On a Thursday afternoon in September 1912, a 58-year-old retired cowhand named Henry Callaway was pulling loose stones from the fireplace of an abandoned farmhouse he had just purchased in Dickinson County, Kansas.
When a folded piece of paper fell out of the wall, he almost did not pick it up.
There was a lot of work to do on the house. He picked it up.
It was a letter addressed to a Miss Anne Ward in Baltimore, Maryland. The handwriting was precise and careful.
The date at the top read November 14th, 1871. 41 years earlier, someone had written this letter and then hidden it unfinished or unscent behind a loose stone in the fireplace of this house.
And now Henry Callaway was holding it in the afternoon light, reading words that had been waiting for decades to be read.
She begins, “Dear Anne, I know I promised to write more often, and I have not kept that promise, but I want you to know that I am well, and that I am in a way I did not entirely expect, happy.
The house is small, but Robert built it himself, and it is solid. And this winter I will add curtains, which will help considerably.
I have something to tell you that I have not written to anyone yet. By spring, there will be three of us.”
Henry read the letter twice, standing in the cold fireplace with the November light coming through the window, frames that had long since lost their glass.
Then he sat down on the floor of the abandoned house, and thought about who had written this letter, who had hidden it here, and why, what had happened to her, what by spring there will be three of us had come to mean.
I am going to take you into two separate years at the same time. I am going to take you to 1912 with Henry as he tries to find the answers [music] and I am going to take you to 1871 with Eleanor Ward as she writes.
They both lead to the same place. Henry Callaway had spent 31 years working cattle in three states before his niece made the decision that he was done.
He was 58, unmarried, the kind [music] of man who had spent his working life in motion and now had to figure out what to do with stillness.
He had enough saved to buy a modest piece of land. And a friend in Selena told him about a farmstead [music] in Dickinson County going for back taxes, 40 acres, a house in poor repair, [snorts] a barn that needed work but had good bones.
He bought it in August 1912. He was not sentimental about it. He needed a place to put his tools and his body and the remaining years of his life.
And this was a place that could become that. The house had been empty for over 30 years.
The previous owner, according to the county records office in Abilene, was a man named Robert Marsh, who had sold the property in 1876 and moved west.
For for Marsh, the land had been homesteaded in 1869. Henry was the third owner.
He spent the first two weeks doing an honest assessment of what needed doing. The roof needed new cedar shingles on the north side.
The kitchen floor had two soft spots that wanted replacing. The windows needed new frames and glass.
The fireplace had settled unevenly, and several of the riverstones in its facing had come loose and would need to be reset properly before the first cold weather.
It was pulling at one of those loose fireplace stones on a Thursday afternoon in September that the letter fell out.
Henry was not a man who was easily shaken. He had seen a great deal in 31 years of ranch work and trail driving, but something about holding this letter stopped him entirely.
Someone had put it here. Someone had pressed it into the gap behind this particular stone and the stone had been replaced and 30 or 40 or more years had passed and the house had stood stood empty for most of them and nobody had known.
[music] He read it twice. Then he sat down on the floor. The letter was signed.
Your loving sister Elellanar. He did not know anyone named Elellanar. He did not know anyone named Anne.
But he was going to find out who they were and what had happened because the letter in his hand had the specific quality of something that mattered and had been waiting a long time to matter to someone.
Elellanar Ward was 22 years old in the spring of 1871 and she lived with her widowed mother and her younger [music] sister Anne in a row house on Mount Vernon Street in Baltimore, Maryland.
She worked as a copist for a law firm on Charles Street, 3 days a week, copying correspondents in a hand her employer described as the finest he had seen in 20 years of practice.
She had been corresponding with Robert Marsh of Dickinson’s County, Kansas since January of that year through the correspondence pages of a Baltimore newspaper that ran a small but legitimate matrimonial column.
Robert’s entry had been brief. Farmer Dickinson County, Kansas, aged 34, owns land free and clear, seeks correspondent view matrimony.
Brief was, she discovered, entirely characteristic of Robert Marsh. His letters were short, direct, and honest in a way that was unusual.
He did not describe the farm as better than it was. He told her the house had two rooms, and that he intended to add a third before winter.
He told her the nearest town was Abalene, 12 mi east on a road that was good in summer and variable in spring.
He told her the winters were hard and the summers were harder, and that in between there were three or four months of weather that was in his assessment, about as fine as anything he had seen.
Eleanor’s letters to Robert were longer. She told him about Baltimore, about her family, about the copy work she found tedious but did well.
She told him she was not romantic about the West, but was serious about her situation, which was that a copist’s [music] wages in Baltimore in 1871 were not enough to look after herself and contribute to her mother’s household much longer.
She was not looking for rescue. She was looking for a fair arrangement between two people who would work at it honestly.
Will Cather wrote in my Antonia published in 1918 the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
I have thought about that sentence often reading Eleanor’s letters because what she was doing in those pages was precisely that, writing the first chapter of a history that would take place on Kansas land in a house with two rooms and a third coming with a man she had never met but had assessed with great care.
They agreed in late March 1871. Elellanena would come in May. She arrived in Abalene on the afternoon train on May 19th, 1871.
Robert met her at the station with his wagon. She later wrote to Anne that he was exactly what his letters had suggested, quiet, direct, kind in a way that expressed itself through actions rather than words.
The house was small. The curtains she had been promised were not yet up. The kitchen stove was an excellent one, which she noted approvingly.
By November, she was, as she wrote in the hidden letter, happy. Henry Callaway was not an educated man in the formal sense, but he had spent his life reading animals and weather and terrain, which is a different kind of reading that teaches you to pay attention to [music] small things.
Reading Eleanor’s letter, he paid attention to the small things. She was writing to her sister Anne in Baltimore.
The letter was dated November 14th, 1871. She described the house, the state of the farm, the coming winter, and the pregnancy.
She wrote that Robert did not yet know. She was going to tell him that evening.
She wrote that she was not afraid, only surprised by her own happiness, which she had not expected to feel this thoroughly in this place.
Two things in the letter struck Henry. First, it was unfinished. The letter ended mid-page, not mids sentence.
She had finished a thought, but there was empty paper below the last line, as though she had been interrupted or had decided to add more later and had not.
Second, it had never been sent. The envelope was in the same gap in the fireplace as the letter, and it was unsealed and empty.
The letter had been folded and put in the envelope, and then set behind the stone.
But it had never been addressed, never been sealed, never been sent. Henry was a practical man, but he was sitting on the floor of an abandoned Kansas farmhouse, holding a 41-year-old letter from a woman named Eleanor, who had been happy and pregnant and writing to her sister.
And somewhere between November 1871, and the moment Robert Marsh sold this farm in one, 876, something had happened.
He went to the county records office in Abalene the following Monday. What he found there confirmed what the letter had made him afraid of.
The autumn of 1871 on the marsh farm was by Elellanor’s account in her letters to Anne, a good one.
She had arrived in May knowing almost nothing practical about farm life and had learned quickly because she was the kind of person who learned quickly when learning was the only option.
She put up preserves in August. She helped Robert with the grain harvest in September, which he said she was better [music] at than he had expected, which she took as the compliment it was.
She liked Kansas in autumn. The grass turned gold and the sky took on a particular quality of light in October that she tried to describe to Anne several times and never quite succeeded.
It is not so much the color as the angle of it. Everything that the light touches looks slightly more real than usual.
Robert was, as his letters had promised, honest and consistent. He worked very hard and expected her to also, which she did not resent because she had known it was coming.
He was not a man who expressed himself easily in words, but he expressed himself clearly in actions, and she had learned to read the actions.
He fixed the south wall insulation before she asked him to, because he had noticed she felt the cold.
He came home from Abene one afternoon with a bolt of blue calico because she had mentioned once in passing that she liked blue.
The curtains she put up in October were blue calico. In her November letter, the hidden one, she wrote, “I want you to know, Anne, that I made the right choice.
I know you had your doubts, and mother certainly had hers. But I have spent 6 months in this house with this man and I am telling you that he is the kind of person who does what he says he will do and says what he means and that combination is rarer than anyone tells you before you go looking for it.
Then she told Anne about the pregnancy. She wrote she was going to tell Robert that evening.
She wrote she thought he would be pleased. She wrote she was not afraid of the birth, though she knew she should arrange for a midwife from Abalene before February when the roads became unreliable.
The letter ended. She folded it and put it in the envelope and set it behind the fireplace stone, intending, presumably to finish it when she had more news to share, when she had told Robert when the evening was done.
She never finished it. The Dickinson County Records Office was a single room in the courthouse basement managed by a clerk named Mrs. Orpha Greer, who had been doing the job for 16 years and knew the records with the thorough familiarity of someone who had filed most of them herself.
Henry Callaway explained what he was looking for. Any records pertaining to a Robert Marsh who had owned land in Dickinson County and sold it in 1876 and to his wife Elellanar.
Mrs. Greer found the deed transfer quickly, Robert Marsh, 40 acres in the [music] Third Township, sold March 14th, 1876 to a man named Conrad Alrech.
[music] She then checked the vital records which were less complete but not empty. She found Elellanar Marsh in the death register.
January 9th, 1872. Cause recorded as childbirth complications. She was 23 years old. Henry stood at the records counter for a moment.
Without saying anything, he asked, “Was there a record of the child?” Mrs. Greer checked.
There was a boy born January 7th, 1872, recorded as James Robert Marsh. The birth record noted.
Mother [music] deceased. James Robert Marsh, born January 7th, 1872. Mother dead 2 days after he was born.
Henry asked if there were any further records for Robert Marsh or for the child.
There were. Robert Marsh remarried in 1874 to a woman named Clara Dawson. The remarage record noted two children from the second marriage.
In 1876, he sold the farm and the family moved west, which was consistent with what the deed transfer showed.
No further records in Dickinson County. James Robert Marsh, Elliser’s son, born 1872. Henry asked if there was any trace of him in the county records after 1876.
There was one, a school enrollment record from 1879, 3 years after the family had moved, showing a James R.
Marsh enrolled in a school in Wallace County, Kansas, which was further west. He had been 7 years old, Wallace County, Kansas, 1879.
That was where Henry started looking. [music] It took Henry Callaway three weeks and four letters to find Eleanor’s son.
James Marsh was 40 years old in 1912 and lived in Garden City, Kansas, where he ran a small but successful hardware business with his wife and two daughters.
He had no memory of his mother, having been 2 days old when she died.
He had been raised by Robert and his stepmother Claraara, who had been, by his account, a decent woman who did her best.
He knew his mother’s name was Eleanor. He knew she had died at his birth.
He knew almost nothing else. Henry wrote to him on October 12th, 1912. He explained who he was and where he lived and what he had found.
He copied out Eleanor’s letter by hand in full, word for word, in the most careful handwriting he could manage.
He put the original in the envelope and addressed it to Garden City. He mailed it on a Wednesday morning from the Abolene [music] Post Office.
James Marsh wrote back in November. His letter was short. He was not a man who wrote easily.
But the last paragraph said this. I have read the letter you sent me a great many times now.
My daughters have read it. My wife has read it. I want you to know that I had never heard my mother’s voice before this in any form.
I did not know she had been happy. I did not know she had been looking forward to my coming.
I did not know about the blue calico curtains or the quality of the autumn light or what she thought about my father.
I am 40 years old and I did not know any of this until a stranger found a letter behind a stone in a fireplace.
I am grateful to you in a way I do not know how to write [music] properly.
Henry kept that letter. He framed Eleanor’s original and sent it to James’s eldest daughter, whose name was Alice, and [music] who was 19 years old, and who wrote to Henry the following spring to say she had hung it in the front room of her house in Garden City, where it remained for the rest of her long life.
Here is what I keep thinking about. Eleanor Ward wrote that letter on November 14th, 1871 and put it behind a stone and intended to finish it when she had more to say.
She never had the chance. But 41 years later, a retired cowhand pulling loose stones from a fireplace found it.
And 3 weeks after that, her son read her voice for the first time. And 40 years after that, her granddaughter hung it in her front room.
The letter got to Anne. After all, it just took a very long time to get there [music] and it went to the wrong Anne.
And it turned out that was exactly right. Outside the window, as I read through Henry Callaway’s papers, the Kansas light does exactly what Eleanor described.
