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Adams Express Company
The pile of old papers handed down from generation to generation and now finding itself in my hands has quite a few folded scraps of yellowed paper–letters, clippings, recipes, and so forth–whose context and relevance I don’t know. They’re interesting in the own right, as artifacts from two centuries ago, and their endurance is fascinating. How have these old letters and receipts managed to survive for so long? And, more importantly, why have they survived for so long? I toss my own papers every day. If I should stuff a few of them into a vault for 150 years, will future generations be fascinated by them? Will they be imbued with importance…
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Bessie’s Hair
One of the more peculiar findings in my grandfather’s papers was inside a folded piece of paper tucked away in a folder with the papers of Ellie Stoneroad Patterson, my delightfully name great great great grandmother. It’s a lock of hair from a woman who died the same year the U.S.A. celebrated its first centennial. The very matter-of-fact note reads: Bessie died Sep. 1 1876 Myrtle” Oct ” Bessie’s hair A leaf that was on her corpse + a piece of her’s and Myrtle’s shroud A piece of hair and shroud
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A presidential tomb
The 29th president of the United States, Warren G. Harding, died on August 2, 1923, before completing his first term. He was beloved at the time of his death, since his official corruption and incompetence were not yet widely known . That knowledge would come later, cementing his legacy as among the worst presidents of all time. Following his untimely passing, a movement sprung up to construct a memorial to Harding in his hometown of Marion, Ohio, whose hometown newspaper he ran before embarking on a political career. Marion’s Harding Memorial, a ring of white marble columns encircling an open courtyard with the graves of Warren G. and his wife, Florence, was completed…
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School papers
The Juniata County countryside, like so many other rural places in the U.S., is dotted with pieces of education’s past. One-room school houses have been turned into homes or sit empty in the middle of farm fields; buildings once housing larger schools are now apartments; and, in the case of the Tuscarora Academy in Academia, the one remaining building of a nineteenth-century academy for boys houses a museum that’s occasionally open. My collection of papers includes some artifacts from this educational past. Here are three pieces: two souvenirs from the East Waterford Primary School, listing pupils from the 1896-1897 academic year, and an invitation to the commencement exercises of the…
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Retail artifacts
That my grandparents lived in a funeral home was a slightly odd but mostly accepted piece of childhood. That the house had also contained a store about a decade before I was born was a piece of childhood fascination. My mother talked of minding the shop and slicing meat for customers, and that old meat slicer stood along the wall in a room that held musty old toys that we grandkids played with when we visited. The idea that an insignificant rural crossroads like Honey Grove, Pennsylvania, could be home to a grocery store seemed impossibly quaint and old-fashioned to my young mind. And like so many other stories I heard…
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Continental traveler
A yellowed but intact envelope from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Department of Highways was marked, in big, loopy, penciled writing, “Important Don’t Destroy.” Inside was a very important looking document indeed–a title for a 1922 Buick sedan, registered to John J. and Beulah Patterson of East Waterford, Pennsylvania. It’s dated 11-24-23. JJ Patterson was the brother of Grace Patterson Henry, my great great grandmother. JJ and his wife, Beulah Pannebaker Patterson, had no children and lived in a beautiful, rambling house in East Waterford that became the home of his nephew, my great grandfather John Patterson Henry, and wife Margaret Adam Henry, my great grandmother. The Pannebakers and the Pattersons were East Waterford business…
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She didn’t even mention Abe
In a falling-apart expanding file are a number of beautiful little envelopes of private correspondence to Ellie Stoneroad Patterson, my three-greats grandmother. Inside are handwritten letters, embossed, on paper still substantial and barely yellowed, even after all these years. The handwriting is exquisite but light, not written darkly and faded over time. They’re tough to read, but not impossible. One letter, dated March 9, 1861, comes from S.E. Dixon, one of Ellie’s friends. Mrs. Dixon writes from Harrisburg of her travels to Baltimore, Annapolis, and Maryland over the previous week. We spent Sunday at Annapolis, had a delightful time, Monday we went to Washington, where we remained until Wednesday afternoon.…
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Letters from 1827
I opened a yellowed folder, filled with equally yellowed, folded scraps of brittle paper. Inside were five letters–single sheets, folded numerous times, and addressed and mailed. No envelopes, no staples, no tape. Just folded correspondence. It was a series of four letters from 1827 and one from 1828, written by my five-greats grandfather, John Patterson, to his son, Alexander, my four-greats grandfather. John was a member of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for three terms, representing Mifflin County and living in Tuscarora Township in what was to become, in a few short years, Juniata County. The father-to-son correspondence was unfailingly businesslike, discussing such things as crop prices and the business before…