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Category Archives: Memoir/Letters

Shepherdess of Elk River Valley

22 Monday Jul 2019

Posted by Sara M. Barnacle in American History, Memoir/Letters, Unforgettable older novels, Women's History

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sheep ranching, women ranchers

This book is hard to categorize. It is a memoir by Margaret Duncan Brown, and was published in 1982 by Golden Bell Press of Denver, Colorado.

I will quote from the preface.

During the 47 years that Margaret Duncan Brown lived alone on her Colorado sheep ranch, she kept a diary of her thoughts and exceptional life. She had never submitted anything for publication, except a short piece to The Reader’s digest, that received the First Person Award, September, q958, entitled, “A Little Bunch of Sheep.”

Mrs. Brown died Julyl 30, 1965. As attorney for her estate, my wife being her niece and Executrix of her will, I found her writings stored around the ranch house, mostly on small tablets that she carried in her pockets while tending sheep. I had the enriching experience of organizing the writings into the form here presented.

The writings trace margaret Duncan, an extremely attractive but pensive young girl, of gentle Southern parentage, to marriage, at age of 18 , in 1900 to Thornton Brown, then a mining clerk in Cripple Creek, Colorado. By 1915, her husband had become cashier and resident manager of a bank in Cripple Creek, and the couple were quite active in business and social circles. They decided to become ranchers, and in late 1915, they made a small down payment and moved on 160 acres on Elk River, Routt County, in northwestern Colorado. In 1918 her husband died. She stayed on, and after the hardest of struggles, solely on her own, she paid out the ranch and expanded. When she died, she had a beautiful, improved ranch of 713 acres, debt free. The richest heritage is, of course, her indomitable spirit, her great sensitiveness, perception and philosophy of life, which live in these writings.

Signed, Paul E. Daugherty

I obtained my copy of this unforgettable book through the Bas Bleu Society, in fact, it is “A Bas Bleu Edition.” Whatever it takes to get a copy, read it!

My Grandmother’s Novels

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by Sara M. Barnacle in Memoir/Letters, Unforgettable older novels

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Hiram, Maine, Maine literature, Margaret Flint, regional novels, Sebago, West Baldwin, Women's Army Corps, World War II

My mother left me her most prized possession — a collection of her mother’s novels. Mother, Eleanor Jacobs Mitchell, read them through once a year. I had read one or two, or maybe a few chapters in another, during visits to my parents in East Parsonsfield, Maine. Due to a series of changes in my life, the books have been in storage for several years. This fall I decided it was time I made their full acquaintance. I set them in chronological order of publication on the top shelf of my bedroom bookcase, supported on either end by my Noah and the Ark bookends, then took down the first volume and commenced to read.

The Old Ashburn Place was Margaret Flint Jacobs’ first novel, hammered out on a manual typewriter during sweltering southern nights after her children were in bed. It was published in 1935. The action is set, however, in the beauty and coolness of the Flint family’s ancestral stomping ground, West Baldwin, Maine — pre-World War I.

Margaret Flint (her pen name) was no ordinary lady author, and she did not, I find, write “lady author” books. The conflict in the story is a man’s impossible-therefore-unrequited love in a tug of war with his unsought-but-inevitable adultery. The graphic detail of such scenes, which would be written out at length in a modern novel, is abbreviated here; but the emotional impact is almost hard core. The book won the First Novel of the Year prize, run by Dodd, Mead Publishers, in 1936. This housewife and mother, who had been pounding that typewriter for many years, was swept into a round of book signings and speeches.

Reading The Old Ashburn Place was a re-read, and I found it to be as much an encyclopedia of farm life in Maine, as a memorable story. Also, it is the only Flint novel currently available — new, on Amazon and from the publisher, Istoria Books. (IB publishes ebooks and print on demand paperbacks. Fiction: romance, mystery, and literary women’s fiction. See http://www.istoriabooks.com/IstoriaAuthors.html for more background on both the book and its author.)

Since the first novel is the only one to have received much notice, I’ll make this a long post and briefly cover them all, in an amalgamated review.

The second novel, Valley of Decision, — written after my grandfather’s passing and after my grandmother had moved the family back to Maine — surprised me by being set in the deep South, on the Gulf coast. My grandmother’s habit of close observation of nature, along with her curiosity about what makes humans tick, comes through almost as well in the Southern as in the Northern context. Evidently, her sojourn in the south with husband and six children had not been all perspiration and diapers to change. Yet I found this book less appealing than The Old Ashburn Place, partly because she was delving into some rather deep psychology, into the area of mental manipulation. Character and plot development get downright creepy. And, I was beginning to wonder, small-mindedly, if ALL her heroines were going to be petite, with small hands and smaller perception of the havoc they raise in the hearts and innards of her heroes? In fact, not one of her characters is perfectly beautiful or handsome, completely good or wicked. One feels that the author yearned over all of them.

Deacon’s Road (1938) introduces Ephraim Squire, the young, farm-inclined hero, who yearns to revive the ancient family farmstead. The ups and downs of his possibly achieving that hope form the framework for the story. And with this novel, the heroines become more realistic.

As the plot unfolds, the reader is introduced to old-time town meeting politics and to the caste system among the ancient families, newcomer wannabes, and the poor. Serious news for today’s reader is how hard thrifty farm women worked. Eph’s aunt, Hetty Hicks, what we today might call a swinging single, is also found crocheting a bedspread, “all in one piece” to sell in exchange for paint to redecorate the bathroom on her father’s farm, buy the material for her spring clothes, and “have some money to tuck away in the bank besides. Yes, along with her spring cleaning, she would do that bathroom over. . . . nobody could say she slighted her regular housekeeping in favor of these extras. She . . . [kept] things immaculate from attic to cellar . . . had a flower garden in summer and potted plants in winter . . . had shelves of home-canned food. . . literally hundreds of jars.” Whew.

Heritage and proximity have destined Eph and a neighbor girl, Lois, for each other. But enter the glamorous city teenager, Shirley. It takes the rest of the book to get that tangle straightened out. Along the way, the reader is immersed in the beauty of changing seasons, the comforts and hardships of farm life, and the social ways of rural communities: “The [farm’s] livelihood . . . had come from the tilled land; the cash which made that life easier, which bought good clothes, and carriages, and machinery; which furnished the houses with solid and handsome mahogany, maple, and walnut; which sent the boys to Harvard or Bowdoin if they wished to go — that cash had come from timber. Towering pines, straight, bare of branches to their feathery tops, had been felled and reared again as the masts of ships. Virgin forests, booming markets, men of keen business sense and unbounded energy — the combination had built a prosperous rural community, and an aristocracy of trade and labor.”

History lessons mix in with funny, frustrating, or poignant human relations, as in all Flint novels. The backdrop is ever the rolling countryside of western Maine that hugs the foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

Breakneck Brook (1939) illustrates another Flint novel characteristic, for it is set on the banks of an actual brook in West Baldwin, Maine. I have splashed in that brook. My grandmother had a talent for combining the real and the fictional into a believable whole. The same goes for characters. Although she always claimed her characters were entirely fictional, friends and neighbors — and foes — were sure they saw themselves or someone they knew in the pages of one or more of the novels. And they probably did. My grandmother, for instance, would attend town meeting, reporter’s notebook in hand, to garner material for her stories. My mother shows up in this story, as the pretty, cheerful, stay-at-home Thurlow Parks. My Aunt Bunny appears as her sophisticated, city-acclimated, older sister Beth. My Dad has been said to furnish the model for the main character in October Fires — I sincerely hope not, as the man supports a mistress on the sly for years, then drops her.

Back to Breakneck Brook. The plot is not unusual, as it tracks the sorting out process of pairing up three women — after several false starts and twists — each with her right man. This book is special to me, though, partly because it describes in detail the climb up to the scenic ledge my mom, her siblings, and a horde of cousins used as a hangout on Saddleback Mountain across from my grandmother’s house. I’ve heard Mother’s stories and seen the family photos. I could just see that ledge from the bedroom in my grandmother’s house where I often slept as a child. The novel confirms and expands upon Mother’s stories.

Back O’ the Mountain (1940). The title, a colloquialism, brings up another characteristic of these novels. Maine accents are notoriously difficult to reproduce, even by professional actors. Yet Flint was able to hear acutely the colorful dialect of her neighborhood, and she devised an accurate system for writing it down. Unlike other lady authors of her day, she also included enough of the local profanity to faithfully fabricate authentic conversations.

This story is about Kate and Sam. Her struggle is to keep house and raise four children on the modest income from the farm that Sam works hard to maintain and improve. This is acceptable and even happy for them until they need to give a home to Sam’s truly “impossible” mother. It’s a wrenching situation on the wider family as well, and is only resolved just in time for the reader to finish the book in peace.

Down the Road a Piece (1941) also sports a colloquial title, which “has more than its obvious meaning. Neighbors may be separated by a mile or more, yet they are bound together by the road which is always open. Though they may know considerable about each other’s affairs, they do not interfere. There’s bound to be talk, of course, but they can live and let live,” according to the Prologue.

This novel lets us see the previous novel’s family situation from the perspective of Kate’s elegant and aspiring younger sister, Elinor, and Sam’s agribusiness-man brother, Clem. The strong bonds of love pull the family at cross purposes, at times, and create new tangles to be resolved. One highlight is, believe it or not, the week Clem and Elinor spend — in and out of each other’s company — at Maine’s annual Farm and Home Week at the flagship state university. This adventure shows us another common Flint theme: Women striving to better themselves and their families beyond their traditional roles without abandoning the home and garden. And the other side of the equation — men, also trying to adjust to the rapidly modernizing era.

October Fires (1941) doth stick in my craw, just a bit. Its theme is how Leroy Varney makes the best of a highly respectable, upwardly mobile, but mistaken marriage, all the while mismanaging relations with his faithful, backwoods mistress. Oh, and also while nursing a decades-long lust for the town beauty. My grandmother really knew how to get her characters into a fix! The protagonist’s strengths are commendable, but his weaknesses wear one down. I wouldn’t mind, except for the gossip connecting Varney with my father as mentioned above. No way.

Enduring Riches (1942) is the last of the series of novels set in the Baldwin/Hiram/Sebago area of Western Maine.

“Judith was the daughter of Joseph, who was the son of Eleazar, who was the son of Deacon Ephraim Squire. Then, if you must have it, the Deacon was the son of Eleazar, who was the son of Joseph, who was one of the proprietors of Squire Township. Later on, and for some unholy reason, the name of this township had been changed to Parkston.”

For “Squire” one could read “Flint” and see how my own ancestry is woven into these stories. I could take you, for instance, to the Deacon Ephraim Flint horse watering trough in West Baldwin, sadly neglected at present.

To continue: “On the distaff side, Judith’s heritage was no less impressive, and by some it was considered more so.”

“. . . very well indeed did Judith know the traditions and standards by which, supposedly, her thoughts and behavior were to be governed.” Yet, she finds herself voluntarily backed into a marriage that nearly wrecks her and her children’s lives. Can she solve this knotty problem without resorting to divorce? I’m not telling, but the title gives you a clue. I believe the title also sums up Margaret Flint’s real-life relationship with her land and her people.

My grandmother’s final published book was the novel Dress, Right Dress (1943), about life in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. Her research material was primarily letters home from her two WAC daughters — only thinly disguised as friends in the story — who had differing ambitions and temperaments. My mother is “Sergeant Nell.” My Aunt Edith is “Corporal Bess.” I was startled and comforted at some of Nell’s advice in letters to her friend, for it could also have been meant for me.

Like all Flint’s novels, this is a penetrating commentary on the times, on social and economic matters, on education and opportunity. In addition, it touches on evolving race and gender relations, as well as the evolving nature of the U.S. military.

An unfinished novel, named (as I recall) Hard Cider, and all my grandmother’s papers, notebooks, clippings from her prize year and other publicity, and copies of her many newspaper and magazine articles are housed in the research library at Colby College in Maine. Most extant original copies of Margaret Flint’s books are in the hands of family, collectors, or in several Maine library special collections.

Island of Peace in an Ocean of Unrest: The Letters of Dorothy von Moltke

07 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by Sara M. Barnacle in Christian Science history, European history, Memoir/Letters

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Christian Science, Germany, Naziism, World War I, World War II

The sub/subtitle here is: An Extraordinary Woman’s Letters Witness Germany’s Descent into Chaos. And by the time one reads through all the book titles, the contents has already been made clear.  The author of the book is Catherine R. Hammond. Publisher: Nebbadoon Press, 2013.

Dorothy Rose Inness was a young South African woman, born into a highly placed English-speaking family. After meeting and marrying a young German count, she kept up a steady correspondence with her parents as she learned to negotiate the mores of east German gentry, circa 1905. As hard-working mistress of a large, agricultural estate and devoted wife of an aristocrat, she had daily contact with all levels of German society. She learned to love her new life, which eventually included five children, and so does the reader, though both come to see and deprecate the cultural characteristics and political mistakes that made Germany vulnerable to Nazism and Hitler’s rough-shod rise to power.

At the same time, this is the story of the rise of Christian Science in Germany, told from an outside/insider’s point of view. This book contrasts the viewpoint of the the well-known Christian Science in Germany by Frances Thurber Seale, the Christian Science practitioner sent by the church to Germany to introduce that movement.

Count von Moltke, after witnessing an attention-getting healing or two, became a student, took class instruction, and became a busy, full-time practitioner in Berlin. He soon was made the first Christian Science Committee on Publication in Germany, charged with correcting misinformation — rumors and half-truths rampant around the new faith and way of life — that would create impositions on the German public. Dorothy early on saw the value of Christian Science and became an earnest student, too. They both worked on the first translation of Science & Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy, into German.

The book consists of letters from Dorothy to her parents in South Africa, woven together almost “as-was” by Catherine R. Hammond. For all the World War I and II films I’ve seen, history lectures attended, etc., this offers the best insight into that period’s sad descent from beauty and purpose into national degradation.  For instance, I had been taught to deprecate Lord Astor’s sympathy with the post-WWI rise of new nationalism in Germany. In Britain, and consequently in America, such Brits were seen as 5th columnists. However, Dorothy saw how Astor’s respectful communication with the new German government helped exempt the burgeoning Christian Science church from the persecution with which the Nazis attempted to flatten other “foreign” churches. By the time Hitler’s radar swept over the Christian Science church, its adherents had been able to grow a much firmer and long-lasting grip on the faith. Astor’s buffer allowed the Christian Science movement in Germany to develop deep enough roots to survive the Holocaust and emerge with strength into modern Germany.

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