Women Writers – The Parnassus Pen

I Read “Yesteryear” This Week

My sister posted a few weeks ago about our shared obsession with anything adjacent to “Little House on the Prairie.” It was the early 80’s. Michael Landon starred as the frequently bare-chested Charles “Pa” Ingalls in the television drama adapted from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books. I was barely in elementary school, so I paid no attention to Pa Ingall’s six-pack. I paid a lot of attention to Laura’s braided hair and her bonnets. And her numerous sisters. I had long brown braids, just like Laura’s! Our mom sewed us our own bonnets and matching ruffled nightgowns. I had a lot of sisters, just like Laura.

We lived in rural central Pennsylvania when our “Little House” fascination began. Or, rather, we were born into our “Little House” era. Amish farms surrounded our small town. (The town often smelled like manure.) Our family drove past the farms in our station wagon, and I watched Amish kids my age run around barefoot. Amish families travelled past our house in their black, horse-drawn buggies. An Amish family even owned the local bakery / bookstore! (Mom took me to the Amish store and I picked out a book for myself. The owners’ son rang me up at the counter. He had six fingers on each hand. Mom told me that the young man’s parents established a store for him to run because he was unable to work on the family farm. Years later, I saw a photo in my high school biology textbook of a six-fingered hand that resembled the hands of the store owners’ son. The book introduced me to the term “Ellis-van Creveld syndrome,” a “genetic disorder in the Amish community.”)

The town’s volunteer fire chief owned the deli directly across the street from the volunteer fire station. The fire chief answered the fire department’s landline phone while he filled deli orders. The all-volunteer ambulance station sat next to the fire station. My dad volunteered on the ambulance crew because the town was so small that everyone had to volunteer to do something, or else the town wouldn’t have basic emergency services. That’s how small and isolated our town was. When our elderly neighbor suffered a fatal sudden cardiac arrest, my dad was on the ambulance crew that responded. Another time, a local Amish boy fell out of a hay loft and suffered a head injury. Dad had to drive the ambulance that transported him 50 miles to Hershey Medical Center. Medical helicopter evacuations didn’t exist in our community back in the “olden days” of my childhood.

I read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s original “Little House” books, and also that bummer of a memoir about her newlywed life “The First Four Years.” (Spoiler alert: Laura and Almonzo’s infant son dies. Their crop fails at least once, maybe several times. Then, she burns down their first house in a cooking accident.)

Our aunt gifted us a book titled “The Hunky-Dory Dairy” by Anne Lindbergh about an eleven-year-old girl who meets a farm family that is stuck in time in the 1800’s. The girl from the twentieth century shows the girl from the 1800’s her Sony Walkman cassette player. (It was the 80’s, after all.) The girl from the 1800’s teaches the girl from the twentieth century how to make butter and stuff.

So, I’m a sucker for books about rural life in the 1800’s, or about people who romanticize this rural, 1800’s-ish life.

My sister K. taught me how to use a public library this past March. Okay, not really. I worked in my college’s library for four years. When I was fresh out of college, I used the computers at my local library almost every day after work so that I could look for a better-paying job. (I was too cheap or too poor to pay for my own internet access.) Then, I got rich and lazy and I paid for my own internet access and purchased all of the books that I wanted to read. However, K. is a librarian. One of her favorite topics is “how to use a library card to get free stuff.” K. inspired me to “refresh” my library card, because I hadn’t used it for so long that it expired.

I added myself to my local library’s hold list for the novel “Yesteryear,” by Caro Claire Burke. I did this at the beginning of April. At that time, there were at least 50 holds on the county’s 18 physical copies of the book. It seemed to me that it would be a fun story that involved time travel to the 1800’s. I had no idea until yesterday that Anne Hathaway already signed a contract to produce a movie adaptation of this novel. I don’t follow anything on TikTok and the only reason that I know that BookTok exists is because I heard about it on a podcast.

Anyway, my “turn” for one of the 18 county-wide copies of “Yesteryear” came up on Thursday. I read the book on Thursday evening, Friday and Saturday because rained all three days. I returned the book to the library Saturday afternoon so that the next person on the list could read it.

Here’s what I think about “Yesteryear“: It’s a weird book.

The protagonist is a social media influencer by the name of Natalie Heller Mills. She is a parody of Pioneer Woman’s Ree Drummond or else that family with 18 kids. Anyway, she marries into a rich, conservative Christian family and her father-in-law gives her the money to buy a farm in Idaho. She has an Instagram account promoting her large family and their lifestyle as “homesteaders.” She is a “tradwife.”

However, it’s all fake. They buy most of their food at the grocery store, because her husband is actually a terrible farmer. They depend on their immigrant farmworkers and their household staff in order to function. They mistreat “the help.”

Then one morning, Natalie wakes up in hell. Actually, she wakes up in what appears to be the year 1855. Life as a woman bites for her. Modern medical care doesn’t exist in this new universe. The entire family is filthy. Her husband physically assaults her. (Warning: this book does describe the sexual assault of adult women.)

The book alternates between life in this hellish new universe and flashbacks to Natalie’s journey from a high-achieving high school track star and Harvard scholarship student, to her marriage to the son of a wealthy politician, to her success as a grifting social medical influencer.

My husband Jonathan bought me several books for our anniversary last month. He confessed that he “almost” bought me this book, but in the end decided not to because he “wasn’t sure whether I would like it.” (He didn’t know that I had this on my “to be read” list.) On Amazon, the hardcover is currently $19.50 marked down from $30, and the paperback is currently $29.82. (Yes, Amazon is selling the hardcover for LESS than they are selling the paperback.) I assume that the book costs $30 or close to $30 at a real bookstore. I’m glad that I waited for my turn at a library copy.

Part of me feels that the author wrote the book in order to “teach the reader a lesson,” but I’m still not sure what that lesson was supposed to be. Yeah, I already knew that life as a woman was terrible in the 1800’s and that life as a woman can still be bad in the 2000’s. I already knew that most of social media is fake. I already knew that modern medicine is good. I already knew that a lot of “Christian” culture is designed to make women feel badly about themselves. I already knew that life is easier when you’re rich. I already knew that it’s really easy when you have a lot of money to judge the choices of people who don’t have a lot of money.

I feel like a terrible person to admit this, but I laughed reading this book. I feel terrible because several women and children get hurt. However, it’s a dark comedy. I imagine that some readers will choose this book because it is fan fiction about a social media influencer – someone like Pioneer Woman who is already rich – who “gets her comeuppance.”

I posted above a photo that I took of our own house yesterday. Our house was built in the 1890’s and we like historic architecture. We also like having lived in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. I imagine that most of the readers of “Yesteryear” also like living in the year 2026. Otherwise, they wouldn’t choose to read a book about how awful it is to live in the past.

Telegraph Operators and Their Heartbreaking Tragedies

Jonathan and I live in a house built in the 1890’s.

The Alter family originally owned our home. This same family is now buried in a churchyard down the street.

Jonathan researched the Alter family.

Let’s start with the family patriarch, Frank Alter Sr.

Alter was born in 1871 in Pittsburgh.

Alter’s father fought in the Civil War. Alter’s father then maintained a long career with the Allegheny Valley Railroad Company.

Frank Alter Sr.’s own professional life began at age 17 with his own job at the Allegheny Valley Railroad Company as a telegraph operator. Four years later, he was appointed station agent at New Kensington.

Now, shortly after Alter assumed his first job with the railroad, the Johnstown Flood killed over 2,000 people, in May 1889. A privately-owned dam on a private lake upstream from Johnstown failed. The wall of water demolished the communities that sat between the lake and Johnstown, and then the water hit Johnstown and destroyed it as well.

The flood occurred upstream from New Kensington. It occurred on a tributary to a tributary of the Allegheny River. According to the book “The Johnstown Flood” by David McCullough, flood debris washed downstream from Johnstown, eventually into the Allegheny River, on to Pittsburgh and points beyond. McCullough wrote that somebody plucked a live baby out of the Allegheny River in Verona, which is downstream from New Kensington. McCullough wrote that onlookers stood on the banks of the Allegheny, watching the results of the flood flow past them. Some even plucked souvenirs from the river.

Did Alter first learn about the flood during his duties in the telegraph office? Did he join the crowds which lined the Allegheny River’s banks?

Now, I grew up an hour’s drive south of Johnstown, and my sixth grade class studied the Johnstown Flood. We read excerpts from McCullough’s book.

McCullough acknowledged at the beginning of his book that “most” of the dialogue in Chapters 3 and 4 of his book had been taken directly from a transcription of testimony taken by the Pennsylvania Railroad in the summer of 1889. The railroad’s tracks lined the tributaries hit hardest by the flood. The railroad’s telegraph system documented events leading to the moments before the flood wiped out the tracks and the telegraph lines.

McCullough’s book noted that in the moments before the Johnstown flood happened, a railroad telegraph agent communicated the impending dam failure to Hettie Ogle, who ran the “switchboard and Western Union office” in Johnstown.

McCullough identified Ogle as a Civil War widow who had worked for Western Union for 28 years. The book noted that she was with her daughter Minnie at the time. She passed the message on to her Pittsburgh office. McCullough noted that the two perished in the flood and their bodies were not recovered.

When I was in the sixth grade, I was told that Hettie Ogle faithfully stayed at her telegraph post and relayed river gauge data until at last she wrote:

THIS IS MY LAST MESSAGE

The story haunted me.

Based on how this story was presented to our class, I was under the impression that Hettie Ogle was trapped in the telegraph office with just her daughter. I assumed that Hettie Ogle and her daughter were “rare” because they were women who also worked outside the home at the telegraph office.

Now, here is something that McCullough’s book did NOT tell me, and that I learned instead from the website for the Johnstown Area Heritage Association (JAHA): Ogle was actually trapped in that office with her daughter Minnie, “four other young ladies” who were named by the JAHA website, and also two named men. When I read the website, I understood this to mean that all eight of the named women and men who were trapped in this telegraph office worked in the telegraph industry. They all perished.

I didn’t realize until I first read the JAHA website that Hettie Ogle actually managed an office full of staff. I also didn’t realize that many of the employees in Johnstown’s Western Union office in May 1889 were women.

I have since figured out that if Hettie Ogle worked for Western Union for 28 years until she died in 1889, that means that she started her Western Union career in 1861. The Civil War also started in 1861. As I noted above, she was identified as a war widow. Did she have to take a job with Western Union in order to support her children when her husband went off to war? Did she do it out of a sense of duty for the war effort, and then she stayed with it because she enjoyed the work? What circumstances led her to her “duty” operating the telegraph?

I speculate that since Frank Alter Sr. got his start in the railroad industry as a telegraph operator, the tragedies of the Johnstown Flood would have impacted him personally. Perhaps he even knew some of the telegraph and / or railroad employees who died that day in 1889.

The telegraph industry of the 1800’s fascinates me because I think a great deal about my own dependence on technology.

I first realized how much I – or at least my sense of well-being – depended on being able to keep contact with others and with information on September 11, 2001. I lived in the family home in Somerset County. I worked in downtown Johnstown. Flight 93 crashed between these two points while I was at work that day.

After I and my co-workers watched the twin towers burn live on television, our employer’s co-owner told us to “go back to work.”

However, a few minutes later, this same co-owner’s daughter rushed through the office to announce that a plane had crashed in Somerset County. (This plane, we later learned, was Flight 93.) We learned that we – along with every other worker in downtown Johnstown at that time – were being evacuated because a federal court building existed in downtown Johnstown. I couldn’t reach my family who lived with me in Somerset County on the phone. I attempted, and I had no connection. I then learned that we were being asked to stay off of our phones in order to leave the lines available for emergency crews. I also learned that a portion of Route 219 – the main highway that I used to drive to my family home in Somerset County – was closed due to the morning’s events. I was being forced to leave downtown Johnstown due to the mandatory evacuation, but I had no information about whether I would be able to get back to my home in Somerset County.

I made it home to Somerset County without incident. However, this was the first time that I remember feeling confused because all of my decision making instincts depended on information that I couldn’t access.

More recently, I thought that I was so slick because I specifically curated my Twitter feed to follow the feeds for Pittsburgh’s transit agency, the National Weather Service, and several other emergency management agencies. I worked in downtown Pittsburgh by then, and I commuted home each weeknight – usually by bus – to New Kensington. I reasoned that with my specially curated Twitter feed, I would have available all of the information that I needed to make informed decisions about my commute home if I were to be in Pittsburgh and a natural disaster – or another terrorist attack – happened.

However, on the day that Pittsburgh and its surrounding region had a major flash flooding event, Twitter broke. I had based my entire theoretical emergency plan on having up-to-the date tweets from all of the sources that I listed above. I had access to no updated information from any of these sources.

Once again, I felt completely betrayed by technology at the moment when I felt its need the most.

Now, for another story that I have about being dependent on technology:

I read part of “The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant).” Julia Dent Grant (JDG) was born in 1826. In 1844, Samuel Morse sent the United State’s first telegram over a wire from Washington to Baltimore. (Congress partially funded this.) In 1845, JDG’s father, Frederick Dent, travelled from their home in St. Louis to Washington for business. He sent a telegram to Baltimore. JDG wrote that her father received an answer within an hour and that “it savored of magic.” The event was such a big deal that Frederick Dent brought the telegraph repeater tape back home to St. Louis to show the family.

Now I’m going to skip ahead in the memoirs to 1851. At this point in the memoirs, JDG is married to Ulysses S. Grant and they have an infant son. Julia visited family in St. Louis while her husband was stationed at Sackets Harbor, near Watertown, in New York State. JDG planned to telegraph her husband from St. Louis, and then travel with her nurse to Detroit. Then, she would release her nurse and meet her husband in Detroit. Finally, she would travel with her husband from Detroit to Sackets Harbor. I am under the impression that the trip from St. Louis to Detroit to Watertown was all by train.

Well, JDG telegraphed her husband in St. Louis per the plan. She left St. Louis and travelled with her nurse to Detroit. She dismissed her nurse and waited for her husband in Detroit. Her husband never showed up. JDG eventually travelled alone with her baby to Buffalo, hoping to meet her husband there. Her husband wasn’t in Buffalo, so she continued on the train to Watertown. From Watertown, she had to hire a carriage (the Uber of the 1800’s), and travel to Madison Barracks, the military installation at Sackets Harbor. The entrance to Madison Barracks was closed, so she had to yell to get a sentry’s attention.

The telegram that JDG sent to her husband from St. Louis arrived at Sackets Harbor IN THE NEXT DAY’S MAIL.

That’s right – at some point in the journey, the telegram failed to perform its basic function as a telegram. The telegram became snail mail.

After JDG’s husband was promoted during the Civil War, he travelled with his very own personal telegraph operator. (In fact, the Grants learned about President Lincoln’s assassination through a personal telegram received by the personal telegraph operator.)

By the end of the Civl War, the Grants had come a long way since their days of “snail-mail telegrams.”

Other people have actually written entire books about how telegraphs and semaphores affected the Civl War.

Here’s one of my favorite parts of JDG’s memoirs: At one point during the war, JDG asked her father, Frederick Dent, why the country didn’t “make a new Constitution since this is such an enigma – one to suit the times, you know. It is so different now. We have steamers, railroads, telegraphs, etc.“

I just find this so fascinating because JDG witnessed her country’s tremendous changes that resulted from Technology. She wondered how all of these Technology changes affected her country.

I, personally, spend a lot of time wondering about how Communication Technology in general – the telegraph, the internet, whatever – changed our national culture and also changed each of us as people.

Remember the End: Greensburg Historical Fiction

Greensburg Station. Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Photo taken November 3, 2019. This is now the Greensburg Amtrak station. This was originally a Pennsylvania Railroad station. The station opened in 1912. (Photo: Jenny Gaffron Woytek)

I have family who lived in the Greensburg-ish, Pennsylvania, area in the early 1900’s. A bunch of them died young and / or poor, so I can’t tell you much about them. However, because of them, I got stuck on Western PA history.

I read this historical fiction novel titled “Remember the End” by Agnes Sligh Turnbull. Turnbull was a New York Times bestselling writer from New Alexandria, PA.

Turnbull graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP). (My sister, a double IUP grad, told me that IUP used to have a Turnbull Hall. This got knocked down and replaced with a parking lot.)

Anyway, Turnbull wrote Remember the End. This novel began in the late 1800’s in Scotland, then moved to the Greensburg area, then ended in Greensburg around 1917.

(The book didn’t actually list dates. I only knew that the book ended around 1917 because at the end of the story, several of the characters talked about fighting in the War (World War I). The War started in 1914. The United States entered the War in 1917. )

At the very beginning of Remember the End, (the very poor) Alex McTay left his home in Scotland. He emigrated to Pennsylvania. He fell in love with Maggie, a (poor, but not quite as poor) Westmoreland County horse trader’s daughter.

Alex married Maggie. He opened coal mines. He became a millionaire before his 35th birthday. He built a fancy home for Maggie in Greensburg.

I think that Turnbull based the protagonist on a hybrid of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick. At one point in the story, McTay referred to Andrew Carnegie as his hero or his role model or something.

Unlike Andrew Carnegie, McTay didn’t become a philanthropist.

McTay deliberately ruined his business rival’s life after the rival humiliated him at a fancy Greensburg party.

Remember the End haunts me because my family lived in Western PA during this same time frame. Fictional Alex McTay’s fortune could very well have been built upon my family’s backs.

I posted above a photo of Greensburg’s train station. The Pennsylvania Railroad built this station in 1912. So, if Alex McTay existed in real life, he and his family could have travelled through this station. Did Turnbull visualize Alex McTay in this station?

Turnbull is now buried in New Alexandria. Remember the End is now out of print. I purchased my copy used.

Meeting Aaron Burr in the Alleghenies

Scene from the Allegheny Mountains between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia

On July 11, 1804 – 215 years ago today – Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in their famous duel. Alexander Hamilton died the next day.

Burr reportedly travelled west through Pennsylvania in the duel’s aftermath.

Later, Burr was accused of conspiring to found a new empire and install himself as the leader. Burr allegedly travelled from Pittsburgh, down the Ohio River to Blennerhassett Island. Burr allegedly intended to stage a militia at Blennerhassett Island. Allegations swirled that other prominent Americans, including future POTUS Andrew Jackson, played a role in the Burr conspiracy.

From what I understand, Burr’s daughter Theodosia waited at Blennerhassett Island, thinking that her father would install her as his official hostess in this new empire. The Blennerhassett family had to flee from the island after the allegations came out against them and Burr.

Now, the Burr conspiracy allegedly happened in 1804/05 – 1807, and Aaron Burr was arrested in 1807 and tried for treason. A U.S. circuit court acquitted Burr.

I found a chance connection between Aaron Burr and the mother-in-law of ANOTHER future POTUS. Julia Dent Grant (JDG), the wife of future POTUS Ulysses S. Grant, was the first First Lady to write her own memoirs. Mrs. Grant’s memoirs were published years after her death.

In “The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant),” she wrote that her own mother, Ellen Bray Wrenshall Dent, grew up in Pittsburgh and travelled to Philadelphia to attend school.

Mrs. Grant wrote in her memoirs that Mrs. Dent told a story to her children about the time that she stopped in a tavern in the Allegheny Mountains and Aaron Burr was at that same tavern! Mrs. Dent remembered that Burr and “his army” showed kindness to her.

Actually, here is the quote from JDG’s memoirs:

“Mamma has told me of riding on horseback all the way from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, where she was sent to school, and of once meeting Aaron Burr and his army in the Allegheny Mountains encamped around the little tavern which contained one room and a kitchen. This one room was, of course, occupied by the officers. Mamma, though much fatigued, was very loath to lie on the settle, or bench, before them all to rest until they pressed around and made for her a bed and a pillow of their cloaks and begged her to rest, telling her she would be just as safe there as in her mother’s arms. Lying down at last, they covered her with another martial cloak, and she slept as soundly as the princess in the fairy tale.“

Now, I actually grew up in the Allegheny Mountains between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. I never heard this story until I read JDG’s memoirs.

I wonder what year this occurred. Mrs. Dent was born in 1793. I am under the impression that Mrs. Dent would have been a schoolgirl in the first decade of the 1800’s. Keep in mind that Burr shot Hamilton in 1804. The Burr conspiracy allegedly happened in 1804/05 – 1807. Aaron Burr was arrested for treason in 1807.

So, was Burr in the process of planning the alleged Burr conspiracy when JDG’s mother saw him at the tavern? When JDG said “Aaron Burr and his army,” did JDG mean the militia that Burr allegedly raised for the conspiracy?

This story stands out to me because, in my mind, Mrs. Dent said to her children (including future FLOTUS Julia Dent Grant), “Did I ever tell you about that time that I met a very famous person? Wait until you hear about this!”

Now, keep in mind that Ellen Bray Wrenshall Dent passed away in 1857. The American Civil War started in 1861. Mrs. Dent’s son-in-law, General Ulysses S. Grant, captured Forts Henry and Donelson in 1862 and saw victory at Vicksburg in 1863. So, Mrs. Dent passed away before her own son-in-law became nationally famous.

Did you ever meet famous person? Was this person Aaron Burr-famous?

My Sister Met Elizabeth Gilbert’s Sister

I have four sisters. Two of my sisters, K. and E., just went on a girls’ weekend together in West Virginia. I wasn’t there because I went sailing on Lake Erie with my husband. Anyway, K. remembered the time that she sat next to Elizabeth Gilbert’s sister at a library association luncheon. K. wrote this post on her own blog: The Story of the Time I Sat Next to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Sister at Lunch.