Imagine This
Imagine that you are a 13-year-old girl living in a town of about 800 people in rural Ohio, Holmes County. It is February, 1895, so the dirt streets usually turn to mud in winter, but this winter has been mild, and a medicine show has come to town. You sit down to write a letter to your Grandma, Emeline Stout, who lives in Guernsey County.
The Letter
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- Vera Stout to Emmeline Stout 1897-1
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- Vera Stout to Emeline Stout 1897 – 2
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- Vera Stout to Emeline Stout 1897 – 3
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- Vera Stout to Emeline Stout 1897 – 4
Vera and Emeline
(The photo of Emeline Stout below is undated, but since I have younger and older pictures, I believe this is roughly the right time period. I previously mis-identified it as being Hattie Stout because I misread a caption that said “Grandma Stout”. Since it was my Grandmother Vera’s handwriting, it is Emeline, not my mother’s Grandma Stout–Hattie. The photo of Vera is approximately the time she wrote the letter, but unfortunately I do not have one that is better quality.)
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- Emeline Cochran Stout, mother of “Doc” William Cochran Stout
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- Vera Stout (Anderson) on her bicycle in front of the family home.
The Background
Your father is a doctor and, as usual, is out in the country helping a patient. Not a lot happens in this small town except church on Sundays and other church meetings. A medicine show with a painless dentist has replaced the interest stirred by the Methodist Church revival, which has now ended. The revivals are almost as well attended as a traveling circus, and draw nearly everybody in town. Some of those people, not already committed to your father’s chosen place of worship, the Church of Christ,will respond to the emotional sermon of the traveling minister and walk down the tent’s aisle to join the Methodist Church. After you report on the Methodist’s success, t occurs to you a that you had better also tell Grandma about the activities of the Church of Christ. (You are writing the letter on Monday, so your church yesterday occupies your mind ).
When you announced your intention to go to the medicine show, your mother, upholding the reputation of the good doctor, lets you know in no uncertain terms that you cannot go. One can only guess how appalled she is to think that neighbors would see Doc Stout’s youngest daughter at this charlatan’s traveling show. Additionally, although you Vera might not have known, alcoholism ranks as the biggest social problem of the time. The traveling medicine man’s main income comes from selling “medicine” that is almost totally alcohol or morphine. It would not occur to you that Grandma Stout might disapprove as much as your mother did of the medicine show. Emeline Cochran Stout took an active role in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU).
You let it slip later in the letter that you already went to the medicine show, because you were tempted to let the painless dentist pull your teeth. But since you report honestly on both the good and the bad, you admit that you chickened out of having the teeth extracted.
Perhaps your mother did not realize you had attended before, and when she learns about your plans to go again, you see your mother’s refusal as being contrary, and you pitch a fit. You get so angry that you even refuse to write a thank you letter to your Grandmother Stout even though your obedient older sister, Maude, has written her letter.
But when you calm down, you write the letter to Grandma and in plain terms, confess to your contrariness.
Transcription and Notes
The 13-year-old was my Grandmother Vera Stout (Anderson). She wrote the letter on her father’s stationary and filled in the date February 25 1895. In three months she would celebrate her 14th birthday. The portion in italics is what Grandmother wrote. I have left her spelling, but for clarity I added periods at the end of sentences. My notes are in brackets. I will include additional notes at the end of the letter explaining things that might not be clear.
Printed letterhead, with fancy frame around name (see picture above):
W. C. Stout, M.D.
Office days, TUESDAYS and SATURDAYS (from 9 A.M. to 3 P.M.)
Killbuck, Ohio, Feb. 25 189 5
Dear Grandma,
I will answer your letter this evening. I was to contrary to ans when Maud {Vera’s sister} did because I was mad. I received your mittens you sent me and thank you ever so much. think they are very nice.
There is a show in town & has been here for wk and is going to stay all this week. ma got a contrary spell & would not let me go & I have been crying about it for a long time. Pa is up to Stagers. Mr. Stager was down after him to go to see his wife. she has the grip. {grippe–flu}
The Methodist church broke up last night I do not know how many members they got. I think about 30 I am not sure. Are school will be out in about 2 months & Mr. Searles is going to teach a Normal school {school for teachers} this summer. I will not attend.(1) We had church last night & two came out and three were taken in.(2) Bertie Knavel and Mrs. Williams joined and the Fox girl was taken into the church. We got Uncle Tom’s little boy’s picture & he is awful sweet. they named him after Pa. William Clarence Stout. & it make it W. C. Stout like Pa name. He is awful sweet. I expect you have one of them. he is standing by the hobby horse.(3)
Well grandma I got two teeth filled the other day . Mr. Mackey from Millersburg {County Seat, and biggest town in the county}. I only have two more to have filled & 4 to have pulled & will have good teeth. will be glad of it. The show that is here is a medicine show and the Doctor pulls teeth without pain & I am to big a coward to get my pulled. I started to and set back down. backed out.
This was a lovely day. the sun shone all day & the roads are nice.(4)
When are you coming out{?}
This is all I have to say this time so good bye. From your grand daughter Vera
Tell the girls I will write to them to. {Vera’s cousins, who were close to her in age– the nieces of her father, Doc Stout. Mary (b. 1883) and Myrl ( b. 1885), daughters of “Lib” Elizabeth Stout Cunningham.}
(1) If May seems early for school to be out, remember that in an agricultural society, parents needed their children on the farm during planting season.
I don’t know why Vera felt it necessary to say she would not be going to the Normal School conducted by Mr. Searles, since Normal schools were for high school graduates, not pre-high school.
(2) “two came out and three were taken in” In Evangelical churches like the Church of Christ people “come out” and confess their belief generally at the end of a service. After some time passes, the minister baptizes them and they are “taken in” to membership in the church. “Taken in” could also mean people who moved from another congregation.
(3) Uncle Tom is Tom Stout who ranched near Sheridan Wyoming. The little boy named after Doc Stout, born in 1891, grew up, married and had a child, but was killed in an automobile accident in 1919. Unfortunately, I have not found a copy of the picture of the child with his hobby horse.
(4) “the sun shone all day and the roads are nice” This is the most evocative line of this letter, taking us back to a town when the condition of the roads could not be counted on to be passable, particularly in winter.
What Did I Learn About Grandma’s Life?
Now if your imagination is still in tact, and you are transported back to small town Ohio in 1895, imagine what happened after Vera wrote this letter.
My first reaction focused on how wonderful it was to have such a revealing letter from my grandmother. I can see the plain-spoken, no-nonsense woman I knew in her later years. It brought back to me that small town life really did include things like medicine shows and painless dentists, and the westerns that I saw in the movie theater where Grandma worked in later years were not just making things up. Did you ever see Bob Hope as a painless dentist in The Paleface? (Remember, also, that in 1891, Ohio was still considered the West.) Excellent description of the American phenomenon of traveling medicine show in this article.
But my second reaction was to ask, “If this letter went to Emeline Stout, why was it among my great-grandmother’s papers?” Was Vera’s Ma, Hattie Stout still being ‘contrary?; Was Vera drop the letter in the slot at the post office, or did her mother make her recopy it and leave out some offensive lines? Perhaps I am over thinking this, because when people wrote letters by hand in an era that prized beautiful writing, it they frequently recopied a letter and mailed the “clean” copy.
Now that you know Vera as a 13-year-old, and her mother Hattie, what do you think happened? And what do you think of my grandmother?
