In this day and age, newspapers rarely print fiction. Of course, there is the occasional magical story written by a third grade class that appears every once a week in the Arts and Entertainment section of the paper, but for the most part, fictional stories of real substance are not published in newspapers anymore. This was not the case in the 1800's. Appearing in The Valley Star each week was...
On January 23, 1849 at the graduation ceremony at Geneva Medical College, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in America to receive a degree to practice medicine. The traditional commencement ceremony and distribution of diplomas was held in the college’s Presbyterian Church. Within the hour before the ceremony began the Church was filled to maximum capacity. The audience present at the...
In February 1840, the Virginia Legislature was busy discussing the Lynchburg and Tennessee Railroad Bill. The Bill argued that the Southwestern part of Virginia needed access to major trade routes. The majority was in opposition to the original bill (for many reasons, particularly monetary), so Mr. Paxton of Rockbridge County, Virginia proposed a substitute bill, which was found more agreeable by...
After a sixteen-year hiatus, cholera was once again on the doorstep of New Orleans. On December 30, 1848, reports from Pittsburgh began circling that cholera was the responsible agent for thirteen deaths aboard steamships known as the Diadem, the Watkins, and the Savannah; all of which had docked in the New Orleans harbor. A message from Cincinnati stated that fourteen people aboard the Peytona, which...
Cotton farming had reached great heights in Georgia by the mid-1800's but some saw that there was still room to grow in the cotton business. Though most of their neighbors were engaged in farming, twenty citizens of Athens, Georgia decided to break the mold. In January of 1849 they announced in the Athens Southern Banner, that they were joining together to form a new business: The Athens...
It seems that John Murrell of Lynchburg, Virginia, was often away from his Louisiana plantation. Murrell bought Tally Ho Plantation in Iberville Parish in 1848. The plantation was run by an overseer named L. Hewett, who communicated with Murrell through a series of letters, most posted to an address in Lynchburg and some to an address in New Orleans. In the letters, Hewett told Murrell about the...
"He called the slave owners worse than house thieves and we laughed at the old fool for his ignorance," said Margaret Lynn Lewis in a 1849 letter to her son John Lewis Cochran. As members of the planter class, the Lewis family relied on slave labor in order to maintain their farm.
The use of slave labor in Florida was centered on King Cotton, which was essential to the prosperity of the...
Published in the January 1843 edition of "The Lowell Offering and Magazine" is a poem entitled "On A Young Man Lost At Sea" by an author credited as "M.G.B." The mournful poem reads like a funeral dirge and expresses the sorrow of a sister who has lost her dear brother. The author writes of how this young man's voice will never again be heard nor will his presence be seen around the family...
In the 1840s, a Virginia slave named John Brown became a victim of a practice involving the use of slaves to further medical knowledge in the antebellum South. Originally known as Fed, Brown was sold from his master’s house in Northampton, Virginia by a slave speculator named Starling Finney. He was moved to Georgia and sold again to a man named Thomas Stevens. Fourteen years later, Stevens became...
In 1848, Ellen Craft transcended racial, gender, and intellectual hurdles, in order to escape slavery in Macon, Georgia and experience freedom in Boston, Massachusetts. Craft’s physical appearance aided her and her husband in their escape because “notwithstanding my wife being of African extraction on her mother’s side, she is almost white.” On December 21, Craft donned the disguise of...