Becoming

If Sophia Emery Graves were alive to speak to us today . . .

I am one of a large family — the thirteenth child of Nathaniel and Louisa (Emery) Graves. Look in your children’s school maps and you will find the bay-indented coast of Maine. On Penobscot Bay is the city of Rockland, originally a part of Thomaston, in which town I first saw the light and sight of the Atlantic and its rocky islands.^⁠[1]

My father, Nathaniel Graves, was a joiner,^⁠[2] fisherman and farmer, which meant that in our house the work changed with the season but never disappeared. Wood had to be shaped. Nets and lines had to be tended. Fields had to be planted, food preserved, children taught, and sorrow borne without much outward display.

My mother, Louisa Maria Emery Graves, came from a family that had been in Maine as long as any. The Emery name carried its own web of kinship and memory kept through family reunions.^⁠[3]

My sister, Louisa, named for our mother, and I were the youngest of our parents’ children. I was born on November 29, 1829, and Louisa followed on November 5, 1831.

The first born of our family was Lydia, born in 1809. Then came George, Elizabeth, Mary, Dennis, Margaretta, Sylvania, Edward, Harry, the twins Josiah and Nathaniel, Sarah, myself, and finally Louisa. Of all that great household, only Harry and Sarah died in infancy, though death was never far from any family in those days.

Lydia was the first to marry. In 1832, she wed Oliver Wheeler, but within a month she was gone, buried on a cold October day when Louisa and I were too young to remember her. Still, the absence of a sister may be known even by those who cannot recall her face. In a family like ours, the dead remained part of the household. Their names were spoken, their picture on the mantel, empty places felt, and their stories folded into the lives of those who remembered.

We learned our letters and numbers in a one-room schoolhouse. In such a family, love could not always be quiet or tidy. It came in bread baked, stockings mended, small children watched by older ones, and the steady labor of keeping everyone fed, clothed, and warmed.

When I was about thirteen, my brother Dennis became a mariner and was lost at sea. Six years later, my brother Edward went to California during the gold rush, and Josiah, set on joining him, died of yellow fever in Mazatlán Harbor in 1851. A year later, my mother was laid to rest in the village cemetery.

My brother Edward returned to Maine from California in the fall of '53, began at once to build ships and opened a store on the Keag^⁠[4]. That same autumn, Louisa married Edwin Furness. He had been our schoolteacher, then went West promising to return and marry Louisa. They left for Illinois right after their wedding and I lost the only sister near my own age. My four other sisters were long since married and when I was a child, they were more like aunts than sisters to me^⁠[5]

With Louisa gone west, my world in South Thomaston narrowed. I became the woman of my Father’s home, but when he died on January 9, 1855, I was alone on the homestead. Nathanial took his own life after father died. Ed married and I went west, reuniting with Louisa — called Lois in family habit — who by that time was living in Porter County, Indiana on the shore of Lake Michigan. There, I became its first school teacher.^⁠[6]

It was a small beginning — a 12x16 foot board shanty hardly larger than a room at home. The school moved from one makeshift shelter to another: first to another board shanty, then to the upper story of a wagon shop, and later, a proper schoolhouse. My name stood at the beginning of that local memory.

Louisa had her babies. I had my students.

By the late 1850s, the whole country seemed to be arguing in a long, rising, dischordent voice over the question of slavery. It was a national crisis pressing into churches, newspapers, lecture halls, parlors, classrooms, and political meetings. The Missouri line failed to settle it. The Compromise of 1850 had not quieted it. The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened new ground to old violence, and the Dred Scott decision of '57 declared that Black people had no rights that white men were bound to respect. Every year the argument grew less abstract. Slavery was no longer a question waiting at the edge of the Republic. It was the question by which the Republic itself would be judged.

Maine, where I had come of age, was never free of prejudice, but slavery ended when the Revolution had. In 1850, there were only a few hundred Black men in Maine, many of them seafarers, shipbuilders, dockworkers, and men of the coastal trades. No one was enslaved. No law barred them from settling there. Discrimination lingered, yes, but the law did not forbid their lives.

Indiana was different.

Indiana was a free state, but its freedom had sharp edges. The constitution adopted in 1851 barred any new person of Black or mixed race from settling there. Those who already lived in the state could not vote. They could not testify against a white man. They could not send their children to public school. In some towns, not far from where I lived, Black families were driven out altogether, by mobs or by ordinances dressed up in law.

And yet, even there, the truth ran deeper than law. The Underground Railroad ran silent through fields, thickets, and darkened roads of the lake country. The land there rolled gently beneath hardwoods, and not far off rose the dunes — great sweeps of sand pressed up against the southern edge of Lake Michigan. In summer, the air carried the scent of warm earth and wild sweet clover, and the lake stretched blue and vast like an inland sea. In winter, raw winds came off the water and drove snow into the gullies and fence lines, sometimes so thick a person could lose the road entirely. And in every season, people escaping slavery moved north toward Canada.

There were nights, people later said, when one did not dare strike a match, let alone leave a candle in the window. But they came—mud-caked, bloodied, quiet as shadows—and we fed them, hid them, and prayed them on. The law said we were wrong. But we believed in a higher law.^⁠[7]

I was a young woman from Maine moving through the educational world of the Great Lakes and a greatly divided nation. On January 30, 1858, I received a teaching certificate in Chicago.^⁠[8]

The stories of Florence Nightingale had reached even our small corner of Indiana. Her courage in the hospitals of Scutari had made its way into newspapers, magazines, sermons, and poems. In 1857, Mr. Longfellow wrote:

A Lady with a lamp shall stand

In the great history of the land,

A noble type of good,

Heroic Womanhood.

Some women longed for such noble work — for a place in the wider world of learning, service, and usefulness. Too often, we were told our worth lay in the emotional well-being of those inside our husbands’ well-ordered homes. I had neither husband nor household of my own. But I had hands, a mind, and a will to be of use.

At the end of 1859, I traveled east to Boston to spend a year in study at the New England Female Medical College, one of the few institutions in the country where women could receive formal medical instruction.^⁠[9] Its work focused heavily on midwifery and the care of women and children, and I absorbed what I could.

Teaching had already taught me that knowledge, once gathered, could be carried anywhere — into a schoolroom, a sickroom, a neighbor’s house, or a settlement still building itself out of stumps and boards.

At the end of the term, I returned west. Abraham Lincoln had been elected, and secession was in the wind, though few of us yet understood how near we stood to the storm. The lake country still needed teachers. Families still needed help. Children still needed tending. Women still needed other women who could enter a room without fear and bring what knowledge they possessed.

I had been trained to notice, to listen, to steady my hand, and to believe that a woman’s mind was no small thing.

That, too, was part of my calling.

NOTES

¹ Full transcriptions of the Sophia Emery Graves Realf letters, found in the Richard J. Hinton Papers, Kansas State Library, Topeka, appear in later chapters of I Was His Wife . Unless otherwise noted, chapter notes use shortened references identifying the correspondent and date: Sophia to Sarah Realf Whapham, March 26, 1879.

² Nathaniel Graves was born in New Hampshire and, upon his father’s death, was apprenticed as a joiner, or finish carpenter. About 1804, he and his half-brother, William Graves, migrated to South Thomaston, Maine.

³ Sophia to Sarah Whapham, March 26, 1879. In this letter, Sophia wrote that she had “a host of relatives on the Emery side” and promised to send Sarah an account of the Emery reunion as “some token” of her family connections.

⁴ From Keel to Furrow, the Life of Edward Small Graves

⁵ Sophia Realf to Sarah Whapham, March 26, 1879.

⁶ The History of Porter County, Indiana, p. 163. See: https://www.kankakeevalleyhistoricalsociety.org/Kankakee%20River%20History/Books%20and%20papers/Counties%20of%20Porter%20and%20Lake,%20Indiana.pdf

⁷ Testimony published in the Valparaiso Weekly Herald, February 2, 1889, in a retrospective on early abolitionists of Porter County, Indiana.

⁸ Chicago Daily Tribune,  February 02, 1858: Meeting of the Board of Education, January 30, 1858 …  Mr. Brooks, chairman of the committee on the examinations of teachers recommended that certificates of qualifications to teach be granted to the following candidates:—Lucinda E. Dutton, Sophia E. Graves, Bette Perry, M. Jennie Larsen, Mary E. Reed and Susan Davis. Concurred in by the Board . . .

⁹ Eleventh Annual Report of the New England Female Medical College, p. 5, term of 1859–1860. One student is listed as Sophia E. Graves. While the record does not independently identify her as Sophia Emery Graves of Indiana, the name, timing, educational background, and Sophia’s later Massachusetts connections make the identification plausible. She is not listed in the census of Chicago or Furnessville in 1860.