THE LIVES OF EDWIN F. AND ETHEL SHAFER SNELL

PART I

PREFACE

This volume is the first of two about my parents, born Edwin Snell and Ethel M. Shafer, telling the story of their lives through 1925. It is written for family members and others closely associated with us.

Grandpa Shafer and Mother and Father left the basis for this account by saving so many letters and papers, also a great number of photographs, and by recalling the past they shared. They hoped to be remembered. How I regret not having asked more questions! I was aware, though I could scarcely have said, that they talked mostly about such experiences as furnished a good line, or story. They seemed to be disposed to keep the rest— all they had not forgotten— to themselves. I hesitated to ask, knowing how highly they valued privacy, and how ill bred they thought it to talk much about oneself. All the same, they might have answered most questions I knew enough to ask. My interest, although real, was too passive; I was so much under their spell.

Family members and friends have lent a hand. Steven L. Henneman copied the old photographs with skill and patience. Suzy Snell gracefully lettered captions to the photographs and to extracts from camping journals, drafted the maps, and had the copies bound. Jamie Snell arranged for typing the initial draft into the computer, and Esther Nui carried it out. Jamie then entered the many changes, formatted and helped to index the text, and reproduced it for distribution. He and Suzy also made suggestions and advised. Tee Loftin read and criticized part of an early draft and contributed anecdotes. Betty and Arthur Snell and Laura and Dan Litscher put me up on trips to Grand Rapids to visit and do research. And the Litschers introduced me to some old friends, among them Mrs. Roderick White and Mr. Donald Denison; both of them revived youthful memories for me. Terczi Frisch kindly read and so gently commented on the manuscript. Information about the ancestry of the Snells was supplied by the kindness of Paul E. Snell of Paramus, New Jersey [he moved upon retirement]. Eleanor Ryder of Norwich, Ontario furnished a useful point about the Nobbs family. I am grateful to all of them for their help. For the use to which it was put, I alone must answer.

I am indebted to several people for help in 1977-80 with old records: Messrs. Lewis Clark and Francis Collins, and Ms. Pamela Boynton, of the Michigan Room of the Grand Rapids Public Library; Mr. Edward Loyer, the Assistant Registrar, and Ms. Mary Lou Miley of the Office of the Registrar, the University of Michigan; Mr. James F. LePell, the Assistant Registrar of Valparaiso University. I am indebted also to Mr. George W. Krupp, Jr., of the Grand Rapids office of the Lawyers Title Corporation; and to Mr. Roland R. Robey, the Registrar of Probate, Probate Court of Kent County, in Grand Rapids. I should acknowledge likewise the services of the Georgetown Branch of the D.C. Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives.

Father had “a hard row to hoe.” A sorrowful childhood ended with his being put out to work his way. In youth and early manhood he struggled to make a place in the world, at length in his mid-twenties qualified himself to teach high school. His character was defined in the process. Together with the self-control, determination, and frugality that saw him through, he cultivated cheerfulness and detachment, made friends, enjoying their company as the chance came. He soon learned to disguise, and relieve, his feelings in the mild irony and skepticism that would continue to season his courteous, formal manner. Further years in the classroom helped to reinforce such behavior.

Having turned forty, still a schoolmaster, he seemed at once contented with his work and dissatisfied with his “station,” apt to hear condescension in expressions of respect for his patience and authority, and those of affection for his unassuming humanity.

In later life, moved by some memory, he might recount a story or relate a circumstance of those first forty-three years. His words, to the best of my recollection, all have their place in the following account, which is divided into childhood in Paris Township (1861-72), youth thrown on his own (1872-80), study at Valparaiso and various employments (1880-86), years in the Black Hills (1886-93), settlement in Grand Rapids (1893-1904).

Childhood in Paris Township (1861-72)

On Wednesday 29 May 1861 a male child, called Edwin, was born to Mary Ann Snell and her husband Jefferson Snell, then recently settled in Paris Township, Kent County, in western Michigan. Probably they were still under temporary shelter.

As to Edwin’s year of birth. The 1870 census gives his age as nine (as of 1 June), fixing the year at 1861. During boyhood and youth he considered that the year he was born.^[1]  But later on, he changed his mind. The first evidence that I have is the entry for him in the 1900 census, which shows his year of birth as 1862, his age as 38.^[2]  And 1862 would remain his official year of birth, from which was dated his retirement from Central High School in Grand Rapids at 70, as prescribed, in June 1932.

Curiously enough, in 1912 or not long after, he entered 1861 as the year of his birth when writing out in his fine hand the generations of the Martin family, that of Mother’s maternal grandfather.^[3] That could have been a slip.^[4] But on the authority of the 1870 census I have dated his birth in 1861, in this following Mother’s opinion.

As to his given names. Most earlier Snells would have borne familiar Christian names; among the men old names such as George, Peter, James, Jacob, and John, those of Edwin’s grandfather and uncles. But customs were changing, and so Jefferson Snell had been named differently, after the third president, I suppose. His younger sons, Clarence and Lynn, were called after that very same fashion of borrowing family names and titles.^[5] Edwin was named after another fashion, the revival, started well along in the previous century, of almost disused English Christian names.^[6] These had gained less acceptance with British than with American parents, far readier to try something different. Of the several revived forenames, Edwin seems to have been especially popular.

Edwin almost certainly was not given a second (middle) name early in life. The practice of bestowing two (or more) names was by then general in the United States, along with the distinctively American custom of using one of them along with one or more initials.^[7] It was only when naming their third son Lynn Elliott, born in 1867, that Mary Ann and her husband would adopt common practice.^[8] Edwin did not use a middle name, or initial, in his youth. In his new Autograph Album, in 1878 and 1880, when a middle initial seemed to be called for, he was still addressed as Mr. Edwin Snell and as E. Snell while those writing inscriptions would sign as Miss Ella E. Watson and C.C. Gordon. He apparently adopted the style Edwin F. (or E.F.) in his beginning year at Valparaiso (1880/1).^[9] The middle name he would rarely if ever exhibit; some people doubted that he had one. In the above-mentioned Martin genealogy he would give it as Fremont, I should think after the well-known Western explorer and first Republican presidential candidate, John Charles Frémont.

As to Edwin’s parents. A portrait survives of them with their infant son (following p ***). It will have been made in the latter part of 1862, to judge from Edwin’s size.^[10] The fall of the year was the season in which Jefferson Snell would have had money to spend for such a purpose, no doubt aided by two years of rising wartime prices for farm products. His parents seem not to have been on the best of terms that afternoon, but, it may be as a result, they look alive. The Jefferson Snell we see, then age 24, was short—5 foot 7 and one-half inches^[11] —and strong, physically equal to clearing and working a farm. According to Mother, he was reputed the best axeman in the township. His blue eyes look straight at you from a ruddy face, over a slight smile not usual among the wooden portraits of the time. Mary Ann was 30; her disapproving glance also gives an impression of a strong will. Little Edwin, in skirts, seems attentive, and as if excited by the strange experience.

Jefferson Snell was born in North Norwich Township, in Upper Canada. His parents had moved there some years before from upstate New York (Montgomery County, Openheim Township). So much Edwin would find out at one time or another from parents, uncles, and cousins. By his mother, born Mary Ann Nobbs, Edwin was told that her parents had left England and crossed the ocean when she was “a babe in arms”; her mother Sarah (her maiden name apparently did not get written down) had died during the long voyage. The two families lived together on a farm bought by William. He died in 1838. Robert was killed in 1843 in a barn raising. Mary Ann grew up in the household of her aunt, who remarried, and it became a large household. That’s about all Edwin was to learn of his ancestry (and more than he would ever repeat).^[12] I shall add just a little to help explain what follows.

In moving west from the Mohawk Valley in upstate New York in 1834, Edwin’s grandparents, George P. Snell and his wife Pauline (born Reynolds), with their three infant sons, had started out west to acquire cheaper land. By that time most of those moving west from New York and New England were bound for the Old Northwest, to which easy access had been opened by the Erie Canal.^[13] George Snell may well have been influenced by reports from one or more of those that had gone to upper Canada, as so many had before 1825. Information from neighbors and relatives played its part in directing the westward movement generally.

Robert Nobbs and his brother William, in emigrating in 1833 with their young families from Norfolk, had likewise been part of a growing movement, one of conservative villagers and townspeople of small means in obsolescent trades, who faced a bleak future as recruits to the fast growing English proletariat. That prospect was before many of the Quakers living about Norwich, the county town. Some, like the Nobbses, would emigrate to the new Norwich in Upper Canada, likewise a center of Quaker settlement.^[14] Taken as a group they lacked the skills and endurance, often the adaptability, required to deal with the unexpected rigors of the American farming frontier.^[15] They had one advantage: that of belonging to a close-knit group with common beliefs.

Mary Ann Nobbs and Jefferson Snell had grown up on the farming frontier and were well prepared in some ways for the next move west. All the same, they were an ill-matched young couple, of few resources. Like many another in his position, Jefferson Snell, after having come of age, proposed to marry and move on. He was a headstrong fellow, probably not on good terms with his father and older brothers. He had little enough to offer, far too little, I should imagine, for most young women but for Mary Ann, almost 28, a chance of escape from a life of labor in the households of others. Perhaps they attracted each other, as strong personalities may. She must have found it quite hard to break ties with the close Quaker community of Norwich. Still, she and Jefferson Snell were married on Sunday 8 July 1860.^[16] It seems likely that they stayed out the farming season before leaving for western Michigan.^[17]

Jefferson Snell’s choice of Kent County probably was reached in much the same way as that made earlier by his father; he too must have been influenced by what he had heard about the experiences of neighbors that had already gone west. Kent county had been settled for nearly a generation; the county seat, Grand Rapids, a rising town of just over 8,000, was acquiring road and rail connections with wider markets. Yet there was still uncleared land, though much dearer than it had been.

It was surely a hard trip, especially for Mary Ann, who will have learned on the way that she was with child. Settlers of some means journeying to Western Michigan went at least some part of the way by water, in any case sent their household goods on ahead to Grand Haven. Jefferson and Mary Ann may well have gone overland, slowly, by wagon with their poor possessions. By November the weather will have turned cold. On arrival they doubtless moved in with another family until Jefferson Snell could put up a simple shelter.

As to the place. The strongest evidence is Edwin’s own belief that he was born in Paris Township, a belief consistent with the entry in the 1870 census, which indicates he was born in Michigan. At first, Jefferson Snell probably worked a farm on shares, perhaps clearing it in lieu of rent. It may have been the 40-acre farm he bought in December 1864, the southeast forty of the northwest quarter of Section 16, directly across the road from the county poor farm.^[18] By then, Jefferson Snell had saved enough, with the help of fast rising wartime prices, to make a down payment; the grantors took a mortgage back. The 40 acres, partly improved, would have brought at least $800,^[19] more than twice what settlers had paid for a section of uncleared government land two decades earlier.^[20] The farm was conveniently located, about five miles from the center of Grand Rapids.

I well remember going to see the old Snell farm one mild winter’s day, very likely in the mid-1930’s during the long Christmas holidays.^[21] At Father’s suggestion we walked through the fields southwest from the Martin farm to have a look at the place where he had been brought up, by then bare of buildings. The poorhouse across the road, locally called the “County House,” was the same building as in 1860, much enlarged, to be sure— there had been only 26 inmates in 1870—and not such a sorry place as in the early days, yet depressing enough. Mother had taken me as a boy to visit the “County Infirmary,” then under the supervision of Wilmarth T. Shafer, a first cousin of hers.^[22] In Edwin’s childhood it had stood as a daily reminder of the awful fate in store for those unable, or unwilling, to shift for themselves.

Paris Township, like Kent County, can be described conventionally as “gently rolling.”[I forgot that Paris Township no longer exists. What is not part of Grand Rapids is called “Kent Wood.”] The land tilts from east to west toward Grand River, which runs in a deep glacial channel. Nearly the entire area is drained by Plaster Creek, which meanders across from the southeast, dropping west of northwest toward Grand River. Smaller streams, most of which feed Plaster Creek, form their own little valleys.

Roads, except for the earliest, were laid, uphill and down, along section lines. The Grand River Valley Railroad (later the Michigan Central), the only one that crossed the township in 1870, climbed steadily southeastward across the southwest corner of the township at a gradient estimated at 0.5%, until near the south line. (A map of Paris Township in 1870 follows p. ***.)

The soil was formed from a layer of limestone over sandstone, with clay farther down in places. The settlers had found much of the higher land heavily timbered, chiefly with beech and maple; the lower, more sparsely, often with oak. Some bottom land was heavy, but sandy loam predominated; at the level of the Snell farm (or about 100 feet above Grand River), rather more sand than loam.

The house where Edwin passed most of his childhood was probably the small unpainted structure— all one room with a loft, with an outhouse attached— photographed in the early years of his own marriage (shown following p. ***).^[23] The view is evidently of a long deserted pioneer house. Edwin, once weaned and able to get up and down a ladder, would have slept on a pallet in the loft, his brothers following. Two windows are shown, unlikely to have been glazed. When they were shuttered and the door closed, the wood fire would have provided the only light, though a tallow candle or a “betty lamp” may have been used on occasion. Inside, the walls would have been left bare and rough to the touch, as would the plank or puncheon floor. A bench or two, a trestle table, shelves or else an open cupboard, a chest, a frame bed with straw-filled tick on slats (or rope) will have been about the only furnishings, all home made. For preparing and serving food, Mary Ann had a big iron pot with trivet (or otherwise hung from a hook driven into the chimney), a long-handled skillet, teakettle, churn, a few bowls and cups, pails for water and milk, also one for slops, a chopping board, a tin-plated dipper, a few knives and spoons. A scrub board, flat iron, scrub brush, mop, and besom made up Mary Ann’s equipment for housekeeping. She presumably had a small sewing kit. She very likely made her own soap, probably did not spin her own thread and yarn, though she well may have known how.

As all that may suggest, the family was poor. By 1870, still living on the same farm,^[24] they had possessions valued at only $250. According to the census, Jefferson Snell had $50 worth of farm implements and machinery, much less, for example, than recorded for Grandpa Shafer or any of his brothers. He owned 1 milch cow, 2 other cattle, 2 pigs, to a total value of $75. As of 1 July he did not have a horse.

By then Jefferson Snell had cleared the entire farm, and had most of it in crops. In 1869, he said, he had harvested 110 bushels of wheat, 100 of corn, and 130 of potatoes, along with 20 tons of hay. The figures may have been rounded upwards. On any reading, the implied crop yields would have run well below the average for Michigan,^[25] though not for Paris Township.^[26] .

The farm also had produced—or, in other words, Mary Ann Snell had churned—100 pounds of butter, using the greater part of the milk produced by one cow. Most, probably all, the family will have used. Skim milk and buttermilk would have been fed to the hogs. Jefferson Snell had slaughtered animals during the year to a value of $123.

All told, he and Mary Ann had made a creditable showing. The output of the farm in 1869/70 had come to $579, as calculated by the census enumerator; that figure of necessity reflects any overstatement in the basic data.^[27] The average for the township was about $750, the mode between $600 and $700, per farm; the average farm had nearly 75 acres, 80 being the mode. Accordingly, Jefferson Snell achieved substantially greater than the average output per acre in Paris township, by exploiting his land to the fullest, as would be done by any poor man working a small ill-equipped farm. And despite his handicaps— too little machinery, far too little manure for fertilizer— he came close to the average output per farm laborer for the township, by working himself, also Edwin, very hard.^[28] And hard as they all worked, the family still was poor. A prudent, energetic— and healthy— man that owned his 80 acres “free and clear” had a very comfortable margin to work with. Jefferson Snell, with 40 acres burdened by debt, had almost none. His situation was readily understood on the farming frontier: he was the “marginal” man. His gross money income, after an allowance for what he earned as axeman in the off-season, may have run in 1869/70 to more than double the wages of a good farm hand. After laying in bare necessities for farm and household and covering the taxes and interest payments— rather high interest rates prevailed— he and Mary Ann should have had something left, though less than in the earlier years of boom prices.

Edwin’s first clear memories would have dated from the nine months, from early March until late November 1865, when his father was away in the army.^[29] Jefferson Snell, enlisting in late February, may have expected he would be taken in the draft. If not, it was an odd time to enlist, just after he had managed to buy a farm, with a large mortgage. Perhaps he badly needed the $33 1/3 offered as a bonus for one year’s enlistment. And even so, he may have itched to get away. It was a good time— and almost the last moment— for that. As anyone could see, the war was nearly over. As it turned out, his regiment, the 10th Michigan Cavalry, still had nearly four weeks of operations against Rebel communications, mainly in North Carolina, including skirmishes with rear guard units, followed by one more month in the field, before settling into the routine of camp life in Tennessee.^[30]

Nine months— a single farming season— was not so long a time, yet surely a hard time for Mary Ann, having two small sons, one still a baby. Jefferson Snell may have sent home something from the $13 a month he was paid.^[31] More likely not. A neighbor may have helped, as with plowing or going to the grist mill. State and Federal governments provided some relief for families of soldiers, more than $200,000 in Kent County during the war,^[32] but independent Mary Ann would hardly have applied for help. At best, overwork, worry, and loneliness would have weighed on her.

It should have become easier when Jefferson Snell marched home again. But there was a new trial in store; he had “acquired a drinking habit,” as people said. The garrison army in which he had served out the last seven months of his enlistment had time to kill and very little outlet for energies. And it was doubtless hard to come back from enforced comradeship, discipline, and idleness to near isolation on the farm, a lot of hard work, and a mortgage always hanging over him.

Americans traditionally had been steady tipplers, at the work place and in the village tavern, under a certain social constraint. On the farming frontier, as in the industrializing town or city, such constraints had ceased to exist. Men drank in company that they rarely saw outside the saloon. By no means everyone; in reaction more and more “well-thinking” Americans, men included, were turning toward Temperance.

Mary Ann and her sons must have been frightened now and then, often disgusted, always anxious. It was up to little Edwin to try to help and comfort his mother; she had no one else. Neighbors would have held back from taking a hand in such a case; there were no relatives, no public services to turn to. Mary Ann would have missed keenly the small close-knit, protective society she had left. Edwin, little Clarence as well, grew to fear, even to hate their father; the word is not used lightly.

As a small boy Edwin would have been set tasks about the house and in the garden, fetching a little wood, gathering and cleaning vegetables, helping to prepare food and to wash dishes. Once in the winter of 1925/6, when he was cooking for Art and me, he would recall an early memory of stirring apple butter by the fire. By 8 or 9 Edwin was pumping and fetching water, carrying out slops; feeding stock, cleaning stables; helping to put in and harvest hay, wheat, corn, and potatoes— and weeding. By 10 he would have pulled one end of a two-man saw, had learned the use of sickle, scythe, and axe. He milked night and morning, drove the cattle back at sundown, calling “co’ boss, co’ boss.” He could harness and drive a horse, or team, and began plowing and cultivating. He had learned of course to saddle and sit a plow horse. He would have had his turn at various chores, cleaning out the outhouse, in the winter shoveling snow. Farm children all helped; in poor families they started early and worked hard. When his father was in town, or too drunk to do the chores, Edwin would have been on his own.

Still, he was away for part of the day and week during the short school year. For we know he went to school, probably beginning in 1867.^[33] He very likely was sent to school no. 5, walking more than a half mile east, then another half mile north on the road toward Reed’s Lake (now Breton Road) as far as Laraway Road. The schoolhouse, then seven years old, of buff-colored brick, stood at the corner of the old Leavitt farm, owned by John Leavitt’s widow Mary Richards. Edwin’s two closest school friends, Fred Darling and Walter Meech, lived up Laraway Road just to the east.

But Edwin knew others scattered about the township. Two of them, Carrie Parks and Hattie Aber, would have attended the Bowen School, a frame schoolhouse a mile and a half south on the road to Middleville and Hastings.^[34] Two others, Jessie Pennell and Stella Laraway,^[35] were of course assigned to the Godwin School, another brick building, near their homes, two and a half miles from the Snell farm, right at the western edge of the township, on the plank road south to Kalamazoo (now Division Street). All these children were within two years of Edwin’s age. His strong attachment to several of them makes clear what their friendship must have meant to him.^[36] Of course he knew and well remembered others some years older and younger.^[37] For example, Jessie Pennell’s sister Hattie was three years older; Ida Godwin, who lived across the well-traveled plank road in Wyoming Township, and the courageous Mary Leavitt, who had been crippled by polio but would yet live a long, full life were both his elders by six or seven years his elder. Will Powers, who would be his closest friend from the mid-eighties, was only two years older, but went to still another school, no. 1, to the far northwest of the township (northeast quarter of section 7), at the spot where Eastern Avenue now meets Burton Street. Will Swank, of whom Edwin would see a good deal one day, was six years younger; Will’s future wife Carrie Squier, a niece of Dr. Shafer, was a little older than Edwin.

The above named, except Will Swank and Will Powers, came of families better off than the Snells. But many settlers had started in poverty, a familiar affliction, and nothing hereditary. Nor was prosperity, for that matter; big farms generally were divided among sons, some shiftless or spendthrift. For these reasons, and by virtue of the frugal and laborious existence shared by nearly all, rural society was in fact as in doctrine egalitarian, although distinction was cherished. Some families had been longer established, one source of prestige and wealth. Both Henry Godwin and Abram Laraway, for example, grandfathers of Ida Godwin and Stella Laraway, had come out in the mid-1830’s.^[38] People took much pride in colonial ancestors; respected military rank, political office, education, although not unreservedly; retained habits from “back east”—when Grandma Shafer was a girl, one had spoken of “Squire” Laraway. And yet social classes were slow to form.

If you escaped, or easily threw off, the prevalent diseases, among them the ague and the “milk sickness,” it was a good time and place to grow up. Kent County in the 1860’s enforced plain living and, if not high thinking, then hard work and instruction in the still slowly changing realities of the countryside. You lived under the Argus-eyed gaze of family and neighbors but almost free of the state. Food was plentiful, plain, yet in season varied; most clothing of the simplest, often patched and darned, handed down to younger children when outgrown.

The township was generally, though lightly settled. The population, which had reached 1,327 in 1860— or about 37 to the square mile— rose slowly. Of the 310 families in 1870, those of “old American stock” were still numerous, or even predominant, but alongside were many immigrant families that had settled since 1840, from Ireland, England, the Netherlands, and the German states. Intermarriage came easily.

A good deal of land remained uncleared; for example, the 20-acre woodlot at the back of Grandpa Shafer’s farm and the stand of sugar maple (or “sugar bush”) on the south part of Greatgrandfather Martin’s new farm (he bought it in 1864). Little wheeled traffic passed on the roads, deeply rutted, almost impassable after heavy rain, except for the above mentioned plank road south to Kalamazoo, completed in 1855, a toll road, or “turnpike,” until 1869.^[39] Wooden bridges sometimes washed out.

The countryside was entirely safe. “Treaty” Indians no longer roamed in bands, as they had as late as the 1850’s. Restless old men might wander off from the county farm— as they often would in my boyhood— but did little harm. Black bear, bobcat, and wolves had almost disappeared.^[40] Perhaps the most dangerous animals at large were the half-wild pigs in the scattered “oak openin’s” that remained; their flesh was highly regarded.

Yet game was abundant, including white-tail deer in the woods, where partridge rose in flocks with a sudden noise; quail along rail fences foretelling rain (”More wet! More wet!”); and the imposing wild turkey, proposed by Benjamin Franklin as the national bird. Will Swank would shoot his last turkey as a young man, or by the early 1890’s; by then they were fast disappearing from the county, along with the stands of timber that sheltered and, in part, fed them.

Children, I daresay, were bored now and again— when and where were they not?—but did not lack pastimes. Boys ran footraces; played tag, leap frog, hide and go seek; turned handsprings and somersaults— amusements for which only a few are needed. They perhaps fought with their fists, oftener “rassled” catch-as-catch-can, every once in a while in dead earnest, perhaps near the school yard, watched by a circle of boys, advising, encouraging. They had a form of Indian wrestling, still practiced in my generation: two boys stand braced, right foot against right foot, right hands clasped; at the word, each one tries with feints to pull or push the other off balance. They pitched horseshoes, old cast-offs; tried skipping flat stones along the surface of the creek. In winter they snowballed one another, doubtless the girls as well, went coasting in homemade bobsleds.

Often enough, boys (and girls) would join in teasing or persecuting some unfortunate child, with words if not worse. Some boys certainly added such classic illicit amusements as smoking a pipe down in the cornfield, stealing watermelons, pestering or hurting a dog or cat, shooting with slingshot at birds or other targets.

Each having a small knife of some sort, they would have played mumbletypeg. And of course every farm boy learned to whittle; some became expert. Father would always be highly amused at my crude efforts with a knife, even to sharpen a pencil.

In season they will have bathed and fished in sluggish Plaster Creek, gigged frogs along the banks, dug sassafras root— good to chew— climbed for nuts, and searched for wild strawberries and cherries, wintergreen and mint, perhaps even giant puffballs, of which Edwin would always be fond. They learned whatever grew. Of a spring morning in the late 1920’s, as I worked with him on the low wet ground near the northwest corner of the Martin farm (later condemned by the railroad), Father would point out May apples, which they had picked and eaten when he was a boy. We did not try them; I have since read that they taste like pineapple. And once in the 1930’s as we drove to town up what at home was called “the north road” (soon to be Breton Road),^[41] possibly one hundred rods south of where it crosses Burton Street, he would observe that in his boyhood there had been a wild plum orchard in the ravine just to the east, next to the nameless little stream still running there.^[42] He or a friend might have come on the orchard in the first place by working upstream, or perhaps he heard about it from someone living nearby. The Snell farm produced no fruit, and he was always hungry for it.

He may have ridden to take a sack of grain to the grist mill, perhaps the Bostwick Mill intermittently in operation on Plaster Creek, just to the west. That would have been a heavy responsibility; millers were not to be trusted. In my boyhood he would sing in his light tenor a ballad about the dying miller, examining his three sons, to see which should inherit— the one that cheated most shamelessly, outrobbing Chaucer’s miller with his “thombe of gold.”

The daily routine was broken now and again by disputes and anxiety over money. From what little we know, I should judge that even in the fairly good years just after the war, Jefferson Snell set aside scarcely more than enough to pay interest on the mortgage.^[43] If the farm was by then as productive as in 1870, taking better years with worse, he could have saved, given the prices still prevailing, what was required to pay a large share of the principal. Apparently he, and his friends, drank up the difference, and words will have been spoken over that.

In late August 1868, Jefferson and Mary Ann were forced to refinance the mortgage; the original mortgage holders, the Butlers, evidently had not been ready to renew it, may perhaps have threatened to foreclose. Wright C. Allen, of Paris Township held the new mortgage.^[44] Allen was an experienced trader in land and substantial land owner; he then was living near the western line of Paris Township, on Section 19.

In the two years that followed, things went from bad to worse. Prices of farm produce continued to decline, and it became harder to make ends  meet.^[45] In August of 1870, Allen assigned the mortgage, very likely at a discount, to Joshua Morse, leaving him the highly unpopular task of foreclosure. Five days later, Morse moved to foreclose, alleging that the sum of $119.95 due him had not been paid, evidently accrued interest to  date.^[46] The foreclosure sale was scheduled for two in the afternoon on 29 November at the front door of the Courthouse in town (in the Phoenix Block, so  called).^[47]  That will have been a bleak fall at the Snells’, charged with recriminations and fears for the future. Edwin, then 9 years old, will have heard it all; besides, his mother may have confided in him. In the end, she was able to save the day, bidding in the farm herself; she received a “sheriff’s deed” for  it.^[48] Probably a neighbor helped to finance the purchase, taking back another mortgage— an act of kindness, in no way imprudent given the remarkably strong market for farm land since the mid-1860’s.

Mary Ann seems to have had some small means of her own to contribute. She could not have saved much from selling butter and eggs, and perhaps taking in laundry and sewing. She is likely to have had a small bequest from her widowed sister, Elizabeth Hall, who died childless, perhaps at this time, somewhere in Michigan.^[49] If so, Jefferson Snell may even have left the interest unpaid just so as to force her hand. That’s all supposition; we can be sure only that she acquired title to the farm, and almost certain that she had more than $150 to put up.^[50]

A determined woman, as I sometimes thought as a child, seeing her portrait. Edwin will have been as proud of her as he was ashamed of his father. I find it, on reflection, understandable that he would never say anything about this transaction— for he never did— the memories were too painful. And understandable as well that he would one day marry another strong, resourceful woman. There may be something to the popular view that men often marry women that remind us forcibly, in some way, of our mothers.

Yet all Mary Ann had accomplished was to buy time— the length of time over which she could meet interest payments. At best she could expect to lose the farm after a few years, long before the younger boys became big enough to fend for themselves.^[51] She must have known that. She did what she could, and with grim satisfaction. Incidentally— or perhaps not— she provided herself an estate, as things fell out, her final effort to help her boys. For, nine months later, on 27 September 1871, she died.

Eloquent is the dry entry in county records on the cause of death:^[52]

Premature child birth (taking care of a drunken husband and family).

All that Edwin would ever recall was that “she died of a broken heart.” A neighbor may have taken the boys in, thus perhaps sparing them the last agony of their mother. Edwin, the oldest and most affected, probably blocked off the experience. He remembered something of his mother’s suffering while alive, and would never forgive his father.

Yet he had to control his feelings and take over entire responsibility for the household, and also for two younger brothers, aged 7 and 4. He must have worked very hard, and it is scarcely possible he could have gone to school, or had any time to himself. It was in this year that he was forced to suppress his own reactions and desires to an extent that left him for years self-sufficient and self-protective. He was never to talk about this period, so far as I know.

Nor would he have had much idea of what was in store for him and his two brothers, perhaps only in the late summer of 1872. Not until Wednesday, 21 February, did Jefferson Snell come before the Hon. Benjamin A. Harlan, Judge of Probate, Kent County, to petition that he be appointed administrator of Mary Ann’s estate, the value of which he put at a round [sic] $2,000.^[53] Because she had died intestate, her three sons, living with him, would inherit.^[54] Someone, presumably the Registrar of Probate, Cyrus E. Perkins, must have persuaded Jefferson Snell that he might not be qualified to administer an estate, for later the same day he appeared again before the court, requesting that “administration of said estate may be granted to your petitioner or some other suitable and competent person...”

The court did so after two days’ delay, on 23 February appointing one G. Chase Godwin as “Special Administrator.” Chase Godwin, a first cousin of Edwin’s friend Ida Godwin, had like her been born and brought up in Wyoming Township. He was a rising young lawyer, also a Democrat. Perhaps not wholly on that account he was held in low esteem by many in Paris Township, the Shafers included, as Mother would recollect in my boyhood, sniffing at the mention of his name. That by the way. Young Chase Godwin was in politics— later in the year he would oppose Judge Harlan, quite unsuccessfully, for election as Judge of Probate— and thus a proper person to be given such a chore. He filed necessary papers, had the estate inventoried and appraised, paid probate fees and bills outstanding, collected amounts due the estate, and arranged for the sale of chattels. Under the press of other business,^[55] he took more than two years to finish, and then only at the court’s insistence.

The chief figure in handling the estate was one Robert Slater, on 28 February appointed guardian of the three boys, on the petition of Jefferson Snell. It is not improbable, once the position was explained, that the latter was ready enough to give up all responsibility for the boys and their farm. It had been hard enough with Mary Ann to help. There cannot have been so many others in the township qualified by business experience and ready to undertake the duties, most notably that of getting along with Jefferson Snell. (And as it happens, the Slater family were also Democrats.) Robert Slater’s qualifications were soon underwritten by a younger brother George, with whom he lived, and one Lawrence Meech. The George Slaters lived on the north side of Laraway Road, east of the Leavitt (Richards) and Darling farms; Lawrence Meech belonged to one of the Meech families settled across the road and next to the east. The two of them went Robert Slater’s bond for $3,000.

As guardian, Robert Slater stood to make something for his trouble, and a fair amount of trouble it was to be. He entered fees and expenses for twenty days that he devoted to his duties during the year.^[56] First off, he found three men to appraise the Snell farm— Great-grandfather Thomas W. Martin, who lived not far down the road to the west; and two neighbors of the Snells, Stephen Tobias to the east and Lansing K. Rathbun to the west. All three of their farms were quite small,^[57] and none of them was engaged in buying and selling property. On 2 March, Judge Harlan appointed these “three suitable and disinterested persons” to do the job. A week later they came back, finding the value of the land— without accounting for inventory— at $1,600, or $40 an acre, “this without any response to any encumbrance.” In August, Chase Godwin’s two appraisers, one of them L.K. Rathbun, put the value at only $1,200 to $1,300.

There things rested until mid-September, after the Snell boys had been moved to their new homes, as soon to be told. Jefferson Snell presumably stayed at the farm to finish the harvest, on the likely assumption that he grew a crop that season. But Robert Slater was free to petition the court to have the farm sold, as he did on 18 September. He explained that the debt on the farm now amounted to more than $600, on which a payment would shortly fall due, and his wards had no resources with which to meet it.^[58] Moreover, they were “in want of clothing”; funds were needed “to provide the same, and also to board and educate them....”

A month later, on Monday, 21 October, Judge Harlan gave him authority to advertise and sell the property. From the 31st on, notices of sale were posted in the township for six weeks,^[59] and in the last week one appeared also in the Grand Rapids Weekly Eagle. On a Wednesday, 11 December, the farm was sold at public auction, at “the front door of the County Offices in Kent Street” (later Bond Street). It was bought by George Slater, for $1,385, “and subject to all encumbrances thereon.” Given that the encumbrances came precisely to $614, he apparently put the value of the property at about $2,000, well above the estimate of either set of appraisers, and more than double what Jefferson Snell had paid for it eight years earlier. Oddly enough, as I have observed, land prices had gone on rising after the Civil War while agricultural prices dropped.

The $1,385 net paid by George Slater, less various fees, plus the net amount due from Chase Godwin, added up to almost $1,275, the inheritance of the Snell boys. Late that fall, Clarence died, and on 14 December his one-third share, $425, was paid to his heir-at-law Jefferson Snell, by order of the court.^[60]  On the same day, the latter made a formal agreement with Robert Slater to “provide in a suitable manner” for his sons Edwin and Elliott L. (as Lynn was identified in the Probate records), for which he would receive $250 a year from their inheritance. The records show that Jefferson received the first $200 a year later, and $50 more on 17 October 1874 for “boarding and clothing” the two boys “up to this date.” He was asked for no accounting; indeed he seems to have given a receipt for only the $50. Not long after, having pocketed a good half of the whole inheritance— to which he will have felt entitled— he appears to have left the county, and the state.

In 1875, Robert Slater made a few disbursements directly for Edwin— for cloth, a suit, a hat, all told, almost $20.^[61] And that was that. After all, there was not enough to support the two boys through school, and Robert Slater seems to have concluded it would be best for them, as it was for him, to retain the balance until they reached their majority. He doubtless had satisfied himself that they were in school and not in want.

Youth on his own (1872-80)

By early September 1872—at eleven years old, as he now and then would observe in later years— Edwin had been put to work for a farmer of the Township of Caledonia. Lynn, not yet 5, was sent to another family in the township, probably that of William Jackson, on Section 14, two miles north of Edwin, if we may judge from much later evidence.^[62] Perhaps to begin with, Jefferson Snell may have paid something toward Lynn’s board; afterwards Lynn seems to have been kept out of kindness until he was of age to shift for himself.

Whoever it was that first thought of sending the Snell boys out of Paris Township, Jefferson Snell, perhaps Robert Slater as well, would have had an interest in removing them from friends and neighbors, and awkward questions. Lynn and Edwin saw each other, though seldom, I think; Lynn seems to have left the area by 1880.^[63] They probably saw little of their father, nor wished to see more. Once, at least, there was news from relatives; Lynn would recollect meeting their uncle James, who will have been coming to see two or three of his sons that had emigrated from Canada to Michigan in the mid-to-late 1870’s.^[64]  Edwin would quickly push childhood and family to the back of his mind.^[65] Later he would speak of himself, understandably, as an entirely self-made man. Nonetheless he would be touched to tears when one summer afternoon in the 1930’s, standing with him by the kitchen door at the farm, I said— I fear in rather a superior if kindly manner— that the first six years of life were considered critical in one’s personal development; his mother’s love, example, and guidance must then have stood him in good stead.

He went to work first for Albert Tobey, then in his late 30’s, who owned 108 acres in Section 26 of the Township of Caledonia, toward the southeast corner of the township touching Barber Lake.^[66] (A map showing the township in about 1878 follows p. ***.) Evening and morning, Edwin milked, tended stock, cleaned stables; in his own words, he was “Al Tobey’s barnyard clerk.” He also went to school. But from early in April into October he will have been in the fields as well, doing a man’s work; Al Tobey had no regular hired hand, and the Tobey children were small. For this, Edwin was paid $8 a month “and found.”^[67] He saved practically all of it; in a year or so he had $100 to put out on interest to a neighboring farmer.

He worked for Al Tobey two, or perhaps three years, and later for two other farmers in the neighborhood, as recorded in the downright words of yet another, Pat Kehoe, with whom Edwin would stay when teaching school and “boardin’ round.” Said Pat, “Snell, ye have worrked for three of the manest^[68] men in the Township of Caledonia, Al Tobey, J.B. Proctor,” and another whose name I’ve forgotten. John B. Proctor was a nurseryman, whose farm lay a mile south of Al Tobey’s, on Section 35, alongside the Thornapple River. All told then, Edwin spent five years working his way, meanwhile going to school. He seems not to have thought of returning to work in Paris Township, out of pride?

When he was done with school, having turned sixteen— or nearly six years after his mother’s death^[69]—Edwin had been through the six genteel McGuffey readers and the blue-backed Webster spelling books, learned to cipher through the double rule of three^[70] and to solve easy “word” problems in algebra “by logic.” He had practiced a copperplate (”Spencerian”) script, and had acquired some history and geography, chiefly of the U.S., including the then famous mnemonic song on the state capitals that began, “Maine, Augusta, on the Kennebec River...” And he had taught himself to concentrate. A country school was a one- or two-room building— a frame building in the Township of Caledonia— heated by a wood burning stove (or two), crowded with girls and boys of 6 to 16 years. In between recitations, reading aloud by all pupils was customary, from which the name “blab school.”

Children were drilled daily in spelling, and there was often a “spelldown,” an elimination contest, sometimes with sides chosen up. On special occasions the school might hold a “spelling bee” in the evening, before a crowd of parents and neighbors. Words were spelled aloud by syllables, as, for example, “predestination, p, r, e, pre, d, e, s, des, t, i, ti, n, a, na, t, i, o, n, shun.” When I was a boy, if a spelling question came up, Father would still follow the same practice. I don’t recall finding a misspelled word in his letters and journals.

Reciting long memorized passages, of prose or verse, was also required and encouraged, close attention being paid to enunciation, emphasis, and gestures (“elocution”). In the seasonal school “exercises,” such performances got the most notice. Perhaps the most famous set piece was “Casabianca” (by Felicia Dorothea Hemans), which began, “The boy stood on the burning deck...”^[71] Edwin got some long pieces by heart, as the following story shows. In the mid-1930’s, a few years after retirement— that is, about sixty years after he had finished district school— he and Mother would attend a Central High School teachers’ picnic one summer afternoon. After everyone had had enough to eat, several of the English teachers, led by Miss Ethel Louise Knox, performed the scene from  A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which the rustics rehearse “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Having waited for the applause to die away, Father rose and recited letter perfect a long humorous poem he had once learned on the same theme. Perhaps he knew about the program in advance; anyhow his youthful memory of those verses had remained intact. And Mother declared—as she would repeat at home— that she had never heard him say, or mention, them.

The society in which Edwin grew up still depended a good deal for information and entertainment on sayings, stories, speeches, debates, old people’s recollections, singing. The native-born farm population of the Old Northwest was mostly literate, but, school days past, had not much to do with the printed word. To remember easily and verbatim was a source of pleasure and social prestige. I think that may help to explain why schoolteachers set so many exercises in memory, and— what is more— why schoolboys and schoolgirls of the day willingly took the time “to learn by heart.” Or, to borrow another phrase of that generation, its metaphor for having learned thoroughly, to know “backwards and forwards.”

And they sometimes did, literally. Edwin, and many or most of his generation, could, for example, say the alphabet as easily from “zee to a” as from “a to zee.” (They may have heard, but did not say “zed”; Edwin would recall the similar formula, then obsolete, “a to izzard.”) That would die out only slowly, surviving even into my boyhood. They played games with reversals. One, quite widely known, treated the word “preface” as an acronym: “Peter Rice eats fish and catches eels; eels catch alligators, Father eats raw p’taters,” one that Edwin had heard, which would soon appear in The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1883).

Memory also figured in a game with which older children would baffle the younger: “Take a number...add three...multiply by two...divide by two...subtract the number you started with...,” which ended with the propounder’s announcing with what number the child was left. Apart from the simple trick of canceling out the unknown, which some may have learned first in the schoolyard, the marvel is— today— that many a one of them could carry these sums easily in his head.^[72]

The district school then provided a great social as well as intellectual stimulus for children, otherwise confined to farm routine, not least for Edwin. For out of school these years had been from first to last a trial of endurance and patient determination. In the Township of Caledonia he had little time for social life. He would later recall bitter envy of any neighbor lad that drove past in the family buggy with a flourish of the whip to see his girl on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. Edwin would have borne many hard words and slights. Then as later he was quiet and forbearing, but once, he would say, he went for a bigger boy who had taunted him past endurance, and gave him a thrashing.

Having finished school, he asked for the vacant teaching job. The school inspectors hesitated. He was short (about 5 foot 7 like his father), slight, young, and inexperienced, even if wiry, plucky, and “a good scholar.” As one inspector warned, “The big boys have thrown out the last two schoolmasters.” Edwin of course knew that; it didn’t dissuade him. But the inspectors naturally wondered whether he would fare better. Finally, two out of three voted to let him have a go at it.^[73] So, in the year 1877/8 he had his first school; it was located on the main north-south road in the east part of the township, not far south of Al Tobey’s farm. That we can say because he would tell the story so, and because he stayed at Pat Kehoe’s while “boardin’ round.” Pat had recently moved from Ada Township to the Township of Caledonia, Section 26, where the school was located.^[74]

Edwin held the job, through the year, calling on the exceptionally strong will forged during his hard boyhood, and also, I imagine, the tact for which he was to be noted later on. He continued, we may be sure, to save most of what he earned, “boardin’ round.” Even so, he probably made less per year than a good farm hand, perhaps $125 for the 6-month school year of 1877/8.^[75] And the position of the schoolmaster in a farming community, though prominent, was not high.^[76] Farmers (like miners) envious and always apt to complain— or as they said, “to bellyache”—nevertheless have always looked down on outsiders. But for Edwin, having his own way to make, it was a step forward; he was getting experience, cultivating skills, useful in another world.

The young master, though known in the district, seems to have had but few friends there. His newly bought Autograph Album holds inscriptions, entered during the spring of 1878, by two young women from the area, neither from that school district. One was Sarah L. Bechtel, daughter of one of the owners of the flour mill in the village of Caledonia, in the southwestern part of the township; the other was Lottie Wood, also very likely a villager. Two other entries of the season were by children of the nurseryman, John B. Proctor, whose farm was a half mile south of the school— an assertive signature by John R., some verse with a signature by Mary L. Both were several years older, acquaintances that date from working for their father.^[77]

Also among the inscriptions of the same spring and early summer are those of five young men and five young women from Paris Township; most, perhaps all, of them he had known as a boy while growing up there.^[78] He evidently began enjoying himself now and again with these childhood friends. He will have borrowed a horse for the 20-mile round trip, or he may have walked.^[79] It was doubtless during that season that he became proficient at the jig and the hornpipe and acquainted with the movements of the square dance, to the music of the Virginia Reel, Money Musk, and other traditional tunes. His good friend Walter R. Meech wrote the following:

In the future, Ed, whatever your fate,

Remember the winter of ‘78,

With its mud, parties, and spelling bees, too,

And the girls I admired, but alas!

They liked you.

In the same vein, another friend, Fred R. Darling, added a postscript: “Remember the girl you left behind you,” thus recalling the title of an old song popular on the frontier. This is the joshing of young males; still it suggests that Edwin was already practicing the gentle, humorous courtliness, pale blue eyes twinkling, that was to lead to numerous sentimental attachments.

Edwin taught only a year at his first school, leaving in the spring of 1878, very likely to put behind him unpleasant memories.^[80] Anyhow, he must already have been eager to try something different. He went to work on a large fruit farm in Barry County, southwest of Hastings, in the township of Prairieville. A season of working for John B. Proctor would have given him some useful background, perhaps a reference. Almost certainly he was better paid than he had been while teaching. Sometimes in my boyhood he would talk about the experience. His employer, whose name I have forgotten, was a Seventh Day Adventist, strict as to language, coffee, tea, and Saturdays, but not unkind. Edwin retained only pleasant memories of that year, along with some knowledge of grafting and spraying fruit trees, and of bee keeping.

He stayed a year. Two young women of the township, Cora and Rosalia Stanley, composed inscriptions for his Autograph Album, addressed to “Friend Eddie.” The latter was an older daughter— the former also, more than likely— of one Asher D. Stanley, a well-to-do farmer, and perhaps Edwin’s employer.^[81]

Whatever the satisfactions in fruit farming, Edwin was back again the next fall teaching school in the Township of Caledonia.^[82] But this time he taught at Caledonia Center, or LaBarge, a village of 50 to 80 people, almost in the center of the township, situated along the banks of the “beautiful Thornapple River.” Two young women from the village wrote inscriptions in his Autograph Album, one on 26 October 1879, the other on 19 March 1880. These are the only ones entered in that year.

LaBarge, as the village commonly was called, apparently was named after Francis LaBarge, who had owned land nearby in the 1860’s.^[83] The village had a sawmill and flour mill driven by water power. It had the usual trades— two blacksmiths, a handle factory, shoemaker, wagon shop— and a general store and post office. There was mail service three times a week, by stage, from the village Caledonia, which was on The Grand River Valley Railroad.

Edwin had had plenty of chance to become acquainted in the village, and he seems to have come to think of it, provisionally, as home. LaBarge was the home address he would give when he went on to normal school.^[84] He would come back to visit. He had gone, however, by June 1880, for he is not listed there in the decennial census.^[85] Very likely he was visiting in Paris Township, probably also in Grand Rapids, renewing acquaintance.

Edwin’s moves away from, then back to, teaching school reflect an uncertainty about teaching as a career, one that would long remain with him. Teaching district school was an especially trying experience. He lived among settled folk, carrying his few belongings from house to house, eating at others’ tables, sleeping in strange beds, vacated for him, or perhaps not entirely, for the schoolmaster might have to bunk with one of the older boys.

Edwin and his school would have had something in common with schoolmaster and school in Will Carleton’s caricature, applicable grosso modo to many a school then.^[86] For example, the noise: “...His little scrub-thicket of pupils sent upward a half-smothered hum.” Or...

There were two knowing girls in the corner,

each one with some beauty possessed,

In a whisper discussing the problem

which one the young master likes best.

Also the desk tops carved, bespattered with ink, the square stove in the center glowing,

And the children’s hot faces were streaming

the while they were freezing their backs.

But in Edwin’s school critics would have found small grounds for such charges as were voiced by the village elder making an unexpected visit with a deputation to Carleton’s school master, including those of innovation in reading, spelling, and ‘rithmetic.^[87] Edwin would have been reluctant to make changes, respectful of local opinion although independent in matters of discipline.

There is nonetheless a truth in Carleton’s description: the schoolmaster led a very exposed life. As a reminder of that an illustration accompanying the verse is included here (following p. ***); it shows the village fathers confronting the master by the hot stove. It was that public scrutiny of the master’s behavior— he was always being tested— that made it a formative experience, for Edwin as for many other young Americans. One of the most distinguished, John Adams, who had taught school in Worcester to support himself for a time while reading law, recalled the advantages in these words:^[88]

I advise every young man to keep school. I acquired more knowledge of human nature while I kept that school than while I was at the bar, than while I was in the world of politics or at the Courts of Europe. It is the best method of acquiring patience, self-command, and a knowledge of character.

Study at Valparaiso and various employments (1880-86)

By the summer of 1880, Edwin had increased his savings to $300 or more, and had taken a decision about his future. In August he enrolled in the North Indiana Normal School and Business Institute at Valparaiso in northwestern Indiana. The school was housed in a cluster of plain red brick and one or two frame buildings, on a hill outside the town itself, overlooking the winding, marshy Kankakee River.^[89] The Pennsylvania Railroad ran close by; there was a walkway over it for students.

Enrolling in “Normal,” as they commonly called it, was another big step, leading Edwin away from farming and toward town, or city, life, as he must have suspected. Restless, unsettled, ready for a change, he will have been encouraged by reports about the Institute. He probably learned about it from students, like his friends the Pennell sisters and Ida Godwin.^[90] They must have reassured him that he could do the work, and pay his way. Word-of-mouth persuasion surely recruited nearly all of the newcomers at Valparaiso. The school, entirely self-supporting—intended indeed to turn a profit—had been founded in 1873 for students in just his condition, with a country school education and little money. He need meet no entrance requirements; even those not fully literate were admitted— and taught to read— an idea well ahead of its time.^[91] Courses were given at a broad range of difficulty and taught with patience.

The school had grown very quickly as a result. In 1880, an official asserted that it was already the largest normal school in the whole country. By the following school year, 1881/2, the enrollment reached 2,000. By then students were enrolled from all over the Old Northwest, with a scattering from the southern border states, the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states, even the northeast.^[92] A bachelor’s degree— which the Institute had assumed the authority to award— took just three years, of 50 weeks, six days a week. Full holidays came seldom; there was none, for example, in honor of the great Fourth of July. The chapel bell rang at 6:30 in the morning, and classes continued all day, into the evening. Edwin’s favorite teacher, Miss Mantie (named, but never called Samantha) Baldwin, taught class 10 hours a day. Professor H.B. Brown, the founder, kept up an equally arduous schedule.^[93] And he required all to do the same. The teaching staff of thirty were thus able to hold down not only tuition but also class size, to the point at which they might guide, encourage, and correct each student.^[94] If they worked hard— even for the time— they were, for that time, well paid.^[95]

One might say that Edwin received a thorough, if an old-fashioned high school education at “Valpo.” Yet that would be misleading. In most colleges, students in the 1880’s were still closely supervised, a professor was still likely to be more schoolmaster than scholar, and the course rarely covered as much as the first two years in a good twentieth-century U.S. college or university. The course at “Normal” then equaled about the first two years at college. Several studied the two years more to take a bachelor’s degree at a state university; a few went on to graduate school. Edwin would later say he should have followed their example.

Such normal schools seem to have done a better job than the teachers’ colleges that succeeded them. Faint praise, it will be agreed, and it must be allowed that “Valpo” had energetic, ambitious, and uncommonly industrious students. Besides high school teachers and administrators, alumni of this period would include four U.S. senators^[96] and a number of college professors, lawyers, doctors, and business executives. They would send back eloquent testimony as to their training.^[97] I wonder whether they understood how few there were like them: the number enrolled in all “institutions of higher education,” including normal schools, although growing fast, in 1880 came to only 1 out of 37 of all those aged 18 through 21.

In the school year 1880/81, Edwin was already enrolled, I believe, in the scientific course in which he finally was graduated, with required credits in English (rhetoric, grammar, literature), mathematics, foreign languages, history, and of course science, by far the weakest subject.^[98] That first year, it seems, he studied Rhetoric, algebra, German, medieval history, and physics (Natural Philosophy). He took bookkeeping also— as insurance, just in case? There remains a notebook outlining Rhetoric in his most formal hand, with artfully shaded strokes. The other courses I have inferred chiefly from his extant textbooks, the natural order of some topics, and information on subjects studied in his second and third years.^[99] The texts would repay comparison with those from earlier and later periods— that for physics was decades out of date— but such an exercise would go beyond my present purpose. Casual inspection shows a basic level of instruction, though with more compact exposition, requiring more attentive study, than similar texts today.

We know who three of his teachers were. The outline of Rhetoric, mentioned above, is presented to Miss Baldwin, in these words:

In memory of the many pleasant and profitable hours spent in the Rhetoric class of N.I.N.S. the outline of Rhetoric, the first work of my hands, is respectfully dedicated (by the Author).                                                   Edwin F. Snell

Miss Baldwin, in turn, signed herself in the Autograph Album on 26 July 1881, “Your friend.” Edwin may have attended her class in algebra as well. The general admiration and affection with which she was regarded can be explained not only by patience, encouragement, and good humor but also by her skill in teaching—“beginning at the beginning, and testing her students well before going on,” an approach Edwin will have approved. Incidentally, she marked his outline 100 on each count: on “logical arrangement,” “accuracy,” “exhaustiveness,” and “business appearance.”

The others that can be identified are Mrs. C.W. Boucher, instructor in history, and her husband, who was professor of commercial law and bookkeeping; both were early graduates of “Normal” and thus nearly of Edwin’s own generation. Each of them inscribed his Autograph Album.^[100] (Professor Boucher’s signature is shown following p. *** below.)

Valparaiso provided in every way a novel experience— not only new material to learn, the company and challenge of many like-minded contemporaries, encouragement and guidance from teachers, but also an outpouring of evangelical emotion and practical benevolence that he would hardly have expected to find, least of all in a business enterprise. As I noted, the school was cheap— the “poor man’s Harvard,” they called it. For one ten-week term, tuition was $8, room was $2, and the cheapest board $14—all told, $24. Basic fees then were $120 a year.^[101] Of course there were numerous expenses for books, paper, ink, quills, pencils, needle and thread, soap, mops, brooms, and kerosene; also fuel wood, which students could have at cost if they cut and chopped it up themselves. Total expenses, then, including those for travel once a year to and from school, for bed linen (the first year), replacement of shoes and clothing, any medicines and doctor bills, might have averaged over $200 a year.^[102] Of course students charged their own stoves, refilled and trimmed their lamps, drew water at the well, swept and mopped their quarters; not a few will have scrubbed and ironed their own linen. They may have exchanged services. In any event, they spent some hours a week at housekeeping.

Students without funds for a year could, and did, stop— without loss or discredit— at the end of any 10-week term. Moreover, the head, Prof. H.B. Brown, kept down expenses and helped students at the same time by offering them plenty of work—“slinging hash,” bucking wood, milking, keeping books, gardening, feeding hogs.

Whether Edwin worked his way in part, I can’t be sure; probably not in his first year. In any case, there was time to make friends, and they enjoyed themselves in that “winter of deep snow.” Ten inscriptions by students are entered in the indispensable Autograph Album, from February to August 1881.^[103] Among those signing are the two Pennell sisters, Hattie and Jessie.

One inscription lets us know that Edwin’s gallantry was rather widely, and lightly, diffused. Hattie Stanley wrote,

Friend Eddie,

Peruse these simple lines,

If ever you read any,

And think of me,

Sometimes, among the many.

Several inscriptions allude to dissatisfaction with the diet in East Hall. Jessie Pennell counseled, “Be not discouraged. Plain food maketh brain.” Another friend wrote, appending this souvenir, “Remember our dinner of onions and crackers.” A longer inscription represents his roommate in East Hall, W.A. Davis of Hecla (Whitley County), Indiana; it is dated 22 March 1881:

Edwin— when your miles away,

Think of that dull dreary day

When we went to gain some knowledge,

At the famous “Valpo” college.

Think of that bad smelling butter

Fit to grace some back-street gutter,

Think of crackers, bread and meat—

Low would be the dogs to eat

The food they set up to use there

At the East Hall in the Campus fair.— But drop these thoughts from out our mind

For in this world we cannot find

(No matter in what sphere were born)

A blushing rose without a thorn,

Lets give old “Prof” his honest due,……

Compliments of your room mate

If not quite literate and wordy to a degree, Mr. Davis’s indictment is clear. “Prof.” was the popular O.P. Kinsey, a co-director of the school with the founder, H.B. Brown. As manager of the East Hall, “Prof.” was well known for cutting corners. The “butter” was in fact oleo— very poor stuff in those days— for that was what was served in halls where the fee was $14 a term. In halls where you paid $20, butter was served.

If even Edwin complained about the food— he that would later declare (in words said to come from a nursery rhyme), “I eat what’s set before me”—then it must have been lacking in some way. The school generally, and Professor Kinsey in particular, made boast of economies— dealing directly with producers, buying whenever possible in carload lots, keeping portions small, slicing bread thin, so there would be little waste, serving unpeeled fruits, cooking leftovers, and the like. You could have second, even third helpings of bread and potatoes, but were urged to take no more than you would eat, breaking a slice of bread rather than leaving any. In the end, it may have been no worse than the institutional— and Army— food others have eaten. Farm boys, and girls, had pretty high standards.

In August 1881, at the end of the academic year, Edwin left, perhaps to come back; he wrote to at least one girl in school.^[104] Like so many others, he had to go back and earn more money. He will have had funds left, far from enough to carry him through two more years, very likely too little for a year. He had his portrait taken, looking young and fresh (following p. ***). But he may have been discouraged: slow rises worth by poverty depress’d.

He then probably taught a term in Mecosta County,^[105] to the north of Kent, principal place the town of Big Rapids, a center of the lumber industry. There is no entry for that period in the Autograph Album, so I can’t determine exactly where he taught; the lack of an entry fits in with Mother’s recollection that he stayed only the first term, for entries generally were made late in the school year. Nor do we know why he wouldn’t have stayed the year out. It may be that he had had enough of teaching country school, and again began looking for something that would pay better.

The record remains blank for five months following; the next entry in the Autograph Album is of early June 1882, when he was again at LaBarge. It was made by a young woman, presumably a classmate from Valparaiso, in German script, as follows:^[106]

Die Seligkeit der Welt vergeht,

Nur was wir Gutes thun, besteht.

Where he spent the winter and spring we can at least guess. For example, he may have found something to do in the area, through one of his cousins, Silas and Jesse Snell, who had emigrated from Ontario, settling in Big Rapids, in 1878 and 1880, respectively.

In the summer, at the end of June or in early July 1882, he enrolled in a course at the Oberlin Telegraph College in Oberlin, Ohio— at whose suggestion?—as evidenced by several entries in the Autograph Album (one shown following p. ***). Learning Morse Code is drudgery, and the weather must have been hot, but Oberlin was, as it still is, a pleasant place, and Edwin would have enjoyed the company. The course lasted through August, and he seems then to have gone back to Michigan.

On 12 October he was again in Grand Rapids, collecting his inheritance. The date refers back to Jefferson Snell’s petition to be appointed administrator of Mary Ann’s estate, in which he had recalled Edwin’s date of birth as 10 October 1861.^[107] Finally 21 years old, by court record, Edwin was paid a round $400 in full settlement of “all my claims and demands upon Robert Slater, my late guardian.”^[108] The final amount in effect represented the $425 due Edwin in February 1873 less outlays charged to him, plus simple interest at 7% p.a. on the balance carried forward.^[109] Robert Slater could pay even simple interest at 7% p.a. on the boys’ inheritance only by investing in loans, doubtless commingling their funds with his own. It seems likely that he had put most, perhaps all, his and his wards’ money into mortgages. They paid him good rates of interest, 8% to 12% or more, and ran for relatively short periods.^[110] In a strong, generally rising market for farm land, he was taking little risk, though in periods of crisis a prudent investor would hope to maintain credit, or funds, for bidding in at foreclosure sales to cover his loans.

As the above, I hope, explains, Robert Slater not only stood to make something, over and above fees, from handling the estate; he was entitled to it, as a return on the use of his skill and position in the market. These constituted his chief qualification as guardian. In his view, probably not in his alone, it was his business to invest his wards’ money wisely, not to look out for them.^[111] What Edwin might have thought about that, I have no idea; it is one of the subjects on which he would remain silent. As it looks now, he could have done worse. $400 in 1882 was worth nearly half as much again as in 1873. It was fully as much as he could then earn in two years; added to funds he already had on hand, it would have carried him through his last two years at “Valpo.”

But he didn’t go back. He must have made up his mind well before leaving for Oberlin, even though he could look forward to receiving his inheritance in early fall. He may have thought it better to accumulate more funds; that would have been in character. Perhaps he had found attending school less to his taste than expected. Anyhow, the restlessness earlier evident had not vanished; and he was curious to explore other careers more active than teaching school. He was never to intimate what lay in his mind then. Over time he may have forgotten.

So then, as shown by entries in the Autograph Album from Grand Rapids and LaBarge, he stayed in the area until late October, enjoying the company of old friends but principally looking for work. By the end of the month he probably had found an opening. We know from Mother that he worked for a season in northern Michigan as a railroad telegrapher, probably through the winter of 1882/3. In the end, she would say, he was overwhelmed by being alone with a responsibility for the traffic that passed. He gave up telegraphy.

In the spring of 1883 he tried yet another field, signing up on a surveying crew, more than likely at Big Rapids. We have a portrait (following p. ***) of the members of the crew— Edwin sporting a new moustache— with their equipment; a framed enlargement would hang on a bedroom wall when I was a boy. He will have worked at surveying through the season, from spring to fall. Long after, he would remember surveying lore, would always keep his text on the subject. And he would record with satisfaction late in 1941 that his son Arthur in turn was learning the use of level and transit, at Fort Sill.

One of his fellows on the crew wrote as follows in the Autograph Album:

                                 7/25/83

Mr. Ed Snell Esq.

Do not forget the backwoods life

Where you and I mosquitoes fight.

And Pete the notty storeys tell

And keep us awake for the Breakfast Bell.

Now Ed remember your failing and

That you may long live and prosper

Many wishes to you and your family

                                 Very Truly Yours

                                 Thos. Trettnake

                                 Detroit Mich.

What, I wonder, was Edwin’s “failing?” Surely some obvious habit— snoring?—for he evidently did not share confidences with his mates.

In the following winter, 1883/4, he served as bookkeeper in Oliver Seaman’s lumber camp, on the Muskegon River. His cousin Jesse Snell (a son of Edwin’s “Uncle Jim”), who had come to Big Rapids in 1880, probably was working as a cook’s helper in a lumber camp— by the early 1900’s he was a chief cook. It may then have been upon his suggestion that Edwin apply at Ol Seaman’s. In my boyhood, on rare occasions, he was to recall the experience in a phrase or two, the rough, dangerous life of the men in the woods, felling trees with double-bitted axe, one-man and two-man crosscut saw and wedge; marking logs with a timber stamp; then laying them on skids with the help of a cant hook and moving them to the river bank for stacking till the spring drive. The lumberjacks, easygoing in camp, where Edwin bunked and boarded with them, became rough and dangerous themselves on their binges in Big Rapids. They were heavy drinkers, brawlers, and spent money right and left, mostly on loose women.

That Edwin had his own quieter amusements is suggested by an inscription dated Tuesday 29 January 1884, by Hattie Tuxbury in White Cloud, a village north of Newaygo and south and west of Big Rapids. She wrote, in a postscript, “Remember the dough and beans.” Sounds rather domestic.

He may have dropped in to see Hattie on a trip between Muskegon and Big Rapids; Ol Seaman’s mill was on the river four miles south of Big Rapids.^[112] As bookkeeper, Edwin may have had to make such trips— by rail— to keep a record of orders and deliveries. His visits to the mill made a lasting impression on him. The sawyer stood alone, exposed and isolated, a star performer, deciding quickly how to cut up logs so as to produce the most high-grade lumber, with the least waste. The work called for good nerves, quick reactions, tried judgment, and great endurance, and Edwin watched, admiring and absorbed. One day he was to take his family to see such a sawmill, to show us what it was like.

He may perhaps have been invited to the wedding of Zara H. Davis, 23, the adopted daughter of Isaac D. Davis (whose second wife, Mrs. Louisa M. Barr, was her mother), to Will Powers on 19 February at Mr. Davis’ farm just south of Bowen Station, in Paris Township. Edwin of course would have had to send regrets, with best wishes. Will, with his new wife, returned directly to the Black Hills.^[113] Two inscriptions mark the close of the season, at the time everyone was paid off. One, presumably from some relative of the boss, reads, “Compliments of P.N. Seaman, Big Rapids, Michigan 4/13/84.” The other, from the camp cook, it would seem, reads: “Compliments of Fred Marble, Culinary Artist, Big Rapids, 4/3/84.”

There follows another period lasting several months, for which we have only one small piece of evidence— an inscription on the flyleaf of a New Testament issued (in 1860) for the interdenominational British and Foreign Bible Society, the name of which is imprinted in the dull black cover along with the suitable legend, “sold under cost price/fourpence.” The inscription reads:

Presented to

Edwin Snell

by

M.C. Fluebury

Ontario

Remember the Sabbath.

July 21/84

Conceivably Edwin met M.C. Fluebury as a guest of one of his Snell cousins at Big Rapids. But I am inclined to believe that he went to Ontario for a few weeks in the late spring and early summer of 1884, to visit relatives, with whom his cousins at Big Rapids would have remained in touch.^[114] M.C. Fluebury, so far as I know, was no relative. Edwin probably would have met him at a church service at Norwich. The Snell cousins were great churchgoers, Presbyterians, as I recall. One, Byron Snell, may already have been studying for the ministry. Edwin’s favorite first cousin, Mary, was the wife of the Rev. Robert Dennis, of nearby Burgessville. Edwin may have received the Testament as a parting gift; at the end of July he will have started back to Valparaiso by the Grand Trunk Western. Evidently returning to school had come to suit him better over the last two years.

The first autograph from Valparaiso was entered in late October, once again by a young woman. There are two other such from December. One exclaims, “E[ast] H[all] Table 1. ‘No’!” A similar inscription of the following March, from a young man, adjures, “Remember Table ‘1’ East Hall.” These are referring back to 1880/81—to the food— for Edwin lived in 1884/5 in Dodge Hall. The food must have been better at Dodge Hall— and more expensive? Maybe. Anyhow we are sure he enrolled again in “Normal” in August of 1884. He stayed through the year, as we see from autographs of the winter of 1884/5 and the spring of 1885. The school record surviving in Valparaiso is evidence enough (there are also autographs) that he remained through 1885/6.

The studies he followed can be sketched, though not term by term. In science, his texts and exercise books vouch for botany, geography (with the elements of geology), astronomy, and chemistry, probably in that order. There will have been few experiments, no laboratory or field work for students.

In mathematics, the courses studied were geometry (plane and solid), trigonometry (including spherical), and analytic geometry. The text for the last subject covers conic sections, the general equation of the second degree, equations of the third and fourth degree, “transcendental curves” and their equations, and the geometry of three dimensions, ending with the general equation of the second degree in three variables. There is no suggestion that classes received “an introduction to the calculus.”

In history, Edwin probably went on with that of modern Europe, followed by two courses on the ancient world— one on Greece, one on Rome— and one on teaching history; the field seems to have attracted him. Besides a 2-volume survey of Western history, his texts included a 2-volume work on Greek history by T.T. Timayenis and a “student’s Gibbon.”

In English, he very likely took grammar with Prof. H.B. Brown, whose specialty it was, a couple of courses in literature, from Prof. O.P. Kinsey (or possibly Miss Baldwin), and a speech course. Literature was taught with Victorian enthusiasm, with Taine’s highly colored determinist history as a text; Edwin’s copy survives. They read something of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Gray, Scott, Dickens, the English romantic and “classic” American poets. I have the impression that in one of these courses they read Homer, using Bryant’s verse translation.

He had two or more terms of Latin; we have his copy of the Latin grammar of Allen and Greenough, sold to him by the school library on 20 March 1885,^[115] signed on the flyleaf with a flourish, E.F. Snell, Valpo. His studies would have included at most one term of translating easy excerpts from classical authors, with first exercises in composition. To be sure, an inscription in the Autograph Album of 1885 gives the opening lines of the Aeneid, with a gloss that parallels Troy with Michigan, Italy with Valparaiso, and Lavinia with “Normal.” But it seems likely that this passage was copied from the section on prosody toward the end of the grammar. The only Latin allusion I remember his making was to repeat the familiar boast of Caesar, which he pronounced “Veen-eye, vied-eye, vice-eye,” as still was a common practice.^[116]

He certainly continued with German, though I don’t find any texts: he will have borrowed from the library, or resold them. His instructor for most or all the two years was J.E. Roessler, a young graduate of Valparaiso himself— and future president of the school— well known for conducting a lively course. Edwin would remember the boys who said, “Ick liebe dick,” a favorite butt of Mr. Roessler’s. Sixteen courses were given— united victorious Germany was then at the height of its fame as leader in the world in science and technology, culture, social legislation, and warfare, and the language was a universally popular subject in this country. Edwin took a number of (ten-week) courses. His notebooks contain a few short German poems in his hand, some in Italian, some in German cursive script, I suppose to be got by heart. He would occasionally repeat at home some lines, perhaps the first lines, of a poem I haven’t identified, beginning: “Es lächelt der See, es ladet zum Bade…” He learned in toto, maybe from the “sings” held in the last half hour of German class every Friday, “Die Wacht am Rhein,” a patriotic song, the words written in 1840 on the threat of French invasion, the music dating from 1854. He may even have taken part in the German society programs, glee club concerts or the play given yearly. At least he would have attended.

Edwin’s teachers of the last two years do not show up in the Autograph Album; evidently he no longer was looking for encouragement. But numerous students appear, about 20 from the class of 1885. One of the girls wrote: