Fading Footprints, or The Lowly Lives of Long Ago
The third series ran in volume 47 of Arthur's Home Magazine in 1879, the year Rice also addressed the Ashland County Association and spoke at the Andrews golden wedding. It is quieter and more personal than the earlier two. Her father Alexander, now an old man, rides along to gather butternuts and every stump and elm tree tells him something. Over a supper of mush and milk he explains how corn was pounded in a burned-out stump in the winter of 1811.
The first number follows an old maid's memory through the patches of a quilt, a square at a time. The fourth is a courtship told entirely in the voice of Aunt Betsey, with the whole craft of flax spinning woven into it. The fifth, in two pages, is the closest thing to autobiography on this site: Rice, aged eight going on nine, and the young Vermont schoolmaster who taught her grammar, walked her home through the snow, and died of fever among strangers. She paid for his gravestone with money from her writing.
If you read only one series, read this one. It shows what she meant by the lowly lives of long ago.
Contents
- No. 1Second-Cousin Lydia and the Patchwork Quiltone page
- No. 2Wagon Ride Into the Pastone page
- No. 3Childhood of mush and milkone page
- No. 4The Courting of Aunt Betseyone page
- No. 5The New Schoolmaster — a Strangerp. 1p. 2
No. 1. Second-Cousin Lydia and the Patchwork Quilt
Laid up with rheumatism at second-cousin Sally’s, Aunt Lydia Cummings asks for her unfinished patchwork quilt and remembers her lost sweetheart John Long, her lonely years, and how the quilt brought a deacon into her life.
No. 2. Wagon Ride Into the Past
Rosella, her brothers and her father Alex ride a wagon to the creek bottom to gather butternuts, and every stump and turn of the road sets the old man telling of pioneer days, including a child lost at a well.
No. 3. Childhood of mush and milk
A supper of mush and milk leads Rosella’s father to recall pounded-corn bread and the winter trip from Newark, Ohio, and he tells of newlyweds Dave and Ruth, who moved in on Dave’s startled mother.
No. 4. The Courting of Aunt Betsey
Aunt Betsey tells how she came to marry Nathan, a young Virginian in a fringed hunting-shirt who turned up at Mis Runnels’s cabin while she was spinning flax, and how he finally spoke his mind.
No. 5. The New Schoolmaster — a Stranger
A frontier family hires a Yankee schoolmaster fresh from the shores of Lake Champlain. Page 1 follows the school meeting, the winter term, and the quiet, lonely stranger who befriends little Rosy.
Questions
Is the schoolmaster story true?
It reads as memoir. Rice names herself in it, gives her age, and her father appears as the school director Aleck. She was born in August 1827, so the winter described would fall in the mid 1830s. The stone she bought is inscribed The Stranger's Grave. We have not located independent records of the teacher.
What is the golden wedding mentioned in the third number?
The fiftieth anniversary of Thomas and Marilla Andrews of Worthington Township, Richland County, in January 1879. A newspaper clipping of the talk Rice gave there survived in a scrapbook and is on this site as Golden Anniversary.
Where is the series in the magazine?
Arthur's Home Magazine, volume 47, 1879, pages 42, 94, 200, 236 and 381.