Swanee River

 Most articles on this history blog have a very direct connection with Watch Tower history and pre-history. But others have a more tenuous link. This is one of the latter.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is sometimes called “the father of American popular music.” He wrote over 200 songs, some of which are still performed today. Many suggest the music of the southern states, and were performed by minstrel groups, although apparently Foster only ever visited the south once in his life. Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Beautiful Dreamer, and Swanee (Suwannee) River (Old Folks at Home) are among his titles. The latter became the state song of Florida in 1935.

When he died in 1864 he was buried in the Allegheny cemetery, as were a good number of his family. Most readers here will know that CTR’s parents, siblings and other relatives were also buried in a family plot in this cemetery.

The Tampa Bay Times carried an interview with Mabel Packard in its issue of 24 January 1960.

Mabel Packard was the daughter of Joseph Lytle Russell, CTR’s father, through his second wife, Emma Ackley. So she was CTR’s half-sister. She was born in 1881 and when about 15, Stephen Foster’s brother, Morriston Foster (1823-1904) was a next door neighbor. From him she got the information that one of Stephen’s most famous songs that starts “Way down upon the Swanee River” was originally called something else – “the Pee Dee River.”  “Swanee” sounded a lot better and the name stuck.

The house where Mabel was living at the time of the interview was the address for her mother Emma Russell, and also her aunt Maria Frances Russell from 1922 until their deaths. Emma died in 1929 and Maria died in 1938, but according to the newspaper cutting Mabel did not move into the area until 1941. That might be an error. The obituary for Maria in 1938 mentioned a surviving niece, Mrs Richard Packard of "this city." Mabel died aged 80 towards the end of 1961, and is buried in the same family plot as Emma and Maria. From the Tampa Bay Times for 21 November 1961:

Whatever Happened to Lizzie Allen?

 In the May 1880 issue of Zion’s Watch Tower, the list of contributors had a new name, L A Allen. This was Lizzie (Elizabeth) A Allen, and her history is reviewed in Separate Identity volume one, pp. 203-207.

She and her father, Ira, who died in 1881, had been supporters of Nelson Barbour, but when the division occurred she supported CTR. Eventually, she left Zion’s Watch Tower to support John H Paton’s Universalist group and write for his paper The World’s Hope. In 1890 she was the pastor of his Church of the Larger Hope in Buchanan. In the 1890s she wrote for a Universalist paper Manford’s New Monthly Magazine. This dwindled in the latter half of the 1890s and may have coincided with her marriage (see below), or it just may be that she switched to writing for other publications that are yet to be discovered.

The last sighting of her had been in 1907 in the report of her mother’s funeral. We will pick up the story from there.

When Emily Allen died there was a report in the Rochester Democratic and Chronicle for 20 February 1907 which mentioned her surviving family. Lizzie was mentioned as now living in Chicago. Crucially for research, the report also mentioned that one of Lizzie’s sisters was now a Mrs Jessie Henby who resided not far from Chicago.

It appears that Lizzie was to die by drowning the following year in June 1908.

Below is the death certificate for an Elizabeth A Allen, aged 49, who died from drowning on 24 June 1908.

There are quite a number of people named Lizzie Allen in the records to make life difficult, but her parents are listed here as Ira and Emily, which makes this the right person. Lizzie has been married but is using her maiden name, and in fact, we do not know for sure who her husband was. She has one living child.  Her occupation is housekeeper, and that was her temporary employment when visiting Muskegon, Michigan. According to the certificate she died from accidental drowning in Black Lake while bathing, and there was no inquest.

Armed with the certificate it was possible to trace newspaper accounts of what happened. There are two newspaper accounts. In the first she is a woman of mystery – because she was there temporarily on a kind of extended vacation, but no-one really knew who she was. From The Muskegon Chronicle for 25 June 1908:

The accident was described thus: “The woman had stepped into a pit in the sandy beach of the lake where the water was about 10 feet deep and apparently did not know the first thing about swimming or the science of keeping afloat.”

Lizzie presented the paper with several mysteries:

So she had been married about ten years before (around the time her known writings dried up) but the marriage had only lasted about three months, and left her with a young son named Roger who was nine years old. She had continued using her maiden name, and the newspapers do not give her married name. She was known to be an expert in stenography and typing – that was part of the mystery – why was she doing domestic work? She had brought her typewriter with her which suggests active writing. Amongst her possessions were some letters from a mysterious “H.” That mystery remains unsolved.

In the second cutting, after they had been in touch with her family, they now knew a little more. From The Muskegon Chronicle for 27 June 1908:

She is now described as a writer and editor. She was a member of a Chicago social settlement. The settlement movement was an important reform institution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century providing services and trying to remedy poverty in crowded immigrant neighborhoods of industrial cities. The best known settlement in the United States at the time was Hull House in Chicago. According to one reference work unrelated middle-class men and women often lived co-operatively as “settlers” with the aim of sharing knowledge and culture and implementing “social Christianity.”

The full report shows that her family who had now been contacted included a Mrs A E Henby, which tallies with Lizzie’s named sister at her mother’s funeral the previous year. Jessie Allen (1871-1952) had married Arthur Elias Henby (1874-1936) who became a homeopathic doctor.

The accident was viewed as straightforward – while paddling in the lake she fell into a hidden hole and drowned – while her young son, Roger, was nearby. He called for help, but it was too late.  Since Lizzie had a history of guilt and self-loathing that pushed her towards Universalism (see Separate Identity Volume 1, pp. 206-207) the possibility of suicide while mentally disturbed comes to mind. However, the locals without that background judged this to be a simple tragic accident and no inquest was required. Her body was taken by her sister back to Chicago and there was cremated.

It was a sad end, and there may be more of her activities from the late 1890s to still discover.