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Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The light in the room had changed.
Samuel Edgerton Stratton had been watching the light all afternoon — the way it came through the curtains of the bedroom on the second floor, the way it moved across the ceiling as the hours turned, the way it told him, as surely as any clock, that the day was going. He was fifty-one years old and the cough had been fighting him for months and he understood, with the practical clarity of a man who had spent thirty-five years measuring things, that the fight was almost done.
He had measured a great deal in his life. Mill races and gear ratios and the height of a courthouse cornerstone above the floodline of Wildcat Creek. The tolerance of an iron axle in a stone bushing. The angle at which a millstone could turn before the bearing burned.
He thought about other things, too. Things you could not put a number to. Voices in a darkened parlor. A tap on the underside of a table where there was nothing under the table. The look on his wife’s face when the medium said the name of the child who had not lived long enough to be named.
Hester was downstairs. He could hear her moving about. The sound of her keeping the house was the most ordinary thing in the world, and he loved it with an intensity that surprised him.
I am going to die in this room, he thought, with no particular distress. And that is all right. I have done enough.
The light moved on the ceiling.
He closed his eyes, and Howard County opened around him like a book.
He was born into silence.
The Friends meeting at Russiaville sat on a piece of ground that the Society had cleared from oak woods in the early eighteen-thirties, when Howard County had been Miami country and the white settlers were arriving in carts with the lumber for their houses tied across the axles. The meetinghouse had no steeple and no organ and no bell. The Friends sat on benches in two rows facing each other, men on one side and women on the other, and they waited for the Spirit to move them, and most First Days the Spirit did not, and so they sat in silence for the better part of an hour and then shook hands and went home.
Samuel was born in 1833, the year the Society of Friends in Indiana was just beginning to feel the great fracture that would split it open before he was grown — the Hicksite separation, the Wilburite separation, the patient orthodoxy of his father’s people set against the inward-turning mysticism of the New Lights. He did not understand any of this when he was small. He understood that his father did not raise his voice and his mother did not laugh out loud and the silence at meeting was the same silence as the kitchen on a winter morning when the fire had not yet been built up.
His father was Jonathan Dallas Stratton, born at Maurice River, New Jersey, in 1804, brought west by his own father Eli to the Quaker settlements of Preble County, Ohio, and then to the new ground of central Indiana when the Howard County land sales opened. His mother was Prudence Edgerton — small, practical, descended from the County Wexford Edgertons who had come to America in the early seventeen-hundreds and married into Friends meetings up and down the Delaware Valley. They had been married at Westfield Monthly Meeting in 1833, and Samuel had come along that same year, the first child, named for his grandfather Edgerton in the way of Quaker families who carried the maternal line in a son’s middle name.
He learned the silence and he learned the work. The two were not separable. A Friend was a person who put his hand to what was in front of him and did not waste motion. By the time Samuel was twelve he could run a corn cracker. By fourteen he could repair one. By sixteen he had built a mill of his own.
That was the year everything changed. Sixteen years old, in the spring of 1849, he had hauled the timbers and set the bearings and dressed the stones for a small grist mill on a tributary of Wildcat Creek, and the day he turned the water in and watched the wheel come around and the stones begin to move and the meal begin to fall, he understood that he had found the thing he was going to do.
The same week, he met Sarah.
She was not a Friend. That was the first thing about her, and it would turn out to be the only thing the Society needed to know. She was a girl from one of the new families that had come into the county in the rush of settlement after 1844 — Methodist, possibly, or Baptist, the records do not preserve which. He saw her at a husking, watched her hands move through the corn faster than any of the other girls, and knew before he had spoken to her that he was going to marry her.
The Friends disowned him for it.
He stood in the meetinghouse on a First Day in the autumn of his eighteenth year and listened to the elder read the disowning minute, and he did not argue, and he did not weep, and when the elder was finished he stood up and walked out and did not come back. Sarah was waiting for him on the road. They were married that winter. The Society of Friends, in its careful records, noted that Samuel Edgerton Stratton had been disowned for marrying contrary to discipline, and there the matter rested as far as the meeting was concerned.
It did not rest with Samuel.
He had been raised in the silence and he carried the silence with him. The mill on Wildcat Creek was a quiet place — water running, stone turning, dust falling soft on the floor — and in the long hours when the wheel was doing the work and there was no one to talk to, he listened. He had not been told what he was listening for. But he had been raised to listen, and he listened.
Mattie was born in 1854.
She was Sarah’s daughter and his daughter and the most ordinary miracle of the household — a small dark-haired girl with her mother’s quick hands, who ran the kitchen yard barefoot in the summer and could already pick out a tune on the parlor melodeon by the time she was six. She was the joy of the house. He understood, watching her, that he had not known what joy was before her.
The mill prospered. He took on partners. He bought into the Anderson Machine Works at the courthouse end of Kokomo, where they were building the new generation of agricultural implements that the country was beginning to need — corn shellers, hay rakes, threshing machines that did the work of ten men in a tenth of the time. He read everything he could get his hands on about gear systems and water power and the new steam engines that were beginning to come into the territory. He understood that the country was changing under his feet — that the frontier was ending, and what was coming next was something his father had not had a name for, and that men with practical hands and patient minds were going to be needed for it.
In 1859 Sarah died.
The county records are silent on the cause. Most likely it was a fever — typhoid, perhaps, or the cholera that came through Howard County that summer with the canal traffic. She was not yet thirty. Mattie was five years old. Samuel buried her at the cemetery north of Kokomo and came home to a house that had two people in it where there had been three, and went back to the mill the next morning because there was nothing else to do.
It was that winter that the Reverend Mr. Hartshorn invited him to a meeting.
Hartshorn was a former Friend who had become a Spiritualist — there were a number of them in Howard County by 1860, men and women who had come up through the Quaker tradition with its trust in the inward voice and had taken the natural next step, which was to listen for the inward voice of the dead. The meeting was at the house of a widow on the north side of Kokomo. There were perhaps fifteen people in the parlor. There was a table and a circle of chairs and a young woman in a dark dress who was, Hartshorn explained, a medium of unusual sensitivity.
Samuel sat down with the others. He folded his hands. He waited.
The medium closed her eyes.
What happened next, in the parlor of the widow’s house on a January evening in 1860, was not the kind of thing a man like Samuel Edgerton Stratton would later try to put into words. He was a millwright. He understood load-bearing timbers and millstone tolerances and the hydraulics of water-powered machinery. He did not understand the voice that came out of the medium’s mouth — a voice that was not the medium’s voice, that addressed him by his middle name, that said three things about Sarah that no one in that room could have known, and that closed by telling him be steady, Edgerton, the work is not finished.
He sat in the parlor for a long time after the meeting had broken up.
When he stood up, the widow was watching him. You felt it, she said.
He did not answer.
He walked home through the snow.
The mill was running the next morning. He had work to do. He had Mattie to raise. He had the Anderson Machine Works partnership to attend to, and a contract for a new corn cracker out by Greentown that needed his eye. He went back to all of it.
But he went to the next meeting, too. And the one after that.
By the spring of 1862 he had been sitting in Spiritualist circles for two years, in parlors all over Howard County, and the silence he had been raised in had taken on a new quality. It was not empty silence anymore. It was full silence — the kind a man listens into, knowing that something is listening back. He did not announce it. He did not make a scene of it. He simply went to the meetings, and he listened, and what he heard he kept to himself, because that was what a Friend’s son did with what he heard.
He was a Spiritualist by then. He would be one for the rest of his life.
He did not yet know that there was a woman he had not met, a thousand miles east, in a boardinghouse on Ninth Street in Washington, D.C., who would one day come home to Indiana carrying the same faith. He did not yet know that her husband shared his name.
The boardinghouse on Ninth Street had a parlor on the ground floor with two windows that faced the street. The wallpaper was a faded green and the curtains had been new in the Polk administration. There were nine chairs in the room, and on a Saturday afternoon in April of 1863, every one of them was filled.
Hester Donnellan Stratton stood at the door and watched them come.
Her husband was in the next room.
Joel had died on Tuesday. The wound that had taken him had been seventeen years old when it killed him — a bullet through the lung that he had carried in his body since the Wing gang had returned fire on the St. Lawrence in 1845, that had ached on damp mornings and put him to bed for a week at a time and finally, in the spring of his forty-seventh year, had sealed itself into the kind of slow consumption that no doctor in Washington could treat. She had been with him at the end. He had said her name. He had said the children’s names — Frank, three years old and sleeping upstairs, and Susie, four months old in her cradle and unaware. He had said Seward, and squeezed her hand, and gone.
Now the parlor was filling up.
She watched them. She knew most of them. The Lauries had come down from Georgetown — Cranston Laurie and his wife and their daughter Belle, whose voice was the voice that the spirits found most readily. There were two members of Congress whose names Hester would not write down even in her own diary. There was a clerk from the Treasury whose wife had lost a son at Antietam. There was the Reverend John Pierpont — the Unitarian, the abolitionist, who had become a Spiritualist in his old age and was not ashamed of it. There was Mary Todd Lincoln.
Hester had not been entirely sure she would come.
The First Lady had sent word that morning that she would attend if she could, and not to set a place at the front for her, and not to make any fuss. She came in by the side door with one of the Laurie women and a plain bonnet and sat down in the second row and folded her hands. She was wearing the black she had been wearing for fourteen months, since Willie. The grief had aged her. It had also given her a hardness around the eyes that her enemies in the press would describe as madness and that Hester recognized for what it was, because Hester had it herself now, and had known on Tuesday afternoon that she would carry it for the rest of her life.
The Secretary of State stood at the back, beside the door.
He had not sat down. He had not removed his hat. He stood with his hands behind his back and his head slightly bowed, in the posture of a man who has come to pay a debt and not to be seen paying it. William Henry Seward had been a friend of the Strattons for thirty-two years. He had recommended Joel to Geneva Medical College. He had given Joel an Arabian mare. He had brought Joel to Washington when the lung wound forced him out of the Jeffersonville penitentiary work, had placed him in the patent office, had written him into the small hidden network of unofficial agents that the State Department maintained in the war years. Joel was Seward’s man. Joel had also been Seward’s friend, and the difference, in that parlor on that afternoon, was not a difference Seward was prepared to discuss.
Belle Laurie sat down at the small table at the front of the room.
The room went quiet.
Hester took her place beside the table — not as a participant in the séance but as the host, the widow, the woman of the house. She looked at her two children’s faces in her mind. Frank, who would be the man of this family before he was old enough to understand what that meant. Susie, who would never remember her father at all. She looked at Joel through the open door of the next room, where he lay in the simple coffin on the trestles she had asked the carpenter to make plain.
Belle Laurie closed her eyes.
What happened next, in that parlor on Ninth Street, would be remembered differently by every person who was in the room.
What is documented is this: the funeral of Francis Joel Stratton, conducted by the Spiritualist circle of Cranston Laurie at a private boardinghouse on Ninth Street in Washington, D.C., in April of 1863, was likely the first public Spiritualist service held in the capital of the United States. The historian Mark A. Lause, who reconstructed the event a hundred and fifty years later, drew the contrast that needs to be drawn: while a Methodist camp meeting that same week in Maryland was racially segregated, the parlor on Ninth Street had Black mourners and white mourners, free people and the recently freed, sitting in the same chairs. The Spiritualists were the integrationists. They had been all along.
Belle Laurie spoke.
The words she spoke were not her own words. They were spoken in a voice that was not her voice. They addressed Hester directly, and they used the name Joel had used for her in private — the small name, the name that was not in any official record — and they said three things.
The first was about the children.
The second was about Indiana.
The third was about a man Hester had not yet met, whose name was the same name as her dead husband’s, who was waiting for her in Howard County and did not yet know it.
Hester closed her eyes. She held her hands in her lap.
She would go home.
A hundred and twenty miles west and a little north of Howard County, on a farm in Lagro Township that Mark Stratton had named Hopewell after the home of his British ancestors, a girl was born on the seventeenth of August.
Mark Stratton was fifty years old. He was a Methodist minister and a farmer of English descent. He had been born in Sussex County, New Jersey, in 1812, brought west to Wayne County, Ohio as a boy, married Mary Shellenbarger on Christmas Day of 1835, and come to Indiana in 1838. He had eleven children already. The girl who was born on the seventeenth of August was the twelfth, and the last, and the one his wife had said she could not name.
He named her Geneva Grace.
He held her in the late afternoon light in the front room of the Hopewell Farm house and looked at her face and felt the particular wonder a man feels at fifty when an unexpected child has been added to his household — the sense that the world had not been done with him yet, that the long arithmetic of his life had one more entry to make. Mary lay in the bedroom recovering. The older children were doing the work of the farm.
Mark Stratton stood in the front room with his daughter in his arms and thought about Hopewell.
He had named the church and the farm both after a place in England his great-grandfather had told him about — a village in Sussex, near where his own grandfather had been born, where there had been Strattons since before the Conquest. The same name, his grandfather had said, had been used by settlements of our kinsmen in New Jersey and in Virginia. Mark had taken that as a charge. The Strattons made a Hopewell wherever they went.
He did not know — would never know — that another Stratton family, also originally of New Jersey, also descended from the same colonial root, had a son three counties south, in Howard County: a thirty-year-old millwright named Samuel Edgerton Stratton, who at that very hour was running his mill on Wildcat Creek and partnering at the Anderson Machine Works and sitting in a Spiritualist circle once a month and waiting — though he did not know what he was waiting for — for a widow from Washington who would come home to Indiana before the year was out.
The Strattons of Hopewell Farm and the Strattons of Wildcat Creek would never meet. They would build their lives within ninety miles of each other for the next sixty years and never know they were possibly cousins. The Methodist minister and the disowned Friend and the millwright would attend different churches in different towns and read different newspapers, and what little they had in common — a colonial New Jersey Stratton ancestor whose name neither of them knew, a habit of work, a steadiness their wives had married them for — would remain unspoken because no one knew it was there to speak.
Geneva Grace Stratton would grow up at Hopewell Farm.
She would become Gene Stratton-Porter — naturalist, photographer, novelist, the most-read American woman writer of her generation, the author of Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost and twenty other books that would teach two generations of American children to love the swamps and the songbirds.
She would never know about the millwright in Howard County.
He would never know about her.
Mark Stratton kissed his daughter’s forehead and laid her down in the cradle and stepped out onto the porch of the Hopewell Farm house and watched the August light coming low across the cornfield. The cicadas had started. The cattle were coming up from the creek. The world was full of work that needed doing.
He went back to it.
She came back in stages.
First Indianapolis, where Hester’s brother had a house on the north side, and where Frank could go to a school for a season. Then west to Howard County, where Hester had family on the Donnellan side — her father Dr. Nelson Donnellan had practiced medicine in Kokomo for some years, and his name was still remembered by every doctor in the county. Hester took the children to her father’s old house in 1864. She was a thirty-two-year-old widow with two children, a small pension from the patent office, and a faith.
She started attending the Spiritualist meetings within the first month.
The widows in those parlors knew each other within a circle of a few miles. There was no formal church. There was a network — of Friends-turned-Spiritualists, of bereaved Methodists and Universalists, of free-thinkers and abolitionists and the small but insistent Indiana Spiritualist circuit that held séances in private parlors and published a small newspaper out of Anderson. Hester walked into one of those circles on a winter evening in the front room of a house on North Main Street in Kokomo, in 1864, and the man across the table from her stood up to give her his chair.
His name was Samuel Edgerton Stratton.
She heard the surname and stopped where she stood.
He saw her face and understood what the surname had done.
I am sorry, he said. I am not your husband’s kin. I would have heard of him if I were. The name is — common, in our line.
She sat down. She looked at him across the table. He was perhaps thirty years old, sandy-haired, hands like a workman’s hands, a quietness about him that she recognized from her own father. He was looking at her the way a man looks when he has just understood that a thing he did not know he was waiting for has arrived.
Where are you from? she said.
New Jersey, originally. My father was. I was born here.
Joel was New Jersey too. His grandfather. New York and then New Jersey.
Then we are perhaps cousins, he said. Distantly. The Strattons had a way of going west, all of them, in their own time.
Perhaps, she said.
The medium sat down. The room went quiet. They closed their eyes.
What happened in that parlor that evening Hester did not write down. What she wrote down, three years later in the family Bible, was the date of her marriage to Samuel Edgerton Stratton, in Howard County, Indiana, in the spring of 1867. She was thirty-five. He was thirty-four. Frank was seven and Susie was three. Mattie, Samuel’s daughter from his first marriage, was thirteen.
The new household had five people in it.
It had also, though no one in it would have used the word, three ghosts: Joel, in the room behind every conversation between Hester and Samuel that touched on the children, on Washington, on Seward, on the lung wound and the long dying. Sarah, in the corner of Mattie’s eye when she looked at her father across the supper table. And the young soul, hovering — though Hester would not have said this aloud to anyone but the medium — that was waiting to come into the family within a few years and not stay long.
They knew the household had ghosts. They were Spiritualists. The ghosts were not strangers.
The 1870 census taker found them in June: Samuel Edgerton Stratton, age forty, miller; Hester, age thirty-nine, keeping house; Mattie, age sixteen, at home; Frank Nelson Stratton, age nine, attending school; Susie, age seven, born in the District of Columbia, attending school. Five names, neatly written, in the slow hand of an enumerator who had a long county to walk.
Within ten years three of those five would be gone.
The infant came first. He was born in the spring of 1871 and lived eleven days. He was Samuel and Hester’s only child together. The household Bible recorded his date of birth and his date of death and the line where his name should have been was left blank, because they had not had time to settle on one. Hester nursed him through the small fever and held him through the long fever and laid him down at the end of the second week, and she and Samuel buried him in the cemetery north of Kokomo where Sarah was, in a plot Samuel had bought when he had bought Sarah’s, twelve years earlier, against the day a child of the family would need it.
Mattie went next. The records do not preserve the cause. She was eighteen or nineteen, somewhere between the 1870 census and the 1883 county history, and the county history would refer in its careful nineteenth-century way to two children, both deceased, and that was the only public notice Mattie would ever receive. She had been Samuel’s joy. He did not stop building mills, because that was not what he did. But the mill on Wildcat Creek, in the seasons after Mattie went, ran with a man behind the gates who did not whistle the way he had used to.
Susie was the third.
She had been born in Washington in the autumn of 1862, four months before Joel died, in the boardinghouse on Ninth Street. She had no memory of him. She grew up a Stratton in Howard County, with Samuel as the only father she knew, and she called him Father, and he loved her as a daughter, and she died sometime between 1872 and 1879 — somewhere in the middle of those years, before she was grown — of something the family papers do not name. Frank was the only full sibling she had ever had. He was twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen when she went, and he never talked about her after, and the absence of Susie in his later writing was a particular kind of silence that the people who knew him understood.
So by 1880 the household was three. Samuel, Hester, Frank.
They went to the Spiritualist meetings together. Samuel did not stop. Hester did not stop. Frank, who would grow up to be the lawyer-writer, the prosecutor of slot machines, the self-made man whose funeral procession would draw eight hundred mourners in 1905 — Frank in those years sat at the back of the parlors and watched. He never said, in any document that survives, what he believed about the voices that came out of the mediums’ mouths in those rooms. He did not become a Spiritualist himself. But he did not laugh at it either, the way a Methodist boy from Wabash County might have laughed at it. He had grown up in it. The voices in the parlors had told his mother the names of his father in Washington, and his half-sister in the cemetery, and the unnamed brother who had not lived long enough to be named, and he had sat at the back of those rooms and listened, and what he heard he kept to himself, because that was what a Stratton boy did with what he heard.
He was his mother’s son.
He was also, in a way the family did not articulate but understood, his stepfather’s son.
Samuel taught him the mill. Took him to the Anderson Machine Works. Showed him the way an axle is set in a stone bushing, the way a dam is repaired in the spring high water, the way a contract is read for what is missing as well as for what is in it. The skills Frank would carry into law and into writing, both — the patience, the close eye, the trust of his own observation against the noise of other people’s certainty — Samuel gave him those. Joel had given him his name and his face. Samuel gave him his hands.
He was elected County Commissioner in 1878.
It was not a job he had wanted. It was a job he had been pushed into by men in Kokomo who knew a millwright who could read a contract and a Spiritualist who would not be bought, and who understood that what was about to be built in their county — the new courthouse, the railroad spurs, the gas-light installation, the sanitation system that the typhoid summers were beginning to make necessary — required the kind of practical judgment that Samuel Edgerton Stratton had been exercising for thirty years.
He served two terms.
The Kokomo courthouse rose under his eye between 1881 and 1883. He superintended the construction. He read the architects’ drawings the way he read a mill schematic — looking for what was missing as much as for what was drawn. He stood on the site every working morning that the weather allowed, in his fifty-year-old coat, with a notebook and a pencil and an iron rule, and he asked the questions that needed to be asked and did not ask the ones that did not. The masons came to respect him. The architects, who had begun by patronizing him, ended by deferring to him. The county got a courthouse that stood for a hundred years and only came down because the county had outgrown it.
In the spring of 1883, a writer for a Chicago publishing house came to Kokomo to interview him for a county history.
The publishing house was Lewis. The book was titled Counties of Howard and Tipton, Indiana: Historical and Biographical. The format was the standard nineteenth-century mug-book template — a few pages on each prominent man, in his own dictation, edited for the reading public, paid for by subscription. The writer sat in Samuel’s parlor on a Tuesday afternoon and took notes in shorthand for two hours.
He asked the standard questions: birth, parentage, education, mills, partnerships, marriages, children, civic offices, religious affiliation.
When he came to religious affiliation, he looked up.
Mr. Stratton, he said carefully, I am told you are a Spiritualist.
I am, Samuel said.
For how long?
Thirty years this winter.
The writer wrote it down.
Some of my subjects, he said, prefer that I leave that out. I can describe you as a free-thinker, or as a man of broad religious views, if you would prefer.
Samuel looked at him.
Write what is true, he said. I am not ashamed of my faith. If the people who buy your book are ashamed of it, that is their concern, not mine.
The writer wrote it down.
When the book came out in late 1883, the entry on Samuel Edgerton Stratton ran to a page and a half, and it included, in its careful nineteenth-century English, the line that thirty years a Spiritualist was the religious commitment of the man who had built the Kokomo courthouse. Hester read the entry to him in their parlor on the evening the book arrived. She read it twice. The second time she set the book down and looked at her husband across the lamplight and said, He wrote it.
He wrote it, Samuel said.
Good, she said.
Good, he agreed.
He coughed into his handkerchief. The handkerchief came away with a small spot of blood. They had both seen it for a month now. They did not speak of it.
He died in the spring of 1884.
The light in the room had changed.
Samuel Edgerton Stratton lay in the bedroom on the second floor of the house in Kokomo, Indiana, and let his life run through him the way a millrace runs through a wheel — link by link, scoop by scoop, each one full, each one true.
He had built his first mill at sixteen. He had run the Stratton Mill on Wildcat Creek for fifteen years. He had partnered at the Anderson Machine Works. He had served on the County Commission and superintended the construction of the Kokomo courthouse. He had been disowned by the Society of Friends at eighteen and had carried, ever after, the silence the Friends had taught him, into rooms where the silence had a different name.
He had buried Sarah. He had buried Mattie. He had buried the unnamed son. He had buried Susie, who had not been his by blood but had been his by every other measure that mattered.
Hester sat beside the bed.
She held his hand.
She had buried Joel in Washington in 1863, and she would bury Samuel in Howard County in 1884, and she would live nine more years and die in 1893 and be buried beside him. Two husbands, both Strattons, neither of them blood kin to the other but both in some long-forgotten New Jersey way perhaps cousins, both raised in the silence of older faiths and both come to the same Spiritualist circle by the same route. She had been the constant. She had been, in the only way the records can show, the carrier — though she would not have used that word — of a faith that the men around her had come to through her, or with her, or because of her.
She held his hand.
He went.
The light moved on the ceiling.
Three counties west, at Hopewell Farm in Lagro Township, a twenty-year-old girl named Geneva Grace Stratton was reading by the parlor lamp. She had a notebook open beside her, and a pencil in her hand, and she was beginning, though she did not yet know it, the long work of becoming Gene Stratton-Porter, who would write twenty books and be read by ten million people and never know that the millwright who had died that afternoon in Howard County had been, perhaps, her cousin.
Frank Nelson Stratton, twenty-three years old, sat at his stepfather’s bedside.
He did not weep.
He had been raised in the silence.
He stood up, finally, after the doctor had come and gone and Hester had gone downstairs to make the necessary arrangements, and he went to the window and looked out at the April evening over Howard County, Indiana. The mill on Wildcat Creek was still running. The courthouse on the square was still standing. The cemetery north of town held three Strattons now and would hold a fourth before another nine years had passed.
He stood at the window for a long time.
Then he went down to help his mother.
The factual scaffolding of this story is drawn primarily from the biographical sketch of Samuel Edgerton Stratton in Counties of Howard and Tipton, Indiana: Historical and Biographical (Lewis Publishing Co., Chicago, 1883), preserved in the family GEDCOM as note N299. Samuel was indeed born in Howard County in 1833, the son of Jonathan Dallas Stratton (Maurice River, New Jersey, 1804) and Prudence Edgerton (married at Westfield Monthly Meeting, Camden, Preble County, Ohio, 1833). He did build his first mill at sixteen, was disowned by the Society of Friends for marrying outside the faith, partnered at the Anderson Machine Works, served as Howard County Commissioner, superintended the construction of the Kokomo courthouse, and was a practicing Spiritualist for thirty years. His first wife was Sarah, surname not preserved in the records I have been able to find. His daughter Mattie predeceased him; the unnamed infant born in 1871 survived only briefly. He died in 1884 at the age of fifty-one.
The funeral scene at the Ninth Street boardinghouse is grounded in Mark A. Lause’s Free Spirits: Spiritualism, Republicanism, and Radicalism in the Civil War Era (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which identifies the funeral of Francis Joel Stratton, conducted by the Cranston Laurie Spiritualist circle in April 1863, as likely the first public Spiritualist service held in the capital. Mary Todd Lincoln’s well-documented Spiritualist practice, William H. Seward’s lifelong friendship with the Stratton family (preserved in Joel’s 1852 letters cited in Michael F. Holt’s The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, Oxford 1999, and in the 1898 Lewis Publishing biography that records the Strattons as “intimate with the Seward and Lincoln families”), and the integrated character of Spiritualist gatherings in contrast to contemporaneous segregated Methodist camp meetings (also drawn from Lause) all support the scene as I have reconstructed it. Whether Mary Lincoln and Seward attended in person on the day of Joel’s funeral I cannot prove. The case for Seward is strong. The case for Mary Lincoln is plausible. The full attendance list is imagined.
The Wabash County counterpoint is documented as to Mark Stratton’s biography (Sussex County, NJ; Wayne County, Ohio; marriage to Mary Shellenbarger 1835; Hopewell Farm in Lagro Township from 1848; twelfth child Geneva Grace born August 17, 1863) but imagined as to the moment of Geneva’s birth and Mark’s reflection on the Stratton name. Whether Samuel Edgerton Stratton’s father Jonathan Dallas Stratton (Maurice River, NJ) was a kinsman of Mark Stratton (Sussex County, NJ) — and therefore whether Samuel and Geneva were in any meaningful sense cousins — is an open genealogical question. Both fathers were colonial-New-Jersey-born Strattons; the two lines may share a common seventeenth-century ancestor in the Long Island Stratton line, or they may be independent New Jersey arrivals. I have not been able to settle the question. Until then, the cousin claim rests where it should rest — as a possibility, plausibly true, not provably so.
The dialogue, the interior lives, and the scenes are imagined.
The faith is documented.
Samuel Edgerton Stratton (1833–1884) was the son of Jonathan Dallas Stratton and Prudence Edgerton of Howard County, Indiana. He built his first mill at sixteen, partnered at the Anderson Machine Works, served as Howard County Commissioner, and superintended the construction of the Kokomo courthouse. He was disowned by the Society of Friends as a young man and was a practicing Spiritualist for the last thirty years of his life. His first wife was Sarah, who died about 1859. His second wife was Hester Donnellan, widow of Francis Joel Stratton — a man of a separate Stratton line, no documented blood relation, who had been the author’s great-grandfather. Hester brought to the household her two surviving children by Joel: Frank Nelson Stratton, the author’s grandfather, and Susie Stratton, born in Washington, D.C., who did not live to be grown. Samuel and Hester had one child together, a son who survived only days. Samuel died in 1884 at the age of fifty-one. Hester survived him by nine years, dying in Howard County in 1893. Both husbands had been Spiritualists. The author believes Hester was the source.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026
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