Letters, traces of life

Every now and then in the rush of daily activity, my forward momentum is pleasantly interrupted with an invitation to travel in my thoughts back to another time and place. After spending 9 hours in a human services conference in the bowels of the Cleveland Convention Center Friday I detoured back to the parking lot via City Hall.

There on the back wall of the City Hall rotunda was my invitation, portraits of famous Clevelanders. I recognized many of the names but one in particular caught my attention. Rebecca Rouse, and the inscription below the portrait indicated she had organized the Soldiers' Aid Society during the Civil War. That portrait was as a door to walk through and that evening I started the journey, finding an entry in the online Encyclopedia of Cleveland: http://ech.case.edu/ech-cgi/article.pl?id=RRC1

But my primary interest in this historical character had more to do with linking her story to that of many in my family tree who were profoundly impacted by the Civil War. I thought first of my great-great Aunt, Eliza Savage, sister to my great-great grandfather Martin M. Hester. I thought of her because in our family collection we have a great many letters, perhaps 50 that she wrote to her brother during the Civil War, with three sons in the front lines of battle. We have transcribed about a dozen thinking that would be a good sample, but who knows what thread of thought lies buried within those thin lines of faded ink, lines that get smaller and closer together near the end of the page when there is more to tell than there is room to write and paper is scarce and ink is home-made.

Take a quick view back to March 5th, 1864 with this excerpt....

...we received a letter from James last evening, he left here Friday morning and reached Nashville Sunday evening about 6 o'clock.... they would start the next morning for Chatanooga. Watson has enlisted in the 1st Ohio Battery. We will be left quite lonely. Elisha has some thoughts of selling out [the farm] and renting a house in Berea for the present. He cannot do much on the farm alone, help is scarce and high....

Could she have imagined that these words would be read nearly 150 years later.... Could she have imagined the value they are to us now in capturing our imagination for the otherwise unimaginable tragedy of Civil War? And can we imagine how our own written words will be read in years to come...?