Sometime in 2006 I was handed an uneven manuscript of correspondence, pages written by hand and on various typewriters, and newspaper clippings. It represented an initial gathering of information about women who had been associated with Sewanee. The manuscript was 25 years old. A group called the Sewanee Trust for Historic Preservation had formed a few years ago, stimulated in part by the University administration's unilateral decisions about historic buildings and structures. Sewanee's late 1800s barn on Breakfield Road had once been in jeopardy, its timbers considered destined for a different use. A Victorian house on University Avenue was deemed infested with termites and bids had been solicited for its removal. Both structures still stand, however, because some people didn't want to lose them, and interceded on their behalf.
Often, nostalgia is powerless. I know the sinking feeling associated with landmark loss. I've felt it with many things, including the "Old El," the two-story brick elementary school in Escalante, once photographed by Dorothea Lange, then imploded with explosives around 1970. And with my great-grandfather's three-story brick house, which he specifically stated that he built as a monument to be remembered by. It has been lost, melted away to a single story, with neglect and lack of imagination, or lack of champions. A photograph and a drawing remain. (It is doubly sad that my great-grandfather, who had seventeen children, employed the same bricklayer to build the school; in effect, two of his monuments were lost.)
Not everything can be saved, the late historian Anita Goodstein once told me. And that's true. We have to make room for the present. But what is our obligation at present to save some of the past for the future? And what parts of the past do we save? And how do we do it, given the demands of the present, and the everyday?
The mostly oldtimers who helped organize the Trust were repositories of "institutional memory." They knew personally how some things used to be, and valued historical artifacts. Here's my take on it: They wanted a bit of control, a bit of respect, a bit of say. They did not want to deal with an ambush from the rear. They did not want to be called upon suddenly for brushfire action, which can require the excruciating and time-consuming task of contacting and educating people one-by-one. They wanted an organization in place to help guide decisions about Sewanee's historical artifacts, buildings and otherwise. And the fact of an organization's existence might give pause: If an intruder ("decider"?) knows a watchdog is staked out, he may think twice.
But once an organization exists, it doesn't just sit inertly waiting for an issue to come up to have an opinion about. It defines a wider purpose, and takes proactive stances.
So the new STHP held informational meetings, programs primarily about the history of buildings on the Domain of the University of the South, and they began to talk about what they might do: assist the University archivist, lead tours, endow plaques, sell flower bulbs and greeting cards, collect oral histories, support historical publications, produce a newsletter, and so on. Members gravitated toward the tasks that interested them.
Writer and editor David Bowman and designer and publisher Latham Davis created a newsletter with articles about Sewanee's history. It was a lovely publication. David called it Keystone, and I was one of the contributors who provided copy. My pieces were mostly biographical sketches. David called us three the Keystone "Kops."
At one of the Trust meetings, when the president had asked the membership about projects the organization might take on, Loulie Cocke, a genteel wisp of a Sewanee lady, rose from her seat in the back of the room, and suggested that the STHP finish the Sewanee Ladies project, which had been stalled for more than a couple of decades.
It was the first I had heard of it. Meg Binnicker, the Trust president, tracked it down, Bowman read it, and eventually the manuscript made its way to me. It originated with another historical organization, the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, or APTA, which had once had a Sewanee chapter. The original concept of the ladies book seems to have been to create something akin to Moultrie Guerry's pompous old book, The Men Who Made Sewanee, in which the men are often wearing garb of some significance. But there was really no clear parallel in the women's stories; the women were different, the stories were different, their contributions were different. Their grandiosity often operated on a domestic or humanitarian level, and required more discernment.
An initial committee of APTA, which included Loulie, the late Jeannette Avent, Betty Nick Chitty, and the late Arthur Ben Chitty, generated a list of significant Sewanee women and solicited biographical sketches of them, from family members, or from people who had known them, or perhaps from someone who had presented a biographical sketch at some meeting or other. The women included on the list were all deceased. The original concept did not include photographs; reproduction and printing of photos would have been too expensive at that time. But contributors were encouraged to deposit photographs of the profiled women in the University archives.
Mr. Chitty had passed on to his reward when the manuscript came to me, so I could only make some guesses. Some of the sequencing of the sketches was alphabetical by last name. However, from what I could determine, Mr. Chitty had a structural concept that fit the sketches into the history of Sewanee, which he divided into several periods, including a "Golden Age." He had made a stab at that narrative, but did not finish it. He did note that when women were admitted to the University, Sewanee was changed forever. I have an idea that from his vantage point and orientation he did not see the trees for the forest. His connecting narratives, drafts as they were, were not really about Sewanee's pre-coed women. Not surprisingly, he was re-telling the history of Sewanee from a standard viewpoint. He had, in the past, written a book titled Reconstruction at Sewanee and it informed his narrative. He was employed by the University in alumni relations, the history of Sewanee was patriarchal, and the University educated only male students for about three-quarters of its history.
At some point, the APTA chapter dissolved and the project was shelved. The chapter's money was returned to the state organization, except a bit of money that was left with the University, for publication of the project at a later date; it seems to have disappeared into the general fund. Mrs. Avent passed on as well.
And time passed. Then along came the STHP archaeologists, who excavated these old pages. At first reading, I found the cold manuscript an unwieldly hodge-podge and thought that nothing could be done with it. I set it aside. But sleeping on a problem can set the unconscious to work. When Bowman encouraged to me look at it again, I saw some bright spots. A handful of sketches were well-developed, well-written, honest and colorful. Some might be fleshed out with information that I could locate. And some of the sketches were instructive in their own way about the historical period and culture in which the women lived their lives. Sacrifices and frustrations were implicit. Some sketches were only the frames of pictures: about a woman's illustrious ancestors, about her husband, about her children. Some said very little, except that she was a wonderful mother and loved her grandchildren. But there were tantalizing tidbits as well, threads I could follow.
I entered the list of women on a spreadsheet and began to sort it this way and that. I had birth and death dates for some of them. Some obviously important women were missing. A couple of women didn't belong in the history of Sewanee. When the list was fixed, I had about a hundred women. (The book's index of names lists more than four hundred people.)
Loulie filled in some blanks and helped point me to various sources. I looked at cemetery records and tombstones to fill in dates. I joined Ancestry.com and delved into census records, death certificates, and other records. A third of the women were born before the Civil War, in places other than Sewanee. Half were born between the end of the War and the turn of the century, and the remainder born after 1900.
When I sorted the list by birth date, a structure suggested itself, coincident with a rough timeline, and the story of Sewanee was implicit. There they were, emerging from the page, the wives of the founders, and the mistresses of the early boarding houses. And it continued that way, the missionaries, the wives of the later faculty members and theologians, the writers, artists, the matrons of the residence halls, teachers of children and female students. Donors throughout, angels of mercy of all levels who saw needs, big and small, and met them as they were able.
The oldest woman, born in 1801, was Eliza Pannill Otey, long-suffering wife of the flamboyant first Bishop of Tennessee (I added her because I had written about her for Keystone, and a granddaughter had sent her picture). The youngest woman, born in 1923, was Joan Balfour Payne Dicks, from her photograph a modern woman who would not seem out of place today. She illustrated and wrote children's books, had a messy marriage, and committed suicide. A panorama of women had emerged, and begged to be animated.
I am not a women's historian, but I am good at research and at jigsaw and crossword puzzles. This project was a puzzle. I fact-checked and filled in. As I began to find the photographs, I discovered that they told their own story in evolving women's dress.
The project taught me a number of things about women's history, and the tracks we leave on the sands of time. Two women whose lives were extremely well-documented were Sarah Barnwell Elliott and Charlotte Moffett Gailor. Neither married. Miss Elliot was a writer, Miss Gailor an artist who also wrote. They were from prominent families, and left a paper trail that can be found in the University archives. Miss Elliott has been the subject of a book, and someone should write a book about Miss Gailor.
One woman, Susan Dabney Smedes, wrote an unusual and extremely valuable book, Memorials of a Southern Planter. It is ostensibly about her father, Thomas Dabney's, life, but much is apparent about Mrs. Smedes as well. She was widowed after only a few weeks, and did not remarry. (My questions in general led to new acquaintances. The search for Mrs. Smedes led to a correspondence with Rebecca Drake, a historian in Raymond, Mississippi, where in 1830 Thomas Dabney relocated his plantation from Virginia. Becky and I were able to share enthusiasms and help each other with information.).
A couple of women left short narratives of their lives for their grandchildren. They are characterized by a certain humility, but these kinds of documents, especially if they contain details, names and dates, are extremely valuable.
The photo search took me far and wide. Photographs provided authenticity and interest, and with help I located images of ninety percent of the women, continuing to search even when the pickings had become slim indeed. When I went to the archives, my initial search image was (suspicious-looking, possible Sewanee pillar) "woman." I found some women's photos in the husbands' files. Many photos were unidentified, and likely will remain so. Significantly, a photo album kept by a matron, Miss Johnnie Tucker, who never married, was a valuable source of photos, as were the scrapbooks of the Sewanee Woman's Club, in which I found group photos. If a woman's sketch indicated where she had attended college, I was able to contact archivists at other universities and ask them to look in yearbooks.
As I continued to puzzle out and paste in information (and sometimes I had to correct birthdates and change the woman's place in the lineup--I suspect some fibbing about ages), The picture of Sewanee's women became clearer. However, many questions remain, among them Which Sonia Dabney Thurmond (there were two) is the Thurmond Library named for? And where (it must exist) is a photograph of Irene Ellerbee Hall (wife of Vice-Chancellor Billy Hall)? I went around and around on this one, and quit when I reached a librarian who said, "You asked me that question three months ago." I spent a lot of time on this book, filling in small details as best I could, and at the last I wrote a little song about the ladies.
My "outsider" perspective, and the fact that I found no blood relatives in the gaggle of females, gave me a certain advantage in that I could, I hope, take a fresh look at the material. The result is book standing to the side of, outside, the standard narrative, although these women were there all along in shadow. Sewanee Ladies shines the spotlight on a half of the population that provided essential scaffolding and more, and much of historical and general interest can be read between the lines.
One of my old professors, E. Raymond Hall, told me that "there comes a time you have to go to press." Finally it was time to finish up and move on to the next projects.
One of them, I thought, should be writing a few of my memories, with names and dates, and labeling my photographs. Lessons I learned from this project make me wish I had asked more questions (not just about names and dates, but about feelings and impressions, likes and dislikes) of my own mother and grandmother and aunts, and had recorded their answers. Honesty, emotion and homely or unusual detail are sometimes in short supply in accounts of the generic "my life."
My great-great-grandfather, Charles Griffin, kept a journal in which he recounted the offices of authority he held in the Mormon church. He also wrote about harassing the U.S. Army regiment led by Albert Sydney Johnston, and traveling here and there. But he says little about his wife or the births of his children. To my knowledge, his wife, Sarah Smith, did not keep a journal. She was the daughter of Hyrum Smith, who with his brother, Joseph, was killed by a mob at a jail in Carthage, Illinois.
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