I’m reading a book written in the 1890s by a woman who never married and never had children of her own, who was listed in the census as “at home” while her siblings were listed as schoolteachers. She wrote four novels about pioneer families in the Chilhowee valley in Tennessee.

I found one in my boxes of books; I don’t remember where or when I got it. The frontispiece and title page are missing; the title is stamped in red on a brown cloth cover. It’s called Chilhowee Boys In War Time. I had to look it up online to find the author. Inside the front cover are several names inscribed, each in different handwriting, with dates: 1912, 1915, 1918. Apparently it was a Christmas present several times within the Bailly family: Archie, Florence, Katherine, Frederick. Each date is either December or early January. There’s also a small faded stamp from a drugstore, possibly the seller of the book. Inside the back cover is another signature and date, Feb. 18, 1916. The last pages of the novel are missing.

One of the main characters is Parson Craig. He moved with his wife and children to Chilhowee, apparently in the previous book. His five sons and one or two daughters range from 16 down to about 3 years old. He rides the circuit, teaching in various places every Sunday and roaming all over taking care of funerals, weddings, and surgeries. There was a doctor in Chilhowee, but the doctor died before this book starts; we meet his widow and her children, the same ages as some of Craig’s sons. There are two families who own slaves; the slaves are people involved in the community, portrayed as very loyal and hardworking, their speech rendered with cut off consonants and slang. At the midpoint of the book we’ve met two Indian men, one speaking English and good friends with the ‘godman’ Craig, the other not speaking English and less tolerant of pioneers, at least impertinent ones.

Because this is a novel aimed at young men, every couple pages someone sighs over so-and-so’s thoughtlessness or headstrong behavior. If only they could be like the Craig boys, who can be relied on to work hard and do what they said they would do. The women gather with men and boys guarding them, keeping an eye out for bears, Indians, anything that might harm their families. The women spin wool, hack flax, and weave cloth. The men gather to full the cloth, which is described as soaping it and then kicking it repeatedly while it sits in a pile on the floor, the men sitting around it with bare feet. Fulling it shrinks and thickens the cloth, so it won’t shrink while it’s being worn and so it will last longer, kind of like felting it. Then the women sew it into a suit of clothes for the ‘posson’, as the slaves call Parson Craig.

The time of war in the title is the War of 1812; there are two tribes of Indians in the area with one on the American side and one on the British. I wonder if the Indians have realized by then that they will never get to keep the land.

The reason for making the posson a suit is that he’s been called up in the draft, like a lot of other men. His 16 year old son would volunteer to go in his stead, but Parson Craig says no, he thinks his credentials as a minister will allow him not to serve. But he has to show up to present those credentials, and there are those who doubt whether he’ll be back any time soon. The other teen boys have mixed reactions; one is so desperate to go to war and be an admired officer that he rushes through his chores and cuts off three of his toes. The parson sews two of the toes back on, but the third one is cold and dead, so he doesn’t bother with it. The boy says just as well; he’s in a lot of pain from stitches with no anesthetic.

A month or two before this, the book opened with a school building raising. The pioneers gathered to put up the walls and roof of a new school building. The parson taught there for a whole month before the recruiters came. Now there’s no time to find a teacher to replace him, if any available men were not at the war already.

What gets me is that the doctor’s widow mourns that her two daughters can’t go away to school. She wants them to learn, but won’t send them into a war zone unprotected, even just to cross it to a school. She says there’s no chance now of getting a school for girls like the one the parson set up for boys.

Did I mention the parson was only teaching boys? Only Boys?