Our Family Dreams by Daniel Blake Smith

Author:Daniel Blake Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Tusculum, Elijah Fletcher’s Lynchburg home

All of these events only strengthened Elijah’s resolve to focus on his more successful and obedient children while cultivating his pastoral retreat at Sweet Briar. He gave Sidney the Tusculum plantation that had come to him from the heirs of William Crawford, his father-in-law. Elijah was clearly pleased that Sidney was now devoting himself to managing the plantation. “Farming is the only vocation in life that pleases him or which nature seemed to adapt his taste,” he wrote his brother Calvin. And Elijah fairly delighted in regaling family members about the wonderful trips his daughters frequently made to New York City, where they picked up fashionable furnishings for their Sweet Briar home back in Virginia. They especially enjoyed visiting family in Ludlow. “They are all Fletcher,” Elijah proudly noted, “charmed with the Old Farm in Vermont, as well as all our Family, and they possess not a particle of the foolish southern prejudice against Northern people and Northern habits.”58

Like their brothers, Indiana and Betty also thought of adventuring west, but only in the context of touring or visiting, as they always needed a “gallant,” a male chaperone, to accompany them. In the fall of 1848, Elijah reported that the two girls were planning a winter trip, accompanied by Sidney, either out West or to Cuba, New Orleans, and then back home via Charleston. Elijah saw travel not only as a broadening experience but also as a welcome opportunity to visit far-flung family. “My Daughters,” he noted, “have often told me that they value their [travel] opportunities far above any wealth I could bestow upon them.” Thus Elijah felt especially neglected when it came to getting to know Calvin’s children, particularly when the oldest child, Cooley, in 1849 planned a “sojourn” (actually foreign mission work) in Switzerland but made no plans to stop in Virginia. “Can not Cooley make me a visit before leaving America?” Elijah asked his brother. “It seems strange that I should never have had the opportunity of seeing any of your Children, though you have many times promised me a visit from some of them.”59

Elijah himself preferred the quiet and solitude of life at Sweet Briar, while his wife Maria mostly managed the house in Lynchburg, but he also enjoyed taking the entire family to reunions in Vermont. These journeys became much easier with train and steamboat travel. Before that, it could take several weeks to get from southwest Virginia to the Fletcher “mansion” in Ludlow, Vermont. With a strong horse, good weather, and the best of roads, it took four to six days to travel just from New York to Boston. But by the 1840s and early 1850s more than thirty-seven miles of turnpikes, or toll roads, had been built in New England. Furthermore, these new roads were far better constructed and maintained than earlier roads, allowing faster travel. Stagecoach lines now stretched across the Northeast, with fresh horses spaced out every forty miles or so. Steamboats created much faster passenger travel on the rivers, along with carrying enormous amounts of cargo upstream.

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