Ties That Bind across Space and Time

For most of my childhood, at the end of June—usually about June 29th or 30th because that’s when school ended for us in suburban Westchester County, New York—my mom, my dad, my sister, and I would leave our busy life of swimming lessons, gymnastics practice, and girl scouts, pack the car with our summer clothing, cats, dogs, favorite books, and enough stationery to keep in touch with our best friends, and head for the western Massachusetts village of Shelburne Falls. We had a house there—the house my great-grandfather had built in 1870—and because my dad’s flexible summer schedule as a professor allowed, we left the city for the fresh air of the rural village, easing into a slower paced life of playing with summer friends, going “down street” to buy candy and ice cream, swimming for fun, and—when I was old enough—snooping through the one-hundred years of belongings preserved in the nooks and crannies of the twenty-one room home.

There were storage closets everywhere in the old house, all stocked with precious items: a silk top hat, Delft china tea sets, carefully stored wedding dresses, and over twenty framed pictures of Abraham Lincoln (from very small to very large). One snooping mission had me in the large storage closet off of the main upstairs bathroom when I was about ten. I was bored—I probably had gotten into a fight with the summer friends who tended to be mean to me by that age. There was a humongous steamer trunk in this particular closet—probably three feet high, three feet wide, and two feet deep—that I had only explored once before. That’s where the black silk top hat was kept, along with a less formal collapsible top hat. I had taken those items out, laid them on the small steamer trunk across the little aisle in the large storage space and dug deeper this time, to a layer of treasured items stored for more than seventy-five years, uncovering several black and white speckled cardboard boxes, the size of shoe boxes, but much sturdier, certainly made to carry lives past for the future to discover.

In these boxes were hundreds and hundreds of small envelopes. I was intrigued by the names. Most I was familiar with—Roy, Philip, Arthur, Emma, Alice, Eddie, and two Georges. There were also several letters from Zebulon—I’d heard of him, but didn’t know all that much about his life—and more from Roxana, Ira, Rosabella, Olive, and Maria. For fun, my mother suggested I grab a box and we would take turns reading some letters aloud after dinner that evening. I grabbed the box on top, scooped out a bundle of letters that had been carefully wrapped in string, untied it, making sure to save the string to re-tie it as if it hadn’t been touched, and passed out three letters each to my mom, dad,  and sister, keeping four for myself. And so began my fascination with the daily lives of the souls that inhabited our house for the prior one-hundred years.

Those particular letters that evening were all from Uncle Roy, written from Dartmouth in 1901. Every letter ended with “send money!” Over the course of many more evenings from year to year we would take out the letters and get introduced to all of the great-uncles: Arthur, who had lived in Chicago and had died so young that my mom had never known him; Eddie, who wrote from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and later from his position as chief chemist of the United Drug Company in Washington, D.C.; Philip from his various jobs in Wyoming, Panama, and Arizona; and George F. (as opposed to George G.), often through his wife Daisy, from his jobs in Texas and Florida. My grandmother Alice, as well, wrote home, and also back and forth with her brothers and parents from Smith College, Boston, and from her summer stay in Germany in 1910.

When my sister Alix went to graduate school for Library Science, she used the letters for a huge indexing project. As a result, we then knew how many letters we had—nearly two thousand letters in all. We knew who wrote to whom and a timeline for the collection. Roxana Giles started writing letters home to Charlemont, Massachusetts in 1827 from her factory job in Ware. She always signed the letters with her name and her sister Emily’s name, telling her future descendants that this sisterly bond was dearly important to her. (Roxana had several other siblings, but Emily was the only sister close to her in age.) In an 1829 letter to my great-great grandfather Ira Merrill from friend Calvin Gilson of Bennington, Vermont, I discovered the likely source of my great grandfather George Gilson Merrill's middle name. In an 1858 letter from Amherst College President Edward Hitchcock, I learned that my family was helping the acclaimed geologist and early paleontologist find specimens from Shelburne Falls for his collection.

In 1871, my great-grandmother Emma described her wedding trip with “dear husband” George from Massachusetts to North Bass Island, Ohio, where George’s uncle Roswell Nichols was the first inhabitant, to Chicago, where due to tiredness on arrival the morning of October 8th, she and George decided to head straight for Uncle Nathaniel Merrill's home in Milwaukee and planned to spend time in Chicago on their return trip. This never happened as the Great Chicago Fire began spreading after Emma and George had left on the 8th.

The letters continue with sparseness through the 1870s and 80s (when Emma and George had small children at home), then picked up again in the mid-1890s when Arthur went off to Williams College. This starts the most prolific letter writing period for the Merrill family. As their children grew up and went off to explore the world, Emma and George made sure they stay connected with home. Philip tried to go hide in Arizona after becoming ill during his work on the Panama Canal, at one point being so out of touch that his oldest brother placed an ad in the local Flagstaff, Arizona paper asking for help in finding him. (Philip was fine—he was just out hunting and trapping in the wilderness.)

In 1905, Arthur, teaching at a private school in Chicago, suggested a round robin letter writing idea. He didn’t so much as suggest it, but rather assumed everyone in the family would participate, so he started the experiment with enthusiasm. “Enclosed the lost bird. Please give him something in the way of a contribution, send him to Wyoming, and let him stop this time in Chicago before the southern passage.” Arthur first wrote to Alice (who was in her first year at Smith College). We learn that Chicago had no strikes “at present,” but there were still quite a lot of small fires, especially in the poorer sections of town. Arthur had attended a lecture by Burton Holmes at Orchestra Hall. He reported that brother Philip had just passed through Chicago on his way to a job in Wyoming and that cousin Merrill—Assistant Principal at the same school—had taken a group of students to the “sand-dunes” for an overnight trip.

Alice then, in turn, writes to brother Eddie, also enclosing Arthur’s letter with hers. She writes of her courses in Latin, Greek, German, and Math, with the Solid Geometry class being taught by “a regular shark.” She writes of her medical exam at school. “My lungs are in fine shape. I blew 200 points which is forty more than the average Smith girl.” Alice went to the Freshman Frolic with Christine Hooper and went to Mount Tom on October 12th, Mountain Day. She wonders “How many broken necks and black eyes has the W.P.I. team got this season? (A reference to brother Eddie who was attending the Worcestor, Massachusetts school.) Alice also pleads, “For cat’s sake write.”

Maybe Eddie wrote and his letter was retained by someone or another along the way, but his words are not found within this packet of letters. Presumably he wrote to older brother Philip, by then in Sheridan, Wyoming. Philip then writes to “Poddy” (second oldest brother George F.) of the construction details at the site he is working at. (The boys and their father were all engineers of different sorts and they loved to inform each other about the latest engineering trends.) Philip also wrote that the closest large game hunting was fifty to sixty miles away and that his hotel for the first month in Sheridan cost $10. The Big Horn Mountain was thirty miles away and the highest point, Cloud Peak, was at 13,500 feet. The town was also well connected, he reported, with electric lights and a good water system to the mountains, with a prosperous coal mine nearby.

Daisy Merrill writes next. Daisy, Poddy’s wife, is much more entertaining than Poddy himself. I try to listen for her soft Irish brogue as I read her spirited words. Poddy—George F. that is— was “so meshed up with the duties of his new position” that he deferred the letter writing to Daisy. The young couple were at the time in Fort Dade, near Tampa, Florida, having just journeyed by train from Texas, where George had been working. “Uncle” offered George the position of superintendent of construction and civil engineer at For Dade and DeSoto at a salary of $540 a year. George “accepted so quickly as to make one gasp for ozone.” Daisy also writes of the heat and mosquitos, the pineapples, grapes, sweet potatoes, and “grape-fruits.” She reports that they didn’t have any rent to pay for their accommodations and that they could eat at the commissary there, with beef selling for nine cents per pound, no matter the cut. Daisy assures Alice to “be of good cheer, that teacher of Mathematics is…a holy terror & no mistake.” She ends by apologizing for the “horrible scrawl” and sends love from “Poddy.” (“It ought to be Paddy since he became mustacheless, & has so little desire to shave off the stubble.”)

Those at home, Emma and father George G., as well as brother Roy, don’t have letters included inside this round of family reports. In fact, the bulk of the saved letters ends in 1919, when Arthur died suddenly from viral meningitis at the age of forty-seven. He was, indeed, the driving force keeping all the siblings connected with their parents and each other. There are, of course, a smattering of missives over the years—1922, when my mother Olive was born and her dear Aunt Olive was so thrilled to learn of the baby’s name; 1943, when Uncle Roy received a polite response declining his offer of land in Charlemont, Massachusetts as the site of the future United Nations. Eddie’s son, Edward, a prominent educator and chemical engineer, later provided me with a series of communications he had had over the years with my grandmother Alice. Much of these discussed the Greek classics and Edward’s early success in his field.

Today, it’s email and texts. I save every one I receive. My kids have my email account passwords, and I expect them to treat all my saved emails with as much care as the old paper letters have received from their ancestors. I have learned so much from these long lost souls. They tirelessly held onto each other through their day-to-day reports of theater performances, bridge constructions, teaching methods, and who was stealing from father’s chicken coop. As I continue to read them, I still uncover more of their lives every time I open a letter that has rested unread for more than one hundred years. I can feel who they were, what made them tick, and they teach me how important it is to keep family together—if not physically close, then emotionally close. They succeeded in preserving their ties with each other, and have thrown the reins to me to wrap around my generation, and then to toss to the next.