Introduction:
I lived with my paternal Grandmother Elizabeth for several months when I was 5, along with her youngest daughter Agnes, Agnes's husband Larry, and my cousins Ron and Marilyn. Grandma had her own apartment in the lower level of the three story house in Minneapolis, and we respected her privacy, visiting occasionally, but I was never allowed to simply drop in. In retrospect I wish I had known her better. I clearly recall the shock at finding out her actual first name was Jane, as she never used it. Then again, hating a name runs through the family, with my father, daughter and self hating our middle names. Daddy disavowed "Dufty" so vehemently he literally swore to the army on penalty of perjury that D was a "middle initial only", I use Maxson as mine, and my daughter doesn't use hers, possibly because the first person she met with that name poked her in the eye, causing her first word to be "Ow!"
This was written in 1932 by my grandmother, the Welsh contribution to the family gene pool. It was rescued in 1989 and transcribed originally by my Aunt Edith, the middle of her three daughters. I didn't receive a copy until I was already a grandmother myself and Grandma was long gone. There are a few issues with the document I received, starting with the fact I am no longer in possession of the original. Even if I were, it was written on a ribbon typewriter (of course) and ribbon ink can smear when rubbed, as well as fading as that part of the ribbon gets reused a few times. After all, not everybody is/was wealthy enough to be able to buy a virgin ribbon for everything they typed. These days the equivalent would be a toner cartridge at that stage of near emptiness where you can remove it, shake it a bit, then continue printing for a few more pages, repeating until it finally must be replaced. That said, the copy I had was a Xerox copy, so what was made for distribution will not have faded any further, which I shot pictures of before passing it on. Even with that, some errors exist in what can be read in Edith's version, including the age Elizabeth lived to, which was 92, not the 95 Edith claimed in her intro (not included). Edith herself lived to be 97 and 4 months, something my own father, John, felt very competitive about, managing to live to be 97 and 6 months to the day!
I connected with my brother's family who had an original and re-transcribed it, emailing me their pdf copy, since I also managed to skip shooting one of the middle pages. The last page is numbered 12. I took 12 different shots. Counted them even. But I overlooked the fact that the first page is a letter sent by my Aunt Edith, introducing the document to each branch of the family she sent a copy to. As she had 9 siblings, it was a lot of paper, and a lot of work on her part, since Grandma wrote in a little notebook. I have no idea what Grandma's penmanship was like*, but Edith transcribed it from the handwritten version, and her intro mentions that Grandma ran out of room in her notebook so the end is on different paper. Edith offers it as one explanation of why Elizabeth stopped writing when she got married, while also commenting that bearing 11 children and raising 10 of them may have contributed as well. My aunts, uncles and father each popped out at about 18 month intervals.
[* I have a theory about that. Running through our family, left handedness skips to every second generation. My brother and I got it, my granddaughter has it. I seem to recall Elizabeth had it, and if so she would have been forced to change hands to write, as everybody was in those days, and further forced to try for perfect penmanship. The result could have been very interesting. Also note that inserts throughout in these straight brackets are not from the original document written by my grandmother.]
* * * * *
Jane Elizabeth Price Maxson’s (1878-1970) Autobiography
written in 1932 and originally transcribed by her daughter Edith Maxson Bjornstad
in 1989
It was in January, 1878, that I became part of the population of the city of Troy, NY. My father, David Price, had been born in the same city just 36 years before. His parents had left Wales after their marriage and had come directly to Troy, where they spent the rest of their lives.
Their three older children were born before they immigrated, and four others were born in Troy. My grandfather Price died in middle age, and I know very little about him. He was always employed in the rolling mills after coming to America.
My grandmother Price, (Elizabeth), was a quiet little woman, very energetic and sensible, a great Bible student, and a very remarkable Christian. She lived to be 92 years old. She learned English after she came to America. It was my duty as a child to carry on a correspondence with her after we left Troy, and her letters to me always came promptly. I felt the importance of this, and since I was named for her, I considered her my own private property. There is a portrait of her in a white cap with strings, which is in my brother Archie’s possession. In the picture, she is a little middle aged woman, dressed to look like an ancient, which was the quaint custom of those Civil War times. Her face shows much character and gentleness. She often took us children to walk on Sunday mornings, so that our father and mother could attend church. She usually took us to a hilltop overlooking the Hudson River where we could watch the big boats. She always called the whistle of the smaller boats the engine, and the great big one was always the (here the writing is not clear, but it seems to be “hull engine”) much to our delight. I was only five when I saw her last but that memory of her is very vivid to me. I loved her very much.
My mother Ann Dufty, was born in June, 1848, in Kidderminster in Worcestershire, England. Her father was a great student and reader. I do not know whether he ever had any formal education or not. Education in England in his day was a hard thing for a poor man to get. He was a market gardener. He and his wife, Sarah Watson, had 16 children, three pairs of twins. Infant mortality was great in those days, and they were able to bring up only nine – six boys and three girls. (You notice I say only nine.) I am very proud of my mother’s family. They were all well read, pleasant, high minded sort of folks. Several of her brothers were musical. My uncle Robert Dufty had a baritone voice as beautiful as any I have ever heard, and Uncle Arthur sang a very good tenor. These two sang for years in a male quartette [sic] in Troy – a quartette that was in great demand. Another uncle was for years the pipe organist in one of the big Baptist churches in Troy. These three brothers always took all the money they earned in choir and organ work to go down to New York and take lessons to improve their music They were all very handsome men. There is a picture of my sister Ruth’s of five of the Dufty men in young middle age – a remarkably fine looking group of men.
Two sisters were married in England. The Duftys left England when my mother was 24. They too settled in Troy. That is a coincidence I always have been glad about. I am glad my father and mother met and married. I do so heartily approve of both of them. You dear people knew my father in his old age – but it is a matter of regret to me that none of you, my best friends, knew my darling mother. One cannot just go around saying “I had an ideal mother” and so I have oft wished that you had known her. A minister high up in the M. E. church (Bert D. Beck) preached at our church in Richfield [Minnesota] one morning several years ago, and he was surprised to find my husband and me in the congregation. He had been in our class in college. In commenting on his surprise at seeing us he spoke of having known my people. “Mrs. Maxson’s mother was a queen,” he said. That remark was often made. Once Bishop Edwin H. Hughes said the same thing. Mother was very beautiful, tall, brown-eyed, with lovely soft wavy hair, and a wonderful English complexion. I never saw finer coloring on any woman. She had beautiful hands and tiny feet. My father told me just before he died how proud and surprised he was when she consented to be his wife. He had much competition, he said, especially from a Baptist minister who wrote poems to her. They were married Feb. 1, 1874, and lived in a little brown house that had been Grandmother Price’s. I saw this house six years ago.**
[**This was probably in 1926, when Francis and Elizabeth Maxson went to Philadelphia for the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, when the date corresponded with Francis’ birthdate, which was July 4, 1876. That would make the writing of this autobiography in 1932, six years after 1926. So far as I know, this was the only time our parents went east, and this time was one when they were able to go without any of the children along! EMB]
The neighborhood is hardly respectable anymore – and the house, while still standing, looks shabby and very old. It must be 75 years since it was built. I was thrilled, nevertheless, because there it stood on this side hill, just as I remembered it, and there was the little garden at the back, where mother always had flowers, marigolds and four o’clocks and the deliciously fragrant English honeysuckle which she always planted wherever she lived.
They lived in this house about eight years. Here my brother Archie was born, then I and then my sister Ruth. Archie was my mother’s pride and joy, her first born, her only son. I think something of the English idea of primo-geniture must have lingered in her mind because he was the most important child. As a child I bitterly resented this. I could not see why he was in any way my superior. I utterly admired him, but I refused to bow down and pay him homage, as Ruth, and later little sister Frances did. Thus early I developed into a rank feminist. I do not want you to feel that my mother was guilty of partiality. A fairer-indeed woman never lived. But, oh, how I wished that I were a boy instead of a girl!
Archie was the handsome member of our family. He had beautiful black eyes and crisp black curly hair, now white, but still beautiful.
I was only 15 months old when Ruth was born. We were like twins, sharing everything, dressing alike, doing things together. It is strange, now that we are both married, that we have seen so little of each other.
We lived in Troy only till I was five years old (1883). There are three or four memories of that part of my life that stand out. One is a Christmas tree at Grandmother Dufty’s, a real English Christmas when I was three. All her American children and grandchildren were there. On the tree for me was a little green majolica plate Grandmother had brought from England. Ruth received one just like it. They were in the shape of a grape leaf. Mother had a large oval shaped fruit dish to match. It was this large one which two years ago my sister Frances refused to sell for $1000, the offer of a rich New England woman. I have told you that story.**
[**I have the small plate, now, slightly chipped, but carefully preserved. EPM]
Another memory is of how I used to sing. Mother had a lovely soprano voice and a good memory, and always sang at her work. I learned songs from hearing her sing. One song, an anthem, I learned at the age of three, and sang at all family gatherings, collecting quite a few pennies and nickels to put in my bank. It went like this: “How beautiful upon the mountains” and so forth. Rather an odd song for a three year old. My adoring relatives all predicted a brilliant future for me. What a disappointment I must have proved to them! It is often so with infant prodigies.
The other memory I have of my life in Troy is of a wonderful time I had with my father one afternoon in early summer. Mother had gone to a funeral of some relative and Father stayed home to take care of me. We went on the horse cars out into the country and picked daisies. My father and I were wonderful chums. He treated me like a little princess. It always has humbled me to think how my father idealized and loved me. It was this afternoon when I first realized that I meant anything to him that he was the dearest person in the world to me. I was only four years old. This is the one perfect afternoon of my whole life. It is strange how often the memory comes back to me. We stopped on the way home and bought some fruit and candy at my Uncle Sam’s market.
Another day, a Sunday morning, comes back to me, a memory just as vivid but not a happy one. I had a beautiful new hat, a Leghorn poke bonnet with a blue plume draped around the crown, and blue bonnet strings to tie under my chin. I loved it, and when I wore it to church the first time I took it off and insisted on swinging it by the ribbons in the aisle so that everyone could see it. Mother said no, but I kept on and got a very well deserved spanking when she got me home. I had other spankings – a few – but this is the only one I remember. I thought at the time she had a perfect right to spank me from her point of view. I was not repentant, however. I felt that I had really enjoyed swinging my hat in the aisle, and that, on the whole, the experience was well worth the spanking.
My father was engineer in the rolling mill at Troy – a mill that made nails. The mills shut down at Troy, and father was “idle.” Now we speak of being out of work or unemployed, but then it was idle. That word had a sinister sound to me even before I knew what it meant. If a man was idle everyone pitied him and it was too bad for his family. Father went to Greencastle, Indiana, to work at the mill there. His brother Reese had been there for several years and was doing well. Father was in Greencastle for several months before Mother and we three children joined him. [fall 1883? GAM] The trip was a very wonderful experience for us children. For years we children all felt a little superior about it. So many of our playmates had never had even a short ride on a train.
We stayed at Uncle Reese’s house for a week or two until we located. They had a horse and buggy and a sweet apple tree. When an apple fell, Prince, the horse, and we children would race to see who could get the apple first. He liked them too.
Father worked at the nail mill only a few months and then he took the position of engineer and superintendent of buildings and grounds at DePauw University. We went to live in a little yellow house owned by the University and close to the college buildings. I hated the looks of the house, though it was comfortable and decent. I disliked the color and the shape. But we lived there until the year I entered high school.
Just across the street, in what I then considered a marvelous mansion, lived the president of DePauw, Dr. J.P.D. John. His daughter Alma, a tomboy, the despair of her impossibly prim and dignified mother, spent most of her time at our house, where she could breathe a little more easily. She made the journey across the street in three leaps from her front porch to our organ stool. Ruth and Alma and I lived in our old apple tree which was in turn school room, art gallery, millinery shop, hospital, riding academy, concert hall and luncheonette. Here we ate green apples with salt and planned our remarkable futures. Alma is a minister’s wife now. I have not seen her for 35 years. I’d love to.
Under this tree we gave ice cream socials, cutting juicy chunks of ripe pears for ice cream, and long slices of tomato for watermelon. We lit our tables with Japanese lanterns made of hollyhocks tied together at the outer edge of the corolla, thus making little receptacles in which we imprisoned lightning bugs in sufficient quantity so that some of them were always illuminated. We cut out paper dolls in huge families – we wrote poetry and edited a paper. We made a miniature cemetery with moss sod where we buried the bird with a broken wing. We dressed in long dresses and did up our hair. We read stories aloud (the Dotty Dimple series, the Prudy series – James Otis and J. T. Trowbridge.) We went barefoot, and we dug a furnace and roasted potatoes and boiled eggs. Mother entered into it all and helped in everything.
Mother sang us the funny little songs she learned at the Episcopal infant school in England, and as soon as we could talk we memorized poetry, songs and Scripture. Wordsworth was a favorite and we loved to recite “The Pet Lamb,” “We are Seven” and the Ten Commandments.
At six I started to school at the third ward building, the upper floor of which was the city high school. Going to school was my chief joy in life. I loved all my studies except arithmetic and all my teachers but one, and I still hate her, although she has been dead for many years. She pinched my arm once when I was in third grade – for turning around in line - and I was so angry I have never gotten over it. She was a sister of the man who was at that time lieutenant governor of Indiana. When he was a little boy, he had accidentally chopped off her two middle fingers. She used her thumb, forefinger and little finger to pinch with, and I used to wish he had cut off all her fingers. I wonder if teachers realize what a long memory a little child has for undeserved punishment and other evidences of a teacher’s ugly disposition.
When I was 11, my sister Ruth, 10, and Archie, 14, our mother presented us with a baby sister [Frances] , to our genuine amazement. Nothing in the way of an event in my life has ever equaled this. She was perfect, we all idolized her and she did not become spoiled. She was my own child, I felt. I agonized because she was not strong and I was so afraid she would die. She is living now in Middleboro, Mass. I hope she will come to see me sometime so that I can show her to you.
Over an otherwise happy childhood hung a shadow that grew heavier and blacker. That was the doctrine of inbred sin. We lived a block from the Locust Street M.E. church, nearly all of whose services I attended. I early gathered the impression, which grew, that I was a sinner. I knew I was. I suppose everyone is and knows it. But in all the evangelical churches of that time, the extreme blackness of that guilt, and the danger of it formed a great part of the body of the preaching and teaching. Fire and brimstone, while only mentioned occasionally were a very real menace to the unredeemed. The smell and fumes lingered in the background of the happiest hour. I grew to have a great fear – a terror of “falling into the hands of an angry God” as Jonathan Edwards said so long ago. I’d wake up in the night wishing I had never been born, feeling that my case was a desperate one. If I had told Mother she would have set me right. Her faith was sunny and serene, but I could not tell her. It was not till I was 18 years old and a freshman in college that I had the sense to go to our pastor. He was considered too liberal in his views by some of the older officials of the church. I shall never cease to be grateful to him for helping me to reorganize my thinking into something safe and sane and happy. Fear went out of my mind then and I have never harbored it since.
When I was 10 the Maxson family came to live in Greencastle and their son Francis came to our school and entered our fifth grade. He was then 12 years old. He was a fine boy and always had his lessons. There was no nonsense about him. In fact we girls all thought that such frivolities as the existence of girls in the world never entered his head. He has since often assured me that even at that age he was aware of my existence and it was only a short while thereafter that he selected me, in his mind, as the future Mrs. Maxson. It was just seven years afterward that I had my first hint of it, the week after I graduated from High School, in June, 1895, when he asked me to attend his class banquet as his guest. After leaving the eighth grade which we finished together, he had been sent to DePauw Preparatory Academy and I to Greencastle High School. Our commencement was a week before his. I remember with glee my undignified conduct on the day he asked me to go with him. He had waited for me as I came home from my music lesson. My music teacher lived next door to his father’s house, and he knew what time I left there. I was astonished. He was not a ladies’ man. We girls all liked him but he was to our childish romantic eyes a confirmed bachelor (aged 19).
I made lightning calculations, that my graduating dress, a white organdy, and my white shoes would be just the thing to wear and said I’d love to go. It was not quite my first date, but nearly so. Mother would not let me go out with boys while I was in High School.
I went home and told Ruth I was going to the academy banquet with Francis Maxson, and she and I danced around and giggled. If he had seen us I fear it would have been all off.
It was just five years and six months from that date that he and I were married and moved to Minnesota.
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[ Note my grandfather became superintendent of the Richfield, MN school system, dying in 1934 (according to my father, but disputed below) from a UTI, well before the existence of penicillin. My own father, John, had to leave college at that point in order to help support the remaining family at his home. He in turn married Gladys Murial Brogren on May 4, 1941, having finally gotten a job paying enough to get her father's permission, got drafted for WWII, served in Europe, returning home on New Years Eve 1945. My brother Stephen arrived in October of 1946, and I in September of 1948. Steve married George-Ann Davis, who added the notes below.]
Genealogical notes by George-Ann Maxson Dec 2011
John Dufty (1812-1883) married Sarah Watson (1814-1894) in Worcestershire, England;
immigrated to Troy, New York in 1872.
They had 16 children, including 3 sets of twins, but only 5 boys and 4 girls survived. Two of the
girls married and stayed behind in England.
Children immigrating: Arthur, Robert, 3 other boys, Anne Dufty and a sister
John Price (1818-ca 1880) married Elizabeth ___ (1815-ca 1910) in Wales; immigrated to Troy,
NY in 1842.
They had 7 children, three remained in Wales, 4 were born in the US.
Children in the US: David Price, William, Samuel, Reese
David Price (1842-1932) married Anne Dufty (1848-1923) in Troy, NY. They had 4 children: Archie, Jane Elizabeth Price, Ruth, Frances
Alvin Milton Maxson (1836-1913) married Samantha Jane LeSourd (1845-1885) in Indiana. They had three surviving children: Francis Maxson, Lena and Bertha.
Francis Eddy Maxson (1876-1935) married Elizabeth Price (1878-1970) in Indiana.
They had ten surviving children: Archie Milton, David Curtis, Jeannette Miriam, Norbert Price,
Edith Mary, Francis ("Tanny") LeSourd, Agnes Elizabeth, John Dufty Maxson, Paul William, Donald Edward.
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