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.

Getting to Know Uncle Frank

       I have mentioned my Uncle Frank before, in a piece I posted My Great Aunts and Uncles in 2014. He was the brother to my 2x Great-Grandfather Hiram King Wicker. Hiram was a well-to-do man in Lockport, NY but his brother Frank was a man whose career took him to New Orleans, Alaska, and Cuba.

       He was among the surveyors of Russian-America which would later be called Alaska, whose purchase was based on his findings. Frank Wicker worked for the Telegraph Company and while on expedition, he kept a journal of his- often monotonous- journey. 

       His journal is in a stack of photocopied pages. I have been working on transcribing them. It took me a few days to get the feel of his handwriting before I could get into a rhythm. But once my eyes adjusted to his script, I began to read 'him' within the words.

       Sometimes this work feels a lot like time travel.

       I'm in love with Uncle Frank's quiet and clever wit in how he manages the men and the captain. His journal is very matter of fact and yet I hear his humor and amusement and I feel I am getting to know him.

       I'm in love with the way he elongates his lower case 'p' and swirls his 'I' and 'S'. I love that if my brain reads 'r' it's meant to be 'w'. And if I see 'm' its really an 'r'.

       And he's a reader. He's currently working through both Hugo and Dumas. He and I agree about Hugo's unabridged works: "His descriptions are a little too definite and become tiresome and uninteresting." (I mean, who needs to spend 62 pages writing about packing hats?!)

       Uncle Frank is also very serious about how he represents the Telegraph Company. I can recognize moments where he was totally That Guy asserting Authority just to wave his dick around- which he only does when the Captain of his ship harasses his men and/or threatens the purpose of the expedition. But I can also see in him the man who survived the Civil War, who wants to help shape what his beloved country is becoming.

       I am almost halfway through. We have finally arrived at Alaska and are attempting to get through the mouth of the passage. It's almost my birth day, 110 years before I was born...

Watched Over by Hiram King Wicker

When I was recovering in the bed of the Burn ICU I was existing in the blurred edge of reality, still alive and drugged beyond comprehension but also floating near the edge of death. There were spirits around my bed, standing still and holding vigil while the medical staff watching in and out of them. One spirit stood back, a statue in the center of the room he oversaw the other spectral visitors. I recognized his eyes from family photos. He was my 2x great-grandfather Hiram King Wicker.

Hiram was one of three sons born to Thaddeus Rice Wicker, originally from Connecticut, and Cynthia Lusk of Niagara County, New York.

After the Civil War, Hiram married Emma Angeline Whitcher and settled in Lockport. Hiram and his brother William owned and operated a feed store along the canal. He was a practicing Mason and, according to the markings on his gravestone, at some point he was in a position of authority within the organization. But there was another piece of information I knew about Hiram that was lost in my recovery haze.

I didn't remember until a week ago that H. K. Wicker was one of the first Fire Chiefs of Lockport, NY. A man in California, an avid collector of antique fire badges, sent me a photo of a badge he acquired that belonged to Hiram Wicker. His initials were engraved on the back. I had forgotten.

Of course he came to my aid acting as patriarch and overseer. Of course the man who saw it as his responsibility to keep his town safe from fire and destruction came to attend to his 2x great-granddaughter in one of her darkest moments. Those who love us never truly leave us and he was a man devoted to his family and those he considered in his care.

I'm not trying to convince you that ghosts are real. That ancestors walk with you. But they walk with me. I own my experiences. I am trying to show you my world, what I live as normal. Because the world we all live in is bigger than we can comprehend.

Hiram and Emma had one child, Minnie Estelle, who was the mother of Ruth Emma, who was the mother of my father. Hail the Wickers. Hail the Whitchers. Hail the Rustons.

My Great Aunts and Uncles

Libby Dutcher, the artist at work.

In my quest for uncovering as many names as I can for our family tree, I applied a focused tunnel-vision to my search. Who is my grandfather? Who were his parents, and their parents, and their parents? I mostly neglect the names of other children who were not my direct ancestors, noting (sometimes) how many children they had total, and maybe a list of names if it’s an easy copy and paste.

Recently, I had a sobering realization that, not having children, I will become that name on someone else’s family tree that I ignore. There will not be anyone who searches for me. I will forever be someone else’s Great Aunt, however many times removed.

Some of my zeal in uncovering our family history is in getting to share it with my nieces and nephew. It’s in anticipating sharing it with my great aunts and uncles as I grow older. In honor of the acknowledgement that I have dismissed some members from my family tree who may have had very fascinating lives themselves, and in gratitude to my father, who didn’t, I want to share the lives of two of my kin, my Great-Aunt Mary Elizabeth Dutcher and my Great-Uncle Frank Wicker.

Great-Aunt Libby

The cottage, prepared for Swami in 1895.

My 3x Great-Aunt Libby was sister to Reuben Feagles Dutcher, my 3x Great-Grandfather. Mary Elizabeth Dutcher, known as Libby, was a respected artist in her lifetime. I have held a couple of her small board paintings in my hands. I have had my eyes on a beautiful watercolor of the Islands themselves. As far as my research shows, she never married. She never had any children.

But she did own a Victorian cottage on the St. Lawrence River, in the 1,000 Islands. The Thousand Island Park was 20 years old when she lived there, built as a place to encourage the exchange of ideas in an atmosphere of relaxation and meditation, attracting speakers like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglas. There were 600 cottages in the community on June 18, 1895, when Swami Vivekananda arrived at the Park.

In 1893, he traveled from India to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, uninvited, encouraged by his fellow monks to represent Hinduism at the event. A Harvard professor asked him to address the crowd and he opened with this prayer: "As different streams, having their sources in different places, all mingle their water in the sea; so, O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee."

His address is credited with changing the tone of the gathering itself. After the Parliament, he traveled for two years on a strenuous lecture tour. What does Swami Vivekananda have to do with my Great-Aunt? During this tour, my Great-Aunt Libby attended his spiritual classes in New York City and invited him to retreat at her cottage in the Islands.

Libby at the cottage.

In preparation for his arrival, she added a wing to her cottage for his initial seven-week stay, coming at the end of a strenuous to years of lecturing. This wing was actually a three-story addition, comprised of a guest room, a classroom, and a private room for Swami, a monk and follower of Sri Ramakrishna. He was 32 years old.

While visiting Libby’s cottage, Swami taught his followers and began compiling his writings. He eventually returned to India. Swami died at the age of 39 but his work served as inspiration for Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Ravi Shankar, and, decades later, George Harrison.

The cottage today.

Today, Libby Dutcher’s cottage still stands, bearing the name of Swami Vivekananda. It is a sanctuary and place of pilgrimage for his followers. The cottage itself, beautifully restored, is open to the public for tours during the summer months. Dirt from holy places in India was buried on the land. Water from the Ganges was poured into the St. Lawrence. The room that Libby built as Swami’s living space is a chapel now.

I love knowing that the place where she built her home, where she created an environment of art and thoughtful expression, is now a sacred site. I may not know a lot about her, but being able to learn about someone who inspired her so deeply, allows me to build a connection to her ghost.

Great Uncle Frank

Frank (L), William, and Hiram (R).

My 2x Great-Uncle Frank Newell Wicker was one of three brothers to my 2x Great-Grandfather Hiram King Wicker. The Wickers moved to Lockport, NY in about 1845, but once the Civil War started, Frank’s career kept him in perpetual motion. He enlisted in the 28^th Regiment of N.Y. Volunteers in 1861.

His previous position with the Lockport Home Guards earned him a promotion to lieutenant. During his service, he earned a reputation for daring, courage, and a cool head in battle. At some point, a Confederate Force was tasked to capture him, but all their attempts failed. He was promoted to the Signal Corps where he served as an officer for the remainder of the war, seeing battle at Antietam and Georgetown.

Frank was discharged in 1865, but stayed in government service for the rest of his life. In August that year he was second in command of 1,000 men for the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition. He kept a diary of the three months it took to reach their destination (which I am currently transcribing). The men were tasked with laying telegraph line through British Columbia and Alaska, and laying cable across the Bering Straits, through Siberia (eventually scrapped by the construction of the transatlantic cable).

While in Alaska, Frank acted as a surveyor and wrote many documents for the U.S. government about the wealth of the land he saw, including reports on the Alaska seal fisheries. It was my Uncle Frank’s final recommendation that convinced the United States to buy Alaska. In 1869, Frank was assigned there as Special Agent of the Treasury.

Wicker’s next job was as collector of customs at Key West, Florida. He was appointed by President Grant in 1873. Due to a Cuban civil war against Spain, Key West was full of refugees. In 1884, he was dismissed from his position without notice.

Uncle Frank's handwriting.

According to a Cuban newspaper from 1912: “A monster meeting was held at San Carlos hall, patriotic speeches were made, and the audience requested to subscribe funds to aid [Cuban patriot] Aguerro to fit out another expedition. The first to respond was Colonel Frank N. Wicker, the collector of customs at this port; he contributed one hundred dollars. The Spanish consul telegraphed this to Washington and Colonel Wicker was removed from office. Colonel Wicker was probably actuated by a desire to serve his political party. He was the leader of the Republicans in Key West, and knew that this act of friendship to the Cuban cause would be remembered by the impulsive patriotic Cubans, and that they would help his party when he should call on them for support. His name should go down in history as the first American martyr to the cause of Cuban liberty, as well as a martyr to his party.”

He was next, quickly, given an assignment as appraiser at the Port of New Orleans, where he was at the time of his death, in February 1903, of heart disease. He was a member of eight different secret orders during his lifetime, including the Knights Templar and the Mystic Shrine, something his and his siblings had in common. His brother, my 2x Great-Grandpa Hiram, was a Past Eminent Commander of the Masons of New York.

It's about connection. It's about growth. It's about how we are all relations. It's about living. And it's about love. In the words of the spiritual teacher of my 3x Great-Aunt Libby:

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.