winston-Salem looking for work,’ he says, ‘when my daddy soft-talked me into coming home. He told me the state was going to build a paved road up the mountain. He said business at home would improve.’.... This was 1925.” Young Edwin became a cashier in his father’s bank. It was a good decision for him. (Chester Davis, “Banker Ed Duncan Symbol of Northwest N.C. Growth," Winston Salem Journal, 4 April 1965)

The year of Duncan’s decision, 1925, was the year before my father was born. As my memoirs of my father will show, Duncan’s decision to become a mountain banker and the way he conducted business figured significantly in my father’s professional career and in the circumstances leading to his death. 

Edwin Duncan, Sr., in 1965. He was president of the Northwestern Bank from 1958 until his retirement in 1971. (James Smith, “Retired Bank President, Former Senator Dies,” Winston-Salem Journal, 8 Oct 1973)

​Banmon Grayson, known professionally as G.B. Grayson. Mostly blind from an early age, Grayson was an influential fiddle player, singer, and song writer. As a young child, G.B. Grayson “left Ashe County for Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, a very short move in miles, but one that gave him easier access to the Lee Highway, an important road that connected towns all along the Blue Ridge.” (“Music from the Lost Provinces: Old-Time String Bands from Ashe County, North Carolina, 1927 – 31”)

A verse from Grayson's I've Always Been a Rambler captures the travel habits of folks in the Lost Provinces. They did not look to the prosperous, growing towns of the piedmont:

I left old North Caroliner, to Marion I did go,
Then on to Johnson City, gonna see this wide world o'er.
Where money and work was plentiful and the girls treated me kind,
The only object of my heart was the one I left behind.

(Lyle Lofgren, “Remembering the Old Songs: I'VE ALWAYS BEEN A RAMBLER,” Inside Bluegrass, May 2005. This stanza is included in the performance on YouTube.)

G.B. Grayson
​

Thomas C. “Tam” Bowie. Although difficult, traveling east into piedmont North Carolina was necessary for some. Tam Bowie was a state legislator from Ashe County. He was one of many influential people from the northwest corner of the state who boosted the Good Roads movement in North Carolina in the 1920s; his biography in NCPedia credits him as being a leading promoter of the State Highway Act that “initiate[d] a $50 million road building program in North Carolina” (Thomas S. Morgan, “Bowie, Thomas Contee,” 1979).

When the State Highway Act was being considered, officials and businessmen around the state began organizing campaigns to obtain funds to build and improve roads in their localities. Bowie helped organize and lead the campaign for the Lost Provinces in the seventh highway district. In a campaign meeting held in Wilkesboro in May 1921, he described “the great trouble with Ashe county”: “[H]er outlets are in Virginia and Tennessee and not North Carolina.… [T]he people of the county want to come to Wilkesboro; to reach North Carolina cities and towns now we must travel several hundred miles by rail.” He gave himself as an example: traveling to the meeting from his home in Ashe County, a distance of around forty miles, took two days by train. (“Largely Attended Road Meeting Held at Wilkesboro Yesterday,” Greensboro News and Record, 21 May 1921)

Origin of “The Lost Provinces”

For some time, I have known the counties beyond the Blue Ridge in the northwest corner of the state were the Lost Provinces. So far as I can remember, I assumed the term had been hallowed by time, like the State of Franklin or the Lost Colony. I haven’t heard the term in a good while, possibly because I don’t live there, possibly because the term has disappeared from popular usage. (It persists in journalism and on websites devoted to Ashe County history.) Recently I began to wonder how the term came about and when it was first applied to these counties.

As we’ve seen, each area in the northwest corner of the state looked in a different direction for transportation and trade with the outside. In Alleghany, businessmen and travelers looked to the railhead in Galax, Virginia; in Ashe, they looked to West Jefferson and to Marion, Virginia (and later to Troutdale, Virginia); in Watauga, they looked to Johnson City, Tennessee. The area was, for ordinary business and practical purposes, lost to the rest of the state, so the term made a certain amount of sense.

After running searches in newspapers.com, I’ve concluded that the term likely was popularized as a slogan of the Good Roads campaign in the northwestern counties. In fact, although I cannot yet prove it, I think the campaign likely deserves credit for first applying the term to these remote counties.

Using newspapers.com, I searched “Lost Province(s)” for North Carolina newspapers from 1870 till 1930. Not surprisingly, I found that the term was most often used for the Alsace-Lorraine region, provinces on the border between France and Germany that were annexed by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870; they were lost because they had been taken by a hostile country. Until the French regained them as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, they remained a point of friction between the two countries and a frequent source of headlines and news stories even in North Carolina. In other words, just before the Good Roads boosters in the northwest corner of the state needed a memorable slogan to publicize their case, this term became available for a novel application.

One of the first examples I found in this period was published in 1873 by a paper near the coast: “should Marshal MacMahon continue in power five years more, tremendous effort will be made to recover the lost provinces and restore the military prestige of France” (Our Living and Our Dead, New Bern, 24 Dec 1873). Over the years, the term was applied to other territories—China's lost Khanate of Kashgar (Pee Dee Herald, Wadesboro, 7 Aug 1878), the territories lost by Mexico to the US (Fayetteville Weekly Observer, 6 Dec 1883), the Sudan (The Central Express, Sanford, 12 Apr 1890), etc. But it usually referred to Alsace-Lorraine.

In my search, I did not see the term applied to the northwestern counties until 1919—a bit of a challenge to my thesis, since the campaign did not seem to get underway until the following year. But the phrase was used in the context of the Good Roads movement in the northwest: “The ‘Lost Province’ engineers arrived last Friday evening for the purpose of making two preliminary surveys from North Wilkesboro” (North Wilkesboro Hustler, 4 July 1919). I suspect, but can’t prove, that the campaign was being organized behind the scenes and may already have found its slogan.

In any case, the slogan seems to have come into general use beginning with a banquet in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in November 1920. The purpose of the banquet was to support the Good Roads legislative program and to urge the allocation of funds to build and improve roads in Alleghany, Ashe, and Watauga counties. The keynote address was “Shall We Reclaim the Lost Provinces?” An article earlier in the week stated the Lost Provinces “will probably be the keynote for the plan that will be developed as a result of the meeting.” (The Sentinel, Winston-Salem, 23 Nov 1920). “Lost Provinces” was not mythos but marketing.

At least some understood that the term had been borrowed from a foreign context. In late December 1920, in a story headlined “Our Lost Provinces,” the Greensboro Record, wrote “North Carolina's Alsace and Lorraine were not torn from her by any foreign invader, but merely allowed to drift away through neglect” and because of “the mighty barrier” of the Blue Ridge.

Perhaps “Lost Provinces” also had the advantage of echoing the Lost Colony; the failed attempt to establish a permanent English settlement on Roanoke Island in the 16th century was a continuing topic of interest. Mystery and romance attached to the colonists’ unknown fate; perhaps “Lost Provinces” was an attempt to transfer some of that mystique to the plight of the remote mountain counties.

“Lost Provinces” was not used in The Hand-book of North Carolina: The Farms, Orchards & Vineyards, the Forests, Mines and Factories, a 333-page work published by the state in 1893. The handbook mentions the Lost Colony twice. It notes the remoteness of Ashe County, though with undue optimism ("the inaccessibility of Ashe County will soon be a thing of the past,” 319). Indeed, the entire mountain region is described as being, with some exceptions, “inaccessible to market” (7) and “inaccessible to transportation” (6). Still, semantically at least, the mountain counties were neither provinces nor lost. But by the time the State Ship and Water Transportation Commission issued its report in 1924, the term had, as shown above, entered the lexicon of policy makers.

[1] ID numbers and birth and date dates for family members are from FamilySearch.org.
[2] In the late 20’s, a young cousin named Rex Crouse (about 1913 – 1929, 9KGY-LKW) left the mountains in a similar way. He first went to West Virginia to work in the mines, but “I got tired of working in the dark so I just saved me up about $75.00 and sold every thing I had and started out on the Highway and flaged every Car that passed me.” Like John R. Grubb, he ended up in California, but he never left: he and his flight instructor were killed when the plane they were in power dove into the ground.—J.S. Absher, “The Letters of Rex Lee Crouse: A Sad Family Story of No Importance,” unpublished.
 
Posted 3 March 2026; revised 5 March 2016. Elevations are from online US topographic maps. Current travel times and distances are from Google Maps. 

As with many French poems by Rilke, I find the juxtaposition of images, the tone, and the surface simplicity of the verse deeply engaging.  It's why I continue to dabble with translating them, an effort that reminds me of my limits as a reader of French and poet. 

Vergers / Orchards

Give up your life so complicatable.
Look at your hand near the bread on the table:
on the clear cloth both of them are clear,
from father to son and son to father.

Love the earth’s celestial countryside
and the joy that evident suffering hides,
the tranquil window and the strict door
from father to son and son to father.

And always in their place, the kneeling things
and the dog that outdoes them, wagging,
so gentle a believer, never a doubter
from father to son and son to father.

****

Refuse-toi à la vie complicable.
Regarde ta main près du pain sur la table :
comme c’est clair, ces deux choses sur la nappe clair,
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Aime de la terre la compagne céleste
et la joie, cachée par la peine manifeste,
la fenêtre tranquille et la porte sévère
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Et les choses à genoux toujours à leurs place
et le chien qui remue et pourtant les surpasse,
très-doux croyant, ne doutant guère
de père en fils et de fils en père.

Posted 3 March 2026

Portrait by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1828 (in the public domain)

The Fairy King
Adapted from “Erlkönig” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who rides, so late, a night so wild?
A father with his little child.
He keeps him snug in his strong arms,
holds him safe and keeps him warm.

“My son, why hide your face in fear?”
“Father, don’t you see the King,
the Fairy-King with crown and cape?”
“My son, it is a streak of mist.”

Come, dear child, and go with me!
All the fun games we will play!
Flowers bursting from each tree!
The golden robes my mother makes!

“My father, my father, do you not hear
What the King is promising me?”
“Be calm, stay calm, my little child;
it’s the wind sighing through dry leaves.”

Such a fine boy! Come, go with me.
My daughters will be your friends so true;
my daughters will lead you in the dance,
rocking and swaying and singing to you.

“My father, my father, don't you see
his daughters in this gloomy place?”
“My son, my son, it is the moon:
shimmering on the willows’ gray.”

I am excited by your beauty!
Come willingly or come by force.
“My father, can’t you spur the horse?
The Fairy King is hurting me!”

The father swiftly rides in dread,
the moaning boy held in his arms,
reaches exhausted his little farm
and on his breast the child is dead.

******
​
Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?
Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron' und Schweif?
Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif.

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand."

Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?
Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind.

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehn?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein."

Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?
Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh' es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau.

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch' ich Gewalt."
Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!

Dem Vater grauset's; er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in den Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Mühe und Not;
In seinen Armen, das Kind war tot.

(A performance of Schubert’s setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS91p-vmSf0)

Posted 19 Feb 2026

Eleven days before Thanksgiving in 1907, a postcard was sent to Mrs. J. M. Brisco of Marion, Virginia, by AK. The front of the card has a picture of the Aragon Hotel in Jacksonville, Florida, and the card bears a Jacksonville postmark. The card has an odd design that encouraged terseness: the back of the card is reserved for the recipient’s address ([Th]is side for the address), and the front has only a small vertical white strip for the sender’s message.

To the extent that poetry is the art of dividing an utterance into lines to provide rhythm and emphasis, the message may be read as a poem:
 
The worst
is not
yet over
but Dr. says
he will try
and fix me
up so that
I can eat
turkey
Thanksgiving.
He works
two hours
each night.
It's some-
thing fierce,
too. He
is about
half through.
Will write
letter soon.
 
AK
 
The note has end rhyming/slant rhyming {me, eat, turkey) and internal rhyming combined with end rhyming (too, through, soon). Found poetry places intention in the reader (“I choose to read this as a poem”) rather than the writer.

Another odd creation of modern aesthetic sensibility is the erasure poem, defined as "a poetic form in which a poet blacks out or in some way erases words from a preexisting source to create new poems" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/erasure-poetry). By that definition, our postcard is not an erasure poem, but in a deeper sense, it is: to the extent the message has poetic interest, it is because the context has been erased. Someone ailing in Jacksonville, known to us only by initials, is receiving painful medical treatments two hours each night in order to eat Thanksgiving dinner eleven days later. With the postcard as our only source, we don’t know the relationship of writer and recipient, the diagnosis, the nature of the treatment, the prognosis. We don’t know why the writer was in Jacksonville: perhaps AK lived there, perhaps AK went there to seek medical treatment, perhaps AK came to visit family and was detained by illness, perhaps on the way somewhere else AK was forced to stop in Jacksonville because of the illness.

The unknowns may provoke the writing of a poem, the writing of a story, the conducting of historical research.

Background and Research

Around 1960, the year I turned nine, my family moved into the Brisco home on Sheffey Street in Marion, Virginia. I don’t know who had lived in the house immediately before we moved in. As a child, I understood that the owner of the house, Nathan Brisco (1909-1955), had killed himself, thus making the house available for sale. This may be true, but he had died in 1955. The death certificate gives the cause of death as "accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound of head.” The newspapers of the time stated that he "died Saturday, November 26, of a shotgun wounded, accidentally self-inflicted during a fall down the stairs while preparing to go hunting" (1). This was two days after Thanksgiving. There were no witnesses. His “body was discovered by his wife as she returned from a visit with her son at VMI. He was dressed in hunting clothes and still held the shotgun, officers said." (2)

My family knew an African American handyman, Joe. He told us that he had cleaned Brisco’s brains off the wall of the staircase that led to the basement. We were in the room when he told us, pointing to the very wall he had cleaned, a wall that in our day was painted a dark shade of pink. To my mind the color was at once appropriate and in very poor taste.

Nathan was survived by a widow, Helen. Perhaps she sold my parents the house. Those who lived in the house before us left behind books and several issues of the National Geographic from the time of the building of the Panama Canal. One of the books was a Converse College annual from 1922. Ruth Brisco (1899-1979), Nathan’s oldest sister, was the owner of the annual and an alum of Converse. She was at Converse when Billy Sunday preached there. I still have several books signed by her, including Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed. (To my sorrow, the National Geographics were left behind when we moved away in 1963.)

Only when my mom died this summer, at the age of 92, did we find, in a box in the attic, another book left behind by the Brisco’s, a postcard album probably collected by Daisy Kennon Brisco (1875 – 1948), mother of Ruth and Nathan, and wife of James Monroe Brisco. She is addressed on the cards as “Mrs. J.M. Brisco,” in the style of that prefeminist time, and is the recipient of the postcard from AK. In some of the postcards’ greetings, she is called Aunt Daisy or simply as D.

A peek at Daisy Brisco’s family tree suggests that the postcard came from her brother, William Alfred Kennon (1886 - 1951). He was likely known by his middle name, Alfred; in the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia, it was a common practice at the time and for some time after. My parents named me John Stanley with the intention of calling me Stanley. Two of my three brothers are also known by their middle names, and the third would have been had my grandmother not objected so strongly to the middle name because of its distressing associations. My father, John Thomas, went by his first name, but he had an uncle and a brother-in-law named John Thomas, and both went by Tom.

In 1907, Alfred was a young man—he had turned 21 on October 30—so he may have been in Jacksonville for work. Based on the little research I’ve done, it’s clear that Jacksonville was booming at the time. It was a favorite spot for winter tourists. One hundred passenger trains arrived there daily, I’ve read, and Jacksonville would shortly become an important center for the making of silent movies. The financial panic in the fall of 1907 seems to have had little effect on the local economy, beyond temporarily halting a number of construction projects. Many were completed the following year, including a bridge, extensions of the streetcar system, and development of the streetcar suburbs. (3)

Daisy probably would have liked more than Alfred’s brief note, but he promised a letter to follow. Perhaps the turkey he hoped to eat was from his sister’s kitchen. Not his wife’s: he recovered from his illness sufficiently to marry in February of the following year and to live another 43 years.

By June 1917, he had two children and was making his living in Greenville, TN, as a printer for the Greenville Democrat (4). In the 1920 and 1930 census records, he was still employed as a newspaper printer. It’s possible he was already a printer in 1907, but I’ve found no proof of that.

Alfred is my wife’s seventh cousin twice removed.

The Poetry that Remains

To answer some of the questions surrounding AK’s postcard is not to know the Brisco’s. The details gleaned from public records are useful but do not reveal them. Unless the government made it its business to know them, the ordinary facts about them have been erased by death, the passage of time, and the scant documentation. Knowing them personally would not have exhausted the depths of their being, even if they were quite ordinary. They probably were a mystery to themselves.

The Briscos’ importance to me is accidental but profound: it comes from my family’s encounter with their house, a few of their belongings, and the one story about them we heard, Nathan’s accidental suicide, and our mutual celebration of Thanksgiving with turkey. As a kid, possibly based on how Joe told us about it, I assumed he killed himself intentionally. I did not foresee that my father would also leave this world by his own hand.


Traveling Inside My Room

I heard the children playing in the town pool.
From across the street and down a steep bank,
their laughter rose up to tempt me, along with
their tinny music, diminished with the distance

like a tall boat on the horizon shrunk to nothing.
I was on my bed, window open, reading--
Gulliver was waking to find himself
staked under a burning sun, his clothing

and hair knotted to fine strings, the strings pegged
to the ground by tiny people with tiny
voices, like a tin-can telephone’s. I wanted
to splash and tan in the sun, but, even more,

to be rescued from the weak and small, that
first summer I stayed inside my head. 

****

That book, and others, we’d found in the house
when we moved in. It was signed in a neat
round hand on the flyleaf Nathan B., a man
who’d killed himself and left his sister alone.

You can read books and do yourself in. Or not
read them, and do the same. I own his The Light
that Failed and his sister’s college annual
from ’22, when Billy Sunday came

and preached the Book, and maybe saved her
from what her brother did. Or made her laugh.
I own a book of poems Daddy annotated
in the months before he did himself in.

I dogear pages and scribble notes. Dear book,
they promise, someday I’m coming back to you.

Webster’s Reading Room (Old Mountain Press, 2020)


Ruth Brisco

The books in the poem actually belonged to Ruth, but I forgot that fact as I focused on the drama of the deaths self-inflicted by Nathan and my father. I imagined Ruth being left alone, abandoned by Nathan. I did not know till now that she had another sibling, Virgina Francis, or that she had a life of her own: in 1955 she was working as a librarian in Hampton, Virginia. 

Newport News Daily Press, 7 Jan 1955, p. 3

Ruth never married and her death certificate shows that schizophrenia contributed to her death (5). Here's another familial link: my father’s schizophrenia materially contributed to his early death.

Notes

(1) Culpeper Star-Exponent, 1 Dec 1955, p 23. All newspaper quotations and pictures are from via Newspapers.com.
(2) Bristol Virginia-Tennessean, 29 Nov 1955, p. 1.
(3) T. Frederick Davis, History of Jacksonville, Florida and Vicinity, 1513 to 1924, reprinted by Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck.
(4) “United States, World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918”, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:WSZ3-RS2M: Entry for William Alfred Kennon, from 1917 to 1918).
(5) "Virginia, Death Certificates, 1912-1987", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:QVYP-5RFT: Entry for Ruth Littleton Brisco and James Monroe Brisco, 29 Jun 1979).

Edited 2 Dec 2025