Cardy Raper
March 28, 1917
MY MOM NELL: HOW SHE EMERGED FROM VICTORIAN WAYS
“You look like your mother”, uttered cousin Jean, as she smilingly welcomed me
for lunch at her Adirondack home one summer’s day in 1976. Oh no! thought I. I’m not
like my mother! I think differently. I do things Mom would never dream of doing.
I was fifty-one years old then and on my way to becoming a fully accredited
scientist, albeit belatedly, two years after my husband’s death. Mother would not have
been so bold. But my boldness came from somewhere, and some of it must have come
from her.
My mom, Cornelia Hagar Allen, known by friends as Nell, was born in New Prague
Minnesota in 1887. She had one singular memory of the three years she lived there. She
remembered receiving a whack on the brow when one of her two older brothers drew
water from a well and carelessly let the iron pump handle spring out of control while her
head was in the way.
“I ran home crying with blood all over me”, Nell later recalled, “Someone gave me a
thick slice of homemade bread with butter and brown sugar on it. I can see it all yet—all
covered with bright red blood and me trying to eat it and bawl at the same time!”
Curiosity almost did her in at the tender age of three.
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Nell came from parents steeped in the ways of the Victorian Age. Her father, Frank
Hagar, born and bred in Plattsburgh, New York, began his education in a one-room
schoolhouse at the age of six in 1858. He came from a family full of farmers and building
builders. Neither occupation interested him much. He preferred sitting under a tree or in a
quiet room, reading books while his brothers labored manually. His father figured he
might as well let this son go on to college and make something else of himself.
Frank joined the first full four year program at newly established Cornell
University. Although graduating with top honors, his major in Sociology offered few
opportunities for making a living. He turned therefore to the legal profession, and
prepared for it by reading and memorizing Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of
England”. Opportunities prevailed in the newly settled west in the late nineteenth century.
Heeding Horace Greely’s famously quoted advice of the time, “Go West, young man”,
Frank sought a one year apprenticeship in a Minnesota lawyer’s office and taught for a
year in Lake City, Minnesota while preparing for the Bar exams.
And that is where Frank met Nell’s mother to be.
The ripeness of his desire for a mate began to bloomed when Frank first laid eyes on
Mary Merrell, the brightest student in his class. That love flourished throughout the year.
(Photo) Having successfully passed the Minnesota Bar, he moved to set up practice as
the only lawyer in nearby New Prague where he had to learn both German and Bohemian
to deal with the prevailing immigrant settlers.
As expressed in a letter he mailed to Mary from New Prague on January 30, 1881, he
defines his desires and needs, hoping she fits his every requirement.
Dearest Mary;
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Now as to my ideal of a wife...if I have your whole heart and fervent love…I suspect
perhaps your most shining quality will be that I can talk and visit all the day long with
you with so much pleasure. Though you know I am opposed to so-called “Women’s
Rights”, I flatter myself that I will have a companion that will sympathize with every
thought. Nothing else would satisfy me. And I will not leave you alone evenings and other
times to seek company elsewhere...
A few months later, after Mary responds with encouragement, Frank writes:
I expect you’ll be the prettiest lady in town, and I shall take great pride in you all
over, not merely in your face, my dear, but in these other mysterious parts that you cut
me short in expatiating upon…I’ll love you, not your poor head alone, nor your nice
dress, nor your golden hair nor your bright eyes, not your smart talk, none of these alone,
but yourself entire…
Mary writes back with an aura of romanticism:
Married life will seem more like a dream than reality...We can fix up the sitting room
cheerfully and it will be at all times inviting to my weary LEGAL HUSBAND who will
come in and want some soothing so his little wife will have to administer a few drops of
loving words, and if that does not do, will then shower them on to him...
My love, I confess, was at first a little lukewarm but it is now the love of a true
woman, and intercourse, not by letter only, will serve to heighten it and keep it always
burning bright and warm. Your remarks on love are most commendable and I agree with
you perfectly. I shall not fear that you will cease to love me if I grow OLD and UGLY, for
as you say, love is the all cementing force and, so it will be with us. As we grow old and
lose our roses and the silver threads creep into the gold and black, our loves will keep
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growing stronger until no force can wrench us apart except the grim specter, Death, who
will come and carry one away and leave the other alone, sorrowful and unconsolable.
Then, eleven days before their marriage on April 28, 1881, Frank, exudes euphoric
expectations:
My very sweet dear girl—
I have a deep longing for an almost burning affection…My dear, you must be my
companion, my heart’s joy and my heart’s worship…Oh my dear, we love and will love in
depths of the ocean and heights of the starry skies. Like the sweet air of spring morning
will our love flow from one’s heart and bathe the other. Like the beautiful sunset of
evening will one’s dear form be forever fixed upon the other’s tender eye of love. That
love shall be fixed forever and be a perpetual cause to constant amity, kindness and
happiness. Then if one is not so pretty or makes mistakes or does wrong, the love will
triumph as a proud queen reigning over two human lives, yours and mine.
Good night,
Your own Frank
***
Frank had built a small frame house accommodating his law office in New Prague.
He established a thriving practice, not only as lawyer but as loaner of seed money to the
struggling German and Bohemian immigrants who always paid him back on time with
interest.
He and Mary spawned four children before Frank succumbed to a yearning for the
mountains of his homeland back in northern New York State. Having failed to achieve
election to the judgeship he sought, he decided to take his family back to the home of his
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childhood. They moved to Plattsburgh in 1890. With considerable savings from his New
Prague practice, he bought the Hagar Block, built by his father, and set up his office
there. Within another two years he purchased a sizable lot on the west end of town, near
the Normal and Training School where he built a roomy Victorian style homestead to
accommodate his family. (Photo)
Mary bore their fifth child there—a boy, named Luther—just two years before that
“grim specter of Death” carried her away and left Frank “alone, sorrowful and
unconsolable”. The cause of death was called consumption, later known as tuberculosis, a
common disease of the time when vaccines were not yet available.
In my recollection, Nell and her younger sister Sal seldom spoke of their mother’s
death. She, along with those two elder brothers, Art and Paul, seemed to have accepted it
more as fact than as consummate sadness. Or perhaps the pain was too great to recall.
(Photo) Their father, Frank, expressed the loss in a florid style of prose, later to be honed
for authoring a book about male and female roles in society. In writing his wife’s
obituary he conveys profound sorrow for the passing of an ideal mate:
Mary E. Merrell was born at Henderson, Minnesota, January 12, 1861 and died at
Plattsburgh, New York, September 7, 1894. She spent her childhood and obtained her
education at Lake City, Minnesota. She afterward lived ten years at New Prague,
Minnesota from which place she removed in the spring of 1890 to Plattsburgh New York.
She leaves five children, the youngest of whom is two years and four months old.
She was a lady by nature, with a stately, graceful yielding that begets in another pride to
provide and breast the storms of life. She was a housewife more common in the
American school, skillful and attentive in every detail that makes the family thrive and
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happy. Her ambition, honor and pleasure were to do every humble duty of the home;
rather to perform as a willing mother, the offices of love, than to win self fame; and such
work of love must always be the greatest, yet, she was strong in gentle womanly
character, asking for her right, not as a partner, or by force or exaction, but as a wife,
deeming it no humility to ask and to be given, and to give in return a hundred fold in
love and duty. She was a Christian and punctual in every Christian observance from
infancy.
Frank then elaborates on Mary’s faith and finishes in lamentation. Woe that one with
such love of living and fairest future view of earthly bliss should be wrested at mid tide
from the sweetness of life.
She passed away and was buried in loveliest September, still in summer verdure,
when the first fading hues of fruitful autumn, bespoke a brave and beauteous death. The
pine trees over her grave may sigh, the full orbed moon keep lonely watch, and the night
dews weep, but the morning sun, rising again with mellow blaze in the blue sky, shall be
the token of her soul.
It puzzles me yet, how the details of that tragedy never seemed to get passed down to
members of the next generation. I recall when my mom first told me about her mother’s
death. I was seven, the same age as she when her mother died. I was nestled next to her in
the back seat of that big old Franklin car heading home, late at night, from a family
Sunday outing. She had been singing a little song and had her arm around me, fondling
my ear lobe, as she liked to do. I cried when she told me about her loss. I loved her with
such strong feelings of dependency I could not imagine life without her. How could she
not tell me about her mother’s death without crying herself. I can only guess she’d
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repressed her sorrow so deeply she just could not make herself express it. Or perhaps she
was a victim of her times, that Victorian culture as propounded by her father.
Nonetheless, Nell and her siblings survived and thrived through Frank’s nurturing
who, despite the offering and desire of Mary’s sister, Ada, to adopt the younger three,
kept the family together and did his best to raise five young children with the help of a
series of hired housekeepers.
Nell did not hesitate to express strong feelings about those many housekeepers! Paid
two to three dollars a week, they lived in-house, board and room, and had their own way
of life. In a recorded interview, grown-up Nell recalls, “ Some of them were good and
some of them were just awful, terrible! We had a very bad time until I got to be twelve to
thirteen and sister Sal and I took over. One of the troubles we had was that Plattsburgh
was an army town—had been since 1817. (Photo) There were three bawdy houses just up
the street and the soldiers would come by on their way after getting drunk at one or two
of the forty nine saloons downtown. These housekeeping girls always had a soldier beau.
They’d entertain them in the kitchen—shut the door. We kids used to think it was fun to
peek through the keyhole and see what was going on.”
This was virtually the only kind of sex education young Nell seem to have gotten. It
does appear she learned something about girl’s “periods” from her school chums,
however. On July 2, 1900, she writes to one of her aunts:
My dearest Aunt,
I recieved your very kind and most loving letter yesterday and was very glad to get it. I
passed all my examinations for the eighth grade with Arithmetic 85, Geography 94,
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English 95, Spelling 90, Music 95, Physiology 93, Drawing Good, Writing Excellent, with
a general average of 92.
I am in terrible trouble, our girl leaves Wednsday and papa says Ill have to keep house
all this summer and maby fall too, he says Im old enough now to keep his house, it isn’t
my fault because she goes but she has another place where she can get $.50 more so
she’s going.
I try hard and do as well as I can and papa praises my cooking but the boys laugh at it
and make horrid faces and it almost discourages me. And since yesterday Ive tried to
correct Luther (Nell’s youngest brother) several times and the boys laugh at him and say
he must be sick to mind me, Im most discouraged.
I havent had what you asked me about the first night you were here but Carrie told me I
would have it before this spring but I didnt , I dont feel as if I wanted to ask Auntie about
it when I do, Bessie McCorger my school chum told me something about it and so did
Carrie.
I am trying very hard to break myself of that dreadful habit of mine, and when Carrie was
here she wrote to you and told you that I didnt do it any more, but I’ll tell you my self that
I’ve tried to every since you went away and I hope that when you come back I shall have
stoped it entirely.
I am hard up for a thin dress I have neither a white dress or lawn of any kind Im sure
those ribbons you [sent] will be of great use to me.
I know you will excuse [my] writing and [this wretched?] paper. Ive looked the house
through out and can’t find any ink so I took some [..?] dye coloring and made some, so
with such poor ink I can’t write half decent.
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I have a small flower garden and papa has 6 acre one of corn, potatoes cucumber, and
most every thing including millions of your Cuban [..?]
Here the letter ends, in the middle of a statement, with a stain and a tear.
I can only guess what my mom called it that she tried not to do anymore. Maybe
biting her fingernails? Of course she never told me about such bad habits, probably
because I didn’t have that particular one. I am surprised however to note that she received
a grade of excellence for writing when she wrote this Dear Aunt letter with its many
misspellings.
***
Nell’s older brothers teased, as older brothers will—I know from experience having
had five of them. When, as a youngster, I whiningly complained about some such taunts,
she counseled, “They’re just trying to get your goat. Either ignore it or give them back
more of the same.”
Well, she’d learned the hard way judging from an incident she recounted after she
and her sister had been assigned some household chores. “Sister Sal and I had spent all
morning baking bread for the week to come when in marched brothers Art and Paul from
working in the garden. They dumped their dirty bunches of rhubarb and carrots in the
sink, picked up our freshly made loaves of bread and started tossing them back and forth
like footballs. They laughed; Sal and I cried!”
Nell needed guidance. She looked to her father who cherished her. They were
establishing strong bonds. Frank respected Nell’s all consuming curiosity, her willingness
to learn and find her place. But judging from musings she wrote down much later in life,
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she seemed to need a mother. She speaks of certain deprivations while a young child
attending the model teaching school at nearby Plattsburgh Normal: (Photo)
The various children in our second grade class had birthday parties. I was invited
to their parties but couldn’t have one of my own, as I had no mother. So one day I
decided to have a party and invited the whole class up to my house just off the campus. It
was for the afternoon session and when the pupil teacher came in to teach, there were no
children. She came out in the hall to find out and someone told her, ‘”They went that-away’. She crossed the lawn to the northwest of my house and marched us back to school.
I do remember mom telling of talks with her devoted father. She told of entering
his study, finding him there in his laid-back rocker, sitting silently, oblivious to
everything around him, seemingly in another world. She’d asked, “Whatsha doing
Poppa?” “Conning lives, Daughtsy, conning lives”, he’d say. (Photo) Frank conned lives
in a sociological sense. He spent a great deal of time contemplating the separate roles of
males versus females in society. In fact he wrote a 196 page book on the subject entitled
The American Family: A Sociological Problem, issued by The University Publishing
Society, New York, 1905. As indicated in his memorial tribute to wife Mary, he believed
in clear differences between male and female abilities to think and feel.
In the opening chapter, he addresses its title:
The Comparative Qualities of Sex:
In view of the fact that the male among the higher animals and man, after passing
through the course of development of the female, subsequently assumes other and
apparently higher characteristics and qualities, it has appeared to scientific men as
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Darwin and Spencer, that woman is a case of the undeveloped or arrested development
of man.
“Oh, my grandfather wrote that!” think I as I read.
Then Frank goes on. With caveats:
This in measure is physically true, but it would seem somewhat strange and
unjust, that in the creation of conscious human beings woman did not have a
compensating factor, a factor of superiority to equal or balance the superior element in
man, a factor pertaining to the mind or soul, and not merely to the body. Woman does,
indeed, posses this superior element or factor, and the basis of it lies in her very nature
and constitution. It is the element of superior sensibility, that takes by feeling nature’s
concrete picture and which arises from that delicate body formation required for
reproduction, and the love made for and called forth by maternity.
Frank did value education, even for women. But often that education taught a
woman to behave demurely as exemplified by Nell’s recollection of elocution lessons
meant to prepare her for delivery of the usual recitations at her school’s morning
assembly. “Now Cornelia, keep your voice down”, her teacher would say, “And this is
how a lady should walk.” Whereupon the teacher showed her how to move.
Influenced by these dichotomous messages, Nell, begins to develop strength and
desire to seek some independence before assuming the traditional female role full-time. A
pathway opens through teacher training at the nearby Normal School where she had
attended the first few grades as a child. Frank supports her wish to enroll.
Beyond a few hints, I have little deep knowledge of Nell’s experiences during
those teacher training years. Her prodigious memory retained names and facts of
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numerous school mates and teachers, who married whom, and where they all lived, well
into the year of her death at 87. But all these musings provide scant substance about just
what she learned and how that learning affected her. She mentioned receiving some
tutoring in manual training and making her own bloomers to play guard on the women’s
basketball team but spoke little about the feelings this part of her schooling engendered.
A glimpse of those feelings emerge, however, through numerous love letters she
carefully preserved for posterity. They span some ten years before marriage.
Photographic portraits of the time illustrate Nell’s inclination to become a proper
lady and dress in the stylish Victorian way—long flowing skirt with full length
undergarment, small waist painfully constricted by a breast boosting corset, all topped off
with a jaunty broad-brimmed hat. [Photo] The tedious process of grooming without
running water, functioning by gaslight at night, preparing meals by woodstove, then
washing up afterwards, all consumes time and energy beyond my ken. Intrepid Nell
prevails.
Older brothers, Art and Paul, move beyond their childish taunting ways and
begin to view this sister worthy of acquaintance with certain male friends. One friend,
Benjamin Isaac Allen, seems especially suitable. Brought up on a long-held family
farmstead in Peru, New York, just ten miles south of Plattsburgh, Ben is in process of
becoming a lawyer. He admires Frank Hagar, and often visits the Hagar home. Frank
approves of Ben. Ben likes Nell. An interplay develops.
But other young men appear. Now sixteen, Nell is becoming a woman and begins
to play the field.
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Paul, now a student at Union College, introduces her to classmate Leslie Stowe, a
want-to-be actor, who takes such a fancy to Nell he corresponds effusively. She saves
every letter.
A year or two later Nell meets Thaddeus Dewy Smith while day-touring on the
Lake Champlain steamship Vermont where he summers as crew to earn his education in
pre medical education at Cornell University. They too set up a long-running
correspondence. And those letters are preserved.
Then, Nell almost lost it all.
Not one to speak much of feelings, my mom, did tell of a harrowing incident she
suffered during her last year at the Teacher Training Normal school. She relayed the facts
when I was old enough to hear them—as a lesson, I suppose, to beware of strange men.
Beyond those bare facts, this is the way I imagined the scene, with plausible but
undocumented details.
Spring rains came early in April 1908. Twenty-one year old Nell sits alone in the
darkening classroom, her long brown hair brushing the finishing pages of an essay due
early next day. Frowning, she sucks the top of her ink blotted pen and thinks intensely
about how to finish her current thoughts of women’s suffrage and the temperance
movement so forcefully promoted by its contemporary advocates, Frances Willard and
Jane Addams. How does excessive consumption of alcohol by men relate to women
having the vote?
The smell of rain on mud sifts in from outside, freshening the foul odor of newly
oiled floors inside that massive Victorian structure called Plattsburgh Normal and
Training School. It is time to wrap up and start fixing supper for Papa, Sal, and Lutie.
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The final dot in place, she puts her tablet away, skips lightheartedly down two flights of
stairs, and hurries for home just a few blocks away. Within a month she’ll graduate with
certification to teach young children—maybe in New York City.
Rain finished, the sky turns darker, contrasting Nell’s buoyant mood of self
accomplishment. She walks quickly through a grove of oak trees to the edge of a hedge,
thinking brightly of her future, when, suddenly, she’s grabbed from behind, dragged to
the nearest tree and pinned there against it. Nell screams. No one hears. She kicks and
wriggles to no avail. Just as the assailant unbuttons his pants and stars lifting her long
skirt, she thrusts her head forward, and bites down hard on his hairy arm. Gasping, he
clasps his hand over the bleeding wound, and runs away, never to be found and punished.
Nell runs home to wash her mouth out. Younger sister Sal prepares the family
supper. Nell has no appetite for anything that night. Confessing illness, she goes straight
to her room and tells no one then of her brutal molestation.
I discovered, just recently, my mom’s detailed account of this episode buried in a
document, titled “School Days” that she had prepared and read before a meeting of the
Saranac Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution a few months before her
death in 1975. My embellished version fictionalized the prelude and time of day of this
event—it happened at night on her way home from a party. I fought him tooth and nail”,
she wrote, and finally got my teeth into his big hairy arm. He let go of me, and I ran
home as fast as I could go. When I went upstairs. My father had gone to bed but not to
sleep…My dress was torn and I had nosebleed, but I got by my father’s bedroom door at
the top of the stairs and into my room which I shared with my sister Sally. She was asleep
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and I never did tell her or my father about it. I knew he would not let me go out again if I
did.
It seems my mom, in this public telling, had become somewhat less inhibited in her
old age. In any case, I wonder if the knowledge of it left me with a spirit of bravado I’ve
carried ever since—my feeling of relative safety if I walk stridently on spooky city streets
or whistle brightly while purposely riding my bicycle along deserted alleyways.
Somehow Nell recuperates—she never told me how—and completes her
certification to teach. Was it the aura of Victorian discipline? While contemplating
marriage, some day, She’s not yet ready to become a wife and homemaker . She needs to
explore the world beyond Plattsburgh, New York.
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