Tag: Families

The Tennesseans

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing the history of our old house:

In September 1983, Elwood Stackwood Richardson and Mary Blanche Richardson of Smithville, Tennessee, took possession for use as a summer home. They already owned and operated the Dennys River Inn, a B&B in neighboring Dennysville, Maine. A decade later, the house was conveyed to Mary Blanche’s daughter and son-in-law, Wayne Henry and Mary Jo Warner of McMinnville, one county south in Tennessee. The move was essentially to handle the details of selling the site.

This stage of occupancy centers on Mary Blanche, who was born in 1916 in Puyallup, Washington, to a family of transplanted Maine lumbermen. After 1976, she married widower Elwood Richardson, born in 1907 in Bristol, Pennsylvania, and relocated with her daughter, Mary Jo, to Philadelphia. That’s where Wayne Henry Warner, born in 1941, enters the picture. He married Mary Jo, born in 1943, and became a high school football, track, and baseball coach in Tennessee.

Thus, they all would have been adults in their times in Eastport.

For them, Eastport was a summer home, one not rented out in winter, in part because of its rundown physical condition, as Mary Jo told me. Her mother had relatives in Maine, either in Whitney or Whitneyville, neither one far from Eastport. She also loved antiquing. Guests during the family’s summer often liked to tour the Franklin D. Roosevelt estate across the water in Canada, causing her to quip that she visited Campobello more than Eleanor had.

Elwood, meanwhile, enjoyed fishing.

Bicycling and taking nearby ferries were other summer activities.

Mary Blanche was responsible for having the shingles put on the exterior and would have appreciated our raising of the roof upstairs. “It was something she wanted to do,” I was told. The move was apparently inspired by New England author and illustrator Tasha Tudor. Mary Blanche did have a cat named Tasha, reflecting the fondness.

Mary Jo also confirmed that the beams in the front parlor existed at the time, along with the “rather basic” kitchen and its Montgomery Ward stovetop. The property across the street also a house trailer blocking a direct view of the ocean. The modular home came later. And she remembered how small the only bathroom was.

She also asked about the sewage situation in the cellar. What?

And then about our contractor, quite surprised that he shows up on time and sticks to his promises. No comment there.

She was equally delighted to learn that the downtown is no longer boarded up and that the arts scene has emerged. Her stepfather, Elwood, took up painting in his summers in Eastport and was part of a circle that had outdoor shows in town.

Eastport did look quite different that recently. It was a time when the population was sinking and many of the remaining but vacant canneries and their piers lining the downtown were falling into the sea, one by one.

Have you ever done genealogy?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

While living in the small industrial city that’s the setting for Hometown News, I began exploring my genetic roots, at least on my father’s side. It involved a lot of correspondence, especially with a cousin of my dad’s generation, as well as probing whatever records we could dig up.

By this time, my spiritual practice had recentered in the Quaker stream, or Society of Friends, where it turned out my ancestors had been active from the early 1660s until my great-grandfather moved from North Carolina to Ohio and “married out” in 1893. I now had access to historic minutes, correspondence, journals, and other resources that proved helpful.

My findings are presented on my Orphan George blog, should you be interested.

What fascinates me in regards to my fiction is the fact that so many of my ancestors were essentially countercultural in regard to the broader society. They were pacifist, for one, and wore distinctive garb and used distinctive language. (Sound hippie?) In North Carolina, their community had the first manumission society in the state, buying freedom for slaves and transporting them to safer lands. This was not the Deep South of popular culture.

These findings, and the research methods, proved quite helpful when I drafted my nonfiction New England history, Quaking Dover.

The techniques and insights also played into my novel What’s Left, where I took Cassia’s lineage on both sides back to her great-grandparents, including their quite different faith traditions.

I am intrigued by the values and practices from one generation to another. What is rejected and what is embraced?

In my case, I discarded the mainstream Christianity and lifestyle of my parents and grandparents only to find myself later reconnecting with much of the radical Christianity and countercultural outlooks of my great-grandparents. Well, most of them on my dad’s side. My mother’s were an entirely different matter.

As I’ve found, genealogy often presents a much different history than we’re taught in the conventional versions, especially when our focus is on everyday people rather than the political and military leaders and the upper class. The lives can go ways we wouldn’t have plotted. For instance, my family in North Carolina had a gold mine.

Oh, there could be so much more

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

If you’ve wondered about the many unanswered questions in my book Quaking Dover, let me say I’m hoping they become a prompt for other history fans to follow up on.

Frankly, if I hadn’t given myself the deadline of Dover’s 400th anniversary, I’d still be in the research stage rather than having a published book in hand.

I would especially be interested in pursuing what happened to Friends who were disowned by Meeting, especially over matters of marriage. How many joined other congregations – and which ones? How many drifted away from religion altogether? How many Quaker values did they continue, as well as which ones did they reject?

There are also the things from our own time that we might answer, if asked, but that will fall through the cracks. Ours are truly fast-moving times, and I’ve often been startled when presenting my own poetry and fiction to find points I have to explain to younger ears in the room. Transistors, the forerunner to computer chips, was a prime example.

So here we are once again, looking ahead and looking back in our own lives.

As for Dover, as the big 400th anniversary wraps up?

Happy New Year, all!

In all of the holiday festivities

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the colonial era, neither the Congregationalists/Puritans at First Parish nor the Quakers/Friends observed Christmas.

So much for singing festive carols or decorating a tree.

The Friends didn’t sing at all, actually, unless it was somehow spontaneous.

At First Parish, meanwhile, a bass viol was introduced in the 1700s to accompany the hymns.

That gave way in 1829 to an organ built by Bostonian William M. Goodrich. In 1878, the instrument was rebuilt and repositioned by Hutchings-Plaisted of Boston, with alterations in subsequent years.

In 1995, a thoroughly revised instrument was unveiled, the work of Biddeford, Maine, Faucher Organ company. A hybrid of the original pipes and of newer electronic and computer elements, it’s a monster machine capable of rattling the house and shaking the bottoms of your feet.

I am glad we simple Quakers don’t have to pay for its routine maintenance, though I am grateful for those who do.

Not bad for holiday festivities, including accompanying a community-wide Messiah sing.

It’s not the only option in town, either. For some, those carols have to wait till the end of Advent, when the Twelve Days begin.

And, for the record, the Greek Orthodox start celebrating Christmas 12 days later.

As for some of Dover’s conventional histories

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’ve previously mentioned newspaper editor George Wadleigh as a fascinating source of Dover historical narrative.

The Rev. Jeremiah Belknap, a renowned historian, proved far less helpful when it came to the Quakers. They seemed largely invisible to him.

I largely ignored the Rev. Alonzo Hall Quint, another Congregational minister, whose historical notes had been read by Wadleigh, probably when they were originally serialized in the Dover Enquirer from 1850 on. One of my reasons was practical: the scanned ebook edition of the book is nearly unreadable. Besides, even in retirement, I have only so much time. One point worthy of revisiting in the original would be the use of “inner light” in 1855 – if accurate, that would be the first reference to the Quaker doctrine anywhere. Previously, it was Inward Light, with a much different focus. I’m assuming this was a “correction” by John Scales in editing the full book edition published in 1900. Scales himself authored an independent colonial history published in 1923.

One source for later research would be the journals of the Rev. Enoch Place, a pioneer of the Free Will Baptist movement. He visited Friends Meetings in his travels from Strafford, which would offer a fresh perspective, as well as presiding at thousands of burials, baptisms, and weddings from 1810 to 1865. His might balance the histories of the period that revolve around Dover’s downtown mills.

For the history student, I see some doctoral dissertation possibilities

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

There’s so much more I’d like to know about details related to my Quaking Dover story, but I’m not a professional historian.

Some of these could be fodder for a Ph.D. dissertation.

  • An examination of Dover Friends book of minutes dealing with young men who enlisted in the Revolutionary War would be one.
  • Or of where individuals went in their religious affiliations after leaving Friends.
  • Even Richard Waldron’s full biography.
  • A list of the clerks of the Meeting and another of the recorded ministers and elders would be helpful.
  • Or an examination of the actual functioning of the provincial charters, especially the so-called “proprietary colonies.”
  • And, oh yes, a genealogical index of New England Quakers like William Wade Hinshaw’s encyclopedic indexes of New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Ohio.
  • I would even like to see an understandable examination of English settlement in Maine in its colonial years. Where, for instance, did the settlers go after watching from sea as smoke and flames rose from what had been their homes and villages in a fateful five-week period of 1676, eradicating all English from east of Casco Bay?

Am I the man you wanted me to be?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The question is asked by Zorro in the opera by Hector Armienta recently premiered in Albuquerque and Fort Worth. This version of the story is much more subversive than the one I encountered as a kid. And the musical drama is, from what I heard on the radio, very much worthy of retelling.

What stunned me in the question that it’s directed toward the father. How often in today’s Western culture does a son turn toward his father that way, rather than his mother? Not in my experience.

It is making me look toward Dad anew and suspect I hadn’t failed him that much, after all. But the question remains disturbing and enriching, all the same.

How do we males find this working as well in terms of our wives – or lovers? Or our children?

This really gets serious – and unending.

Lest we Friends be too proud

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

From Bowen Alpern’s book, Godless for God’s Sake:

“Much of what we tend to regard as the achievement of Friends as a whole was, in fact, the work of individual Friends, or small groups of Friends, often in the face of opposition or neglect of their monthly meetings. (One of the most positive – if often tedious – aspects of Quaker culture may be its capacity to produce or attract individuals who are willing to stand up to it).”