January 2011

I regret that Mr. Boulton did not stop by Clayton to inspect our nearly mint-perfect specimen (above right) , the only antebellum octagon house in Alabama, and the only true example of gravel-wall construction still standing in the United States. The house was built in 1859 by Benjamin Petty, a native of New York State, and had been lived in continuously by two families until 1981, when the town purchased it. It is listed on the National Registry. We have received grants for returning it to its original condition from the National Trust, the Alabama Historical Commission, the State of Alabama, and the CDBG program as well as donations from individuals. We expect to begin the restoration work shortly. We believe that our entry in the octagonal race is the only house surviving of its age, construction, and physical condition. None of the houses pictured in your article matches ours in these respects.

The article on octagon houses was most enjoyable and informative, but Alexander Boulton should have roamed a little farther south and viewed Longwood in Natchez.

Mr. Boulton did indeed visit Longwood, but we didn’t include it for reasons of space. The photograph below hints at the spectral opulence of the house. Haller Nutt, a cotton merchant, began building his Oriental villa in 1859 only to be forced to stop work on it with the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1970 the house was given to Natchez’s Pilgrimage Garden Club, whose members carefully maintain it and have opened it to the public .

In the course of compiling a history of the octagonal Charter Oak School (above) in Randolph County, Illinois, I discovered that the present building replaced a conventional school in 1873 and was the design of Mr. Daniel Ling, himself a teacher.

TWO THINGS ABOUT Independence, Missouri, Harry Truman’s town, strike you immediately as different from what you might expect. It isn’t plain, flat Midwestern. And it isn’t hick.

The surrounding country is high and rolling with lovely, sometimes panoramic, views, which must have been lovelier still in Truman’s youth, before the town turned suburban. The Truman family farm, twenty miles south, was beside a village aptly named Grandview.

Traditions and outlook in and about Independence are almost as much Southern as Midwestern. Like most of their neighbors, Truman’s people were staunch Confederates, with bitter personal memories of the bloody Missouri-Kansas border wars. Martha Ellen Truman, Truman’s peppery little “Mamma,” remained thoroughly unreconstructed until her dying day, refusing in no uncertain terms during a first visit to the White House in 1945 to sleep in the Lincoln bed. Independence schools were segregated until the 1950s.

Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons Eight More Octagons

A postage stamp history of the United States in the twentieth century …

Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think. By comparing the lapse of time between the issue date of U.S. commemorative stamps and the actual dates of the events and personages they depict, we can arrive at a revealing, “official” philatelic portrait of our nation. Labor and women made great strides in the early 190Os and blacks have always been here, but for the Post Office they were invisible until much later in the century. (And we still haven’t caught up with Prohibition, the Korean War, or Watergate!) All in all, a lavish collection presented in full color.

The winter of the Yalu …

My mother was a member of the class of 1899 at Radcliffe College, having come east from St. Paul, Minnesota—a sort of reverse pioneer. She was one of the two or three students from west of the Berkshires and was considered rather exotic by her classmates because of her Midwestern background, which she loved to describe in exaggerated detail, implying that a fresh Indian scalp was hung over the fireplace every week or so. Her years at Radcliffe were, it seems, passed in a state of continual euphoria. Her enthusiasm and energy appeared to be overwhelming, for she held every office in her class, acted the ingenue in the Idler plays, played basketball in serge bloomers, and went with her classmates on picnics and canoe trips on the Charles River. She threw herself into her courses with the same zest, taking a wide sampling of everything that suited her inquisitive and darting intelligence. She “chose the man and not the subject” and in that way became “remarkably inspired.”

On June 4, 1861, at the age of seventeen, Charles Ferren Hopkins enlisted in Company I, First New Jersey Volunteers. He was badly wounded at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill, Virginia, and again at the Battle of the Wilderness, where he was captured and sent to the notorious prison camp, Andersonville, in Georgia. Many years afterward, he wrote a vivid account of his experiences. This article has been adapted from his original document, which runs to over one hundred and thirty typewritten pages, and which was given to us by his grandson, Gerald Hopkins.

Some historians believe that the Southern prison camps were no worse than their Northern counterparts. But it is Andersonville, under the supervision of Henry Wirz, that lives on with a horror of particular resonance. Judging from Hopkins’s account—and it is one among many—there is good reason for this. --The Editors

Franklin Roosevelt was, and remains, a hero to the British. During his rise to power we were detached from and ignorant of American internal politics to an extent that is not easily imaginable today. The Atlantic in the twenties and thirties was still very wide. The majority, including those politically involved and informed, never crossed it. Very few did so frequently. Anthony Eden, a young, vigorous, and peripatetic foreign secretary in the second half of the thirties, spent over two and one-fourth years in that office without ever once thinking of including Washington in his diplomatic tours. Winston Churchill, after a nasty accident with a taxi on Fifth Avenue in 1931, did not return again for ten years.