Authors: William Maxwell
The portrait of Mary Edie shows a woman in late middle age, with a linen cap over her dark hair, a sunken mouth, and large dark eyes in which I think I read trust in the will of the Lord and patience and resignation with regard to the ways of her husband.
Robert Maxwell and Mary Edie had fifteen children, of whom my great-grandfather, also named Robert, was the eleventh. They were all born between 1794 and 1818, which means that for twenty-five years there was always a baby in the house. Jeannot Creighton, Henry, Elizabeth Stevenson, Alexander Edie, Agnes Carson, Polly Ann, Jacintha, Mary Atkinson, Euphemia, William, Robert, Martha, Walter Carson, Agnes Carson (the first one having died in infancy), and Thomas.
My great-great-grandfather was brought up a Presbyterian, and for twenty years served as an elder. The nearest Presbyterian church was eight miles away, in Cadiz. He had one horse, and Mary Edie would not ride to church and
have her husband walk. A nursing baby could not be left at home while she walked that distance, sat through a long service in the morning and another in the afternoon, and walked back again. She was not strong enough to go on foot with the baby in her arms. The dilemma was resolved by her oldest daughter, Jeannot Creighton (my source is again that same old woman, only now it was herself she was telling about), who loved her mother and father so well that she thought it an honor to do for and wait upon them. On Sunday morning she would milk the cow and do up the housework and then carry the baby eight miles to Cadiz, and if it fretted during the service she took it from her mother and, sitting on a log outside, dandled it on her knee.
All this was recounted by Jeannot Creighton Maxwell to my Grandfather Maxwell’s sister Sarah, a great while later, and found its way into a letter dated April 2, 1876. In the same letter, my grandfather’s sister wrote, “I will speak of Aunt Jane’s visit [to Uhrichsville, Ohio] now. I wish you could have seen and conversed with her. She is very intelligent, and has a splendid memory. It does not seem the least impaired by age or ill health, and she reads a great deal.… I like her very much, she seemed so like father and looked like him. I was sorry for the poor old soul. Her days of usefulness are over, and no one wishes to be troubled with the care of her. She thinks all young folks should marry. She stayed single to please and care for an aged and feeble father. He gave all he had to Uncle Walter to take care of her, but his wife makes it so unpleasant for her that she cannot stay there in peace any longer.”
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Shunted from one relative to another, Jeannot Creighton Maxwell died ten years later, in Iowa, on a visit to the widow of Sam Dixon Maxwell, who was her cousin. In going through her effects they found “some very ancient books, letters, and papers of various kinds”—including the letter written by Robert Maxwell to his brother Henry during the War of 1812, and a volume of sermons with the name “David Maxwill” on the flyleaf. There is no David Maxwell among the descendants of Henry Maxwell. He must have brought this book with him when he came to America, the one clue to the family in Scotland he sprang from.
Walter Maxwell’s unpleasant wife who drove his sister out of the house was born Moriah Shipton. Mary Atkinson Maxwell married Samuel McBarnes, William married Sarah McGraw, and the second Agnes Carson married John Lock. Elizabeth Stevenson and Polly Ann married Robert and James Gibson, who may have been brothers, and Alexander Edie and Robert married Sarah and Jemima Keepers, who were sisters. Keepers is a Welsh name, and came down through my father to me.
This is the place where I stop being totally dependent on family archives and can speak from experience and memory—that is, from photographs that were around me during my childhood, and remarks in which as much information was conveyed by the speaker’s tone of voice as by what was said. The sense of distance is greatly diminished.
I hear my father’s voice, saying, “Jemima Keepers was a remarkable woman.” He never lied about anything, and so it doesn’t occur to me to treat this statement skeptically.
“The Keeperses were a very fine family,” he says. But here, though I accept what he says, I am far from sure what he means. And I can’t ask him because he has gone to join the people he was talking about. I don’t think he meant that they were socially important. Jemima Keepers’ father, William Keepers, had an iron forge. Before that, the Keepers men were farmers in Maryland. My father may have meant only that they didn’t use conspicuously bad grammar or owe anybody a dime; he attached great importance to financial probity. Or he could have meant that they were people of intelligence and character. In any case, he was speaking from first-hand knowledge. My Grandfather Maxwell took him on a family visit to Ohio when my father was a little boy, and he met several of his uncles and undoubtedly his grandmother as well, for she was alive at that time.
I’m sure they didn’t ride in a sleeping car—it would have cost too much. And that they brought something to stay their hunger: thick meat sandwiches. Pickles. Pie. And cake. And that my father had a great deal to say, for he was the youngest and it was the first time in his life that he had enjoyed his father’s undivided attention all through a day and a night. Perhaps he was lucky and had a whole seat to stretch out on, facing the one where my grandfather sat, bolt upright, in the dimly lighted coach. If the train was crowded, he slept with his head in his father’s lap. And woke in the night at mysterious wayside stations, and saw greenish-white lights, and heard voices and mysterious clanking sounds, and asked still another question about what it was like in Ohio, and fell back into sleep the moment the wheels began to turn.
In the morning they got off the train and walked directly across the street to the hotel. And in the hotel lobby my grandfather put the satchel down and told my father to stand right there and keep an eye on it, while he went to the desk. It was a big dark room, with a high ceiling and lots of
polished brass, and potted palms, and marble statues, and numerous cuspidors, and my father had never seen anything like it. He was busy taking it all in, when suddenly he heard his name being called. A big boy in a uniform with his hair slicked down was going through the lobby calling his name. My father went up to him and said, “I’m William Keepers Maxwell,” and a tall, lean, broad-shouldered man with a mustache, who had turned up at the same instant, said, “
I’m
William Keepers Maxwell.” Then, looking down at my father, “Why, you must be Creight’s boy!” The pleasure was mutual and lasting.
Judging by Jemima Keepers’ portrait, my father got not only her last name but also her nose, and my daughter Kate got her forehead. And nobody that I know inherited her high cheekbones and beautifully sculptured upper eyelids. She is wearing a velvet dress with a lace collar, and she seems to have forgotten that she is sitting for her portrait. This air of melancholy preoccupation may be only that she carried a burden of sadness that was habitual and lasting and showed even when she was attending to other matters. She did not have an easy life.
The portrait of my great-grandfather is of a much younger man, with thick dark hair and eyebrows, widely spaced eyes, and a square jaw. It has been so retouched that it looks like a photograph of a drawing by a not very accomplished amateur, and that may be what it is. His clothes are much more simply cut than his father’s. He looks forthright and honest and unreal. He was a marble engraver, which I take to mean that he carved inscriptions on tombstones. My great-grandparents moved from Stillwater, Ohio, to Uhrichsville about 1840, and fourteen years later they moved to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where, that same year, my great-grandfather died, very suddenly, at the age of forty-two. His nuncupative will reads: “On the morning of the 14th day of September
A.D.
1854, Robert Maxwell called upon us the
undersigned in his dwelling house in the Borough of Waynesburg Greene County Penn in the last extremity of his last illness, to notice the following disposition of his property, to wit. William A. Porter Esqu. asked him if he was aware of the fact that he was soon going to die? The Testator answered, that he was. Mr. Porter then asked him what request he had to make?—he said, first he wished all his just debts to be paid out of his estate. Second he wished his wife Jemima to have all the residue of his Estate both real and personal—he said that there was a judgment in the state of Ohio in his favor, which he wished his wife to have also, he said he would like to make some other arrangements but could not talk and called upon us to take particular notice that this was his wish and desire. Shortly after, to the best of our knowledge, about one hour, the said Robert Maxwell died.”
What happened after that is told in a letter to Max Fuller from a cousin of his mother’s. “My mother, Mary Maxwell, was born seven months after the sudden death of her father from dysentery. He was a well-to-do man, living in Uhrichsville, Ohio; Aunt Sade considered him a most remarkable man—very stern, and very considerate, if you can understand that combination. He never broke his word, but was quite slow giving it, she said. After his death, his partner asked for some papers which grandmother gave him, and when the estate was settled, it was found that there was nothing left, but the partner had suddenly become well to do. Grandmother farmed out her five children, and went to her sister to await the birth of my mother. The mortgage on their home was foreclosed. An old friend, Judge somebody, I cannot remember the name, bought in the property, and gave grandmother a deed. One of the choicest stories in our family is that when the sons were grown, they repaid the amount to the old Judge. Mother always rejoiced in telling that. Later grandmother had some of her children
with her, and always my mother; but never your grandfather; he had the hardest lot of all of them, and was I fancy the most ambitious, or he would never have done so well as he did with all the handicaps he had.”
In my Grandmother Maxwell’s scrapbook, under the heading “Maxwell Fuller’s Own Grandfather,” there is an account of his life, in her handwriting. It is maddening. She must have known something about his early years, but what she put down is what she found in print (as if that alone was dependable) in a history of Logan County, published in 1886.
My copy came down to me through the other side of the family, accidentally, in the same box with a dozen big black bound volumes of the
Century
magazine I had asked for. The spine is missing and the cover hangs by a few threads, but the pages are edged, top, sides, and bottom, with gilt, the type is of a good size, the paper hasn’t turned brown after eighty-five years, and the lithographic portraits are of men and women who clearly believed that since God knew exactly what they were like, there was no point in trying to deceive the photographer.
The paragraph about my Grandfather Maxwell begins: “Robert Creighton Maxwell, attorney at law, Lincoln, Illinois, is a native of Ohio, born in Uhrichsville, Tuscarawas County, August 6, 1849. His parents were Robert and Jemima (Keepers) Maxwell, the former a native of Virginia, of Scotch descent, and the latter of Ohio, of Welsh descent. His parents moved to Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, where the father died in 1854. His mother then returned to Ohio, where she is still living. After the father’s death the family was broken up and our subject found a home with strangers.”
My grandfather was barely five years old when his father
died. He was the fourth child; he had an older sister and two older brothers and a brother who was two years younger. Was it chance that he had the hardest lot of all of them? Or was it because his mother knew that he was the one who was most able to stand up to adversity?
Simple hard work or even being worked to the limit of his strength I do not think would have been considered, in that period, a hard lot. He must have been harshly treated (though the writer of that letter could have meant merely that he was cut off from all family affection).
It is only partly clear what happened. Jemima Keepers, having no home of her own, and expecting another child, went to live with her sister, but couldn’t keep her other children with her and so they were divided up, probably among her relatives. There was no one who was able, or willing, to take my grandfather, and she had no choice but to entrust him into the keeping of strangers. Though a bookish man, my grandfather knew enough about farming to do it competently for several years before he took up the practice of law. My guess is that he was handed over to a farmer and worked for his keep from the time he was five years old, and the farmer got all the work out of him he possibly could. But my father and my aunts never spoke about it, nor my grandmother—from which I conclude that my grandfather himself never spoke about it, perhaps because he could not bear to speak about it. Or because it was gone, left behind when he left Ohio.
The history continues: “He mainly supported and educated himself, attending the school of Uhrichsville till seventeen years of age. In 1866 he left Ohio and came to Illinois.”
The history doesn’t tell how my grandfather got from Ohio to Illinois, but I know, anyway: he bought a pair of shoes and started walking. About six hundred miles. Somewhere between a month and six weeks of steady walking. If
it was the early part of the summer, as it is only reasonable to suppose, he was not seventeen but sixteen. In 1866 there was a railroad that would have taken him where he wanted to go, but walking was cheaper. No details of this journey have survived—only the fact that he made it, the year after the Civil War ended. And so it can be assumed that men in uniform trudged along beside him with their discharge papers in their pockets. For a good part of the journey he must have followed the National Road, which at that time extended from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois. The roadbed was thirty feet wide, and the eastern section was paved with an inch of crushed stone and gravel. The western section was not paved with anything. Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them. The National Road was used by a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses, and mules. Now choking on clouds of dust, now with his new shoes caked with mud, my grandfather moved among them.