Circumstances Are Destiny

An Antebellum Woman's Struggle to Define Sphere

Tina Stewart Brakebill

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781612774701
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

A 19th-century midwestern woman's reflections on her role in society

Celestia Rice Colby, born in Ohio in 1827, had lifestyle options that were relatively straightforward for the typical white female child born in the first half of the nineteenth century: she married in 1848, had five children, spent much of her life working as a dairy farmer and housewife, and died in 1900.

Her rich legacy, however, extended beyond her children and grandchildren and survived in the form of detailed and reflective diaries and writings. Her private and published writings show that despite the appearances of the quintessential normal life, Colby struggled to reconcile her personal hopes and ambitions with the expectations and obligations placed on her by society. Author Tina Stewart Brakebill has woven original research with secondary material to form the fabric of Colby's life—from her days as the daughter of an Ohio dairy farmer to her relationship with her daughter, a pioneering university professor. What emerges is a multifaceted picture of one woman's lifelong struggle to establish her own identity within the confines of society's proscriptions.

Colby's life story offers valuable insights that move beyond conventional generalizations regarding women of the past and that continue to affect the study of women today.

PART I

An Expected Life

CHAPTER ONE

1827–1848

“The impress of the Connecticut character”

IN FEBRUARY 1865, after several sleepless nights following the decision to sell their home and move the family from Ohio to Illinois, Celestia Rice Colby noted in her journal that her angst was “not because I regret the sale or wish to stay in Cherry Valley. But every tie of my life has been formed in this humble town.”¹ As we examine her life with the perspective of time, Colby’s observation proves astute. Her location in this small, rural, northeastern Ohio community played a large part in her formation of self-identity. Her sense of self was so strongly imbedded within the context of family, community, and country that even when some of those ingrained patterns were at odds with her personal hopes, she often seemed resistant to break completely from the established norms in her life. Ironically, this past not only acted as a limiting force, but it also helped lay the groundwork for the strong views that eventually broadened her desires for the future.

Understanding the foundations beneath Colby’s outlook on her life’s expectations is important if her later struggles are to be placed in any greater context. Unfortunately, attempts to reconstruct the early years of any ordinary person’s life from the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly a woman’s life, present difficulties, and Colby is no exception. The nineteenth century produced very little in the way of official documentary evidence of women’s lives. Fortunately, however, Colby’s recorded memories provide a starting place for interpretation. Sometime after having children of her own, Colby wrote an essay—of which only an incomplete version survives—describing her early childhood. She nostalgically recalled “my father who lived in the ‘new settlement’ in northern Ohio. Indeed I believe he was one of “the first, who came into the unbroken wilderness in the town of A. [Andover] and the humble location in which I was born.” Her mother she described as “the gentle wife, who with her woman’s love had left home and kindred in the old Bay State, to create by her presence a new home in this wilderness. Here were born unto them four little girls who did not even imagine that their humble home was not a palace.”²

Her depiction of her home as “one of love and peace,” represents a truthful, albeit idealized, account of her early family life. She was the last of four daughters born in rural Andover, Ohio, to Joel Rice and Flavia Rice, née Bradley. Three girls preceded her birth: Celestia Resign, Cordelia, and Cirlissa, born in April 1822, September 1823, and July 1825, respectively. Only two of the girls survived until Colby’s birth. Celestia Resign—the first Celestia—died in July of 1825, just two weeks before Cirlissa’s birth. Two years later, on December 19, 1827, Colby—she was christened Celestia M.—arrived and inherited her deceased sister’s name. Eighteen months later, in July of 1829, Flavia gave birth to a boy named John Bradley Rice. Colby failed to mention this fifth and final child born to Joel and Flavia; perhaps he was left out of the story because only two months after his birth, Flavia Rice passed away. Her mother died when Colby was only eighteen months old; consequently, she could have no real memory of her. Despite this fact, her writings consistently demonstrate how profoundly her mother’s early death affected her. Colby’s draft of her nostalgic rendition of her childhood reveals that she tried several alternate beginnings that incorporated her mother’s death. Ultimately, she chose to discard those versions and continued the essay with an uplifting story of a happy home with an intact mother. Failure to completely come to terms with this loss may have contributed to her inability to incorporate her death into a story for her own children, preferring instead to garner an idealized account of her childhood based on her wishful assumptions.³

Colby continued her childhood reflections with descriptions of their “of course few and scattering” neighbors who, like her family, were working to build a life in this sparsely settled landscape in northeastern Ohio. The majority of settlers in this section of the new nation had started life in New England and eventually moved west to look for new opportunities, and Colby’s parents were no exception. Her father was born in 1796 in Granby, Connecticut, and her mother spent her childhood less than ten miles away in Southwick, Massachusetts. In December of 1819, Joel Rice and Flavia Bradley married at Feeding Hills, just outside of Springfield, Massachusetts, at “the home of Elder Shepherd.” According to family history, Flavia Bradley was descended from an “Irish gentlewoman of property” who had refused to take her husband’s name. The veracity of this defiant step is unknown, and although the tradition did not live on in the New World, several generations later the genealogical notes made by her great-granddaughter proudly related this bit of family history. Sometime after their marriage, Joel and Flavia Rice, like many people looking for land in the early nineteenth century, moved west to Ohio. By 1830, the couple was settled in Andover, a pioneer community in southeastern Ashtabula County, Ohio, which borders Pennsylvania on the east and Lake Erie to the north. The young couple was one of very few families. In 1830, only about twenty-five other families lived in this newly settled portion of the county.⁴

Ashtabula County was part of the Western Reserve and, as such, had strong cultural and social ties with New England. The Western Reserve, a small section of the larger Northwest Territory, consisted of land that Connecticut had claimed as its own. The preexisting inhabitants of the area—the American Indians—had contested this claim. Several years of fierce competition for dominance meant many deaths on both sides before the native tribes of the area acquiesced to the greater firepower and white influx. The 1795 Treaty of Greenville, among other concessions, led to the removal of the tribes from the area. Connecticut ceded the territory that is now northeast Ohio to Congress in 1800. Congress then officially opened the land to settlement. A few pioneers had set out even before this time, but between 1795 and 1800, the total number of white adult men resident in the whole of the Northwest Territory was likely only five thousand. The first permanent settlers arrived at what would be Ashtabula County from Connecticut in 1798. The total number of residents of the Western Reserve in those two years before 1800 was probably not over 125, so these twenty-five Connecticut transplants to Ashtabula made up about a fifth of the Reserve total—a significant addition.⁵

The Connecticut foundation’s effect cannot be underestimated. An 1878 history of Ashtabula County claims proudly that “Ashtabula County may well be considered the legitimate offspring of Connecticut. At least two-thirds of the pioneer settlers of the different townships were born within the boundaries of that State. Full one-half of her population to day [sic] can trace their lineage to the enlightened people . . . of the Connecticut. . . . It was but natural that the new colony should bear the impress of the Connecticut character.”⁶ What this “Connecticut character” meant was that unlike some sections of Ohio whose strong economic and family links to the Southern states lent them a more rustic feel, New England transplants considered themselves more urbane. They had brought their culture with them, which included orderly communities with schools, libraries, and churches connected by a strong sense of Puritan pride and work ethic.

The settlers would need that work ethic. Colby’s essay describes the “unbroken wilderness” and the “humble log cabin” in which her family lived. The “surroundings demanded sturdy toil to fell the giant trees, and make the farm—that was to be when its crop of oak, chestnut, maple, beech and elm trees were removed—productive.” Her words capture the essence of the struggle that these early settlers faced as they attempted to claim farmland from the “gently undulating,” abundantly forested, and predominantly clay soil. Although farmers eventually grew wheat, corn, and oats, these products never would be sufficient to sustain a family. The area’s future lay in its cows. Once the land was cleared, Ashtabula County primarily, and very successfully, produced and sold butter and cheese.⁷

Despite the challenges of the environment, occasional deadly skirmishes with the last remnants of American Indians, the fear linked to Tecumseh’s attempts at forming an American Indian federation, and the few battles fought in nearby Lake Erie during the War of 1812, New England settlers continued their trek into northeast Ohio. By 1804, the Western Reserve population grew to between 400 and 500 people, and by 1812 this number surged to 1,500. Ashtabula organized as a county in 1811, and in the years after the war its population grew steadily. In 1820, approximately 7,400 people called it home, and by 1830, it boasted approximately 15,000 residents. In 1860, this number had doubled to 31,805 people. These new arrivals were a very homogeneous group—white, native-born, Protestant, farm families. The census information for the county at large from 1820 through 1870 lists no slaves and only a handful of immigrants and “free blacks.” As Ashtabula County grew, new communities were born. In 1827, the village of Cherry Valley, initially an offshoot of Andover, officially broke away and elected its own local governing body. By 1829, the year Colby’s brother John Bradley Rice was born and Flavia Rice died, it even boasted its own postmaster. The Rice family still lived in Andover when Flavia Rice died, but just over a year later in November of 1830, Joel Rice remarried, and sometime between 1830 and 1832, Joel Rice and his new wife Evelina Rice, née Johnson, moved the entire family several miles west to this new community—Cherry Valley, Ohio.⁸

Cherry Valley was fairly representative of what was considered the northwest at this time, in which transplanted New Englanders strove to recreate ordered communities within their still predominantly rural environments. True to this end, the first settlers to the Cherry Valley Township established an organized society in which they constructed their homes and businesses along several intersecting roads. The area’s first road, Hayes Road—named after the man instrumental in its construction, Col. Richard Hayes—was built in 1812. The first frame barn was built in 1818, the first frame house in 1825, followed by a sawmill in 1829. By the time the Rices arrived from Andover in the early 1830s, Cherry Valley was not merely a town legitimized by the act of a petition to separate, but an already viable community.⁹

Today Cherry Valley consists of a few houses surrounded by woods and grape arbors identified by a sign at the intersection of Routes 90 and 11, but in the early and middle nineteenth century it was a thriving rural community. Initially, Cherry Valley was typical of many frontier settlements, as many people came and went during its first decade of existence. It eventually coalesced, as those residents who could afford to purchase and improve land stayed and those who could not moved on. In 1840, the year that Colby turned thirteen, Cherry Valley’s population was 690 people—approximately a third each of men, women, and children. Throughout Colby’s residency, this population remained fairly steady before starting to drop in the decade after the Civil War. By 1920 it had plummeted to only 256 people, and today it lacks a separate census figure or a post office of its own.¹⁰

Families like the Rices, who arrived in the 1830s and 1840s and settled, kept the population relatively stable. When the children and grandchildren of these families became adults, however, many of them either migrated to more urban areas or moved west. Although mobility typified the late nineteenth century, an additional factor contributed to Cherry Valley’s lack of growth and eventual decline as compared to Ashtabula County as a whole: no railroad lines entered the community. Other parts of the county were connected by rail to each other and eventually to the rest of the country, but a rail line did not enter into the southeastern section of the county until 1873. In an age of transportation revolution centered on train travel, Cherry Valley’s fate was sealed when the rail line passed to the east through Andover.¹¹

Joel Rice, somewhat of an entrepreneur, worked at times as a peddler, a merchant, a farmer, and a speculator. He owned dairy-farm real estate and participated in the rising market economy by opening in 1832 the “second store” at the corner of Hayes and Center roads in Cherry Valley. Census reports show the family’s assets to be among the highest in the community. The Rice family also continued to grow after their arrival in Cherry Valley. Three more children, Napoleon, Flavia E., and Jay Joel, were born in December 1831, November 1840, and March 1842, respectively. They also housed an occasional hired hand or young male relative who helped with the farm. During Colby’s preteen years the household fairly consistently included two adult men who worked primarily on the farm, one adult woman who worked in the house and the farm, five children in school, and several under five years old. Young families dominated the community, so although the Rice household was typical, all indications also point to a certain level of prosperity.¹²

In basic character, Colby’s family was much like those of her neighbors—typical northeastern pioneers who valued religion, education, and family. As will be discussed at length, her adult writings show quite a high level of discontentment with this typical life. These writings also indicate that, at least in Colby’s view, other members of her family and community apparently did not experience this same sort of unhappiness. Why? Although discerning the inner workings of their minds is, unfortunately, not possible, we are privy to some of Colby’s thoughts. Colby’s self-reflective words provide evidence that those very factors so important in her community underpinned much of her later discontent. Ironically, those values assessed to be core to the “Connecticut character” of which Ohio was so proud contributed to her eventual struggles. An entire chapter of the previously noted 1878 Ashtabula County history describes the many laudable character qualities inherent in its “parent state.” “Education was cherished. . . . Religious knowledge was carried to the highest degree of refinement and applied to moral duties. . . . There was mutual trust. . . . The widest latitude was given to forms of belief. . . . Connecticut from the first possessed unmixed popular liberty . . . kept active by the constant exercise of elective franchise. There was nothing morose in the Connecticut character. Life was not somber. . . . Religion itself sometimes wore the garb of gaiety.”¹³ The manner in which those themes of education, religious freedom, and personal liberty as a citizen manifested themselves throughout Colby’s life affected many of her life goals as well as her level of happiness. Their initial embodiment occurred in her childhood.

Despite the cheery tenor of Colby’s essay on her childhood, other evidence disputes this interpretation. Happiness was not a constant. In Colby’s own estimation, her mother’s early death serves as a turning point. Her father’s second wife—he eventually would marry again and outlive his three wives—inadequately filled the void left by her mother’s absence. Colby’s extensive writings never mention Evelina Rice, who entered Colby’s life in the role of stepmother in 1830 when Colby was only three years old, and remained in it until her death in December of 1863. Colby’s descriptions and references to her father neglected to mention a spouse. This omission is especially ironic; prior to the marriage Evelina was already a part of the family. She was Flavia Rice’s half-sister, thus Colby’s aunt. Colby’s daughter, J. Rose Colby, who as an adult wrote about her mother’s early life, did...