How to Salt Pork in a Barrel According to Great-Great Grandma Emma

Years ago my father gave me some handwritten recipes we found among his Wicker-Whitcher memorabilia. I spent a while deciphering and transcribing them. I was able to separate the handwriting between my great-grandma Minnie Estelle Wicker Ruston and her mother, my great-great grandmother Emma Angeline Whitcher Wicker.

The recipes were written on various slips of paper. Some were written on the back of grocery lists. A few were even written in Emma’s hand over scraps of young Minnie’s homework. I found one fraction assignment dated January 25, 1906.

My favorite slip of paper was the one where she explains how to brine pork in a barrel. My great-great grandma Emma was born in 1845. She was sixteen when the Civil War started, nineteen when she married, and forty-five when my great-grandma Minnie was born in 1890.

This recipe gave me a glimpse into the past, before processed packaging of groceries. And a 2x great-grandma is not so far removed from me. All of these bits were on the same slip of paper.

Curing Pork

It takes 3 weeks. For 1 lb of meat thoroughly mix: 5 lb salt, 3 lb granulated sugar, 2 oz salt-peter. Every 3 days the meat is rubbed with 1/3 mixture. After last rubbing, leave meat in the barrel for 2 weeks, then smoke.

Plain Salt Pork

Every piece is rubbed with salt and packed closely in barrel and stand overnight. For 100 lbs of pork make a brine of: 10 lbs salt, 2 lbs salt peter, both dissolved in 5 gal of water. Boil the water. Cool brine and pour over meat. Weigh down and cover.

Sugar Cure

For 100 lbs of meat: 8 lbs salt, 2 lbs brown sugar, 2 oz salt peter, 4 gallons of water. In the summer boil the brine. It is not necessary to boil in the winter. Bacon should be left in the solution for 4 weeks and hams 6 or 8 weeks.

I won’t be brining pork in a barrel anytime soon but I am delighted to have his glimpse into the past. Even more precious to me is the paper with her handwriting on it. I know that she touched that paper. She held it steady with one hand while scrawling the recipe out with the other. I have her handwriting from when she was younger, where she took greater care with her penmanship in a correspondence to a beau.

But she touched that paper and when I touch it the time distance between us slips away for a millisecond. She is always with me. All of the ancestors are.

What is remembered, lives.

Emma writes a cake recipe in pencil over Minnie's fraction homework from 1906.

The Whitcher Monument

Photo by Kerri Kaiser Newman

A few blocks north of the home where I grew up sits Glenwood Cemetery, bordering a public park where we spent many afternoons at play. When I was older I used to walk that cemetery, looking for the oldest tombstones. It was a surprise when my father told me he’d discovered the damaged gravesite of prominent ancestors of ours in that very same place.

The Whitchers

I’ve written previously about Bailey Harrison Whitcher and Ordelia deLozier, my 3x great-grandparents. Ordelia’s father Peter, of Connecticut, was a P.O.W. at the Battle of Tripoli in 1803. After his thirty month-long ordeal and release, he came to own a cabinet-making business in Lockport. Bailey was his apprentice. One of two things happened… either Peter abandoned his family and Bailey took over the business, marrying Ordelia, or Bailey and Ordelia married and Peter took that as his opportunity to leave and return to the sea, but he never returned.

Bailey and Ordelia had thirteen children, seven girls and six boys. Two sons died during childbirth and one drowned in the Erie Canal in 1836. Their remaining three sons were soldiers in the Civil War. I have letters from my 2x great-grandma Emma, written to another soldier in her brother George’s regiment, describing the day the first boy from Lockport died in the war, and the funeral march the city had for him. The Civil War changed everything for the Whitcher family.

George Harrison fought with the Michigan 7^th at Gettysburg and died defending Cemetery Ridge. His body was never recovered. The inscription plate from his musket was dug up from the site, and returned to his family in 1889, by the same friend of George that Emma had been writing letters with- there is evidence in her letters that he was corresponding as well. His name was Charles Thompson and he had returned to the site as a personal pilgrimage. He discovered the plate among items being dug up. A monument now stands in Gettysburg to the regiment where the battle took place. George Harrison was 22 when he died.

What a loss this must have been to the family. It wasn’t the last.

Orville Bailey was mustered into the New York 8^th regiment, heavy artillery. He was at the Battle of Cold Harbor in VA in May and June of 1864. He was wounded on June 3^rd, which also happened to be his birthday. He turned 21. He died June 18, 1864 in Alexandria from his wounds. Ulysses S. Grant said in his memoirs of this last battle, “I have always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made. ... No advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.”

The Whitcher Sisters, family archive. Back row, Emma (my ancestress), Mary, and Frances. Front row, Lucy, Ellen, Harriet, and cousin Flora. The photo is of their eldest brother Daniel, in his uniform.

The Union gained no advantage from the loss of their second son. How that must have affected the family, still in fresh grief from George’s death… Emma’s disposition seemed to change greatly. She had seemed to be courting George’s regiment buddy through their exchange of letters, but he also seemed greatly affected by the loss of his brother and friend. A few months after the death of her brother Orville, Emma Whitcher married a young businessman named Hiram King Wicker. They were my 2x great-grandparents.

Back to the Gravesite

The monument my father found in Glenwood Cemetery belonged to Bailey Harrison Whitcher, who died the year after his son Orville. Bailey had grown deaf in his old age and was struck and killed by an oncoming train he could not hear as he had grown deaf in his old age. The monument also included most of his family, including his two sons who died in the Civil War.

It was on a steep slope and the obelisk had toppled over, strewn precariously in pieces down the incline, obscuring two sides and their inscriptions from view. My father began to investigate how we might get it repaired, seeing how important the family had been historically to the city. It took a while.

Photo by Kerri Kaiser Newman

Mark and Dennis Devine brought it to the attention of the Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter 268, who championed its restoration. Family and various local organizations helped raise the $2100 needed to repair it and on November 11, 2016, a ceremony took place revealing the restoration and honoring the fallen Whitcher brothers.

I wasn’t able to be at the rededication ceremony, but my father was, and various other descendants of the family showed up to help mark the occasion. Reenactors from the Colonel John B. Weber Camp, No. 44, the Reynolds Battery NY Light Artillery, the 155^th NY Reenactment Regiment, the NY Volunteers 140^th, and the Union Volunteers Fife and Drum Corps were all on hand to set the tone for the Veteran’s Day ceremony.

Gratitude

I wish there were words to express how deeply wonderful it is to see other descendants and groups take an interest in honoring the legacy of this Whitcher family. I can’t wait until spring, when they finish polishing the marble and the grave is renewed. It’s a privilege to count these men and women in my ancestral bloodline.

Thanks to my dad, for sharing his passion for genealogy with me, and for wandering old cemeteries and stumbling over graves. Thanks for following up inquiries with letters and e-mails and sharing Whitcher stories, and encouraging interest in seeing this restoration through to completion. I'm glad you were at the ceremony. Uncle Dave would have loved it. I'm sure he did.

A special thanks to Kerri Kaiser Newman, a Whitcher cousin, who was in attendance at the rededication ceremony, for the use of her photos! Both our families descend from Bailey and Ordelia's children. She's one of the closest Whitcher cousins I've discovered yet. If you have Whitcher ancestors, check out the facebook group Whitcher, Whicher, Witcher, Whittier, Welcher Global Family Tree. There are more of us out there.

Other blog posts of Whitcher interest:

A Death at Gettysburg 150 Years Later (July 3, 2013)

A P.O.W. from Tripoli (June 5, 2013)

The Story in the Life (May 2, 2012)

Emma's Letters (February 22, 2012)

Kolachkis for Grandma Ruth

My father’s mother died of cervical cancer when he was five years old. Her name was Ruth Emma Ruston and she was only forty-two. The closer I get to that age myself, the more I find myself thinking about my her. At this age, what would it be like to know that I might have to leave behind my husband and three sons?

My dad has this picture of her at a family party in this fabulous red dress, a bit out of place for a Sunday afternoon get-together. She is looking at the camera with a big smile on her face. My dad said that she went into the hospital the week after that party, and she knew she wasn’t coming out. That dress was her favorite dress.

This year, both at the holidays and in my work, I’ve been focusing on reaching out to her, trying to build traditions with her that we were never able to have. In that spirit, I made kolachki cookies, for the first time, with Grandma Ruth in my butter-yellow kitchen.

As I’ve been doing our genealogy and family history, I find that my family resemblance is to her line of the family, the Ruston line with its Polish heritage. It wasn’t a leap to try to connect with her over a Polish cookie. I am not historically talented in the kitchen, something I’ve been working on for the last few years. So my offering to her spirit was the attempt to make something that was a bit more complicated.

The dough was prepared the night before and chilled in the fridge. The black walnut filling was mixed and beat into submission. And then I pressed the dough out between two layers of wax paper until it was paper thin, almost translucent. As I rolled the dough out, firmly and repeatedly, I thought about my Grandma Ruth. I thought about the line of Rustons, who come through Wickers and Whitchers, Whitchers and DeLoziers, Loziers and Zabriskis, Zabriskis and Terhunes, Zabriskis and Van Der Lindes, back into Poland. And I rolled the dough thin and smooth.

It felt as if dozens of women stood in the kitchen with me, cutting out three inch squares, dolloping golden filling on them, and folding opposite corners in over each other. The warmth from the oven made fingers and dough supple and into the oven they went to cook. Besides the fact that I need to work on my folding skills, they are delicate and flaky, and delicious.

I wish my father could have better known his mother. I wish that I could have known her. I’m not sure if she ever made kolachkis or if her family ever had, but in my heart I made them to honor my unknown Grandmother and all who came before her, so that I could be here, with hands in warm dough, and heart full of love, peace and wonder. 

Family Treasures: The Harvester

Over a year ago, my father and I sorted through an old tote of photos and collected articles from his maternal side of the family. His mother, Ruth Ruston, died when he was five of cervical cancer. The items in the trunk belonged to her mother, Minnie Estelle Wicker, and Minnie’s mother, Emma Angeline Whitcher.

Among the assortment of natural beauty tips and recipes cut from the newspaper, I discovered that my Great-Grandma Minnie was a local singer, as well as an amateur photographer. There were dozens of photos taken on family camping trips of lakes and woods. I found a piece of birch bark, collected and kept as a memento. Was it something that spoke to her? For I also have a fondness for birch.

Beneath those layers we discovered older portraits and a hand-sewn quilting sample. There were also unopened envelopes of patterns that Minnie had sent away for; a doll pattern and an apron. Pamphlets from church events became brochures for the Order of the Eastern Star meetings, a spiritual group with no religious affiliation; it was a fraternal order that both men and women could belong to.

There were recipes from the US Department of Agriculture, explaining the correct nutrition for your children in 1917. Still yet came recipes scrawled out for danish pudding, baked apples, cauliflower pickles, suet pudding, cabbage salad, marmalade, olive oil pickles, molasses layer cake, chicken croquettes, homemade catsup, and canned beets. It’s unfortunate that most do not have clear instructions. They seemed to be recipes often used. At some point the handwriting changed and dated back to the turn of the century where my 2x Great-Grandma Emma had written down how to brine pork in a barrel, placing the separate cuts at varient levels and taking them out after different lengths of soaking.

At the bottom of the tote was a water-soaked book. One book in the whole trunk and it was like gold to me. I am an avid reader and I always have been. My mom helped me get a card to the adult section of the public library before I was of age as I had read through the children’s library. So, to find a book that had been saved over time, and set aside with other personal things, was a treasure to me.

I’ll never know if it was a favorite book, or if it had any sentimental meaning to an ancestress. I’ll never know if it was purchased or borrowed from a friend and never returned. I’ll never know if it was the book someone was reading at the end of her life or if it was a favorite book to bring along on vacations. But it speaks to me that there might have been another reader in the family who had fond memories of curling up with a book against a window in the afternoon light.

The book has a red cloth cover. It is water damaged and misshapen. The spine is cracked and bent and the book sits at an awkward slant. There is an old bug on the inside, where the cover seems to have been used as a means to its death. It has definitely seen better days.

Illustration by W.L. Jacobs

It is a first edition from 1911, called The Harvester by Gene Stratton-Porter, published by Grosset & Dunlop in New York. I was surprised to discover that the author was a woman, born Geneva Grace Stratton (1863-1924), who achieved commercial success with her writing in her lifetime, during which she wrote over 20 books. She wrote her fiction to support her non-fiction; she was an amateur naturalist.

A biographer stated that, “Readers who are completely in tune with nature and who find fulfillment through its healing qualities are easily absorbed into the characters of her novels.” Gene herself wore men’s clothing, wading into the swamp and woods, writing about the wildlife around her. She included her findings within her novels.

The Harvester is a syrupy love story. But the love the author had for the wilds comes through in her details. The information in using natural herbs for remedies alone would have been invaluable to most readers, caught up in the story of the Medicine Man who prepares them. The main character has a mystical vision and moves mountains to manifest that vision into being, the truest kind of magic.

I curled up with the book, tenderly turning old and worn pages. I stepped back into a time when other hands, not mine and yet with similar blood, touched the same pages in turn. Despite the impossible speeches, I found myself drawn into the Medicine Woods that Stratton-Porter described, transported to a space once also visited in the mind of an ancestor:

 “The forest is never so wonderful as when spring wrestles with winter for supremacy. While the earth is yet ice bound, while snows occasionally fly, spring breathes her warmer breath of approach, and all nature responds. Sunny knolls, embankments, and cleared spaces become bare, while shadow spots and sheltered nooks remain white. This perfumes the icy air with a warmer breath of melting snow. The sap rises in the trees and bushes, sets buds swelling, and they distil a faint, intangible odour. Deep layers of dead leaves cover the frozen earth, and the sun shining on them raises a steamy vapour unlike anything else in nature. A different scent rises from the earth where the sun strikes it. Lichen faces take on the brightest colours they ever wear, and rough, coarse mosses emerge in rank growth from their cover of snow and add another perfume to mellowing air. This combination has breathed a strange intoxication into the breast of mankind in all ages, and bird and animal life prove by their actions that it makes the same appeal to them.

            “Crows caw supremacy from tall trees; flickers, drunk on the wine of nature, flash their yellow-lined wings and red crowns among trees in a search for suitable building places; nut-hatches run head foremost down rough trunks, spying out larvae and early emerging insects; titmice chatter; the bold, clear whistle of the cardinal sounds never so gaily; and song sparrows pipe from every wayside shrub and fence post. Coons and opossums stir in their dens, musk-rat and ground-hog inspect the weather, while squirrels race along branches and bound from tree like winged folk.”

Read my blog post about the Quilt Sample from March 2012.

Read my blog post about birch trees, featuring the found birch bark, from December 2012.

The Story in the Life

Painting of Lockport NY, 1839, artist W.H. Bartlett

 For the last few weeks I have been writing out what I know about each of my ancestors into a chronological timeline. I have been doing historical research into the towns they lived in, as well as what was happening in the world-at-large. I enjoy the repetition of writing out information. It’s how I learn. It’s how I remember, puzzling names and dates into history. Their history is my history.

Slowly I am building flesh onto bone and adding tissue and shading where the information is weak or lacking. There are so many names and so many lives that stretch out behind me, so many human beings with dreams and wishes, hopes and regrets. People like me.

I am weaving the moments of their lives that are known with moments from history we can’t forget. I’ve been plugging in world events: wars, natural disasters, new discoveries, etc. I am witnessing the generations that saw the introduction of the telephone, or the first commercial airplane use for travelling. I am seeing the generations that survived or succumbed to plague and lost children to warfare. The emotional context is thick and rich and I can almost reach through the layers and touch them, hold their hands.

The World of Bailey and Ordelia Whitcher

Bailey Harrison Whitcher, my three-times Great-grandfather, was born in 1799, at the turn of the century, in Danville, Vermont. At the time, America was comprised of 16 states and John Adams was our second President. In 1810, Ordelia DeLozier was born, daughter of a man who survived being held hostage at the Battle of Tripoli, a man who owned a cabinet-making business in Lockport, New York.

During their childhoods, at the end of the War of 1812, after the eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia, in 1815, the world knew a year without a summer, where frosts and snow in the New England area through July and August devastated crops. New York declared that all slaves must be freed by 1827 and Mary Shelly published her work Frankenstein.

Bailey’s father died in 1817, and I assume this is when he began his trek to the West, seeking his own life in a new frontier. He was the third son of 12 children. The next time we see him is as an apprentice of Peter DeLozier, the cabinet-maker in Lockport, a town along the Erie Canal.

In 1821, Dr. Isaac Smith settled in the village as its first physician. Construction began on the locks that would master the 60’ drop in the Erie Canal in 1822 and a riot of lock workers resulted in the very first murder in town of a man named Jennings. A year later, the village of Lockport recorded its first earthquake, and two slave hunters from Kentucky came to town to arrest a black barber named Joseph Pickard. Instead, a mob of Irish canal workers drove them out of town empty-handed. The Quakers had a strong anti-slavery hold in Lockport.

Bailey was working as an apprentice for Ordelia’s father, which is where they must have met. They were married June 13, 1825 when he was 25 and she was 15 years of age. The year of their marriage, construction ended on the Erie Canal and the first boat went through the new lock system in October with great fanfare. Lockport was a stopping-point for General LaFayette’s tour, and he made a four hour visit to the village where he received a hero’s welcome for his part in aiding the colonies struggle in the Revolutionary War. In 1832, an epidemic of Asiatic cholera swept through the village.

By 1835, the small village had a population of 6,000 people and had bought its first fire engine, which held a barrel and a half of water. Its first hospital was constructed around the same time as, elsewhere in the country the Cherokee were being forcibly relocated from Georgia to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. The village population went up to 9,000 in the next five years. Elevated water tank toilets were commonly found in homes, not just hotels, and the world saw the first mass-production of vulcanized rubber condoms. Niagara County had it’s only hanging, after the first murder conviction of the County occurred in Lockport.

In the first thirty years of their marriage together, Bailey and Ordelia had sixteen children.  Their son Albert Tracy died at the age of 7 in 1836 and the twins, Edward and Edwin, died the same day they were born in 1838. My Great-great-grandmother, Emma Angeline Whitcher, was born in 1845. She was the twelfth of sixteen children.

The year of Emma’s birth, a telegraph office opened in Lockport and news of the Great Irish Famine was spreading. The famine killed a million people and led to the emigration of 1.5 million Irishmen. Soon after, the California Gold Rush boomed and Ordelia’s father and Bailey’s former employer, having abandoned his family to return to the sea, died of Cholera in Clinton, Connecticut, his birthplace.

In the 1850 census, Bailey Whitcher is listed as a shoemaker. During this year over 30,000 boats passed through the lock system to finish their journeys to Buffalo. The Village of Lockport had a population of 12,000 people and made use of gaslighting. A great fire swept the town in 1854, destroying 26 buildings and 10 acres of land. One of the buildings that burned was Bailey’s store, the first brick building in Lockport. Bailey was 55. His wife Ordelia was 45 and my ancestor Emma was 10. Lockport was a center of industry, thanks to the canal.

In the larger world, the first dirigible was invented by French engineer Henri Gifford and the first packaged toilet paper was sold right around the time that construction of Big Ben was finished in London, in 1858. The next year, Charles Darwin published his controversial work, On the Origin of the Species.

In 1859, Birdsill Holly, famous patent-holder and inventor of municipal tap water, fire hydrants and steam heating, moved to town. He was a friend of Thomas Edison, who visited Lockport often. In the 1960 Census, Bailey, age 61, was listed as a retired shoemaker. His mother-in-law, Lucy DeLozier was living with the family. His daughter Emma was 14. Susan B. Anthony spoke in town at the Universalist Church against slavery, while elsewhere in the world Louis Pasteur was proving his discovery of bacteria, of germs. Things were changing.

Then my forebears saw the start of the American Civil War. Lockport became the first official volunteer regiment to answer Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers. The same year, unrelated yet in tandem, the first condom advertisement appeared in the New York Times newspaper. Bailey and Ordelia’s son George Harrison Whitcher, joined the Michigan 7th regiment. Their son Orville Bailey Whitcher joined the New York 8th regiment. In 1862, Emma exchanged letters with Capt. Charles Johnson, George’s brother-in-arms, mentioning that the town’s first dead soldier returned home. It resulted in the first funeral procession through Lockport, with the fire engines draped in black fabric as they accompanied the body on a hero’s welcome home through town.

On July3, 1863, George Harrison Whitcher died at the Battle of Gettysburg. His body was never recovered. Lockport had grown enough to become the first city in Niagara County the following spring. A year after his brother’s death, Orville Bailey Whitcher died as a result of wounds he received in action in Virginia on July 14. Bailey and Ordelia lost two of their sons to the war.

Four months later, Emma Angeline Whitcher married Hiram King Wicker, a man who would become a prominent merchant and citizen in Lockport. 1865 saw some major changes. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth and the end of the Civil War came. Two months after the last battle, Bailey Harrison Whitcher died at the age of 65, having seen the death of four of his children.  

In the last 23 years of Ordelia’s life, her children and their families were flourishing. Her son-in-law Hiram King Wicker, my Great-great-grandfather, owned a Flour and Feed Store with his brother, served as Fire Chief for the city and was a high-ranking Mason in his lodge, denoted as a Past Eminent Commander. Ordelia’s mother died in 1874 at the age of 84. She had still been living with her daughter. Two years later, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.

In Lockport, Birdsill Holly used his own home to prove his patent of central steam heat in dwelling spaces and was able to build a boiler large enough to heat 50 homes and one large school building. The City Council decreed an end to segregation in the school system. In 1879, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, the Nestle chocolate company formed and the first motion picture camera was invented.

Before her death, Ordelia remarried a man, surname Niles, as his fourth wife, but he died a year later. Lockport was wired for the use of incandescent lights, electric street lights were installed and the first door-to-door mail delivery began. At the other end of the state, construction on the Statue of Liberty was completed. Ordelia died two years later at the age of 77, in 1888. She outlived her first husband by 23 years. Neither Bailey nor Ordelia lived to receive the letter about the bit of rifle that had been dug up in Gettysburg belonging to their son, George Harrison in June of 1889. At the time of Ordelia’s death, there were 38 states ratified and Grover Cleveland was the 22nd President of the United States.

Relevant Post:

Emma’s Letters (published February 22, 2012)

Stitching in Time: In Step with Minnie



Crafted by Minnie Estelle (Wicker) Ruston 1890-1964.

One of my favorite childhood books was Halfway Down Paddy Lane by Jean Marzollo, the story of a 15 year old girl who takes a bad fall and wakes to find herself in 1850s America, in the home of an Irish immigrant family, all of whom work at the local cotton mill (who she later discovers are her ancestors). One scene in particular has always stayed with me. One night, after working a long day in the factory, the matriarch sits out on the porch with her daughters, making lace. Not darning it, but making it. It was the first time I realized in my childhood that even the things I thought were complicated to make were, in fact, once crafted by human hands.

I am reminded of that book when I take sewing work into my lap at night. I love to hand-stitch. I enjoy the discipline of learning to sew in a straight line without a guide, and the body memory I learned that ensures my stitches will be of even size and space between them.

In the bin of my father’s family belongings, I pulled out a small quilt sampler. Based on the other mail-order patterns addressed to her, my best guess is that the sampler was made by my Great-Grandmother Minnie Estelle (Wicker) Ruston. It was loose in the bin and has some color-bleed from basement water damage over the years, but besides suffering two pinprick moth holes, it is otherwise perfect and the stitches are unmarred.

I turned the sampler over in my hands to see how it was sewn. Such tiny stitches stared up at me and I was momentarily overwhelmed. I was holding a piece of family history that spoke to something I do to calm my thoughts, something I enjoy in my time. To better reach out and connect to Great-Grandma Minnie, I set out to recreate the pattern she made, to walk in step with her.

I tried to keep to her pattern without undoing her piece, imagining that her fabric choices were probably made up of leftover scraps she had from other projects. The small pattern I drafted was made up of a circle in the center, 12 inner petals and 12 outer petals. Ten of the inner petals were paired, two of the same with two extra individual ones. I kept the same pattern for mine, with scraps I had in a drawer. Minnie’s color scheme was more white, linen and brown, while mine was white, purple and green.

There were 25 pieces in total. As I worked them together, stitch by stitch, I quickly grasped that there is artistry to this kind of piece-work. After sewing, my pieces seemed smaller than Minnie’s and it is far from a perfect replica. But the spirit of the design holds true and the intention of sharing her work ended in creating a thing of beauty I might not have endeavored to make otherwise and might never have learned how capable I was to undertake it.



Crafted by me, February 2012.



What was more wonderful was finding that the areas I had to fudge due to my inexperience were almost twin to her own sampler, ways of pulling the fabric in when there is a tad too much. And my center piece was smaller than I intended it to be, but in the making of it, I remembered how a dear friend used to make quilt circles during our U.U. services and once that memory bloomed, I figured out how to make it work (and that I should have cut it much larger).

Hand-sewing is a meditation I love, folding fabric, like time, and binding it together in the shape you desire. Hands have been stitching longer than we can remember, where men at sea and soldiers were often more capable darners and menders than wives and mothers, before sewing was ascribed a gender role. These meditations through time layer the past onto the present. I am sewing a pattern that my Great-Grandmother sewed. I can feel her hand over mine, more sure, more used to the rhythm of it.



Minnie (left) and me (right), folding time in one pattern.



To create my sampler, I used the same stitch that my Great-Grandmother used. That her Great-Grandmother used. That all those who have come before and taken a needle into their hand have used. The needle separates the edges of threads and weaves in, through the threading, the fabric, and weaves out to take breath on the other side, before diving back down again, into the earth. I am sewing and weaving the earth and sky together. I am creating.

Working on my family tree, I realized that I was meditating on the backstitch in my head. Emma Whitcher was born and died. I slid the needle into the fabric at her birth, and moved it to the left, slipping out at her point of death, life’s beginning and end. But then I move the needle back to the right, halfway, to the place where Minnie, Emma’s daughter, was born, sliding the needle in at her birth, and then all the way to the left to Minnie’s death, coming back out of the fabric. And then halfway to the right, when her daughter Ruth was born, then out to the left, where Ruth died and halfway back to where my dad was born. The rhythm repeats, through those still living and those who are yet to be, so that someday a descendant- though not mine- might find my sampler and wonder at the stitches and endeavor to step into my shoes and take a needle into their hands.

Emma's Letters

Emma Angeline Whitcher was born in 1845. She was my great-great-grandmother, mother of Minnie, mother of Ruth, mother of my father. Among the family possessions are letters that 16 year old Emma wrote to Captain Charles Thompson, stationed in the same camp as her brother George Harrison Whitcher, during the Civil War. Charles and George were both in the 7^th Michigan Infantry.

Emma’s letters were written on stationary embossed with a Union flag and seal, in the year 1862. Her handwriting was exquisite and easy to read except where the ink was faded. My father and I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by old photos and program books, picture frames and antique shelves. I read aloud words 150 years dead and forgotten. The story of a young girl and a man she was smitten with.

I don’t know if she knew Charles before her brother joined the war or not, and we don’t know when young George left Western New York to make a life for himself in Michigan. We know he was living there at the outbreak of the war. I wonder if Charles was a childhood friend from his hometown or a new friend he made in Michigan?

In the first letter, Emma chastised Charles, in what seemed like a very forward manner, for reading the letters she had sent to her brother, where she inquired about Charles and wanted to know more about him. Emma implied that her brother George was supposed to mask her desire for a “likeness” of Charles by suggesting the friends pose together for a sitting, so he might send it back home to his family.

Emma’s tone was both familiar and flippant, a brash young girl talking to an unknown man as if no social boundaries lay between them. At the same time she apologized for breaking social etiquettes in her reply. Emma asked Charles to forgive the fact that she did not wait the appropriate length of time before responding to his letter, but she wanted to address the wrong she felt was done. And then, as if to reinforce her interest, she sent him back a likeness of herself and hoped that he hadn’t built her up in his mind so elaborately that he was disappointed in the reality of her. I found her honesty and forthrightness fascinating.

She talked of her time spent sleigh riding and ice skating with family friends. She told Charles about the first soldier sent home to Lockport in a casket, and how all the fire wagons were draped in mourning cloths. The body was escorted home by seven soldiers and there was a procession through the entire length of town. She had never heard the “death march” before but she said she thought it was beautiful.

She mentioned that George said “a letter from home was better than dinner at noon” and then quipped that she doubted very much that her brother would pass up a meal for a letter from home in a playful voice. But her lightness belies her worry and fear for the war after the first soldier from town came home dead. She even goes so far at the end of the letter, keeping a light tone, to ask Charles if he would make sure George did not get shot in the back before he managed to write another letter home.

My Great-Great Grandmother apologizes to Charles for all of the “rail fences” in her letter. It took me a while to realize she meant all the misspelled words that she had crossed out lengthwise and then slashed top to bottom multiple times. Emma begs Charles to overlook them, as if she would normally have rewritten the letter before it was appropriate to be sent out. To me it speaks to a hastily written letter, important for her to post, a glimpse of how wartime changed some of the established social frameworks.

Isn't her script lovely? (Photo by Phillip R. Eaton)

George Harrison Whitcher enlisted in company A, Seventh Infantry, Port Huron, MI at the age of 19 in 1861. Emma and Charles Thompson exchanged letters during 1862, each one from her a bit more familiar and forward. George was killed in action at Gettysburg, PA on July 3, 1863 at the age of 21. As far as the family knows, his body was never recovered. A year later, on November 16, 1864, Emma married Hiram King Wicker.

The question we were left with, sitting at the kitchen table, was how these letters come to be back in Emma’s possession? Did Charles return them to her? Did he also die and they were returned to her? We double-checked that the letters were in fact postmarked and had been sent to Charles. I wondered if it was the death of her brother and the following bereavement on both their parts that saw them parting ways, for it seemed understood that Charles and George were close friends.

My father unearthed an old newspaper article a few days later and sent it to me, about how the Whitcher family had spent years and money searching for George’s remains. The article was about how Daniel Whitcher, a brother, received “a letter enclosed in which was a small metallic plate battered and covered with hard earth, in which was stenciled the dead soldier’s name.” It was news worthy enough to make the paper, a part of a dead soldier returned home, 1889.

A man went back to Gettysburg 26 years after the battle and found a piece of rifle that had been dug up from the battle field 3 years earlier, with George Whitcher’s name and infantry unit engraved on it. He sent it back to the family. It took me only a moment to recognize the name of the man who signed the letter, the man who returned to the spot where George Harrison Whitcher had died and not been found. A name that would have meant nothing to me without the letters that Emma had written.

It was from George’s friend Charles, who seemed to have his own pull towards finding closure. For himself? For the family? For his fallen brother-at-arms?

Port Huron, Mich., June 19, ‘89.

Daniel Whitcher,

            Dear Sir:--While at Gettysburg last week I came across the enclosed which was dug up about three years ago at the place where we stood on that memorable third of July, 1863, after being buried nearly 24 years. “Was the body of G. H. Whitcher recovered and taken home for burial?” I could not find his name among the dead in the National Cemetery.

Yours,

C. Thompson,

Late Lt. Co. A, 7^th, Mich., Vol.