Lovejoy State Memorial
Alton, IL

By Evan Allen Wood

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was shot by members of a mob and succumbed to his wounds on the evening of November 7, 1837, in Alton, Illinois. Decades later, the community erected a 110-foot-tall monument honoring him. The monument has a central granite column with a winged statue of Victory cast in bronze on top. Looking at the monument from the eponymous Monument Ave. it appears neatly framed by the stone retaining wall and staircase leading into the cemetery. Beside it are two smaller columns with a curved whispering wall wrapping around behind.

Lovejoy had been publishing The Alton Observer, an anti-slavery newspaper, for the better part of three years, and on the day he died a mob formed—not for the first time—intent on destroying the Presbyterian minister’s press. Lovejoy’s editorials were written in a straightforward voice, and he often invoked his Christian faith. In a characteristic example from September 8, 1837, he wrote: “It is the duty of us all to unite our hearty and zealous efforts to effect the speedy and entire emancipation of that portion of our fellow-men in bondage.” Although his friends rallied to his side, an exchange of gunfire left the 34-year-old editor dead. Nobody was prosecuted in the weeks that followed, and Lovejoy’s body had to be buried in a secret location lest the citizens who’d participated in his killing decide to press their harassment beyond the grave.

It’s hard to look past the irony of a community tacitly allowing a mob to kill one of its citizens then several decades later erecting a grand monument heralding the same man as a defender of the free press and superior moral convictions. The cynical view might hold that the monument constitutes an attempt for the river town to paper over the reality of its past. But allowing Lovejoy to rest in an anonymous grave is an even less preferable course. It would not be unreasonable to ask how a community could best practice restorative justice for a killing that was, by that time, sixty years gone.

Abolitionist organizing wasn’t a safe proposition anywhere in the United States in the 1830s. Mobs tarred and feathered or otherwise chased away abolitionist speakers, editors, and groups from Nashville to New York. It’s fair to posit that the consequences tended to be more dire in states where slavery was legal like Missouri, but abolition, which entailed immediate emancipation of all people kept as slaves (as opposed to gradualism which called for a slower end to the practice), was still a fringe view among anti-slavery advocates in the US at this point.

Elijah Lovejoy knew he was risking his life by continuing to publish his paper, originally called The St. Louis Observer. He moved upriver from St. Louis to Alton to avoid mob justice on the western banks of the Mississippi, where his paper’s offices had been raided and his press destroyed. Alton, despite being in a free state, was not a safe haven for Lovejoy. His press was again destroyed and tossed into the river after it had been shipped to its new home, and mobs would harass Lovejoy and his Observer multiple times before his death.

Each new instance of peril seemed only to strengthen Lovejoy’s resolve. He spoke out on his own behalf at community meetings and walked the streets, damn the consequences. That his life was in danger was something he often acknowledged in editorials and addresses, but he was unwilling to abandon his cause. In his final recorded remarks, apparently from a public meeting of Alton citizens, he remarked that “if I die, I have determined to make my grave in Alton.” Lovejoy’s determination in the face of mortal danger was commendable; perhaps the monument is a fitting tribute.

But one can’t help but think of the thousands of lynching victims across the nation who gave no act of provocation at all, let alone publishing inflammatory editorials. As the National Lynching Memorial has demonstrated, these victims of racial violence are worthy of monuments, as grand as can be built.

Monuments can’t undo the pain caused by the deaths they commemorate any more than they can pardon the communities complicit in them. But a society with a clear sense of its own history is one that properly remembers its heroes and villains. A tour of public statues and monuments across the US at present reveals our ideas about our past are sometimes misguided if not outright delusional. During the time it was erected, Lovejoy’s monument would have stood in contrast to the statues of Confederate generals going up around the country as part of the burgeoning Lost Cause movement. Correcting the historical record in statues could be looked on as a comparatively low-cost act of civic maintenance as opposed to an activist victory, but it should be done all the same.

Lovejoy’s death accomplished more for the abolitionist movement than he could have dreamed of with his paper. The incident made headlines across the country and generated increased sympathy for the abolitionist cause. In an 1857 letter Abraham Lincoln described Lovejoy’s death as “the most important single event that ever happened in the new world.” The moral implications of that statement go beyond the scope of this essay, but it is true that his sacrifice advanced the cause of abolition. The monument at Alton tells us he gave everything he could for a cause that was urgent and just. Let’s hope it stands another hundred years.

Evan Allen Wood’s writing has appeared in The Riverfront Times, Backpacker, Feast, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he writes short stories about people losing their minds and planting trees. Find him on Twitter at @HorseEagle9000.

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Gravesite

Sheridan County, Nebraska

By C.J. Janovy

It’s not easy to get to the final resting place of Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz, whose books, I’ll go ahead and argue, evoke one region of America as powerfully as William Faulkner’s portray another.

Paying respects to Sandoz in the traditional way of visiting her gravesite requires a pilgrimage far from the interstate, through Sandhills counties so thinly populated one can drive 20 minutes (it feels longer) without seeing another moving vehicle, on a two-lane highway dipping and rising through a forbidding grass-covered Sahara. Finally, about 27 miles north of unincorporated Ellsworth, a historical marker affirms that this is Sandoz country. A faded sign across from the Deer Meadows hunting outfitters confirms she is buried three miles farther back in the hills.

Getting to this point requires first knowing who Mari Sandoz was. I never encountered her name on any syllabus despite graduating from the Lincoln Public Schools and earning two fancy English degrees (I hope syllabi have changed). I made this pilgrimage only after reconciling a childhood mystery.

When I was a kid, Mari Sandoz’s name stared back at me from the bookshelves above the fireplace at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma City. The book’s yellow spine sang out like a meadowlark, while tall red letters spelled two simple words: Old Jules. Below that was the author’s name in simple yet elegant black. The dramatic block letters told me the subject of this book was important. But what kind of name was “Jules”? It must be a man (tall red letters were for men). He was “old,” like the grandfather I loved, whose fireplace was where Santa delivered gifts, but this book was on high shelves where only the adults could reach it. The writer had a strange name, too. Was “Mari” a boy or a girl? How was I supposed to pronounce it in my mind? Decades later, after my folks cleaned out my grandparents’ midcentury modern house, this book was the only thing I wanted. And I finally read it.

The Swiss immigrant Jules Sandoz was an awful human, literally filthy and abusive but also educated enough to deliver breech babies on the frontier in the 1880s. Once the United States government had murdered or moved the region’s Indians, Old Jules helped colonize his part of the country through cussedness, luck, marksmanship and the help of obedient women, one of whom wound up in the insane asylum. I don’t know how often Mari uses the word “pounded” in this portrait of her father, but it’s a lot.

Generations of readers have put up with this man for 424 pages of what is now considered Mari Sandoz’s masterpiece. In this way, Mari’s accomplishment is far greater than her father’s legacy of towns and services in western Nebraska. Given the difficulties of making a life in this harsh place and time, one might wonder: Why bother? I think it was so his daughter could write such a beautiful book. “In Jules,” she observed, “as in every man, there lurks something ready to destroy the finest in him as the frosts of the earth destroy her flowers.”

Mari Sandoz Memorial Drive is a sand road that winds past a clanking windmill and ends in a patch of grass on a hill. Farther up is a plot surrounded by barbed wire, with a white gate. The plum-colored headstone reads simply “Mari Sandoz 1896-1966.” A metal glider allows visitors to sit and contemplate the view.

Near the gate is a mailbox; inside is a spiral bound notebook whose messages reveal it hasn’t been long since someone else was here.

“She was an admirable person & wonderful writer!” wrote one visitor from Windsor, Colorado. “I heard her speak at Kearney State College in 1965, approx. 1 yr. before she died. I can still hear her exclaim, ‘read my books.’”

Dan Kusek, vice president of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, had started a fresh notebook six weeks before my most recent visit.

“When they were bringing Mari’s casket here for burial, the hearse could climb no further,” Kusek wrote at the top of the first page. “Mari’s wish was to be buried at the TOP of the hill but they could get no further. A hawk came over us here while we were cutting grass & weeds. I have no doubt it was Mari’s spirit!!”

The only spirit I felt was the unnamed woman in Old Jules who tried to walk home to her one-year-old baby in a blizzard. “When the sun shone warm again over the glistening, drifted plains,” Sandoz wrote, “she was found curled up in a blanket in the slat-bottomed cart, a mile from home, frozen.”

Sitting in the sun on the metal glider, pondering the hills where Mari and Jules last lived, it was tempting to imagine her voice in the wind-stirring grasses. But even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.

Journalist C.J. Janovy grew up in Nebraska and lived on both coasts before settling in Kansas City. Her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. Follow her on Twitter @cjjanovy.

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William Henry Harrison Tomb
North Bend, Ohio

By Sean Andres

It’s not hard to find something of historical significance in the Cincinnati area, but many people don’t even think about North Bend. The town was founded by John Cleves Symmes, father-in-law of President William Henry Harrison, who swiftly and violently removed, swindled, and stole the land of the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Territory, including those who had resided where North Bend now stands. As a child, too young to remember and appreciate, I had visited Shawnee Lookout and the William Henry Harrison tomb with my family, and North Bend soon became a town I passed by on the way to the dentist.

But then in 2010, in my second year at Ball State University, I was introduced to little-known poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt in an American Literature course. This was the beginning of a challenging hike up a steep hill. While working on an ongoing project on Cincinnati area women’s history, I delved into Piatt and, through a Piatt family member, began connecting to other researchers.

Soon I was enveloped in Piatt’s life and her work, which revealed her to be deeply sympathetic to Indigenous and enslaved peoples and grievously anti-war. Because the most famous woman in the Western world had fallen into obscurity after her death, I was able to uncover over twenty poems and a narrative, from her youth to her late years. When I found out she had lived in North Bend, every time I passed by on the way to the dentist, I wondered whether random houses were hers. Then I learned that one of her houses was a half-mile up Mt. Nebo from Congress Green, where Harrison’s tomb sits on what was believed to be a Native mound. As steamboats passed by, it was customary to fire a salute in his honor.

There, at the tomb, Piatt sings loud in my head with her sympathetic, sharp-tongued wit. I envision North Bend as she might have on her daily walks to the tomb with her husband and their children, spotting the wild rose, wild grape and violets she documented in her poems. The river runs below, and I’m reminded of what the Cincinnati Commercial wrote about Piatt’s writing, that it appears “sweet and peaceful” but proves to be like “the depths of a dark river,” “shadowy and terrible.”

Many people had drowned below that tomb and the Piatts’ home, a weight Sarah carried with her. Still, without doubt, Piatt’s “A President at Home” swells in me.

I pass’d a President’s House to-day —
“A President, mamma, and what is that?”
Oh, it is a man who has to stay
Where bowing beggars hold out the hat
For something — a man who has to be
The Captain of every ship that we
Send with our darling flag to the sea —
The Colonel at home who has to command
Each marching regiment in the land.

This President now has a single room,
That is low and not much lighted, I fear;
Yet the butterflies play in the sun and gloom
Of his evergreen avenue, year by year;
And the child-like violets up the hill
Climb, faintly wayward, about him still;
And the bees blow by at the wind’s wide will;
And the cruel river, that drowns men so,
Looks pretty enough in the shadows below.

Just one little fellow (named Robin) was there,
In a red Spring vest, and he let me pass
With that charming-careless, high-bred air
Which comes of serving the great. In the grass
He sat, half-singing, with nothing to do
No, I did not see the President too:
His door was lock’d (what I say is true),
And he was asleep, and has been, it appears,
Like Rip Van Winkle, asleep for years!

The tomb, for me, is less about the Harrisons and more about the Piatts. It’s hard not to think about her two children, here alluded to as “child-like violets up the hill,” for they lie in unmarked graves beneath a tree somewhere on this “beautiful burial-hill” of grief, as Piatt refers to it in “Death Before Death.”

While the tomb succumbed to the forces of nature, the Piatts continued to keep North Bend historically relevant by placing emphasis on the tomb. Aside from Sarah’s regular visits, her husband J.J. lobbied for the tomb to become a national park, writing a bill that made its way to the Congressional floor. When that failed, he intended to save the old-wood forest around the tomb by purchasing it and turning into a park with proceeds from The Hesperian Tree, a book he edited, collecting work from Ohio and Indiana authors and artists, including William Henry Harrison’s granddaughter, Betty Harrison Eaton, reflecting on life as a Harrison in North Bend. The book did not sell well. His attempts failed, and the forest was logged.

I certainly don’t mourn the man in the tomb who violently swept through the Northwest Territory and lies in rest on top of their dead. However, I do grieve for the long-forgotten poet, Sarah Piatt, who seems to try to atone for her predecessors’ sins, seeking rebirth through the cruel river below.

Sean Andres is a marketer, writer, and educator at non-profit KnowledgeWorks. With Chelsie Hoskins, he operates Queens of Queen City, a public history project lifting the voices of women in the history of the greater Cincinnati area through local schools and publications. He loves to be outdoors among the trees and woodland critters when he’s not glued to the computer — researching, writing, and working.

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Old Burying Ground
Jaffrey, New Hampshire

By Catherine Seiberling Pond

In her first known correspondence from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe on a postcard from the Shattuck Inn, “I am working well in this lovely country.” It was 1917, and the acclaimed writer was 43 years old, mid-career, and making revisions to her novel, My Ántonia.

For her first few stays, Cather often wrote in a large canvas tent in the lower pasture of “High Mowing,” a nearby summer home. I first heard about Cather’s tent retreats and her association with the farm in the late 1970s from my best friend’s mother, an English professor and owner of the property for twenty-five years. I had recently read O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, both novels inspired by the Nebraska prairie and Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud, over 1,500 miles from Jaffrey.

Over the next three decades, Cather spent part of many years at “this quiet hotel in the woods,” as she described it in one letter, often with her partner, Edith Lewis. The sublime and solitary presence of Mount Monadnock loomed just to the west of the inn, and mornings of writing were followed by long walks in the afternoon. Cather’s time in Jaffrey was restorative and a needed place of “happy solitude” for her writing. Here she was able to work “in comfort and quiet” — something her busy and parallel life in New York seldom allowed.

In a 1945 letter to her brother Roscoe, Cather compared her rooms at a Maine inn where she was staying that summer with her teenage bedroom, still preserved in the Willa Cather Childhood Home in Red Cloud today, along with its original “rose bower” wallpaper. The room was also similar to her preferred third floor rooms at the Shattuck Inn:

“I have a funny little room in the attic here, with a sloping ceiling, like my ‘rose bower’ in our old first house. Do you remember? I can always work best in a low room under the roof. All my best books were written in Jaffrey N.H. in a little room where I could almost touch the ceiling with my hand.”

Cather wrote to Eleanor Shattuck Austermann only three months before her death, in January 1947. She had not been to Jaffrey for many years because of family illness and loss, but hoped to “drift back to the Shattuck Inn again,” which was not to be: “But I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn,” she wrote, “and I have often wished I were there…”

Cather once described being “homesick for New England” in the autumn, a trait that I share. Having spent much of my life in the region, it’s not hard to picture Jaffrey’s stunning foliage, or the invigorating air and azure skies of fall in New Hampshire — and the best sleeping weather of the year. Still, not everything is the same. The original Shattuck Inn has been torn down, though the Annex remains, now refurbished into condominiums.

A few years before Cather died, she wrote to a childhood friend that she was traveling to her “old resting place in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.” It would, indeed, become just that. After her death in 1947, she was buried at the Old Burying Ground behind the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse. With availability always a question in the Colonial cemetery, her innkeeper friends, George and Eleanor Austermann, arranged for a plot near their own. No one knows exactly why Cather chose Jaffrey over Red Cloud, to where she often returned to visit dear family and friends, but I believe that her own letters reveal much of that answer. In 1972, Edith Lewis was buried alongside her — while she outlived Cather by twenty-five years, they had been together for almost forty.

The gravesite in the southwest corner is framed by white pines and an old stone wall. It is a place of pilgrimage for Cather enthusiasts — and for me, whenever I can return. Since we moved to Kentucky in 2008, I have often been homesick for my grandparents’ old Jaffrey farm, for the people and places of my childhood, and for the landscapes of New England. The Old Burying Ground, with its adjacent meetinghouse and classic village setting, provides sturdy mooring. Many family friends are also buried there, so visiting is now its own kind of homecoming.

The last time I stopped by Cather’s grave, I was on my way to visit my mother for what would be the last time before her death. It was autumn and the leaves were glowing, the air clear and intoxicating, and Mount Monadnock a comforting fixture against the bluest sky. Later I would learn that this was also Willa Cather’s favorite time to be in Jaffrey.

Other visitors leave small stones, flowers, even jewelry, and ponder the words on her granite headstone: “The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.” Cather’s writing is deeply connected to both the people she loved and the places where she lived and wrote. For me, it will forever illuminate the wonder of our collective human experience, starting with my first reading of My Ántonia and continuing into the cosmos with a quotation from it inscribed near the base of her headstone: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

We can only speculate, but the answer may be in the very passage from the novel that Cather edited on her first visit to Jaffrey thirty years before. Perhaps she just wanted to be buried in the place where she felt she had done her best work.

Catherine Seiberling Pond has written for Old-House Interiors, Victoria, Yankee, Literary Hub, and Rethink:Rural. She earned her master’s in historic preservation studies from Boston University and has been marketing coordinator for the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, since 2018, the centenary celebration of My Ántonia. She works remotely from her farm in Kentucky and is writing a memoir about family farms and homeplaces. After the past year, she will again welcome semi-annual trips across the prairie to Red Cloud and hopefully another pilgrimage to New Hampshire.

Photo courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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Ann Rutledge’s Grave
Petersburg, Illinois

By Jason Stacy

As a boy, I found it unsettling that Edgar Lee Masters anthologized the dead in an Illinois cemetery that never existed. Spoon River Anthology’s ghosts haunted the same rich Illinois soil I walked upon, stared out at fields like the ones that rolled by the window of my school bus, and spoke in accents that echoed mine, but these people were nowhere to be found. Doubly spectral, they were the dead neighbors that never were. Reading a frayed copy of Masters’s book brought home by my mother, an English teacher, I felt as if I were peering into a legendary Illinois that dissipated the closer I got to it.

But now that I’m older, I am at peace with the legends. The trick is not to get too close.

Masters himself is buried in a very real place: Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, just about at the center of the state, a short drive from Springfield and down the road from New Salem, the pioneer community where Abraham Lincoln lived for a time. Petersburg is in the Illinois part of Illinois.

Masters rests only a few feet from a legend he helped make: Ann Rutledge, thought to be the one love of Abraham Lincoln’s life. About twenty yards away, down one of the main paths of the cemetery, a low iron fence surrounds a solid block of granite, on which is engraved a poem by Masters:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Rutledge died of typhoid fever in 1835 and was originally buried in the Old Concord graveyard about five miles from Petersburg. After Lincoln’s death, his former law partner, William Herndon, claimed in his biography of the president that Rutledge was the one true love of Lincoln’s life. Her death at twenty-two threw the future president into an emotional crisis and, according to Herndon, Lincoln never loved any woman as much again. As the living Lincoln faded from popular memory after the Civil War, Rutledge’s ghost began to haunt the legends of the fallen president. These legends turned central Illinois into a destination for secular pilgrims, and she became the key to understanding Lincoln’s combination of melancholy and stoic fortitude.

To capitalize on the legend, local undertaker and furniture dealer Samuel Montgomery exhumed Rutledge in 1890 from the Old Concord graveyard and reburied what was left of her — two bones, a little hair, some bits of cloth — in Oakland Cemetery, where he was part owner. Montgomery hoped this location would prove convenient for visitors and fortuitous for the town. Twenty-five years later, in 1915, Rutledge was reburied again, this time symbolically, when Edgar Lee Masters planted her in Spoon River’s fictional cemetery. In 1921, at the height of Masters’s popularity, her epitaph from Spoon River Anthology was engraved on a new monument in Oakland Cemetery. These days, tourists commune with the legend of Rutledge that William Herndon perpetuated, by the grave that Samuel Montgomery filled with a few remains, under a fictional epitaph written by Edgar Lee Masters.

Outside of town, in the Old Concord graveyard, a small headstone marks Ann’s first resting place. It appeals to visitors’ desire for authenticity by telling them that this lonely spot in an out-of-the-way field is, in fact, “where Lincoln wept.” But when I drive through Petersburg, I visit Ann at Oakland Cemetery. The legend is better there.

Jason Stacy grew up in Monee, Illinois. Since 2006, he has served as a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His latest book project, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

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