Nancy's AiRMail 5/24/24

​Happy Memorial Day.
 
According to Wikipedia, “Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is a federal holiday in the United States for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. From 1868 to 1970, it was observed on May 30. Since 1971, it is observed on the last Monday of May.” The holiday has a long and complex history, which you can get a sense of if you read the full Wikipedia article and the many footnoted sources.
 
Why am I telling you this? The short answer is that this long and complex history is related to my latest writing project. As you may know, in the fall of 2022, I served as artist-in-residence at Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia. For about five weeks, I lived in a house built in 1850. This house is located just across the street from where the abolitionist John Brown staged his infamous raid on the federal armory in 1859, an event which many historians believe triggered the Civil War. From the windows of my temporary residence I could look across the Potomac River to the C&O Canal towpath and the high cliff of Maryland Heights. To the right I could glimpse the Shenandoah River coming to meet the Potomac, and Virginia on the River’s other side.
 
During my time in Harpers Ferry and ever since, I’ve been researching and writing about the town, the state of West Virginia, and the Appalachian region. It’s an endlessly fascinating exploration. There is the story of John Brown and his ill-fated raid, the very history of the armory, the dramas of the Civil War (which saw the town of Harpers Ferry change hands fourteen times), and the creation of the state of West Virginia in the middle of that war. The Appalachian Trail goes through Harpers Ferry, and the many famous names associated with the town’s vibrant history include George Washington, Meriweather Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, Robert E. Lee, W.E.B DuBois, and Frederick Douglass. Devastating floods have shaped Harpers Ferry, and the town played a significant role in promoting education and tourism for people of color. All this doesn’t even begin to cover the many other topics and themes that have caught my attention, such as immigrants, mountain culture, the mountains themselves, music, folklore, lost and endangered species, medicine, food, women, politics, transportation, recreation, labor, and geology. One important thematic thread I’m following is “monuments and memory.” This is where origin stories of the American federal holiday, Memorial Day, fit in.
 
I’ve written dozens of short pieces about the town, the state, and the region. They are a mix of fiction, history, memoir, poetry, and essay. Most are 500 – 800 words (a page or two); some are much shorter, and a few are around 1500 words. At the moment, there is no coherent whole to these short pieces, but rather than let them gather dust in a computer file, I’d like to share them with anyone who might like to accompany me on this literary exploration. Not all at once, of course. I’ll be sending out a single piece a week for the next year or so. I’m calling this experiment AiRMail, as in Artist-in-Residence Email. If you’d like to receive these nuggets, you don’t have to do anything – you are already on my mailing list. If you don’t want to clutter up your inbox, simply hit the unsubscribe link below. I promise I won’t be offended. Reader comments are welcome, but certainly not expected.
 
This first entry is the first thing I wrote for this project, and is a kind of introduction to the town, as well as to my own history. And if you’ve read this far, thanks for indulging me!

                                  At the Confluence: Beginnings
 
                                                         Prelude
They call it the “Robert Harper moment,” a sudden realization that there is nowhere on earth more beautiful. This place of two rivers rambling over ragged boulders and flanked by gangly white-limbed sycamores, of towering sheered rock faces, of luminous skies and tumbling hills, of ambitious, even revolutionary, dreams, has laid a hand on your soul and is calling you home. Home, as you had not imagined it. And against all expectations, you put down roots here, in the lower Shenandoah Valley’s rich soil, and settle in, knowing this is where you are meant to be, and where you will die and be buried.
            Robert Harper, for whom the town is named, arrived in March 1747, intending to stay only a night before heading 25 miles to the southwest, where he’d been employed to build a Quaker meeting house. Early the next morning, though, before breakfast, Harper made his way to a nearby summit, and was so overcome by the scenic grandeur -- not to mention the possibilities for water-powered industrial profits -- that he resolved “to end my days there.”  At some risk, he impulsively purchased 125 acres of untitled land and ferry rights from a squatter, the sole resident of the area, and soon put the outpost of Harpers Ferry on the map.
            The years following the American Revolution saw an influx of German and Irish immigrants, white Protestants mostly, skilled workers drawn by opportunities in munitions, transportation, construction, and millwork. And seduced by the sublime natural beauty.
            The first Black to reside in Harpers Ferry wasn’t given a choice in the matter. A man enslaved by Robert Harper, his name isn’t known. His story isn’t known. Did he feel at home? No one can say. By the time John Brown staged his infamous raid one hundred years later, Harpers Ferry, a community of about 3000 in what was by then the United States, counted among its residents three hundred Blacks, half living in freedom and half in bondage.
                                                        Interlude
            I’ve always felt connected to my mother’s Irish ancestors. Her grandparents emigrated to the States late in the 19th century, but extended family still live in the same County Cork home village of centuries past, some even occupying the house my great-great-great grandfather built before the famines. My paternal family heritage, on the other hand, was never very clear and, frankly, of not much interest. I understood my father, too, came from Irish stock, but his was mixed with an equal dose of German, plus a smattering of Scottish and English. His parents were born somewhere in Kentucky and later moved to Ohio. Our surname, my father said, was an Anglicized version of a German name. That was about the extent of my knowledge and, as far as I know, anyone’s.
            Recently, five weeks’ immersion in the mountain culture of the West Virginia panhandle stirred my genetic curiosity. I started to imagine my father’s ancestors arriving on U.S. shores in the late 18th or early 19th century, German immigrants, or possibly Scots-Irish, Protestants from Ulster, like many who settled in this region. In my mind they were, as they’d always been, farmers or tradesmen, not dirt-poor, but not wealthy or particularly well educated. I’d always assumed that as my father had told no stories about them, there were no stories to tell.
            I know better now.
            The saga uncovered by following the trail back from my paternal grandfather is not one of Scots-Irish Protestants from Ulster, nor manifestly of German immigrants. True, eight generations ago, around 1720, a German ancestor arrived in the British-American colonies. He – like my father, named Thomas – promptly Anglicized his surname and married a Virginia-born tobacco planter’s daughter named Pamelia. Pamelia came from patrician stock. Her grandfather, Robert, had landed in America in 1660, leaving behind an extended noble family with roots traceable to William the Conqueror’s invasion of Britain. This same ancestor, Robert, had, before his marriage to Pamelia’s grandmother, briefly been wed to, and left a widower by, the granddaughter of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.
             One could say these ancestors were farmers and tradesmen, certainly not dirt-poor and not uneducated. More accurately, the landed English gentry that my father’s namesake married into were, to use another then-popular phrase, plantation proprietors. They bought, sold, bred, and bequeathed human beings. Dozens of human beings. They were Whigs, then Southern Democrats. They sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War.
            Although, perhaps, not all of them. The German immigrant Thomas and his bride Pamelia, granddaughter of the man who had, for a year, been married to the granddaughter of Pocahontas, left Virginia and settled in the newly formed county of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where German was the language spoken, and where the anti-slavery movement flourished.
                                               To Be Concluded?
            Every newcomer has a story, yes, and every story rises and falls on a wave of conflict. Moral clarity is what we’re after. Every serious plot draws a line in the sand, asks which side are you on? How easy it’s been for me to identify with my mother’s Irish ancestors, impoverished survivors of a great famine. Now I want to meet Pamelia, who long ago had to make a choice, between Virginia and Pennsylvania, between English and German, father and husband, and whose name was stricken from family records as if she’d never been born.