With many topics that arise in the minutes and histories of women literary clubs, the theme of culture runs deep. In the minutes of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore from October 7, 1902 the members announced courses offered in art and then played music and sang. The following week, the meeting of October 14, 1902, was much more packed. Not only had a couple members discussed their newly published books, but also current events.
Much attention was paid to what was occurring within the country, the United State’s impact elsewhere and other countries’ histories. For example there was mention of the Coal Miner’s strike in the US, which then led to conversation about miner strikes in both France and England. Debate over the Panama and Nicaragua Canals, the relationship between the US and President Diaz, and the history of France, Germany and England in that area. Roosevelt, Cuba and the Prince of Siam were also brought up. There is no limitation to the US or Europe, but an intrigue in countries spread across the world.
The women of this era were so interested and invested in being as knowledgeable as possible. Gere makes the point in her novel Intimate Practices that by a woman “acknowledging her own background, she nods toward international travel and the reading of literature as vehicles for achieving the desired cultivation” (182). During these minutes, the President Mrs. J. C. Wrenshall, was abroad. And in the minutes from October 14th after discussion of current events, the conversation returned to the best selling novel of the month and the growth of newspapers. No matter the subject of conversation, these women move around numerous topics, giving thought out and knowledgeable opinions. There is an evident strive to improve themselves individually, but also raise each other up by sharing literature the knowledge.
Cynthia contacted me about a month ago and asked if she could help us transcribe the WLCB records. (I said yes.) Though she’s retired now, she’s been volunteering at the Loyola/Notre Dame archives, and she heard about our project through Loyola’s archivist. It turns out that she was a curator at the Maryland Historical Society and processed the WLCB collection way back in 1975. That’s right: 1975!
Crazy how history moves in circles and repetitions … no?
Since we’ve gotten her set up, Cynthia’s been plugging away, transcribing the minutes from the 1901-1902 season. And her archivist brain has been leading her to sources that help confirm or elucidate what she’s been transcribing, which she’s been passing along to the team. It’s all been quite exciting.
This week, Cynthia sent me a link to the 1905-1906 Baltimore Blue Book (aka the “Society Visiting List”), which she noticed happens to include the complete WLCB officer & membership list. It did not even occur to me that the Blue Book would publish such a thing.
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One question we’ve been asked repeatedly about the Club is how many women belonged. Based on this list, the WLCB had 71 members during the 1905-06 season, and 15 honorary members (most of these were published authors). We also have wondered how the WLCB cultivated its membership and brought in new members. The fact that the entire membership list was published in the Blue Book shows that yes, belonging to the Club was seen as a worthy attainment for the upper crust—and those who aspired to rise to their level.
Perhaps most interesting to me, though, is what appears a few pages after the WLCB listing: the listing for the Daughters of the Confederacy—Maryland chapter.
1905-06 Society Visiting List, pages 456-457.
As several of the team members’ posts testified this summer, the white supremacist sentiments expressed by some of the members of the Club were a source of concern and dismay. We harbor suspicions verging on certainty that members of the WLCB were also members of the Daughters of the Confederacy, since many of them were born during the Civil War or in the years immediately surrounding it—but we have not had the chance to look into the DotC records (also at MDHS) to find out.
The Blue Book confirms that Mrs. Francis Dammann, a teacher at Boys’ Latin School and an active member of the WLCB during the early years of its existence, also belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy. Not only that, she was an officer.
The Blue Book also provides an answer to another question that came up over the summer. At several points, the minutes mention another Baltimore literary society for women, the Arundell Club. We hadn’t had a chance to look into the history of this club, but the Blue Book brought the history to my eyes. A few pages before the WLCB entry, the Arundell Club also has a listing—which shows a much larger membership that includes many names I recognized from the early years of the WLCB. Most of them now belonged to the Arundell Club instead.
The numbers imply that the Arundell Club surpassed the WLCB in social cachet, at least. But were they actually in direct competition? I recalled reading in the minutes that the WLCB expressed the desire for both clubs to co-exist and thrive together, so I wondered if the two clubs defined themselves differently—carved out different niches for themselves, as it were.
I did a quick Google search and found an online copy of Jane Cunningham Croly’s History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (1898), a vast compendium of information about women’s clubs in the 19th century. And there, I discovered that Croly described both the Arundell Club and the WLCB in some detail.
If we’d only known in June when we started this project! Alas, this is so often how research goes—you find the source you need after you’ve figured out (mostly) what you wanted to know.
Croly tells us that the WLCB was founded before the Arundell Club, and so had the advantage of precedence. However, neither club had been in existence for more than a few years when Croly wrote her book.
Croly distinguishes between the two Clubs, highlighting the literary aims of the WLCB and the social, cultural, and philanthropic aims of the Arundell Club. She quotes at length from a June 1896 address from Francese Litchfield Turnbull—a real find, since the minutes book from 1896 has been lost. (In fact, we are missing minutes from the entire 1896-1899 period, so Croly’s book is especially valuable.)
Turnbull’s speech succinctly characterizes the aims and goals of the Club, at least as I’ve seen it reflected in the hundreds of pages of documents I’ve now read. She begins by reflecting on the name of the Club—the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore—which, we know, was decided after a great deal of deliberation. She asks:
“Does our title hold any hint that we are to strive tacitly, if not specifically, for some special good to woman in our literary work; that we are, in some sense, to uphold those qualities which are essentially womanly—not necessarily attributes of women only, nor sought for as differentiating them from men, but that we are to emphasize, as opportunity may offer here, those gifts and qualities which conduce to a nobler womanhood?”
She does not wait for an answer before continuing. “Then,” she says, “as a Woman’s Literary Club, this purpose should fix our point of view in our contact with literature.”
Croly then includes the following, verbatim:
The “modern need of the ideal” — that’s a nice turn of phrase. The need, in modern times, of the lofty aspirations of the past; and the need to apply the modern “precision of method” and “carefulness of study which realism has introduced into art” to bring hazy idealism into the sharp focus of the present. And the womanly attention to morality, beauty, and truth—coming out of the 19th-century Cult of Domesticity—governing all.
In contrast, the Arundell Club (whose president, Miss Elizabeth King, is pictured above) seemed to be a less “idealistic” organization, at least in Turnbull’s characterization of the word. They focused on philanthropy and social reform, on the one hand, and social activities, on the other. While the Arundell Club’s 300 members more than tripled the membership of the WLCB in 1898, Croly notes that the Literary Committee had just 25 members. So perhaps they ceded the literary ground to the WLBC. We should find out for sure, of course.
Regardless of the Arundell Club’s activities, Turnbull’s speech and the characterization of the WLBC in Croly’s book confirms for me what I and the rest of the Aperio team discovered this summer: the WLCB was, at least in its early years, a serious literary organization, not a social club. It was the kind of book club where the members actually read the books—and also wrote them.
And knowing that the Arundell Club took on the more social and philanthropic roles expected of women’s clubs of the time, I’m now willing to give the WLCB a bit of a pass on their decisions not to engage directly with “causes.” I wonder if the rest of the Aperio team will agree.
In the meantime, thanks to Cynthia for helping us—me, anyway!—answer some questions. She’s passed along lots of other discoveries, but I’ll save them for future posts.
This past week, I finished the transcriptions for a Club season I’d been greatly looking forward to: 1903-1904. The reason for my interest: the Baltimore fire of 1904, thought to be the third most devastating fire in United States history. (Dr. Cole already touched on it briefly in an earlier post.)
Amazingly, the Club met the very day after the fire ended: Tuesday, February 9th. The fire had hardly been under control for twenty-four hours. “Few members were present,” the recording secretary wrote. “But the president decided that the record of our meetings should be kept unbroken.” Only a portion of the program was therefore given.
Aftermath of the conflagration. This photograph could have been taken the very day the Club met.
But what shocks me about the minutes from this time period is that, save this one meeting, there is not a single other reference to the devastation in the season. Here’s what they do have to say about it, though:
In a few strong words, [Mrs. Wrenshall] alluded to the great financial loss, from which we must all suffer; but pointed out the comfort that was ours, in the dauntless spirit shown by the people. Especially, she thought, should we unite in thanks, to the press which had risen so wonderfully above the difficulties of the time, to give the public information and cheer. The magnitude of the loss Baltimore had sustained, was almost incredible. The city had been laid low; but we had been spared the worst and greatest agony, in that, there had been no sacrifice of human life, except in one instance. Had the fire begun on any day but Sunday, what horrors would have been added. There could be no shadow of doubt that much of the great misfortune, must be laid to the charge of building those high structures which helped to carry the force of the fire beyond all human reach.
That’s it—one paragraph. What interests me most in this account is the reference to the loss of life “in one instance.” I’m from Baltimore, sort of. My elementary and middle school allegedly owes its existence to the fire. But the narrative of the fire I’d grown up with held that not a single person perished in the fire.
So I did some poking around. In his volume, The Great Baltimore Fire, Peter B. Petersen notes that no one challenged this claim until 2003, when an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University by the name of James Collins, dug up a story in the February 17th issue of The Sun, entitled “One Life Lost in Fire.” The story reported that the charred remains of an African American man were pulled out of the basin—that is to say, the harbor. We don’t know his name.
The story slipped under the radar, and went practically unnoticed. Peterson theorizes, “Officials may not have deemed a single black life sufficient in 1904 to warrant undercutting the supposed—and astounding—lack of deaths related to the fire.” But not even Afro-American reported it.
And the women of the Club couldn’t have been referencing it either. The body was found a full week after their meeting. Whose death they were referencing is beyond me. It could have only been hearsay. But, more likely, this only supports my longstanding hunch that we lost more in the fire than we think.
During our trip to the Green Mount Cemetery today, I was perplexed by one instance in particular: the circumstances of the poet / musician Sidney Lanier’s burial ground. For one thing, the stone was unlike any I had ever seen at a cemetery. For another, his grave was actually located on the plot of the Turnbull family (Mrs. Frances L. Turnbull being the founding president of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore)—no other Laniers around him. This means, of course, we weren’t able to identify the name of his wife, who we know also to have been a member of the Club.
I decided to see what I could find out concerning all of the above.
Photo of Turnbull plot lifted from findagrave.com. Lanier’s grave is the reddish stone with the plaque; the three stones next to him are Turnbulls.
First of all: why the Turnbulls? In Aubrey Harrison Starke’s extensive biographical and critical study of Sidney Lanier (see the “sources” page for citation), he details the nature of his friendship with the Turnbulls. Apparently, Lawrence Turnbull, c-owner and editor of the Southern Magazine, first visited Lanier at his home in Macon, Georgia, after having read his poem “Nirvana.” It’s not unreasonable to assume that the friendship to ensue from this visit is one of the primary ties that drew Lanier to Baltimore in the first place.
Upon his coming to Baltimore, the Turnbulls and the Laniers immediately developed a close tie. Mrs. Turnbull’s relationship with Lanier in particular is thought to be especially important by Starke. He writes of Mr. Turnbull’s “poetic, music-loving wife,” that her “romantic idealization of Lanier has stamped itself unmistakably on Lanier’s character as it appears through the aura of Lanier legend.” He continues, “[Mrs. Turnbull] must be remembered as a real benefactor of Lanier’s Baltimore days.”
I can’t help but wonder how much her “romanticization” of Lanier could be rooted to his reputation as a Confederate nostalgic. A favorite topic of Lanier’s poetry was that of an agricultural utopia. Most of it is Wordworthian, and innocent enough (read: “Corn“). But some of his worst poetry depicts the Antebellum South as having been populated by “happy” slaves (read: “Civil Rights“). But that’s a discussion for another day.
But regardless of how close the Laniers were to the Turnbulls, why would he want to be buried with them? Turns out, it was supposed to be temporary. Starke writes that Lanier had requested that an autopsy be performed to find out the cause of the disease that took his life. But here’s the weirdest thing: he died in Lynn, North Carolina. But they carried his body all the way to Baltimore.
For reasons not specified by Starke, the autopsy was never performed. He was interred at the Turnbull lot in 1881. The stone wasn’t erected until 1917, after his wife requested that his body remain there. But the stone did come from Georgia; pink and black marble.
Close-up of the stone, courtesy of Clara Love. The epitaph reads, “I AM LIT WITH THE SUN,” and was lifted from Lanier’s poem, “Sunrise.”
I was also able to determine (finally!) the maiden name of Lanier’s wife: Mary Day. Turns out Lanier met her in the middle of his time in the Confederate Army, in 1863. She was from Macon, too, and had studied music in New York. She lived for forty years after Lanier’s death, and edited and compiled his works. She died in 1931 in Fairfield County, Connecticut.
But her grave isn’t there. Apparently, she doesn’t have one. Starke’s text was published prior to Mary Lanier’s death, but her page on Find a Grave states that her ashes were spread with her husband’s. That is to say: she rests with the Turnbulls, too.
As my last posts have shown, it has been quite the challenge to try to find who some of these women really are. Notably the married women. I was particularly surprised to find that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall, the long lasting president of the Club, was one of these people that was almost impossible to find.
Or so it seemed.
With the help of Hunter we were able to figure out that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall is ACTUALLY Mrs. Letitia Humphreys Yonge Wrenshall. It is definitely a mouthful but also really exciting to find out another lady’s real name.
Her husband, John C. Wrenshall was actually a captain in the Confederate army. John and Letitia were wed November 22, 1866 in Savannah, Georgia.
Another thing to add to the search is the information that we found while on our tour of the Green Mount Cemetery. All of the team was present for our search which we feared might be fruitless from the get-go. Fortunately we were able to find more than we thought. We were able to find the graves of Miss Caroline Barnett (1871-1957), Miss Virginia Woodword Cloud (d. 1938), Miss Eveline Early (1868-1933) and Mrs. John D. Early (otherwise known as Maud Graham Early 1842-1905), Mrs. Charles W. Lord (otherwise known as Alice Emma Lord 1848-1930), Mrs. William M. Powell (otherwise known as Emma B. Powell 1852-1952), and Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (otherwise known as Francese Litchfield Turnbull 1844-1927).
Just being able to figure out a few more of these names and years keeps the search going. Another interesting thing that we found was that Sidney Lanier’s grave was in the same plot as the Turnbull’s plot. There was the grave for Sidney Lanier but not for Mrs. Sidney Lanier who was a honorary member of the club. We did not know of a connection between the Laniers and the Turnbulls, but we are aware that Mrs. Turnbull was always a big fan of Sidney Lanier and on her grave is a quote of his.
We also are fairly sure that we found the grave of Lydia Crane since we were able to find most of her family but were unable to determine which one was hers due to the weathering of the tombstones. But I know that Katie is going to want to do more hunting to find the truth.
Diving into discovering who the women of the Club are has come with some rewards, and many challenges. For the past few weeks now I have been in charge of figuring out who was in the Club when and where they lived. Thanks to the incredible record-keeping in the early years that is not a difficult task. Much of the same information overlaps in different notebooks. Essentially, from 1980 to 1916 we have an almost complete record of who the members in the Club and also who the board of management was. However, these are just names and nothing more. My next task was to try to figure who these women were or at least try to find some of their real names—not their husbands names.
Instead of trying to find information about over a hundred women, we thought it would be best to start small, and higher up, with the board of management. This board includes an average of twelve women. One president, two vice presidents, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a treasurer, and six members of the board. These are the women that help run and decide the direction of the club. Having the lists of the board from year to year all in one place can also help explain changes in the dynamic of the club. For example, Hunter has been transcribing the minutes for Fall of 1903 where Lydia Crane was recording the minutes. In the middle of a meeting the hand-writing changes indicating that Miss Crane is not writing anymore. Looking at the board of management for 1903-1904 we can see that Miss Crane is not actually the recording secretary, but she was for 1901-1902 and then comes back in 1906-1907. These are the tiny shifts that we are beginning to pick up the longer we read what these ladies were doing. We are able to piece together to try to get a more three dimensional image of the Club.
So the board of management seemed like a good place to start, since these are the women that the club revolves around, and we picked the year 1903-1904. Here is where the difficulty lies, as I have mentioned in my previous posts: many of the women are referred to by their husbands names, which makes it hard to find out their real names. However, I have been able to use different resources such as ancestry.com and findagrave.com to be able to locate the names of the men, and then many times they have the names of the women as well.
When doing these searches it is hard to determine if the information that I have found is really for the same person that I am searching for. Without knowing the birth and death information about a person before I search for them, a slew of people can come into the found list and I am unsure of if it is who I am looking for. Another thing that I am finding more relevant and difficult in my search is the cemeteries where these people are buried. Many of the ones that I have been able to find are in either Green Mount Cemetery or in Loudon Park Cemetery, with private church cemeteries thrown in throughout. Green Mount is the place where many people of prestige were buried. While I have not found out much information about Loudon Park Cemetery, there is a large portion of the cemetery which was dedicated to the burial of Union soldiers which might have had an impact on who wanted to be buried there depending on their sympathies during the war. Another piece of information is where the two cemeteries are located. Green Mount being located in Greenmount Ave, a couple of blocks south of North Ave. This is located close to where most of the members of the Club lived, therefore making it convenient for them to go to Green Mount. Loudon Park on the other hand, is a 30 minute drive from Green Mount when I put the directions into Google. On horse that would take much longer, let along a slow moving burial procession would be about two days.
The top middle of the map is a small green square which is Green Mount, Loudon Park is not pictured on the map but would be south west of the bottom left edge of the map.
Aside from the interesting information about the cemeteries I have been somewhat successful with finding information about the women. Out of the twelve members of the board of management for 1903-1904, I was able to find birth and death years for six of the members and was able to determine the names of two of the women that had gone by their husbands names. In 1903 Mrs. Jordan Stabler, or Jennie Stabler (although I am not positive that this is her) was 35; Mrs. Philip Uhler, or Julia Pearl Uhler, was 44; Miss Lydia Crane was 70; Miss Ellen Duvall was 62; Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese was 47; and Miss Eveline Early was 35. I was really disappointed that I could not find anything on Mrs. John Wrenshall, who is the president for many years of the Club. Thanks to findagrave.com I was able to find a picture of Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese.
This image was uploaded to findagrave.com. Unfortunately we have no ability to double-check if it is really her, but hopefully it is.
It is a sad realization that many of the women in the Club are only recognized by a name that is not really theirs. Thankfully there are tools out there that help make it possible to learn about Julia Pearl Uhler instead of just Philip Uhler.
A few weeks back, I wrote about my interest in the Lutherville Female Seminary, a now defunct college in Baltimore County that was devastated by a fire in 1911. This week, I’ll be focusing on the kinds of education offered at two early Baltimore area women’s colleges with connections to the Club—The Woman’s College of Baltimore City (now Goucher College) and the aforementioned Maryland College for Women in Lutherville—as well as their roles in Baltimore society.
In Anna Knipp and Thaddeus Thomas’ (quite extensive) The History of Goucher College, they quote an 1860 article of the Saturday Review which encapsulates, almost hilariously, how untenable the denial of mental equality between the genders can be: “The great argument against the existence of this equality of intellect in women is, that it does not exist. If that proof does not satisfy a female philosopher, we have no better to give.”
But we can see this kind of circular logic as exemplifying just how absurd this viewpoint had become. In 1860—and especially in Baltimore—it could no longer be defended.
First, though, it’s only right to note that the higher education of women in Baltimore had initially failed—twice. The first of these failed institutions was initially on St. Paul Street: The Baltimore Female College, funded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, opened its doors in 1848 and closed them in 1890. Then there was The Mount Washington Female College of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which opened in 1856 and closed in 1860. This latter school, though, is of particular importance to us at Loyola: it was sold to the Catholic Church and eventually became Mount Saint Agnes College, which merged in 1971 with Loyola College as it became co-educational. It’s part of our heritage.
But in her book In the Company of Educated Women, author Barbara Miller Solomon points to a tremendous boom in women’s education between the 1870s and 1910s. Although she makes no mention of the Lutherville Seminary (which seems, as I lamented in my last post, to have been practically erased from the annals of history), she does make mention of two Baltimore schools: The Woman’s College of Baltimore and the College of Notre Dame in Maryland.
Facade of Old Goucher College, or the Women’s College of Baltimore City, at 2227 Saint Paul St.
Like the Lutherville Seminary, what strikes me—and Solomon—about these two schools is their religious roots. As for the College of Notre Dame, the religious connection is obvious; in fact, it was the first Catholic women’s college in the United States. But as for Goucher college, its religious roots are more obscure—it received much of its funding from the Methodist Conference in 1884. But it runs deeper than that; as Solomon points out, these schools “adhered to the religious ideal of virtuous, True Womanhood,” and more overtly religious schools such as Notre Dame stressed “religious rather than academic ideals.”
But, apparently, Notre Dame and present-day Goucher offered some of the best education available to women at this time, and “extended woman’s sphere beyond the familial roles.” Solomon attributes this, in no small part, to the proximity and influence of Johns Hopkins University—then also present in downtown Baltimore, as opposed to its present-day Homewood Campus. In fact, she points to The Woman’s College of Baltimore City as being rivaled in terms of its “high intellectual standards” by Randolph-Macon College for Women in Virginia (sponsored by Presbyterians).
From the very beginning, The Woman’s College of Baltimore City did much to emphasize its academic rigor. It was no “seminary”; it was a college, and one of the finest available for women. Consider the statement of Bishop Andrews, quoted here in its entirety:
I would not give a fig for a weakling little thing of a seminary. We want such a school, so ample in its provisions, of such dignity in its buildings, so fully provided with the best apparatus, that it shall draw to itself the eyes of the community and that young people shall feel it an honor to be enrolled among its students.
But what of seminaries? Clearly, their reputations were less stellar; according to Bishop Andrews of Goucher, they were something to be scoffed at. But the Lutherville Female Seminary was not exactly a joke; information is scarce, but even in its infancy in 1853, its classes included “moral and mental philosophy, handwriting, ancient languages, natural philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, German, English literature, music, drawing, and painting.” Its reputation eventually became such that students attended the school from out of state, whereas its initial students seem to have come primarily from the city and the county. In 1895, it was appropriately rechristened the Maryland College for Women.
Facade of Maryland College for Women in Lutherville, prior to fire and restoration in 1911.
But, in spite of the grandeur of its facade, conditions within the Seminary were gloomy. The Heritage Committee of the Greater Timonium American Bicentennial Committee (!) dug up an invaluable insight into the daily lives of the students there. The reminiscence of an alumna is printed in their volume The Limestone Valley. Here’s an excerpt:
The school building was large and insufficiently heated. The girls went around the house enveloped in shawls and then were not warm. There was a large dormitory with about thirty beds and each bed was a little apartment with curtains for a dressing room. The provision for the table was also very primitive; bread, butter and molasses for breakfast and supper, with tea or coffee and ham, potatoes and hominy for dinner.
But what’s most remarkable about the Lutherville Seminary is that it existed at all. According to The Limestone Valley, it was from the very beginning meant to be the center of the community; in their words, “the village of Lutherville was planned around the Lutherville Seminary.” Lutherville is rather unique to Baltimore county (largely an amalgamation of unplanned, spontaneous demiurban sprawl) in that it was a planned community. Its street grid was very deliberately laid out, and has hardly changed in a hundred and fifty years.
In this respect, one can rightly call Lutherville a community that was, from its very inception, centered around women’s education. In the 1850s, this was progressive. And to Lutheran founders John G. Morris, Charles Morris, and Dr. Benjamin Kurtz, it was never to be a “weakling little thing of a seminary” at all—it was to be a “first rate Female College.” And that’s what it became.
