Writing to “My Dear Mary”—her niece and my mother—in 1954, Rose Caperton explained that the three leather-bound books she was sending had belonged to Mary’s great-great-great grandmother, Caroline Clifford Nephew, in 1824 when she was a student at the Lafayette Seminary in Lexington Kentucky. Clifford, as she was called at the school, was my great-great grandmother.
Rose topped her letter with her address, Windridge, the old West Virginia farm without electricity or running water where my mother, Rose’s “Dear Mary,” had spent many happy days as a girl, visiting from Richmond. Mary remembered being set to clean and polish the smoke-stained glass chimneys of the kerosene lamps that provided the only light.
A working cattle farm, well-watered and green, Windridge possesses some of the richest land west of the Alleghanies. Monroe County, which surrounds it, is said to have more cattle and sheep than people; this would have suited Rose Caperton, who never married and often preferred her own company.
As a child, I guessed how fond my mother was of this aunt, absorbing the information like so much else through my skin. When Rose died in 1970, Mary went to her funeral and reported that the grand old woman had decreed that she was to be buried in her farm yard without a monument of any kind. Her dogs were to be shot and buried beside her.
Clifford’s leather-bound commonplace books were in the blue box, found by my sister Eleanor Miller at the top of our mother’s closet after she died. The blue box also contains the letters and documents I used in The Blue Box: Three Lives in Letters (Sarabande Books 2014) and Taken by the Shawnee (Turtle Point Press 2024).
Page from Clifford’s 1824 Notebook
Clifford’s volumes are filled with poems and hand-drawn illustrations contributed by her fellow students in 1824 when she was a bright 14-year-old boarding at the Lafayette Seminary. Commonplace books were as familiar to early nineteenth-century communities as Hallmark cards are today. Pious expressions, sentimental effusions and affectionate remembrances fill their pages as well as hand-colored drawings.
I am no fan of family worship, having seen how it constricts the lives of women who are not pious, sentimental or markedly affectionate. But I am drawn to research and write about Clifford because of several unanswered questions: why was she chosen to go to boarding school at a distance from her family home? Several other young women in her family were also educated but they lived in New England where female schools were more plentiful and more widely accepted.
Why was she called Clifford in her early years, then later, after her marriage, shifted to the more conventional and clearly gendered Caroline, then reverted to Clifford when she was abandoned by her husband, the evangelical Presbyterian preacher, Reverend Joseph Clay Stiles, along with their four young children? Why was his family house, Etowah Cliffs, demolished at some point, the date not given? The large pre-Civil War house with its double veranda sat on a bluff over the Etowah River in Barstow County, Georgia, long home to the Cherokee.
Who were the slaves who tended the house and its inhabitants and worked the neighboring fields for three generations? Their names are listed in Clifford’s marriage papers.
How did Reverend Stiles justify owning slaves with his beliefs as a pious Christian? For although the Bible does not outlaw slavery, Jesus’ second commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself, suggests an unlimited love given to all, and his Gospels commend forgiveness and generosity in a way that must have made slave owners at least a bit uneasy.
Of course none of these questions are addressed in Clifford’s commonplace books.
“Your ever affectionate and sincere friend, Priscilla Downing,” a fellow student signed her poem. “I will not deceive thee by flattery’s art,” “I will not compare to the lily thy cheeks” and “I will not compare the sweet balm of thy breath/to the fragrance bestowed by the blooming hawthorn.” The tribute ends, “The esteem that I bear thee first rose from my heart/Tis a tribute I pay to the stores of thy mind.”
It’s hard to imagine today a tribute paid to a girl’s mind as the core of a poetic tribute; now we would expect something about the way Clifford looked. I haven’t found any portraits of Clifford, from her school days, or later, but another poem is addressed. “To a Little But Handsome Woman” which provides a clue.
This is the beginning of another extraordinary voyage of discovery for me, which you will be hearing about in coming months.
Looking forward to following this story!