Two summers ago, I visited the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky. Founded in 1884, the Society collects resources relevant to the history of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley region. Nonetheless, when I was there, I checked to see if they had anything related to Crawfordsville. Lo and behold, I was rewarded with two treasures in the form of letters written in Crawfordsville by two different people.
The earliest letter was written in 1836 by Mrs. Eliza Julia Fry. She was the daughter of William Smith and Mary Speed. She addressed her letter to her uncle Judge John Speed at Farmington, his plantation home outside Louisville. (Let me insert an aside here that reflects the focus of my geeky fascination. In a year, in 1837, this letter from Eliza would still remain in Judge Speed’s possession when his son Joshua, Eliza’s first cousin, met and became best friends with Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, Illinois. This letter would still be in the house four years later, in 1841, when Lincoln visited Farmington where he and the letter coexisted in the same building for three weeks. The letter as part of the Speed Family Papers — Farmington Collection made its way to the Filson Historical Society in 1961 after the sale of Farmington to the Historic Homes Foundation Inc. in Louisville.) Eliza with her husband Thomas Walker Fry and their younger children moved to Crawfordsville in 1836 to run a mill, leaving behind their own Kentucky plantation home called Spring House. They must have left their furnishings with the house, because Eliza wrote that when writing her letter she had no table to write on or a chair to sit on. She was especially upset she did not even have a bedstead. “I can tell you the old Speed temper was so strong in me I could not write,” she wrote to her uncle. As she described the furniture situation with her uncle, you can envision a glimpse of what is happening in Crawfordsville at the time. “The emigration to this place is so great, there is such a demand for furniture. It is improbable for it to be made as fast as it is called for,” she wrote. “We have a tolerable good house, four rooms, a kitchen, milk house and dairy, good society, much piety, and as much industry as ever you saw in one place …… we are quite well-pleased, it will be in a few years a great place.” Two of Eliza’s sons graduated from Wabash College, Dr. Thomas Walker Fry Jr. in 1839 and his brother General Speed S. Fry in 1840. Another son Frank ran the mill. Eliza died in Crawfordsville in 1848.
The other letter was written by Robert Kennedy Krout. He wrote to his sister Jane Kennedy Krout in Covington, Kentucky in 1908 but reminisced about their emigration from Covington, Ky. to Crawfordsville and Montgomery County in 1837. “Our wagon was drawn by two faithful old horses, Tom Tinker and Fanny Fletcher.” Robert’s mother, Hannah Kennedy Krout, had died about a month after his birth, so in 1837, it was he, his father Jacob Krout, and his sister traveling in the wagon. They were accompanied by his uncle Lawson Moore and Robert’s little dog Veney, both of whom traveled most of the way on foot … “Uncle Lawson to procure peaches from road-side orchards and Veney to beg a bone from kind mistresses of the houses,” he wrote. The family settled in Ripley Township. “I can see the old log houses looming up before me now, with their mud and stick chimneys crowned at their tops with lumps of clay of the size and shape of huge corn dodgers. In those houses, you and I made our home for some years.” Robert K. Krout spent the rest of his life in Montgomery County where he attended Wabash College, became a life-long druggist after deciding law was not for him, married, and had several children. (Look for a future article on his detailed reminisces of attending the Bunker Hill schoolhouse in Ripley Township, details I believe that have never been elsewhere disclosed in print before.)
Besides making their mark on our community, both Eliza and Robert left a legacy of a written account that vividly described an era that for many is long-forgotten but was the foundation for who and what we are today as a town, as a community. If you think you might have a legacy of family treasures — letters, pictures, Bibles, business papers or other paper miscellaneous items called ephemera -— that you would like to share, contact the local history librarians through the reference department at the Crawfordsville District Public Library (ref@cdpl.lib.in.us or 765-362-2242, ext. 117). We would be delighted to make a copy of them, or we can even provide a safe and accessible home for them if you worry about their care in the future. Finally, in an age in which letter writing is now expressed in digital e-mails where the delete button is consistently used, if you recognize an email thread as valuable, like a recipe or memory swap with a cousin, print these emails out and tuck them away, for they are the legacies of tomorrow.
Amie Cox is a local history specialist at the Crawfordsville District Public Library and the district media specialist at the Crawfordsville Community Schools.
