About this archive
This site is an independent restoration of rosellarice.com as it existed between 2011 and 2017. The original was built by Peggy Mershon, a former newspaper journalist and curator of the Butler-Clear Fork Valley Historical Society in Butler, Ohio. She collected Rosella Rice's stories from scanned volumes of Arthur's Home Magazine and from newspaper clippings, wrote the biographical pages and compiled the bibliography. The site went offline, and the only copies left were in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. We pulled every page from those snapshots and rebuilt it.
The texts are kept as she posted them, including the occasional scanning errors and the editorial notes she put at the head of some pieces. We cleaned up the page layout, replaced the old HTML with something that works on a phone, and removed her personal contact details, which are out of date and not ours to republish. We added short notes under each story and the introductions you see on the series pages. Nothing in the stories themselves has been rewritten.
The credit for the research belongs to Mershon and to the people she named. She first learned about Rice from Mary Jane Armstrong Henney, a Mansfield historian and genealogist who spent years interviewing Rice descendants and wrote the book Rosella Rice (1827-1888), published by the Ashland County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. The Butler museum holds Rice family papers donated by a descendant of Rosella's youngest sister, and Mershon noted that Bill Jones of Cincinnati, who interviewed Rice descendants for his Johnny Appleseed Heritage Center project, had also collected many of the stories.
The stories are nineteenth century texts and are in the public domain. This archive is not affiliated with the Butler-Clear Fork Valley Historical Society, with Peggy Mershon, or with any of the organizations named on the original site. It exists so that the work she did stays readable.
Peggy Mershon's own account of Rosella Rice and how the site began is kept on its original page.
Questions
Why not just link to the Wayback Machine?
Archived pages load slowly, break on phones and are hard to find through search. The texts deserve a stable home, and the originals were built with site software that no longer renders cleanly. The snapshots remain the source of record if you want to compare.
What was changed from the original pages?
Layout, navigation and image handling. Contact details, phone numbers and email addresses were removed. Links to outside organizations that no longer resolve were dropped. The story texts, the biography and the bibliography are as posted, apart from stripping the old formatting.
I found a transcription error or have a correction.
The texts reflect the scanned magazine pages as Mershon read them, so some odd spellings and dropped words are in the source. If you can point to a page of the magazine that reads differently, we will correct the text and note the change.