Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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“War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1861-1875” by Charles Mills

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During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government’s Works Projects Administration undertook a number of efforts to help the unemployed retain their skills. While critics saw it as creating a huge army loyal to President Roosevelt, the WPA did employ some 8.5 million people in a wide variety of areas. 

One of those efforts was the Writers’ Project, which, among other projects, produced travel guides to cities and states across the United States. Writers also collected oral histories of still-living Americans who had experienced extraordinary events, like the Civil War.

War and Reconstruction in Mississippi 1861-1875 was one such work. It focused on the town of Holly Springs in Marshall County, in the northern part of the state. Holly Springs was noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it had changed hands 57 times during the Civil War. Before the war, it had been a prosperous town in a planter- and slave-based economy. During the Reconstruction period, it was occupied by a federal garrison and experienced Republican political control. 

The WPA document assembled a history of the town and its founding, its experiences during the war as recounted by still living inhabitants, the role of Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and how the former Confederates eventually regained political control by stuffing the ballot box for the Democrats. 

The document was edited and republished by Charles Mills in 2010. While some 60 to 70 years intervened between the events and how people remembered them, it still remains a valuable resource for what people on all sides experienced during the war and what followed.

Charles Mills

Mills is also the author of Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains, Legends of the Superstition Mountains, Death and Delusion in the Superstition Mountains, Treasure Legends of the Civil War, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Civil War, Civil War Civilian Life: Manassas, Virginia (Battle of Bull Run), and several other works on historical subjects. He is the producer and co-host of Virginia Time Travel, a TV program seen by two million viewers in northern Virginia, which is also where he lives (on land once owned by George Washington). 

Top photograph: The New York Herald of Nov. 7, 1862, describing the expected move of Gen. Grant’s army southward toward Holly Springs. 

Restoring the Family Bible – and More

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More than 40 years ago, my father gave me the Young Family Bible. It had been given to him by his father, who’d received it from his father. The value of the book, as experts like to say, was “intrinsic,” In other words, it was zero, except for what a family member would believe.

The book as received from my father was wrapped in brown grocery-bag paper and tied with twine. It has sat on a closet shelf in my parents’ house for a long time, probably since they moved there in 1955. I have very vague memories of it from childhood. 

When my father gave it to me, I did the time-honored thing: I put it on a closet shelf. Eventually, I removed the wrapping and twine and wrapped it in acid-free paper and a box. Its value to me and the rest of the family was what it contained – four pages, inserted between the Old and New Testaments, of family births, marriages, and deaths. The earliest date was that of my great-great grandfather’s birth in 1802; the last date was in 1890. All of the events were written in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s Samuel Franklin Young. He also wrote his signature on an inside cover. 

The Bible restored

The Bible was not in good shape. The leather binding had failed. The leather was gone from the corners of the cover, exposing the frayed and decaying “boards” underneath. The sewing of the sections had failed. Spine folds were damaged. The family pages were damaged. The title page had disappeared. And there was evidence (prior to my possession) (I hope) of damage from insects, mold, and possibly rodents. 

The questions were: Could it be restored? Could we at least save the family record pages? And could I afford it?

My wife found a story in St. Louis Magazine about NS Conservation. It’s owned by Noah Smutz, and it focuses on book conservation and related services in St. Louis and the American Midwest. Noah is the real deal, and it was a real find to discover that he lived and worked right here in St. Louis, about 20 minutes from my house. 

Noah became interested in book conservation when he was a student worker at the University of Kansas Libraries. He did internships with the Smithsonian Archives and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He received a Masters degree in book conservation from West Dean College in the United Kingdom. And he’s worked with the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, the Missouri Historical Society. Saint Louis University, and the Smithsonian Libraries. 

If anyone could do something with the Young Family Bible, it was Noah. 

Last March, I took the book to Noah for an assessment. He looked over it carefully. What was encouraging was that he didn’t reject it out of hand as impossible. As he went through the book, he found something that I’d never come across before – a lock of auburn hair. My best guess is that it probably belonged to my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. She died more than 30 years before my grandfather did and, uncommon for the time, he never remarried.

He told me what he needed to do, and he told me what he wouldn’t do, which was to restore every single page of the Bible. The cost would have been prohibitive. But he spelled out what he would do and named his price, which I thought more than fair for the work he’d be doing. His initial assessment fee ($125) applied to the overall price he’d be charging. 

A family records page

He also said he wouldn’t have it finished until about October. The COVID pandemic seemed to have prompted a lot of people to become interested in restoring family books, Bibles, and similar heirlooms. I was more than happy with his schedule.

He also said the Bible, using the King James Version text, was likely printed in the late 1860s or early 1870s. Tens of thousands of Bibles like this were printed and typically sold by door-to-door salesmen. 

Noah actually finished the work in late August. I knew we were getting close when I saw him post a few pictures on Instagram (nsconservation). What he did was amazing. It’s a bound book again. The family pages and the signature page have protected with Japanese paper. The leather cover was repaired and replaced where needed. The book was restitched; the signature page was placed where it originally belonged, at the back of the Bible (he matched the inkblots). He did a bit more work, and he constructed an acid-free storage box that fits it perfectly. 

The signature page

I’ve had time to think about this Bible and my great-grandfather. The approximate date of the book fits something else that happened in the family. His father died in 1870 (his mother had died some years before). Because of deaths in the Civil War (he lost two older brothers and a brother-in-law), he was the youngest and only surviving son. At 23 or 24 years old, he became head of the family, which included not only his young wife the firstborn child but also including two sisters-in-law, his sister, and their children. And he would have bought a family Bible with its record section because, like tens of thousands of other families in both North and South, the dead from the war needed to be remembered and memorialized, even if it was no more than writing their names in a family Bible. 

What Noah restored was more than a book. It was also a piece of family history and American history. With the publication date, the family records and the lock of hair, the book has the Biblical story to tell as well as its own. 

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

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The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit.

Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages.  The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog. 

When a Book Won’t Let Go

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Two weeks after finishing it, and I’m still thinking about Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. (See my review last week.) 

When I read it, I expected to read about the final convulsive moments of the surrender of the Confederate armies and the immediate aftermath. And that’s the thumbnail description. But it’s about a lot more.

It’s the story of the civilians in north central North Carolina, roughly Raleigh to Greensboro, who found themselves in the path of two defeated armies and one victorious one.

It’s the story of the soldiers in those armies, who had to live with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thing you don’t read in the general histories of the Civil War period in the rather startling increase in soldier suicides and commitments to insane asylums in the years and decades after the war.

It’s the story of some of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian and military population. In generally, Confederate soldiers were focused on finding food, shoes, and clothes, and they didn’t care where they found them. Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were often desperate for food, and together they were raiding government warehouses and supplies. 

The Union soldiers had food. What they were looking for was loot and revenge. There were too many reports of pillaging and looting, and more than a few of rape. Women and often children were brutalized. Houses were burned. It wasn’t only soldiers who developed PTSD. Some of the federal soldiers were disciplined and a few executed for their crimes (especially after the armies surrendered; that meant the civilians were no longer members of a foreign and hostile country).

My great-grandfather was somewhere in that convulsion. Even at war’s end, he was (chronologically) a boy. Too young to take up arms officially, he had enlisted and became a messenger boy for the Confederate army.

What I don’t know is what did he do to stay alive. Did he participate in the looting of government warehouses? Did he steal from civilians? Those questions will never be answered. What we do know is that he had to walk home to southern Mississippi – hundreds of miles across a landscape destroyed in many places and in complete social upheaval everywhere. 

When he finally reached home, he learned his family had fled to Texas. So, his trek continued across Louisiana and into east Texas, where he found them. He also discovered that he was the sole surviving son, the youngest child in the family. When his father died four years later, my great-grandfather became the head of the family, which included a widowed sister, two widowed sisters-in-law, and a number of nieces and nephews. And his only family, too – he had married in 1867, and he and his wife had a little boy. He had to take care of that extended family through the rigors of Reconstruction.

My great-grandfather was made of some stern stuff, and that book, Hearts Torn Asunder, helped me understand just how stern it was.

Top photo: My great-grandfather, Samuel Franklin Young, and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. 

“Hearts Torn Asunder” by Ernest Dollar Jr.

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It’s April 1865, the last month of the Civil War. Richmond has fallen. The Confederate cabinet is fleeing. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Lee’s soldiers are paroled and dispersed, most heading south (and on foot) into North Carolina and toward home in the rest of the former Confederacy. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army is chasing that of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston, and the chase is ending near Raleigh and Greensboro. As Johnston meets with Sherman to discuss surrender terms, he learns that President Lincoln has been assassinated in Washington. 

The final convulsion of the war and the Confederacy is happening in central and north central North Carolina. And it its path are the people who live there, in cities and towns, and on farms, people who see both armies strip the countryside bare of food and provisions. One army’s soldiers experience sorrow and despair, while those of the other feel jubilation. Soldiers of both, after four long years of war, are experiencing what today we recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It isn’t called that then; it isn’t even recognized. 

But citizens and soldiers are experiencing its effects – and the effects of hunger. The hunger was at times so great that soldiers and civilians alike began attacking warehouses and trainloads of provisions meant for the Confederate army.

Horrors and atrocities happened on both sides. Rage, fed by deaths and maiming of friends and fellows and fueled by alcohol, could make otherwise kind men do terrible things. Civilians – men, women, and children, free and slave – bore the brunt of that rage. And it was rage coming from both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Ernest Dollar Jr.

The story of that month and that place is told, and told well, by Ernest A. Dollar, Jr. in Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina. It’s a somber, sometimes shocking story that shows a side of war we rarely see in the movies or are taught about in school. But it happened, and it happens. And it doesn’t simply change people; it also changes cultures and societies. The effects of what happened in North Carolina in April 1865 were felt for generations.

Dollar graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with B.A. degree in history and a B.F.A. degree in design, and an M.A. degree in history from North Carolina State University. He’s worked at historic sites in both North Carolina and South Carolina. He’s currently the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh Museum, and he and his family currently live in Raleigh.

Hearts Torn Asunder makes for hard reading. But it’s a story that needs to be told.

Top image: Engraving of the meeting of Gen. Joseph Johnston and Gen. William T. Sherman at the Bennett Homeplace, April 1865.

The Passing of a Friend

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My mother, who died in 2014, graduated from John McDonough High School in New Orleans in 1940. At the time, it was an all-girls public high school. She remained close to many of the girls who graduated with her, and she never missed a high school reunion for the next 60+ years. And then the reunions stopped. The time came when the number of the 1940 graduates still living had dwindled to less than five. My mother said that they decided that reunions had become too depressing, too much of a reminder of what, and who, was gone.

I thought of my mother when I read a Facebook post last week. It almost seemed nonsensical. A friend posted a short item of the passing of a mutual friend, Paul Stolwyck. It was a shock. I didn’t know he’d been ill. Over the next few hours, I learned what had happened. He died from a brain aneurysm. No warning, no sign, just a collapse. 

I met Paul when we attended First Evangelical Free Church in St. Louis, back in the early 1990s. He was an assistant pastor and enormously gifted in preaching. He’s gone to DeSmet Catholic High School in St. Louis, the same high school my oldest son graduated from. 

Paul Stolwyck

Paul knew everyone, and everyone knew Paul. He was outgoing, among the first to spot a new face in the room. He liked people. He could find common interests faster than almost anyone I’d ever known. He was fun. He’d challenged you. He’d say provocative things, like “Ninety percent of missions is simply showing up.”

He had a heart for missions, and he and his family eventually left our church and became missionaries in Hungary, based in Budapest. They were part of the denomination’s Central European Mission. 

It was Paul who had the idea for what was, at the time, one of the most unusual short-term missions teams ever proposed: a communications missions team. The Central European Mission needed help in communicating what they were about, what their missionaries were doing, and what need and opportunities they had. Paul knew enough about the people at our church that he suggested a team of three people. A guy to manage the trip, a guy to do the filming, and a writer.

I was the writer.

It was a new idea for a short-term team, and a lot of people at the church were cool to the idea. One person, however, championed us, and she occupied a key position in church missions. We got the green light. The plan had been to go in late September of 2001, but 9/11intervened. The trip was rescheduled for May of 2002.

The itinerary was packed. We’d arrive on a Saturday, attend church and tour Budapest on Sunday, and then leave Monday morning for Prague and then Dresden. We’d return via Prague and Brno and spend a day with the staff and other missionaries in the office in Budapest. With travel and filming / interviews, we were looking at 14-16 hours a day. 

Paul met us at the airport in Budapest, and we stayed with Paul, his wife Carol, and their children, and Paul took us on the city tour on Sunday. And it was Paul who told us that “it had been decided” to change our itinerary, and we would also have to travel to Erfurt, Germany, because of a pastor ministering there following the deaths of 13 people in a school shooting. It was an unexpected side-trip that ended up changing my life. 

Paul and his family eventually returned to the United States and settled in Greensboro, North Carolina, still deeply involved in missions. But we stayed in touch. Facebook helped. Paul would occasionally send an email. He asked permission to use some of my poems in sermons. He talked about my novels. He did one of the things he could do so well, and that was to encourage. I can see him now, his glasses propped on his head, talking earnestly about a Bible passage or a theological point, or just about anything.

And that laugh he had. It could be sudden and loud, startling you the first time you heard it and catching the attention of anyone within 30 feet. But it was endearing at the same time. It was the laugh of a man who loved life. 

And now he’s gone, in the blink of an eye. I want to say it’s way too soon, and it is, by my earthly standards. I feel diminished by his death. But I feel enriched by knowing him and calling him a friend. 

And I’m confident I will hear that laugh again one day.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.