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About the author

Mary Beckley Bristow was born 18 November 1808 in southwestern Bourbon County, Kentucky and died 17 March 1890 less than a hundred miles away in Kenton County. She was the only surviving daughter of James and Jane Shelton Clarkson Bristow. Her grandparents, Julius and Elizabeth Sandidge Clarkson and James and Margaret Clopton Bristow, had crossed the Appalachians to Kentucky with their families from the Virginia Piedmont two decades earlier, part of the vast migration to new lands opened for settlement following the American Revolution.

Aunt Polly, as she was known to her many nieces and nephews, never married, possibly due to her uncertain health. Although she lived into her ninth decade, she had suffered from early childhood with a variety of physical afflictions. A studio photograph taken a few years before the Civil War reveals her small frame, but her apparent frailty is belied by the direct, penetrating gaze of her luminous, intense eyes. She looks directly into the camera, or perhaps through it, as if she might be evaluating the state of the photographer's soul. Mary sits calmly: self-contained, serious, not given to unwonted frivolity. The highlights of her lustrous black hair are echoed in the folds of her black satin dress, fitted about her tiny waist, the only accent a simple white collar like that of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, fastened with a modest brooch. The effect is not one of drabness but of subtle, understated elegance. Fittingly, the picture is a double portrait: beside Mary is her Mother, her thinning gray locks covered by an old-fashioned mobcap trimmed with lace. Jane Bristow's gaze is perhaps a little more abstracted. Her worn hands and weathered face bear traces of eight decades of ministering to children and servants, answering the demands of this world while preparing for the next.

Central to Mary's life was her intense religious faith, gained after years of inner struggle. She viewed every event through the lens of her religious experience. She came by her interest naturally; both of her parents took matters of faith seriously, though they came to a parting of the ways. Her Mother remained a staunch Baptist to her death, while her father had left that denomination and joined the followers of Thomas Campbell, attaining some reputation as a preacher.

Mary was well educated, able to quote Alexander Pope and Saint Augustine, and her writing displays a familiarity with history unusual for her time — and ours. She tells us that she was inspired to transcribe her letters and begin what she termed her 'Record' of events by the "old songs and letters" of a great aunt, Molly Clarkson. "Very precious were these old relics to me in the first years of my pilgrimage."¹   The Record begins in 1857 and continues, with gaps, until 1871. The letters she transcribed date from about 1840 to 1856.

About the times

The world into which Mary was born would have been easily understood by her grandparents' grandparents, who had come to Tidewater Virginia from Stuart England over a century earlier. The world from which she passed 81 years and four months later would have been strange beyond their belief. The eight decades of her life spanned the industrial revolution and the transformation of an uncertain experiment in self government into a world power.

The month Mary was born Thomas Jefferson was nearing the end of his second term as President of a young United States, and free white men in all seventeen states of the Union gathered to call out their votes, selecting James Madison as his successor. Congress had earlier that year appropriated funds for work on the National Road from Maryland to Pittsburgh to improve communication between the original states along the Atlantic coast and the new states west of the Appalachians. The importation of slaves had been banned on January 1st, the earliest date allowed by the Constitution. The country was still marveling over the reports of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, who had returned from their exploration into the territory of the Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of the nation. The man who had sold Louisiana to the United States, Napoleon Bonaparte, was in his fifth year as Emperor of the French, nearing the height of his power.

Although Kentucky and Tennessee had been states for more than a decade, vast tracts of land north of the Ohio River and in the deep South were still owned and occupied by the original inhabitants — Shawnee, Sauk, Cherokee, Creek and a score of other nations — who were not at all reconciled to the invasion of their territory by land-hungry whites, as the great Tecumseh and his followers were to demonstrate within a few years. Mary was born in "the Old West," which had been settled only recently. Her mother recalled the Kentuckians' response to the last of the Indian raids south of the Ohio,² and her eldest brother and uncles took part in the War of 1812.³   Mary's passing coincided with the "Closing of the Frontier" when settlement had blanketed the continent, and the surviving native tribes confined to reservations in out-of-the-way places, existing for the most part on grudging handouts from their conquerors. By her adult years, Kentucky was safe enough for a young woman to sit alone on a river bluff and daydream about "the former monarchs of the forest" and imagine "the stealthy steps of an Indian warrior behind me."⁴

Mary witnessed great social changes. In her lifetime, the population of Kentucky grew more than five-fold, from 400,000 in 1810 to 2 million in 1890, and that of the United States by almost nine times, from 7.2 million to 62.9 million. At Mary's birth only one out of a hundred Kentuckians lived in a place large enough to classified as urban; at her death, one out of five.⁵   These transformations in society were made possible by equally dramatic shifts in technology. The first steamboat appeared on the western rivers three years after her birth, and she was a mature adult before the first railroad made its way into Covington.⁶   Although the steam engine made long distance travel faster and less arduous, getting to the depot or the wharf sometimes presented a challenge.⁷   Roads remained notoriously bad until well after her death, when automobiles provided the catalyst for improved construction, and fuel taxes supplied the necessary financing.

In Mary's childhood, for all practical purposes, news traveled no faster than a person could walk or a horse could trot, a speed little changed for millennia. By her middle years, Samuel Morse's electric telegraph was in widespread use, and by the time of her death, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, invented a dozen years before, was well established, with thousands of subscribers in cities across the country.⁸

As transportation improved and manufactured goods became more available, the self-sufficiency of the family farm decreased. In her parents' time, the pots and pans needed in the kitchen, and the axes and plowshares and firearms needed outside were produced by craftsmen in small shops; the spinning wheel and hand loom were common household fixtures. Where Mary's grandparents and their neighbors would have depended on the labors of their families and servants to produce much that was worn or eaten or used, Mary and her nieces turned increasingly to "store-bought" goods from the nearby general store at Union or from the emporiums of Covington or Cincinnati, goods which had been turned out by the millions in great factories in the mill towns of New England and Pennsylvania.

Like most of us, Mary seldom comments on changes. She accepts things as they are, sparing little time to reflect on their novelty. Just as we in our everyday lives seldom marvel at television, ATMs, or wide-body jet planes, Mary regards steamboats, railroads and photography as unremarkable parts of her mental landscape, even though none these things had existed at her birth. If Mary did not ponder the import of the great technological and cultural changes that swept her world, it was in part because the physical world — which she called the world of time — was less important to her than the hereafter — eternity.

About the family

Mary's family was not untypical for the time and place. First, it was large. She tells us that she was one of thirteen children; her mother, Jane Shelton Clarkson, was the eldest of eleven, and most of Mary's aunts and uncles had equally large families. Her father came from a small family: he had only three brothers and some half-siblings. The next generation was proportionally larger.⁹

Second, the family group included more people than we are used to. Mary's entries reveal several examples of extended families, not limited to parents and children, but including grandparents, widows and orphans.¹⁰

Third, interrelationships were more complex. Several of Mary's cousins married other cousins, resulting in multiple degrees of kinship.¹¹   What we may call the social geography of rural Americans in the early nineteenth century was effectively limited by the distance one could walk or ride to and from in a day, narrowing the pool of prospective mates. A comparison of census listings and marriage and probate records shows how often people did marry "the boy next door" or "the girl down the lane."

Fourth, and less typical (even for Kentucky), the household included slaves. In Mary's mind the term "family" included all within the household, black and white.¹²   Her Virginia ancestors had owned African slaves for more than a century. What has been termed the white settlement of the frontier was actually a venture of black and white together.

Fifth, Mary's immediate family were farmers, as were the great majority of their contemporaries, but she could count among her kindred many in the professions. Her eldest brother, Jack, and at least one uncle, James Minor Clarkson, were physicians, as were some cousins. Even those whose main occupation was farming were ready to turn their hands to other jobs. Her father operated one of the first mills in southwestern Bourbon County.¹³   Others followed skilled trades, like her Uncle Julius Willis Clarkson, who was a carpenter. The family seems to have displayed an affinity for language; several members were preachers, lawyers, or legislators, along with some journalists and hymn-writers, all highly verbal occupations.

About names

In any kinship group as large as Mary's, there are bound to be clusters of favorite names, repeated from one generation to the next, such as Anselm, Reuben, Lucien, Elizabeth, Mary, Sarah, and Mildred. Sorting out all these people is made difficult not only by the repetition but also by the numbers involved. The second half of the previous century had witnessed an explosion in the variety of personal names. The old British standbys, such as John and Mary, William and Jane, were supplemented by borrowings, first from the Old Testament, such as Jedediah, Reuben and Gideon, and then from literary and historical sources, which yielded such names as Julius (the Noblest Roman), Statira (the wife and daughter of the Persian Great King Darius) and Alexander (the Macedonian conqueror who spared their lives). Also popular in the decades following American independence were names given to commemorate the Founding Fathers or other Revolutionary heroes, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Francis Marion. In the absence of female generals and statesmen as role models, girls received more abstract names, such as Philadelphia, Virginia, and America. After 1800, there was a surprisingly large number of boys named for the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother, Lucien.¹⁴

Sometimes the choice was made to honor a religious leader, such as Lewis Lunsford (1753-1793), a Virginia Baptist who was renowned as "the Wonderful Boy" and "the Patrick Henry of the Pulpit."¹⁵   He was remembered in the names of at least six boys in our family. Whatever the original inspiration that brought a name into the family, most children were named for grandparents, or aunts or uncles. The family roster includes several examples of Jane Shelton, Reuben Lewis, Catherine Sanford, Lucy Waller, Julius Clarkson, and the like, echoing down through the generations.

Mary's grandparents, Julius Clarkson and Elizabeth Sandidge, were among the earliest Americans to give all of their children two personal names, a novel practice which has caused some confusion over the years among county clerks, ministers and genealogists, who were accustomed to dealing with persons having only one given name.

In Mary's generation, many of her female cousins (but few of the males), were given two "first" names, such as Sarah Jane, Mary Jane, or Mildred Jane.¹⁶   The individual concerned might be known by either or both names, or by a nickname, such as Jennie or Janey, especially if there were aunts or cousins with the same given names.¹⁷   The use of Molly and Polly was helpful in sorting out the many Marys; Betsey, Eliza, Bettie and Lizzie served a similar function among the Elizabeths. During this period nicknames became accepted as genuine formal names. A century earlier Nancy was only used as an informal version of Ann; by 1800 the name was legitimized, and slightly later so was its cognate, Nannie. ¹⁸

About health and disease

Birth, illness and death were frequent subjects of Mary's letters and diary entries. Not only were these matters of more than usual importance, but her generation was much closer to the raw facts of existence than are their modern descendants. People came into the world near the family hearth and usually passed from it within the walls of the home, neither their coming nor their going marked by lengthy stays in the hospital or complicated by intrusive technology.

For those born or come of age after World War II, the discovery of antibiotics and the development of a wide variety of immunizations, Mary's matter-of-fact descriptions of the toll chronic and acute disease inflicted on her kin and acquaintances are sobering. Nineteenth-century medicine could do little more than attempt to relieve suffering. People endured for years the discomfort or agonies of scrofula or erysipelas or languished with consumption. For the most part, the doctor's role was palliative, rather than curative, although some notable advances were made in surgery.¹⁹

Although the mortality schedules of the census give a rough idea of the main causes of death, as do the incomplete vital statistics reports made to the state in the 1850s, we lack accurate figures. As late as 1900, disease statistics were available for only 26 percent of the population and from only ten states.²⁰   In 1860 tuberculosis, then known as consumption, was by far the leading killer, claiming more than half again the number of victims (49 thousand) as fevers (30 thousand) or pneumonia (27 thousand).²¹   Among those who succumbed to tuberculosis were half a dozen or more of Mary's family and friends.

Several of Mary's family were among the victims of the great cholera epidemic of the 1830s, which raged throughout North America. Mary's almost benumbed reaction²² illustrates the difficulties people had in making sense of the epidemic in a time before the theory of microbes and contagion gained acceptance. Writing a century later, a historian noted,²³

Belief that cholera was catching was very unpopular. It made people fear each other; it made it difficult to get people to care for the sick; it interfered with trade, business and all social intercourse; it caused people to flee to the country to get away from the scourge; it disorganized all society. On the other hand belief in an almost omnipotent aerial poison which could not be escaped but must be coped with by a strong constitution and good personal hygiene encouraged the people to carry on even though with a more fatalistic outlook.

Infant and childhood mortality was high; four of Mary's siblings perished so young their names are lost, and another brother, James, died in his teens. That experience was not unusual. Four of her sister-in-law Statira's siblings died in infancy, and two more died in their twenties. Women all too frequently died in childbirth.²⁴   Accidents also took a toll: people were thrown from horses and injured by farm implements.²⁵   But those who survived the diseases of childhood and the hazards of early adulthood often lived into their eighties, as did Mary and both of her parents.

About life on the land

The Southern plantation system never took root in Kentucky. The Virginians who settled the Bluegrass brought tobacco with them from the Old Dominion,²⁶ but after some early success it proved unprofitable, and many farmers turned for income to other crops such as hemp, but they never came to rely on large-scale cultivation of a single plant, such as cotton or sugar cane.²⁷ The figures collected in the agriculture schedules of the census show the variety of farm products. For example, in 1850 the household headed by Jane S. Bristow, Mary's mother, occupied a farm with 75 acres of improved land and 25 acres of unimproved, with a value of $3,000. The family had 8 horses, 4 milch cows (which produced 250 pounds of butter), 3 other cattle (probably steers for beef), 30 sheep (which yielded 60 pounds of wool), and 50 swine. They raised 40 bushels of wheat, 20 of rye and 40 of oats. Their largest crop was 800 bushels of Indian corn, as it was still called. Their fields also gave 3 tons of hay and 300 pounds of flax.²⁸   The garden produced 8 bushels of beans, 20 of Irish potatoes and 10 of sweet potatoes. The land must have had some mulberry trees, because they also reported producing 2 pounds of silk. They kept bees as well, gathering 100 pounds of honey and wax. The value of home-made manufactures was put at $80 and that of animals slaughtered at $75.²⁹   Most of the corn and some of the grain was probably consumed by the livestock.

Mary does not detail everyday activities, but a near contemporary, Charles Reynolds, later recalled his boyhood on a Virginia Piedmont farm in the 1830s. His account — apart from cotton, which did not grow in most of Kentucky — could apply as well to the Bristow or Clarkson holdings in Bourbon or Boone.³⁰

On my father's farm we aimed to raise everything we needed. We even had our cotton and flax patches. I have picked cotton and pulled flax, have helped to take the cotton to the gin and seen the flax sunk in the Creek to be made ready for the cleaning operation, have helped to put it in condition for the wheel and the loom, and have worn clothes made from it. We had a small flock of sheep — say usually about fifty head. They furnished mutton and wool for the family. The wool, after being taken to the Creek and washed, was picked and put into bales and taken to the mill and carded into tolls, and brought home, spun and made ready for the loom and all woven into cloth for the use of the family. The object was to clothe everything at home. Many a day have I sat at the loom and handed threads for the weaver. I was an expert at winding cotton for the woof. It had to be put into balls to be conveniently handled. On every farm was a loom, wheels for spinning wool and a flax wheel. The farmers in my section had nothing to buy but their salt, sugar, molasses and fish.

Kentucky, especially the Bluegrass, had long been noted for the production of livestock of all sorts: horses and mules for work, hogs and cattle and sheep for consumption. Before steamboats and railroads laced the country, the animals had to reach sometimes-distant markets under their own power, tramping hundreds of miles along primitive roads.³¹   One of the Bristows' neighbors in the Bluegrass, Charles B. Colcord, was known as "the first man who ever took a drove of mules to New Orleans by land from Bourbon County."³²

Hogs had been one of the earliest exports from the frontier back to the more settled areas, since they could forage for mast and acorns in the woods and transport themselves to market. As late as 1836, 142 thousand hogs were counted being driven from Kentucky to eastern markets.³³   When the meat packers set up in nearby Cincinnati, farmers in Northern Kentucky found it easier to deliver their stock to "Porkopolis," as the Ohio city was known before it donned the more refined title of "the Queen City of the West." In 1833 Cincinnati processed 85,000 hogs; by 1848, the peak year, the figure was 500,000.³⁴   Not all the porkers went to market. The census takers found 2.9 million hogs in Kentucky in 1850 and 2.3 million in 1860, so many must have been turned into home-cured bacon and hams and sausages which were consumed within the state.³⁵

On 12 December 1863 General Leonard Stephens³⁶ wrote his brother William in Missouri, "The Beech Mast is keeping the Hogs so far which is certainly a help. We sold our surplus hogs for five dollars & a quarter gross, delivered & weighed at Covington. Reuben Bristow got five dollars & sixty-five cents for his. They were better hogs."³⁷   The hogs raised by Reuben and his father-in-law were probably descendants of English imports. There is little information about the early breeds, but soon after Mary's family moved to Boone County the Hampshire Belted was introduced from the east. This "hardy and prolific" breed became known as the "Kentucky Thin-Rind." Berkshires appeared in the 1840s, followed a few years later by Sussex and Middlesex breeds.³⁸

Although hogs seemed to be Reuben's major form of livestock (he had tallied 100 head in 1850, 250 in 1860, and 220 in 1870), he and his brother Anselm also kept some sheep. Mary wrote her father in the mid-1850s about Anselm's troubles guarding his sheep from depredations by neighborhood dogs.³⁹   Spanish Merinos, valued mainly for their fine fleece, had been popular in the early years of the century, but they had been replaced in the ante-bellum period by English Cotswolds, Shorthorns and a variety of crossbreeds.⁴⁰   In 1850 more than a million sheep were counted in the state, and slightly fewer in 1860.⁴¹

Improved agricultural implements, such as steel plows, were in use by the 1840s, but all the tasks around the farm — planting, cultivating, and harvesting — had to be accomplished with only human and animal muscles to supply power. Mules and horses continued to play a vital role on Kentucky farms well into the next century.⁴²

As those who work the land know well, the farmer is at the mercy of forces beyond his control, both natural and human. Disease and adverse weather could ravage crops and livestock. In the winter of 1863 General Stephens noted, "Reuben Bristow has been very unlucky with his hogs. They took cholera & out of 120 good hogs has but few left and he thinks they will all die."⁴³   Mary records spells of drought and freezing and their aftermath.⁴⁴

The uncertainties of the weather were compounded by the boom-and-bust nature of the national economy. The country had been through a dozen depressions by the outbreak of the Civil War, the most serious being that of 1837-1842, when commodity speculation and bank failures devastated the country's economy.⁴⁵

The hazards of unpredictable economic cycles were intensified by primitive financial institutions and by a lack of consistent monetary policies. A miscellaneous hodgepodge of state-chartered banks all issued notes, most of dubious value which diminished rapidly with distance from the doors of the bank. Negotiable instruments, such as checks or letters of credit, hardly lived up to their name. All segments of the economy suffered from a chronic shortage of cash, which was one of the reasons Mary and her neighbors "ran a tab" at the local store, which was settled each New Years.⁴⁶   The United States had no reliable, widely available currency until the appearance of the first "greenbacks" during the Civil War.⁴⁷

Economic factors contributed to the widespread urge to pick up and move on. Like their ancestors, who had moved over the generations from the shores of the Chesapeake to the Piedmont and on to the Bluegrass, Mary's contemporaries were drawn by the prospect of new lands. These periodic migrations were induced both by the desire to leave land declining in productivity and by the need to claim additional acres for the numerous younger generation. Mary's father and brothers had considered leaving Bourbon County as early as 1820, a decade before they moved north to the banks of the Ohio,⁴⁸ and by 1860 many of her cousins were settled hundreds of miles from their birthplaces on the upper reaches of the Licking River. Many Kentuckians, like Mary's uncle James Minor Clarkson, had located beyond the Ohio. Others, including several of the Stephens, Clarkson and Bristow kin, had moved to what became known as Missouri's Little Dixie, an area between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The Southern immigrants brought with them their crops, their slaves, and their building styles, transplanting their culture, one which was very different from that of the German immigrants in Saint Louis.⁴⁹

On the farms as throughout society, gender and status roles were well defined: men and slaves worked in the fields and barnyards; women worked in the house and garden. Business affairs were considered to be the province of men. Mary, as an unmarried woman, and her Mother, as a widow, could hold property in their own right, but married women lost control of their property to their husbands. Mary seems to have left the running of the farm to her brothers, but she did handle the hiring out of her slaves and kept her own accounts.⁵⁰   Household tasks rate only occasional mentions in Mary's Record: sewing and making clothes, quilting, putting up preserves, and the like. "But you must recollect . . . how much work I have to do, more this year than usual. Mother is not able to help me but little, and she is very busy with her fowls and garden."⁵¹

Diet in the mid-1800s was restricted by season and availability. Fruits and vegetables were available only during the local harvest season unless they could be preserved by canning, pickling or drying, and before the advent of refrigerated transport such delicacies as tropical fruits were almost unheard of. Mary probably never tasted a banana. As for meat, aside from breeding stock maintained through the winter months, most of the pigs went off to market in the fall or followed a much shorter route to the smokehouse to wind up as homemade sausages and hams. Meals were prepared from scratch, usually on a wood-fired stove. Cookstoves had supplanted open fireplaces by mid-century. Together with inside waterpumps and sinks, they defined what became the modern kitchen. Even ready-to-eat cereals did not appear until around 1900 when the Kellogg brothers and C. W. Post devised crunchy flakes as a health food.

Not all agricultural pursuits were utilitarian. After the family's move from Bourbon County, Mary waited for some treasured ornamental "shrubs and flowers transplanted from my childhood's home [to] grow up to gladden my heart with their beauty."⁵²

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Notes:

[Click on footnote number to return to text.]

¹ 22 Aug 1857. (References to Mary's writings are by date, except for those made to A Relation of My Experience, reproduced here as the second chapter.)

² 17 Dec 1859. The last major incursion occured in the summer of 1782, seven years before the Clarksons arrived from Virginia, when a joint British and Indian expedition against the American settlements culminated in the Battle of Blue Licks, but sporadic raids continued until the Indians were soundly defeated at Fallen Timbers, Ohio, in 1794. See Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky, 77-84; 138-144.

³ G. Glenn Clift, Remember the Raisin!, 231. Her uncles Archibald Bristow, James Minor Clarkson and Julius Willis Clarkson joined in the militia call-up, but apparently never left Kentucky. Her father served as a regimental quartermaster. See Adjutant General of Kentucky, Kentucky Soldiers of the War of 1812, 16, 126, 212, 248.

⁴ A Relation of My Experience.

⁵ P. P. Karan and Cotton Mather, Atlas of Kentucky, 17.

⁶ The New Orleans, built in Pittsburgh in 1811 by Nicholas Roosevelt, made an adventure-filled journey down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, surviving such perils as the great New Madrid earthquakes.

⁷ The poor condition of the roads is a frequent topic. See, for example, 20 Jan 1858.

⁸ A generation later, Mary's gandnephew, Julius Lucien Bristow II (1884-1971) played a role in providing telephone and electrical service to small towns on the Great Plains. His younger son, Oxley Johnson Bristow, had a successful career with Mountain States Telephone, a unit of the Bell System.

⁹ A brief listing of Julius Clarkson, his children and five dozen known grandchildren runs for three pages. Mary's known Bristow first cousins numbered only 22, due in part to her Uncle John, who had no children of his own. Her uncle Gideon Bristow moved to Indiana, so most of Mary's contact with her Father's kin was with the children of her Uncle Archibald. See Mary's Cousins.

¹⁰ And of course step-children, and half-siblings. Although divorce was rare, death was not, and the surviving spouse usually remarried within a short time, often before the deceased's estate was settled. Many families also included unmarried aunts and bachelor uncles; very few people lived alone in the countryside.

¹¹ The case of Mary's niece, Catherine E. Bristow, may serve to illustrate the complexity of the relationships that could result: Kate, a daughter of Mary's brother Benjamin Franklin Bristow, married as her first husband a first cousin, John B. Ellis, who was a son of Mary's and Benjamin's eldest sister, Jane Shelton Bristow, and Robert Ellis. John died in 1855, leaving a young widow and two small children, Eugenia and Robert. A few years later Kate married the widower Julius Lunsford Dickerson, who was the son of Mary's aunt Nancy P. Clarkson and John Dickerson, consequently Kate's first cousin once removed. She had two more children, Hollie and William Dickerson, who were not only half-siblings of Eugenia and Robert Ellis but also their cousins several times over. (Lunsford's first wife had been another first cousin, Louisa Jane White, a daughter of Mary's aunt Polly B. Clarkson and John White.) The practice of intermarriage was not confined to the Clarksons. For example, the Kendricks, Corbins and Wilsons of Bourbon and Boone Counties had been intermarrying for generations.

¹² See, for example, 25 Jan 1858. This subject is addressed below.

¹³ "Bristow's mill was first a horse-power tread-wheel, but afterward water-power; he also had a sawmill in connection." W. H. Perrin, History of Bourbon, Scott, Harrison and Nicholas Counties, Kentucky, 138. According to a later map, the mill site was on Green Creek, west of Stony Point and north of the hamlet of Austerlitz.

¹⁴ Lucien Bonaparte (1775-1840) may have become something of a hero to Americans when he was seized by the British in 1810 on his way to this country, an act which fed the ill feeling against the Mother Country growing before the War of 1812. The youngest Bonaparte, Jerome (1784-1860), also had an American connection. When in Baltimore in 1803, he wed Elizabeth Patterson. Whether Reuben and Statira Bonaparte Stephens Bristow's son, James Jerome, was his namesake is not known.

¹⁵ He preached at Kentucky frontier stations in 1779, and his kin joined the migration to the Bluegrass. Garnett Ryland, Baptists of Virginia: 1699-1926, 115. Lewis and Richard L. Collins, History of Kentucky 1:416.

¹⁶ Also popular was the now rare custom of converting a masculine name to a feminine form by the addition of "Ann," a practice which gave us Joseph Ann and Benjamin Ann.

¹⁷ Mary's niece, Catherine Sanford Bristow, was called Kate as a child, but later was known as "Bit" for her small size. (See 16 Sep 1863.) Another unusual nickname was that of Mary's cousin, Philadelphia Bristow, who was known as "Kippy."

¹⁸ Countless books, most of them filled with misinformation, have been published about given names. The best non-technical work remains George R. Stewart's classic, American Given Names. An excellent website is Behind the Name.

¹⁹ Both Mary and her mother were afflicted with chronic erysipelas. Mary was able to secure some relief from its torments through the ministrations of her cousin, Dr Joseph Kendrick Clarkson. See 25 Apr 1845 and 18 Sep 1865.

²⁰ Historical Statistics of the United States, 1:58 (Schedules B 149-166).

²¹ Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Preliminary Report of the Eighth Census, 1860, 115.

²² A Relation of My Experience.

²³ John S. Chambers, The Conquest of Cholera, 36. See also Nancy D. Baird, "Asiatic cholera's first visit to Kentucky: a study in panic" in The Filson Club History Quarterly 48:228-240.

²⁴ 30 Jan 1860. Sallie, one of Mary's slaves, died ten days after giving birth at the age of 30.

²⁵ 4 Jan 1858; 11 May 1862.

²⁶ Mary's grandfather, Julius Clarkson, was cited as one of the earliest tobacco planters in Bourbon County. Perrin, History of Bourbon, 138.

²⁷ Lewis C. Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 876.

²⁸ The source of linen fiber. In early times linen yarn was woven together with wool to produce the durable homespun cloth known as linsey-wolsey.

²⁹ 1850 Agricultural Schedule, Boone County, Kentucky, 341.

³⁰ Charles Dent Reynolds, Incidents and Reminiscensces of the Life of C. D. Reynolds from Boyhood to Old Age Beginning at his Earliest Recollections (1893), 3. Transcript at Orange County [Virginia] Historical Society. Charles' father, Washington Reynolds, was a friend and neighbor of Benjamin and Leonard Stephens before they moved to Kentucky. See below.

³¹ Thomas D. Clark, Agrarian Kentucky, 35-37, describes the traffic.

³² Perrin, History of Bourbon, 528. The enterprising drover would have followed the Cumberland Trace from Lexington to Nashville and then the more famous Natchez Trace on down to the banks of the Mississippi, traveling more than 700 miles. Colcord (1789-1854) later became the guardian and stepfather of the orphaned children of Mary's brother, Dr. John S. Bristow, who died on a similar venture, after delivering a herd of cattle to Missouri. (See 18 Nov 1858.)

³³ Gray, 840.

³⁴ John T. Schlebecker, Whereby We Thrive, a History of American Farming, 1607-1972, 83.

³⁵ Joseph C. G. Kennedy, Agriculture of the United States in 1860, I: 124.

³⁶ Mary's brother Reuben had married General Stephens' daughter, Statira Bonaparte Stephens, in 1834. They farmed land on Bank Lick Creek, next to the widowed general.

³⁷ Ruth Douglass Stephens, Stephens Family Letters and Documents, 58-59.

³⁸ Elizabeth Ritter Clotfelter, Agricultural History of Bourbon County, Kentucky prior to 1900, Master's thesis, University of Kentucky, 57-63.

³⁹ 27 Mar 1855.

⁴⁰ Clotfelter, Agriculture, 67.

⁴¹ Kennedy, Agriculture, 1:121.

⁴² Morris, 507. Mechanized reapers and harvesters came on the scene following the war, but lacked internal motive power. Steam engines did not prove practical.

⁴³ To William Stephens, 13 Feb 1863. Stephens Letters, 52. Hog cholera, which is caused by a virus, should not be confused with bacterial cholera afflicting humans, although the symptoms are not unlike: fever, diarrhea, loss of appetite, and lethargy.

⁴⁴ For example 20 Apr 1855. The drought of 1854 had been severe.

⁴⁵ Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (rev. ed.), 178.

⁴⁶ 7 Jan 1858.

⁴⁷ Another wartime innovation, the Postal Money Order (authorized by Congress in 1864), eased the problem of sending money across the country. Gerald Cullinan, The United States Postal Service, 84-85; 195-196.

⁴⁸ The exodus from Bourbon may have been spurred in part by the Panic of 1819, which had especially severe effects in the west. Morris, 157.

⁴⁹ Census records and local histories reveal the overwhelmingly Southern origins of the inhabitants of Audrain, Monroe and neighboring counties. Howard Wight Marshall, Folk Architecture in Little Dixie: a Regional Culture in Missouri, chapter 1, sketches their life. See also R. Douglas Hurt, Agriculture and Slavery in Missouri's Little Dixie. By 1860, Missouri had passed Kentucky in population and in agricultural production. Morris, 506.

⁵⁰ Until Emancipation stripped her of her assets, and she became dependent on Reuben. See her Accounts for 1865-1870.

⁵⁰ 26 Jun 1855.

⁵¹ A Relation of My Experience.

 

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