O!
How is my dear little Earl Emory getting along?
-Carrie H. Blair, 1893
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| Earl Emory Blair, 1893 |
What first drew me to Carrie H. Blair, my
great-grandmother’s sister, were lines she wrote about missing her baby
brother, Earl, while she was 90 miles away from home studying music at Grove
City College, Pennsylvania. “I’d like to have Earl here now and I’d kiss him
and shake him…,” she wrote in one of the three letters I have from her. It was
1893. One hundred years later, I was missing babies of my own — neighbor babies
I had grown to love but who had moved away, or babies I had cared for in day
care centers or as an au pair, and whom I’d had to leave.
When it comes right down to it, genealogy
is all about babies. With no disrespect to my childless-by-choice friends,
childless ancestors are usually disappointing. Dead ends. The hopes of finding
a second or third cousin down that particular branch (who might have old family
photos or letters or stories) are frustrated when you discover that that aunt
or uncle had no children.
Carrie’s letters were the first I knew
about her family, but as rich as they are, it took years of research to put
them into context, to learn more about each member of the family and the course
their lives would follow. And so it was that I worked backward from the
letters — from the intimate details of Carrie’s experiences as a daughter, sister,
sweetheart, and music student — to the colder facts that I discovered in Mount
Washington Cemetery, just outside of Perryopolis, Pennsylvania.
It was when I was in Mount Washington Cemetery
that I had the first of what would be many genealogical aha moments. At the
time, I didn’t know when Carrie had died, or whom she had married, or if she
had had children. But then I saw her headstone, near those of her mother,
father, and several siblings, and suddenly some of the puzzle pieces fit
together to create a new picture.
The last name on her headstone was
McIntire, surely the same McIntire (John Emory) whom she had mentioned fondly in
her letters. Near Carrie’s headstone was that of Wilbur Blair McIntire. There
were several photos of a little blond boy in my antique photo album that were
identified by that name, but I didn’t know who he was until that moment. Carrie
and Emory had had a son.
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| Wilbur Blair McIntire |
Most startling was the date of her death.
She had died at age 29, the same age I was at the time.
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| With Carrie’s headstone at Mount Washington Cemetery, 1993. Headstone reads: Carrie H. McINTIRE JAN 21. 1873 SEPT 1. 1902 |
A newspaper article about her marriage to
Emory in 1895 and the 1900 census gave me a few more peeks into her life. Her
marriage was recorded in The Weekly
Courier, Friday, November 1, 1895.
“W Luce,” who attended the groom, would later marry Carrie’s sister Sadie Blair. Watson and Sadie Blair Luce were my great-grandparents. I love the detail that they proceeded from one room in the house to another to continue the celebration.
Emory, Carrie, and their son Wilbur were living in Unity Township, Westmoreland County in 1900, and probably lived there as early as 1895. Though they were only about 30 miles from the farmland of Perryopolis, their surroundings were vastly different. The McIntires lived in Whitney, established about 1892 with the opening of the Whitney Mine & Coke Works, owned by the Hostettler-Connellsville Coke Company.
Emory, Carrie, and their son Wilbur were living in Unity Township, Westmoreland County in 1900, and probably lived there as early as 1895. Though they were only about 30 miles from the farmland of Perryopolis, their surroundings were vastly different. The McIntires lived in Whitney, established about 1892 with the opening of the Whitney Mine & Coke Works, owned by the Hostettler-Connellsville Coke Company.
Emory is listed as a bookkeeper in the
1900 census1 (he later became the payroll clerk for the H.C. Frick
Coke Company, which acquired the Whitney Mines in the early 1900s). He, Carrie,
and Wilbur most likely lived in the Whitney coal patch town, built especially
for mine workers and their families. Coal patch towns consisted of company-built
homes (with no indoor plumbing), boarding houses, a company store, and a school.
The undated photo below shows the rows of company houses and the company store,
the bigger building on the right. The smoke is coming from the Whitney Coke
Works.2
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| Photo courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania, http://patheoldminer.rootsweb.ancestry.com/whitney.html. |
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| The ramp in front of the company store led to a railroad siding of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Unity Branch, which served Whitney. Photo courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania, http://patheoldminer.rootsweb.ancestry.com/whitney.html. |
The environment was hostile on many
fronts. The miners worked long hours in dangerous conditions for minimal wages, and the threat of strikes was often
met with violence. A similar adversarial dynamic existed between the U.S.-born and western
European workers and the more exotic eastern Europeans, whose language and
customs more noticeably marked them as outsiders.
Of more concern to Carrie was likely the
physical environment caused by the burning coal. A new wife and mother, she
would have faced daily unending battles against dust and soot, unable to keep
anything clean. The health hazards were even more caustic. Beehive ovens, used
to burn coal into coke, poisoned the surrounding landscape, destroying
vegetation and polluting the groundwater. The ovens released a “chemical
cocktail of ammonia, tar, phenols, and choking clouds of smoke…straight into
the air.”3
The toxicity of the smoke would have
irritated Carrie’s lungs, possibly exacerbating the tuberculosis that would
kill her in 1902. Tuberculosis was the leading cause of death in the U.S. at the
time, and the crowded living quarters of the patch town would have given rise
to tuberculosis outbreaks.3 Or perhaps Carrie caught the disease
from her mother, Josephine Gallatin, who died four months before her at the age
of 51, also of tuberculosis.
After Carrie died, Emory’s mother Jane King McIntire moved in with him to help raise Wilbur. Jane’s daughter Anna and son-in-law Charles McDonald also lived in Whitney, in the nicer company houses (with indoor plumbing) on Manager’s Row.
After Carrie died, Emory’s mother Jane King McIntire moved in with him to help raise Wilbur. Jane’s daughter Anna and son-in-law Charles McDonald also lived in Whitney, in the nicer company houses (with indoor plumbing) on Manager’s Row.
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| Back row in chairs: Jane King McIntire and her daughter Anna Mercilla McIntire McDonald. Center row: Paul McDonald (Anna Mercilla’s son) and his wife, Minnie Akerman McDonald. Front row: J. Emory McIntire and Wilbur Blair McIntire. Wilbur was born in 1897, so this is probably about 1905. |
In the early 1920s, Wilbur married Emma
Watts and they had one son, Clifton, in 1925. Clifton never married and had no
children, so my hope of finding a direct descendant of Carrie’s ended.
However, my search did lead me to
discover a half-sister of Wilbur’s. Almost 18 years after Carrie’s death, Emory
married Maud Hugus, and their daughter, Jane King McIntire (named after her grandmother), was born in 1927,
30 years after Wilbur. Jane was born in Whitney but grew up in the nearby
Latrobe area, where she went to high school with Arnold Palmer and Fred Rogers.
She trained with the United States Nurse Corps and spent her early adulthood
in Pittsburgh. She moved to San Francisco in the mid-1960s, where she worked as
an organ transplant nurse at UCSF. And that was where I found her in the early
2000s, living only about 40 miles away from me.
I was thrilled to find this connection to
Emory and Wilbur, someone who could share stories not only about her father and
brother, but also about my great-grandmother Sadie, who stayed in close contact
with Emory and Wilbur after her sister’s death. Jane hadn’t heard any stories
about Carrie, but she did remember that Wilbur had a fondness and talent for
music, and she wondered if maybe he had inherited that gift from his mother.
Until the other day, I thought I only had two other photos of Carrie. One of them is a tintype, with a young Carrie on the left, her brother Sam on the right, and an unknown girl — possibly a cousin named Leora Gallatin — in the middle.
* * *
Until the other day, I thought I only had two other photos of Carrie. One of them is a tintype, with a young Carrie on the left, her brother Sam on the right, and an unknown girl — possibly a cousin named Leora Gallatin — in the middle.
The other photo shows a group of young
adults and children in front of what I assume to be a schoolhouse. There are
two men in the doorway: Carrie is the second woman to the right of the men. Her
sister Sadie is directly to the left of the men. Their younger brother Sutton is
in the front row with his arm around a classmate.
I have scoured these faces looking for their
youngest sister Martha, but I think she must have already died, which would put
the date on this photo sometime after February 1893.
The other day, when I was digging out the photos of young Wilbur to scan for this blog, I took a closer look at a more candid photo of a family on a porch. I scanned that one and sent it to Jane, asking if she recognized those faces. She emailed back and said that it was definitely her dad. She assumed the boy must be Wilbur, and that it must be Carrie on the porch with them.
The other day, when I was digging out the photos of young Wilbur to scan for this blog, I took a closer look at a more candid photo of a family on a porch. I scanned that one and sent it to Jane, asking if she recognized those faces. She emailed back and said that it was definitely her dad. She assumed the boy must be Wilbur, and that it must be Carrie on the porch with them.
I studied the known photos I had of
Carrie, but couldn’t quite convince myself that the woman on the porch was she.
I cropped the photo closer and asked my daughter, to whom I have given these
exercises before. “That’s definitely Carrie,” she said decisively. “Look at her
face!” (Actually, I had been looking at her face…)
Gone are the fuller cheeks and the flower
of curls on her forehead, both seen in the studio photo I have of her when she
was in her late teens, and Carrie looks older and wiser than the 27 or 28 years
she would be here. But I had to agree that the brow and eyes were definitely
the same, and it’s been a real gift to me. I find it a comforting photo —
seeing her as a mother and wife, not too long before she died, but still
looking calm and content.
The uncropped photo of Carrie on the porch is actually a
perfect metaphor for this kind of research, with the blurry woman
unrecognizable in the front, but the other people gradually coming into focus
through a lot of research and a little bit of luck.
Sources:
1 The
1900 census reveals the diverse population of the area. The majority of the
families who lived in Unity Township were somehow attached to the coal and coke
industry, either as coal miners, day laborers, or coke drawer operators. About
half of the families were Pennsylvania or US born; the rest came from Great
Britain and Europe: Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, and Austria/Hungary.
3 http://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-233
©
Kristin Luce, 2017
