Taking a Closer Look

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 6

Last week we began looking at Erasmus Miller Owen's whereabouts during the 1860s.  Today we are going to take a closer look at . . . . photographs!

A few weeks ago, the task I was given for the photo archive project was to begin writing the captions for the photos.  My sister and I decided that it would be a fantastic idea if each caption had the name of the person(s) along with the place and year in which the photo was taken.  Not an easy task, let me tell you.  If the photo was of just one individual, the name was almost always written on the back, so that part was no trouble.  (Unless, of course, we couldn't determine whether the name belonged to the person in the photo, or the person to whom the photo had been sent!)  If there were children involved, it sometimes became easier, but sometimes a bit more difficult.  And, if there were multiple people - not in an obvious family grouping - but only one was named, that was usually nearly impossible.  

The real problem, however was identifying the date and place.  Some of the photos had the name and place of the photographer on them, so that was easy.  Most did not.  And wouldn't you know, sometimes I needed to know the place in order to set the date, and sometimes I needed the date in order to set the place.  Sometimes I could tell that it was most likely a wedding photo, so a date and location were easy, but sometimes I was left asking myself, how old does that kid look?  Then, of course there is the problem that sometimes children died, so trying to guess relative ages became an issue as well.

For the photos of individuals or couples that didn't include children or mark an obvious event, I just had to try to come up with as close to an accurate date as I could.  So, I diligently did my research.  It turns out that there are so many things to consider:

Is it a cabinet card or cart de visit?  What is the size of the card?  What color is the cardstock?  Is the back a different color than the front?  Does it have square or rounded corners?  A thin gold border?  Scalloped edges?  An oval cutout?

Does it have a photographer's stamp? If so, what is the style?  Do we know where it was taken?  Do we know what years that photographer had a studio in a specific place?

What does the background look like?  Does it have a painted scene, or is it plain?  Does the backdrop contain an outdoor scene, or does it look like a fancy room with plants?  What type of furniture is present?

Is it a full-body shot, or a close-up? 

What is the person wearing?  When was that the fashion?  How wide are the lapels?  What type of notch do they have?  Is the jacket buttoned?  Does the waistcoat match the jacket?  Do the pants match the jacket?  Do they have stripes?  Are they narrow or wide?  (This applies to lapels and pant legs!)  Does the woman have a bustle, off the shoulder sleeves, mutton sleeves, or a pie collar?  Is she wearing white or a darker color?

What kind of hair style do they have?  For a man, is it short or long, flat or curly?  Is he clean shaven, bearded, or just mustachioed?  Does the woman have a Gibson Girl hairdo or a top knot, or is it strangely short with curly bangs?

Here is an example of a photo that was relatively easy:

The Sons of Erasmus Miller Owen

This shows Sam and Edgar in the front row, and Mark, Ras, Dick and Conrad in the back.

There is a copy of this same photo floating around all over Ancestry, but it has been cropped down so that you can see neither the card it is pasted to nor the backdrop of the photography studio.

Please don't crop the photos of your ancestors, unless you save an uncropped scan as well!

The parts that my family kept intact are just as important for dating the photo as are the people themselves:

- This is what is called a cabinet card; it is on very heavy cardstock so that it could be propped up and displayed in a cabinet.  Cabinet cards began being produced in the later 1860s, and by the 1880s often had beveled edges - just like this one.  This card is also a  dark brown/maroon color, which was very popular during the mid 1880s to early 1900s.

- The back is a different color - beige/tan/old-acid-paper color.  The corners of the card are rounded.  This tells us that the photo was most likely taken between the years of 1880-1890, although it could have been slightly later if the photographer was trying to use up his old (newly unfashionable) stock.  

- Edgar and his youngest brothers have only the top button of their jackets done up.  That was all the rage during the 1880s and into the early 1890s.  

- Edgar and the second-youngest boy both have large knots on their ties.  That was late 1880s - early 1890s fashion as well.  

- Edgar and the two younger boys have small, narrow lapels on their suits, which was an 1880s thing, and Edgar has striped trousers in a lighter color than his waistcoat and jacket - also an 1880s thing.  

- None of the jacket sleeves show their shirt cuffs, so we wouldn't place this squarely in the 1890s unless they were all wearing outdated suits.  

- Everyone in the photo has short hair, and all of the men have mustaches, which was typical for the 1880s and 1890s.

- Sam's suit is more typical of 1890s fashion - light colored, all three pieces matching, longer lapels.  However, he is also wearing more of a style that today we call Western-wear, so I don't know if that means anything here or not!

- The backdrop shows an indoor scene, which is typical of the 1880s or 1890s, but there are no potted plants or rattan furniture, so it is probably prior to the mid 1890s. There is a shaggy rug on the floor; these first began to be used during the 1880s.

Everything about this photo says late 1880s to early 1890s.  Luckily, we know exactly who is in this photo, and we also know when each was born, so we can narrow this down that way.

- Mark is wearing a full suit with tie.  That means he was no longer considered a little boy, which means he is most likely at least fourteen years old in the photo.  He doesn't look like he could be older than sixteen, though.

- Conrad is not wearing a tie, but he is also not wearing short pants.  That tells us that he was in the transitional ages between boy and young man - probably twelve or thirteen.  He is not too much shorter than Mark, indicating that he might be in the midst of his growth spurt, but he would eventually grow to be much taller than Mark as an adult, so he could have just been a tall child and still be on the younger side.  

- Mark was born in 1875 and Conrad was born in 1877.  In 1889, Mark would have been fourteen, and Conrad would have been twelve.

I feel confident that this photo was taken in either 1889 or 1890, so I am going to date this as c. 1889/1890.  My best guess is that it was taken in Brownwood, in Brown County, Texas.  Although Erasmus Miller Owen was not living in the town itself, that would probably have been the closest photography studio.  As far as I know, the four younger sons were all still living at home.  Sam was most likely in San Saba County that year, but that is close enough that he could have come for a visit.  

And now lets look at the photos of Erasmus Miller Owen himself:

Erasmus Miller Owen

This is the one that every single person out there has attached to their Ancestry tree.  Those are all a color-corrected black and white, but this shows what the photograph actually looks like today.  (It's a shame that the card is so damaged!)  

I thought this one was going to be easy.  A quick glance at the card tells us that is has to be from 1900 or later:

    - The card mount is irregular!  Cabinet cards made prior to c. 1900 are standard sizes.  Not until the turn of the century did they begin to be tall and narrow.

    - The oval cutout is also typical of later photos.

    - The photo itself has "silver mirroring," that metallic sheen on the dark portions that develops over time with the print process most commonly used post-1900.

    - The suit has the higher lapels typical of the 1890s and later.

    - E. M. Owen looks old!

Now, I also knew that the photo had to have been taken prior to 1920:

    - In the 1920s, photos were placed between two layers of card, with the top layer having a cut-out for viewing the photo.  

    - Erasmus Miller Owen died in 1917.  

The question was, when between 1900 and 1917 was this taken?  Now you might be saying, does it really matter?  To which I reply, Yes. Yes it does.  We have already created too many photo pages with captions that include the date and place to turn back now!

Now, I knew even from my preliminary research that the Reverend (doesn't he look the part in this photo?) moved around quite a bit.  In fact, he was in two entirely different states during the time period in question!  What was I to do?

Well, one of the best indicators to narrow down photos from the Edwardian time period would be to look at the shirt collar.  Unfortunately, as was typical of old men of the time, his beard was obscuring that detail.  I couldn't find a single example online of this type of very tall card with (or without) the embossed crown and lion motifs.  I even emailed a nice gentleman who appears from his website to be an ASU professor but is also apparently quite the expert on antique photography, and he told me that between 1900 and 1910 there were many unusual card mounting styles, and that it probably fell into that time period.  So, I had decided to settle with that time frame, and then put a "Texas or Oregon" (we'll get to that!) for the place.  

However, I just found a University of Illinois guide for archiving and exhibiting old photographs while writing this post, and it completely contradicts itself concerning this type of print.  It says in one place that silver-gelatin photos were introduced in 1874, but in another place it says the silver-gelatin paper "emerged" at about 1910. (A different website said that there was a two-layer paper, and later a three-layer paper, so maybe that is what was introduced in 1910?)  Personally, I have only seen this silver oxidation sheen on the later photos in my grandmother's collection - primarily those taken in the 1920s.  But it turns out that the oxidation occurs from poor storage conditions, so I guess it doesn't really tell us anything specific about when within the time period in question the photo was taken.  

Maybe this photo was cutting edge at the time it was taken, and we should date it as being from the early 1900s.  But maybe it was using that new kind of paper and that is why it oxidized the same way as the photos taken later and we should push it to the end of the date range indicated by the card style and say c. 1910 instead.  Of course, that would place Erasmus firmly back in Texas. (Sigh.)  Anyone want to throw in their two cents?

The next two photos I looked at were actually harder for the date, but waaaaaaaay easier for the place:

Erasmus Miller Owen

This photograph has a lot of conflicting features:

- Mismatched pants (striped, gray) and waistcoat and coat (black?) = 1880s

- Creased trousers = 1890s 

- Wide lapels = early 1870s or mid to late 1890s

- Unbuttoned suit coat = 1870s or mid to late 1890s

- Square-toed boots = early 1880s

- Dark green cabinet card with beige back = mid 1880s to early 1900s

- Backdrop with palm tree, rattan chair = no earlier than the 1890s

- Photographer - Schneider (Brownwood, Texas); newspaper article indicates he was in Brownwood in 1900 (couldn't find info for how long before that)

- Old man facial hair = any time period at all!

- Full length portrait, sitting = more typical of earlier than 1890s or after 1900 (but could have been because he was old)

- Erasmus Miller Owen was living in Brown County in approximately 1882 - 1906 (with excursions to other counties within this time frame) and again between late 1909 and 1917 (also with some excursions within this time frame).

So, we know it was taken in Brownwood, because it says so right there on the card mount.  But when do we date this?  I would have to say not the 1880s, because the palm trees and rattan furniture were not popular during that time.  Right now I am leaning toward the late 1890s, or maybe even c. 1900.  It actually has a super shiny finish and is really, really brittle, which sounds like either a collodion or gelatin "pop" print.  Unfortunately, according to the guide I mentioned above, those were made between 1885 and 1930, so that is not helpful at all!  On the other hand, it also has some characteristics of a glossy albumin print, so that would place it in a date range up to only 1895.  (Clearly, I am not an expert on antique photographs!)

And now the next one:

Erasmus Miller Owen

This is a photo I have not seen online, but it is the one that my grandmother chose to include in her family history book.  There is not quite as much going on in this one:

- Suit style = waistcoat early 1880s, open coat to show watch chain 1880s

- Photographer stamp = 1890s (J. B. Chambers was born in 1870, but census shows him in Abilene in 1900.  No records are available showing him in Brown County, but the 1890 census and most newspapers from Brown County have been lost.)

- Background = 1890s

- E. M. Owen looks to be about 60-75 yrs old

- He was living in Brown County in approximately 1882 - 1906 (with excursions to other counties within this time frame) and again between late 1909 and 1917 (also with some excursions within this time frame).

Based on these features, I'm guessing that this photo was taken sometime during the early 1890s, and once again, we know it was taken in Brownwood, Texas from the stamp on the card mount.

Can you see how difficult and time consuming this photo archiving project has become?  

Now, I wasn't satisfied with the three photos of Erasmus Miller Owen having dates that said c. early 1890s, c. late 1890s, and c. 1910(?). So that is when I decided that I needed to take a closer look - a much, much closer look.

Over the past year, we've had a bit of debate over what resolution these photos should be scanned at.  200 dpi? 5200 dpi?  (I guess it is now being called ppi for the scan, and dpi for the print!) I found a website that says that if you scan a photo at 300 dpi, you will be able to print a copy of exactly the same size at the same resolution.  For some reason, though, a 200 dpi scan will give you very poor quality, even though it sounds like there wouldn't be all that much difference between 200 and 300. (Unfortunately, this is what most of the photos people have uploaded to Ancestry have been scanned at.)  Apparently, if you scan a photo at 1200 dpi, which is the same thing as 300 x 4, you will be able to print the same photo four times larger with minimal loss in quality of resolution.  Huh.  Well, that's good to know! (But not so fast!  Printing on different types of paper and portraits vs landscapes will also look different even when scanned at the same dpi/ppi.  It is all so complicated and very confusing!)

The reason we were having the debate in the first place is because my mom scanned all of my grandmother's photos in a variety of sizes, just in case.  She figured, who knows what somebody might want to do with one of these photos later.  Most of the photos have scans that are 4800 or larger - which is big enough that you could print, well, really big prints.  Now, maybe nobody will ever actually do that, but many photographers out there suggest that scans be made as large as your scanner will make them . . . just in case!

Now, it just so happens that, despite the fact that making all of those different scans takes up a ton of time and hard drive space, they have actually come in handy! 

No, I didn't decide to hang a 6 x 8 foot wall poster of Erasmus Miller Owen in my house.  But listen - there I was, trying to put the three photos of him in chronological order, thinking maybe that might help me narrow down the dates a bit.  So I decided to zoom in and look at his wrinkles.  Boy can you zoom in when a photo is scanned at a higher resolution!  Check this out:

Those wrinkles are a bit clearer now, aren't they?  (But where are his eyebrows?!)  Now look at this comparison of the three different photos:

Interesting.  The photo in the center was a worse original copy than the other two.  It was a bit washed out and not as crisp and clear.  But look at the hair line . . . . and the frown lines between his eyes . . . . and the skin tone . . . . and the beard.  I think that the photo on the left is the earliest photo.  Even though his hair seems to be white already, it is less receded and the beard is much more wavy.  (I don't know about the rest of you, but my "gray" hairs are much frizzier than my normal sometimes-somewhat-frizzy hair.  I think when I am white-headed my whole head will look like a ball of wool just like Erasmus' beard in the right-hand photo.)  As for the frown lines, they seem to be almost not even there in the photo on the left, but very pronounced in the photo on the right.  And then there is the skin-tone; I couldn't blow these up bigger and put them in a row, but when they are zoomed in, the one on the left doesn't appear to have any skin damage.  The one in the middle looks kind of mottled (which could just be due to the poor print quality).  The one on the right, however, looks like his face is covered in freckles or age spots - almost like those photos they hang on the wall in the dermatologists office that show the skin damage we can't see with the naked eye.

So, I am really confident that the photo on the left was taken first, and probably in the early 1890s.  Maybe even in 1890/91:

For those of you who weren't aware, Erasmus Miller Owen served on the first board of directors of Howard Payne College (founded in 1889).  Perhaps that photo was actually his official trustee photo taken for the college!

I'm guessing at the moment (I keep changing my mind about these dates!) that the center photo was probably taken between 1895-1905, and the one on the right sometime around 1910.  The only problem is that I think Erasmus looks older in the center photo.  There is something about it that just says old and feeble to me, maybe because he looks so thin and frail?  I don't know.  I think maybe the way he looks might be misleading and we should rely more on the clues from the photo backdrops, processing, and mounts.  If anyone wants to weigh in on this question, I'd love to hear from you!

Aside from the whole zooming-in-to-figure-out-ages thing, I discovered that zooming in on a high resolution photo can really reveal some other astonishing details:

I didn't notice until I zoomed in that Erasmus had two pins in his lapels in the Chambers photo.  The first is on his waistcoat, and it looks like some sort of shiny metal.  The second is on the other side of his coat lapel, and we can just see a section of the pin.  

And did you all know, that the lovely watch chain that is visible in the photo tells us that Erasmus was right-handed?  The chains were always worn on the opposite side from the dominant hand, which makes perfect sense but I never even thought to think about such a thing until I was looking for hidden details in the photos.

Ooh, and look at the texture of his suit fabric!

Now, this next one is really interesting.  This is a close-up of the photograph that has the crack running across the middle of it.  Do you see how the area around the top button of the waistcoat looks weird?  I think that is a place where the suit had been torn and darned.  Notice how it is right by the button hole?  The same button hole he would have fastened his watch chain to?  The watch chain that he had in his other two portraits but is nowhere to be seen in this one?  Probably the watch somehow ripped the fabric when it was pulled or got caught on something, damaging his suit and most likely the watch as well.  You totally cannot see this feature when holding the actual photo in your hand.  

If you look back up to the whole photo, you'll see that this is the one where Erasmus' suit looks a bit too big for him.  This says to me that he had lost some weight since he bought the suit, meaning that it was probably not new.  Combined with the fact that the waistcoat had been repaired instead of replaced, I wonder if he needed a new suit and couldn't afford one?  

As we will later see, Erasmus sold a sizeable piece of land in late 1898.  At that point he most likely would have had enough money to purchase a suit that was neither torn nor too big, as well as to replace or repair his missing watch/chain, so I think this might provide us with a dating clue, and I am going to say that the photo was probably taken in the later mid-1890s.  Or maybe, c. 1897.  (Unless, of course, someone shares some compelling reason to give it a different date!)

Oh!  And guess what just occurred to me?  Let's look at this photo comparison again:

You'll notice how the one on the left looks like a pretty good black and white image. (The lighter portions of the backdrop have maybe a tiny hint of yellow-ish gray, but not too much.)  That one has not had any color correcting done to it - so it appears to have withstood the past 130 some-odd years very well!  

The center image looks pink, or pinkish-purple, and we might be tempted to say, what in the world happened to that photo?! and do a nice color correction to get it "back to" black and white.  Unfortunately, that would probably be an error on our part, because those old-timey photographers actually added different tints to their photos back then, meaning that this may have been the actual original color of the photograph!  

The image on the right has some definite yellowing.  This could be from poor storage conditions - fluctuations in heat and humidity or exposure to pollution - but it could also be that the photographer toned it that way on purpose.  So, once again, scanning every photo with no corrections or cropping is a must for conscientious archivists!

And here is one more tip I learned from the article on archiving old photos: zooming in until you can see the paper fibers can tell you what kind of print it is and thus help with the dating.  (Theoretically, anyway.  It didn't really help me all that much!)

Okay.  This has been fun and all, but it's actually taken a whole week already to get this much written and the inability to stick firm dates on these photos is putting a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm right now.  So, I'm going to say goodbye and get on to writing the next post!

                                                                                                                                                - Therese

Surprise, Surprise

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 5

Now that we've gotten the whole name issue resolved, let's start looking at Erasmus Miller Owen's movements across Texas.  I've started to collect an awful lot of place information for him, and I'd better get a timeline started so that I can keep it all straight.  We're going to try to pull the whole mess together, but I'm not sure what the most logical way of doing that would be.  If I had started writing my posts on Day One of my research, I could have just thrown everything at you when I found it, and we could all have said Whaaat??? or Aaaaahh together as we got collectively confused or suddenly gained an understanding of what was going on.  As it is, I've got a random jumble of documents and secondary source information, and I don't think there's a great way to do this without jumping around between sources - or even topics - but let's give it a go and see what happens. 

I'm going to put up a document right off the bat.  These are the first two pages of Erasmus' Confederate Pension Application:

Erasmus Miller Owen
Confederate Pension Application
(pages 1 & 2)

(You can enlarge this by clicking on the caption.)  I love these sorts of documents because they are so full of information.  From these two pages we can learn:

Erasmus was born in Shelby County, Tennessee.
He arrived in Texas on December 25, 1849.
He turned 81 years old on April 28, 1913, which means that he was born in 1832.
On December 24, 1913 Erasmus was living in the town of Bangs, in Brown County, Texas.
He had moved to Brown County for the first time in 1882.
He had "made several visits to children in other Texas counties" but had lived in Brown Co. for the past year.
Erasmus was a minister, but had become feeble and was no longer working.
He did not own his own home.

Oh, so many clues!  This gives us a nice framework to start a timeline.  We'll take a look at this document again later, when we talk about his military service.  For now, let's switch over to the census records.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I haven't found Erasmus Miller Owen on the 1850 census.  I decided to look for other Owens on Ancestry and see if I could find anything that might help me out.  I didn't, but I did get a hit for the 1850 non-population schedule of the census, which I didn't have attached to my tree yet.  I clicked on the link and was given this document:

U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

This shows, down on line 32, that Erasmus was farming in Burnet County in 1850.  If you remember, this is where we found him and his family living on the 1860 census.  But let's take another look at his bio from the Owen Family Association Newsletter:

Owen Family Association Newsletter
Volume 24 Issue 2, June 2011

(I apologize for the poor quality of this image - I don't know why it does that when you save something as a pdf.)

Let's skip down to the third paragraph.  It tells us that we know Erasmus was in San Saba County in 1856 because he registered one of the first cattle brands there in that year.  (That was the same year the county was formed out of Bexar County.)  I found this information in a 1946 article from the Southwestern Historical Quarterly titled "A Sketch History of San Saba County, Texas" by Alice Gray Upchurch:

I haven't come across an actual primary source record showing this registration of his brand; Ms. Upchurch lists Deed Book I as one of her sources, so I think that is probably where it can be found, but Familysearch doesn't have any of the San Saba County deed books online.  Not a single one.  Not even an index.  I think a person has to actually go down to the San Saba county clerk's office to look at them.  Of course, it could have also been mentioned in the county court minutes, because that is where I found mention of who registered a mark or brand in Hyde County, North Carolina, but the actual brands themselves weren't there; I've seen mention of brand books before, so maybe that existed in San Saba County as well.  

But guess what?  None of that is online.  Not only that, but I couldn't even find any mention of deeds on the San Saba County Clerk's Office website.  It was sooooo weird; probably the least helpful government website I've ever found.  Now, the Bexar County website - they really have their act together.  You can look up everything online, all the way back to when Texas became a state. (When I hit the brick wall in San Saba, I tried Bexar in case he was already there before San Saba was officially split from it.  Of course, I found several Owens, but not our Owen.)

Now, we are going to jump forward for a moment and then jump back again.  In the 1870 census, Erasmus and his family were living in . . . . San Saba County.   So, what we have is:

1850 - Burnet County

1856 - San Saba County

1860 - Burnet County

1870 - San Saba County

That doesn't sound right.  Why would he be going back and forth and back and forth?  Now, that isn't too terribly strange because Burnet County bordered San Saba County:

Colton's Map of Texas, 1856

Okay, I know I did a terrible job of outlining those counties - my hands just don't work the way they used to.  Also, this is not the best map, but it IS a map from 1856, which is exactly what I wanted.  San Saba County is outlined in red, and Burnet County is to the southeast, outlined in yellow.  So, the two counties are connected right there at the bottom.  Not a lot of overlap.  But it doesn't matter all that much, because Erasmus and his family were not really going back and forth and back and forth.  According to the records, they actually only did that once.  

Now, I know some of you want to say What are you talking about?  But listen - back when I was researching a different branch of my family, I came across the same problem.  My third great-grandfather, Silas Blackshear, was shown on the 1850 regular census as living in Arkansas.  On the 1850 agricultural form, he was in Anderson County, Texas.  Then, in 1860, he was in . . . . Anderson County, Texas.  That had me tripped up for quite awhile.  Like, for four or five successive blog posts!  And then I decided that there must be some mistake, so I went back and looked at all of the pages from the 1850 non-population schedule for Anderson County on Ancestry.  None of the pages had a date at the top, and all years from 1850 through 1880 were in the same database.  I suspected that maybe the 1850 pages weren't really all 1850 pages.  So I wrote down every name on the agricultural page in order, and compared it to every name on the regular census pages in order, and compared those to the 1850 and 1860 slave schedule names - in order - and discovered that the names on the erroneously labeled agricultural schedule very closely matched the names (in order, mind you) on the 1860 census, but not so much the 1850 census.  So an hour of data collection proved that Ancestry had made a mistake, and also that my ancestor was not living in Arkansas and farming in Texas at the same time!

This one doesn't require all of that legwork, though, and do you know why?  Because Burnet County wasn't even formed until 1852, so it could not have had a non-population schedule for 1850.  If you go to the image on Ancestry, there is a drop-down menu at the top of the page, and for 1860 it has no county choices alphabetically before Cass County, even though there should have been a ton of counties beginning with the letters A and B in that year.  There are four pages for San Saba County labeled 1860, but Erasmus isn't shown on any of them.  Why?  Because he was in Burnet during that year!  So the timeline should actually look like this:

1850 - whereabouts unknown

1856 - San Saba County

1860 - Burnet County

1870 - San Saba County

For some reason, Erasmus and his family were living in Burnet County in 1860.  How long before then they moved, and how long after that they stayed, we don't know.  (I'd like to say we don't know yet, because I'm not very good at letting such things go!)  But, I can't help asking why they were in Burnet County in 1860.  According to the Owen Family Association Newsletter, Erasmus' first wife, Mary Ann Carr, died in 1858, and he married Rhoda Salome Eastman later in the same year.  I suspected that the move either had something to do with the second marriage, or perhaps even due to problems with the Comanche Indians. (We'll have a whole post on that later!)  I decided to do a search and see if I could find out where Rhoda's family was living in 1860.  

The 1860 census shows Rhoda's mother, four brothers, and a sister living in the town of Lampasas; according to other family trees, her father had died in 1860 (he wasn't on the mortality schedule for Lampasas, Burnet, or San Saba County).  The town of Lampasas is very near the southern border of Lampasas County (outlined in light brown on the map), which just so happens to also be the northern border of Burnet County.  I think my hunch is probably correct, then.  I thought that maybe Erasmus had met Rhoda while doing the circuit-riding-preacher thing, because I read in a book about the early years of Methodism in Texas that one of the circuits included parts of San Saba, Burnet, and Lampasas counties.  (I know we haven't talked about the Methodist/Baptist stuff - we'll get to that!)  But then I decided to check the tax rolls.  I love looking at tax rolls, which is why it's so funny that, every time I look into an ancestor's life, it doesn't occur to me right off the bat to use those records to track their movements!  (I'm going to go do that now.)

Okay. I looked at the Lampasas County tax rolls to see in what years Rhoda's family was living there.  Strangely, there were no Eastmans on the Lampasas tax rolls for 1858, 1859, or even 1860, when they showed up on the census!  They weren't on the rolls for 1861 either.  I thought that was weird, because Rhoda's older brother, Benjamin F. Eastman, was old enough that he should have been taxed.  Then I remembered that a couple of weeks ago I had started, but never finished, looking at the San Saba County tax rolls, and that is where I found B. F. Eastman in 1859 and 1860.  He didn't own any land, just one horse and 4 head of cattle in 1859, and nothing but miscellaneous property in 1860.  (He shows up again in 1867, still with no real estate but a relatively high value of miscellaneous personal property.)  The 1860 census showed his occupation as a "waggoner," which is kind of like a teamster, but can include a person who just gets paid by local farmers to drive horses in relation to planting or harvesting activities or to carry their produce to market.  I guess you wouldn't need property if you weren't farming.  And, I guess Rhoda's mother did not show up on the tax rolls because she was a woman who owned no property, which makes me think that Rhoda's father had also owned no property (I found him on tax rolls in 1848-1850 and he was not a property owner in those years).

Anyway, I've spent hours looking at tax rolls and don't seem to have gained any answers to the question of why Erasmus and his family were in Burnet County.  I did sort of get an answer as to how long they were there, though.  Erasmus Miller Owen is listed on the tax rolls of San Saba County for nearly every single year between 1855 and 1881.  (The rolls begin in 1856, but the assessor wrote in "for 1855" on some pages. I guess I need to fix that on the timeline.)  The only years he is missing are 1863, probably because the page with the N, O, and P names has been lost, and 1866.  (I have a guess where he may have been in that year; maybe we'll get to it later in this post!)  This means that the family wasn't in Burnet County for very long - less than a year, because he was still enumerated on the taxes for San Saba County in 1860 and 1861.

I also checked the Burnet County tax rolls, and Erasmus wasn't there.  But do you know who was?  Some other Owens, that's who.  In 1859 there was a John Owen and a W. M. Owen.  In 1860, there was W. M. Owen again, and also an E. A. Owen.  And, in 1861, there were those two men, plus a Joseph Owen.

It turns out that E. A. Owen was Erasmus' brother, Eliphalet.  (Okay, I must confess.  I am following this line of research while I am typing right now, and I was like, how will I ever find out what those initials actually stood for?  It barely occurred to me that if someone was on the tax rolls in a census year, it was likely that they would be on the census for the same place, so that is how I figured this out.  Silly me!)  Eliphalet was a 26 year-old stock raiser in 1860, and he was living with the C. C. Arnett family.  C. C. Arnett was actually named Cullen Curlee, and he was . . . . the uncle of Erasmus' wife Rhoda!  When I saw that E. A. Owen was in the Arnett household, my mind kept telling me "Mary B. Arnett, Mary B. Arnett" and I was like whose mother was that?  Rhoda's?  So I checked my tree and sure enough it was.  

(I haven't figured out yet who the John and Joseph Owen men were.  Neither one turned up with a quick check on the 1860 census.  There is a notation on the 1859 tax record that makes me think John Owen had died.  William M. Owen was a 48 year-old physician who was born in North Carolina.  His kids were born in Missouri and Texas.  One of his daughters shared a name with one of Erasmus' sisters.  So, a distant cousin, maybe?  Or possibly just a coincidence.)

And now do you want to hear something ridiculous?  It turns out that Erasmus and the Arnett family were living right next door to each other; maybe Erasmus was even living on their land, because they are listed as dwelling 222 and 223 on the census, but they are listed on two separate pages, so I never noticed this before!  (I just went back and checked the tax rolls for Burnet County in 1860, and wouldn't you know, there was C. C. Arnett on the very first page with 578 acres of land.)

But back to the tax rolls.  In 1860, Eliphalet is shown to have had no cattle, but 26 horses (valued at $1040).  Was he hiring cowboys and driving cattle for other stock raisers?  Or was he rounding up wild horses for sale?  Maybe he was rounding wild horses up, and then breaking them before selling them.  I came across some old PBS flash game online called "Texas Ranch House" which was kind of like the choose-your-own adventure thing (like the classic Oregon Trail game).  In the introduction it said that usually about a dozen cowboys would drive a herd of cattle, and that, because the horses had to work so hard, each cowboy needed six horses apiece!  By 1861, Eliphalet had sold the horses and was able to purchase 500 acres of land for only half the price his horses had been valued at.  Sounds like a profitable venture, right?

Now, we sort of got stuck at the not-1850 census and then this blog post sort of morphed before our eyes into something I didn't anticipate (that's research!), so I didn't mention what Erasmus' occupation was reported as.  Here is the census page:

1860 U. S. Federal Census
Burnet County, Texas

Erasmus reported his occupation as "Stock Raising."  I had read somewhere recently that a lot of the early stock-raisers were creating their herds by rounding up the feral cattle that were roaming around on the frontier.  If you paid attention to the map up above, you can see that San Saba County was about as close to the frontier as you could get.  According to The Western Range Revisitied, during the 1860s "stock-raising was touted not as a way of life, but as an 'adventure' or get-rich-quick scheme."  It wasn't until the financial collapse of 1885 that ranching began to be seen as a business.  (And, if any of you wants to learn more about early cattle drives in Texas, you can read this fantastic article on the Frontier Life website.) 

Oh!  I showed you the agricultural schedule up above, but we didn't talk about what it said either, because I was just trying to make a timeline!  That document recorded that Erasmus had no land - none improved, none unimproved, and none owned in Burnet County.  This makes sense considering that he was never on the tax rolls there.  So that tells me that he most likely was living on the Arnett's land at the time.  Hmmm.  We should look at what the agricultural schedule showed for C. C. Arnett.

1860 U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

Aha!  There they are right next to each other again.  (I didn't even notice that!)  Mr. Arnett had 100 acres of unimproved land and 488 acres improved, and, even though he reported his occupation as "Farmer," he had 75 head of cattle.  This schedule shows that Erasmus had 10 horses, 25 milk cows, 4 working oxen, and 20 head of cattle.  The top of the form says they were supposed to report what livestock they had on June 1st, and the rest of the form was supposed to show what they had produced in the whole preceding year, as opposed to the tax records which were supposed to show what they actually owned at the beginning of the year.  The 1860 tax records over in San Saba County showed that he owned 7 horses and 50 head of cattle.  So in six months' time he had gained three horses, but kept the total number of cattle pretty much the same.  Mr. Arnett, on the other hand, in addition to having a large herd of milk cows and other cattle, produced an awful lot of grain on his cultivated land; perhaps Erasmus was exchanging the use of his two teams of oxen for "rent" on the Arnett farm.

You know, this post is getting harder to write by the minute!  I keep wanting to talk about one thing, and then realize that I should probably talk about what these records actually show us, which I wasn't even going to do until later, but maybe it makes more sense to just do it now.  (Does it?)  Anyway, while checking the headings on this form, I noticed that the top right category says "PRODUCED IN THE."  Produced in the preceding year is what it is supposed to say, which reminded me that there is supposed to be a second page - this was a two-page spread!  So why do none of these include the second page?  Well, those are - for some reason unbeknownst to me - indexed under the drop-down menu titled "Saint George."  (Is that some secret code for "We have no idea where these pages actually belong"?)  So, I just discovered that the left-hand side of each spread has a page number on the left, but no year - hence the mis-indexing as 1850.  But the Saint George, a.k.a. right-hand page of each spread, has a page number on the right, and just below that it says "1860."  See?

1860 U. S. Federal Census Agricultural Schedule
Burnet County, Texas
Ancestry.com

Huh.  I guess I should go back and take another look at my other 3rd great grandfather's record!  I didn't put up the whole image of the first page, but you can use the Ancestry link in the caption to take a look if you want.  Or, if you aren't on Ancestry, you can view the page here instead.  Erasmus was listed on page 11, so I went and found page 12.  And I know that these two sets go together because both had eleven pages and the last page of the left-hand spread had only 12 names listed, and there was a matching page in the Saint George set (even though it was microfilmed in reverse!).

If we look down to line 32, which is where Erasmus was listed on the left-hand side, we can see that he hadn't focused much on farming the previous year.  The first page showed that he had produced only 15 bushels of wheat and no corn, which was less than most other farmers on the page.  This page shows that he put his 25 milk cows to good use, though, producing 150 pounds of butter - just under the average amount compared to the other families listed.  

But, back to the question we had before - why were Erasmus and his family in Burnet County?  Maybe Erasmus was there doing the stock raising thing.  Maybe he and his brother were meeting up to do a round-up or to drive his cattle along with others to market, and he wanted Rhoda and the children to be close to family who could help them out and keep them safe, maybe especially because the Comanches were rampaging across San Saba County at that time.  (I know that sounds terrible, but we will see in a subsequent post that it was happening from time to time.)  Maybe the move had something to do with Erasmus' preaching circuit.  Maybe it was because Rhoda was having a difficult pregnancy and wanted to be close to family.  I just looked more closely at where in Burnet the census placed them, and it was in the Burnet town postal district; after a half hour of research, I determined that, although the town of Burnet was in the center of the county, there were no other postal districts north of the town in 1860.  So, maybe staying with the Arnetts put Rhoda close to her aunt as well as to her mother.  And, since Erasmus' brother was living with Rhoda's aunt and uncle, they might have been killing two birds with one stone.  (Or three if Erasmus was preaching along the way!)  The census was enumerated on the 30th day of June, and their daughter Mary was supposedly born in December of that year, so maybe before June Rhoda was far enough along to suspect that there might be problems and the move was made.

Or how about this: While trying to find out exactly when Rhoda's father died, I looked at the 1860 mortality schedule for Burnet County:  

1860 U. S. Federal Census Mortality Schedule
Burnet County, Texas

(You won't find this on Ancestry because the way the mortality schedules were microfilmed is very confusing; this county has either been missed, included with the pages of another county, or filed into the wrong year.  I found it on FamilySearch, and if you click on the image caption it will take you to that page.)

The mortality schedule for Burnet County reported six infant deaths in the preceding year - all but one died within days of being born, and one was one month old.  All but one were unnamed.  The one who had been given a name was named Edgar Owens.  There were only three families with that last name on the census: our Erasmus, the physician William M. Owens, and Eliphalet, who was unmarried.  (All three had the last name spelled "Owens.")  That means that the infant Edgar was born to either Erasmus and Rhoda or to W. M. Owen(s) and his wife.

Now, today we tend to think that it would be weird for Erasmus to have had a baby named Edgar who died, and then later to name another son with the same name.  But maybe people didn't think it was creepy to do that back then.  Maybe families who named their children in honor of their grandparents and aunts and uncles and siblings thought it was perfectly normal to name a child in honor of their own lost brother or sister.  I mean, my great-grandmother Lula was named after her sister who had died as an infant.  If you look at Rhoda's sons, the first was named after her father, the second was named after Erasmus, and the third was named . . . Edgar.   

Also, doesn't it seem weird that two possibly unrelated Owens (which was not a very common last name in most of Texas at the time) would end up naming their sons the same, not-very-common first name?  And consider the fact that the four other babies who died were not given names; if anyone was going to name a one-day-old infant, I would think that it would be a minister who would do so.  Erasmus and Rhoda would have been married for almost two years by the time the 1860 census was taken.  The baby in question had died in December of 1859, which is late enough to have been theirs, and early enough for Rhoda to have been pregnant again by the following March.  What if it was the death of her first child that prompted them to move closer to family when Rhoda discovered that she was pregnant again?  Or what if they had moved closer to her family even earlier in 1860 to help her get through the grieving process?  

I tried looking at the age of W. M. Owen's wife Sarah to see if she was too old to have a child, and she was 43 years old.  I looked for statistics showing the average age at which a woman had her last child in the mid-1800s, and could only find a data set for the Mormon women in Utah.  There, the average age was 40.5.  Of course, that was an average age, so some would have been younger and some older.  I took a look at the women on the Burnet County census and found that most older women appeared to have had their last child within the range of 37 to 42 years old, but there were three women who had children at the ages of 45, 46, and even 50.  Now, of course some of those other women may have had a child who had died and wasn't listed on the census, but surely not all.  If we consider Sarah Owens, we find that her youngest child was six years old, meaning it would have been born when she was 37 years old.  That is at the bottom of the average range, so it is possible that was her last child.  It is also possible that she had a younger child, or even children, who had died for some reason.  But, her husband was a doctor, who would have been trained in obstetrics and the diseases of women and children, so . . . .

I don't think we have enough evidence to say who the infant Edgar belonged to, but there is a statistical 50/50 chance plus some reasonable arguments that (maybe?) make it even more likely that he was the child of Erasmus and Rhoda.  Perhaps this explains the uncertainty out there over which of Erasmus' wives was the mother of his daughter Rosemary, who died in infancy in 1848.  Many researchers say that Mary Ann died in childbirth and attribute that baby to her.  But others, like my grandmother, have recorded that Erasmus and Rhoda lost their first child as an infant, and name Rosemary as that child.  If the 1848 date that everybody records for Rosemary's birth and death is correct, she had to have been the child of Erasmus and Mary Ann, because Erasmus did not marry Rhoda until September of that year.  Perhaps the fact that Rhoda lost her first child has been remembered correctly, but the actual name of that child has been forgotten.  Perhaps that child was the infant Edgar.

And now I feel like one does when there has been twenty minutes of talking in a room and all of a sudden the conversation just dries up to nothing.  This post certainly took a turn from what I had planned, and although I hate to end things with an unsolvable mystery, I think it will be better to end here (I've spent a whole week on this post already!) and try to get back on track with the timeline next time.  Or, maybe we'll see what some of the memoirs I've rustled up can tell us about Erasmus' life in San Saba during the 1860s.  Either way, I'm sure I'll have some interesting things to share!

                                                                                                                                              - Therese

The Legend of Dr. Joe

The Erasmus Miller Owen Family, part 4

Wow.  If anybody had told me that in my fourth post on Erasmus Miller Owen I wouldn't have gotten past the whole name question, I would have thought they were crazy.  But, here we are in the third post, and that is still what we are looking at.  After studying the death certificates of Erasmus himself and of his children, and after considering the fact that Edgar's family knew that his father was called Dr. Joe, and yet Edgar did not report on his death certificate that Joseph was his actual name, I have come to the conclusion that it probably wasn't.  

However, I would like to investigate the Dr. Joe story anyway.  The first time I heard it, I was pretty skeptical.  I mean, my mother and my grandmother were really close with the Maben side of the family.  My grandmother wrote a whole book of family history and never mentioned such a thing.  Surely at the time she was doing her research she asked Clara's daughter, her Auntie Babe, what she knew about Erasmus Miller Owen.  She was also in contact with Orlena's son, James, and still didn't seem to have heard that particular story.  She had scores of old family photos and she could tell you who almost every single person in them was, and yet the fact that Erasmus was a Baptist preacher was the only significant detail of his life story that has been passed down! 

Now, I've come to discover that the legend of Dr. Joe is pretty widely cited out there in internet-land.  I might have been so skeptical as to suspect that one person had posted it on a discussion board way back at the advent of Ancestry and everyone became a believer (I have seen this happen), except for the fact that Leon Owen told the story to his sister only thirty-three years or so after his grandfather's death.  That means that the story either has at least a kernel of truth to it or our Erasmus really had his family fooled!

Since the story has more than one version, and since we do not have definitive proof as to whether or not Joe was Erasmus' given name or a nickname, and since I am never satisfied if I haven't investigated every single source of information I can find about an ancestor and wrapped it all up into a cohesive story, we are going to take a closer look at it.

So, let's review for a moment, shall we?

In my first post, I showed an article from the Owen Family Association Newsletter that said, "Some biographies state Erasmus attended medical school for two years in New Orleans, leading to his nickname, "Dr. Joe."  He would become a circuit riding preacher, ministering to souls and physical ailments."   I also showed a transcript of a letter from Edgar's son that said, "Grandpa was raised in Memphis Tenn . . . . Grandpa Owen went to Vanderbilt University at Nashville where he studied medicine and he was called Dr. Joe in San Saba Co before he quit practicing medicine."

Okay.  Both stories state that he practiced medicine and was called "Dr. Joe."  The first one, which is a relatively recent summary of all of those "family stories" out there, says he attended medical school for two years in New Orleans.  The second, which was written down in approximately 1950, says he went to Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.  I figured that the easiest first step would be to find out what year Vanderbilt University was founded.

Well, Vanderbilt University was founded in 1873.  This particular detail, then, cannot be true, because Erasmus Miller Owen was living and preaching and supposedly doctoring people in San Saba County for like ten years before then.   

And here is the problem with writing a research blog - in order to confidently make that claim, I had to look at the census records, the tax rolls, the marriage records, the birth locations of his children, and his confederate pension application.  If I tried to show all of those to you right now as proof, not only would it be a giant detour from what we are supposed to be talking about, but it would be silly to show you a document, say a tax roll, and just say, see, he was living in San Saba County, but ignore all the other interesting stuff we could learn from the document.  Or I could show you his pension application and say, see he says he entered Texas on Christmas Day 1849, but ignore everything else, like where he was born and what year he moved to Brown County and all of the other interesting bits of information that we could learn.  So, right now you are just going to have to trust me when I say that I looked at all of those documents and that I am going to show them all to you before we are finished telling the story of Erasmus Miller Owen.

Alright. Vanderbilt was a bust.  But what about Nashville?  Well, the University of Nashville had a medical school, but it wasn't opened until 1851 (it was later transferred to Vanderbilt University in 1874).  I guess the whole location mentioned by Leon Owen was a bust then.  Maybe he just assumed that his grandfather had studied in Nashville, because that is where Vanderbilt University was located.

So how about New Orleans?  I did some searching, and I found a 1934 article from the Annals of Medical History titled "HISTORY OF MEDICAL EDUCATION IN NEW ORLEANS FROM ITS BIRTH TO THE CIVIL WAR" By A. E. Fossier, M.D.  According to Dr. Fossier, the first medical school in New Orleans, the Medical College of Louisiana, was organized in 1834.  (If I read it right, in the following year the French-speaking Medical College of New Orleans was created and the two were joined.)  At the time, the next closest medical schools were in Ohio and Georgia, so this new school served what was then the entire western and southern portions of the U. S.  The school was very small, had very few students, and grew very slowly.  In 1845, the state of Louisiana chartered a university, and the medical college was absorbed into it (today it is known as Tulane University).  

Now, Erasmus was reportedly born in 1832, so he wouldn't have been ready to go to college until he was something like sixteen years old at least, which would have been in 1848 or so, which means this story is plausible.  But, the book also said that the medical school was very, very expensive, that it had a three year course, and that the first year was spent with a private tutor or preceptor before entering the medical school proper, which took two more years.  (And that was it - after two years of medical study, the person would graduate as a doctor!)  The book also said, though, that no student was even allowed to apply for graduation until they were twenty-one years old, which means they couldn't enter the medical college until they were eighteen years old; Erasmus would have been eighteen in 1850, but he was already in Texas by then, and I forgot to mention that he married his first wife (in Texas) in 1852, so that means that he could not have gone to medical school in New Orleans for two years.

So, it looks like both stories are a bust.

On a positive note, I learned something very, very important from reading that book.  Apparently, "it was the custom of that time for all letters from the public published in the newspapers to be signed with a non de plume."  That means that, when we read those old, old newspapers, any letter to the editor will not be signed with the person's real name, but instead with a fake 'pen name.'  Well, that sure throws a monkey-wrench into research, doesn't it?  Maybe this was a negative note instead!

Anyway, once I discovered that neither version of events could be entirely true, I decided to see if I could find a chronological listing of all medical schools in Tennessee or the United States, just in case there was some other school in Tennessee in the late 1840s that he might have attended.  Not so easy, friends.  Either the search engines can't do their job properly, or nobody has cared enough to put the information online.  Finally, finally, after many attempts with different search terms, I stumbled upon a blog post from somebody named Brian Altonen, MPH, MS, Public Health, Medicine and History.  And that might actually be the title of the website.  I'm not really sure, because the banner at the top is arranged very strangely.  Anyway, it was just a random post from his blog, and I wasn't even sure why it came up in the search results, because it sounded like it was just some sort of criticism of a famous and often quoted writing on medical history because it is full of cultural biasness that gives a one-sided picture of medical history or something.  So, I was like, weird, what does this have to do with a timeline of medical schools?, but I scrolled down the page, and lo and behold, I found this:

Excerpt from Chronological Review chart
"Timeline of Medical Schools"
by Brian Altonen

I couldn't include the whole chart because it was really, really long, but this is the part we are really concerned with anyway.  I snipped the portion beginning with the medical college in New Orleans that I mentioned above, and I went until 1848, which would have actually been later than we need to look at here.  I really, really like this chart, because it tells us all kinds of useful information: the year the medical school was founded, where it was located, what type of medicine it taught, and whether or not it was discontinued.  I don't know where this guy found all of this information, because like I said, I had trouble finding much of anything online!  

It looks like the medical schools fell into four basic types:  regular, botanic, homeopathic, and eclectic.  I am assuming that regular is what we think of as a traditional medical school, homeopathic should be what it is today (I didn't even know that was a thing way back then!), and botanic sounds like herbal or medicinal medicine, not surgery and whatnot.  I'm guessing eclectic was a mix of the others.

So, let's take a closer look at the schools and their locations.  By the time Erasmus would have been old enough to attend a medical school, there were options available to him in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, and . . . . well look at that, Tennessee.  The Botanic Medical College, founded in 1846, was in the city of Memphis, right there in his own backyard!  According to Mr. Altonen, this medical school was a mixture of regular and botanic, which means that the doctors training there would have learned traditional medicine, like obstetrics and surgery, as well as "botanic" medicine, which simply means the use of herbal remedies.  

I did a bit of looking around online, and discovered that botanic medicine became popular during the Jacksonian Era, and it was sometimes called Thomsonian medicine, after its founder, who actually had his early training with a local "root doctor."  (There is a long but interesting lesson on the history of this type of medicine, and you can read it here if you are interested.)  I tried to discover what the summary in the chart meant about "political problems" and couldn't find anything specifically related to the school in Tennessee, but apparently the entire botanic movement met with a whole lot of resistance from "regular" doctors (who were actually still doing things like bleeding their patients and treating them with mercury!!), as well as from the founder of the movement himself who, believing that training should consist only of hands-on experience, was opposed to formal schools that used texts in a classroom setting, causing the movement to split into two rival factions.  The funny thing about the whole mess is that the "regular" doctors were offended that the botanic doctors called themselves such, while the followers of botanic medicine accused the regular doctors of "scientific poisoning and quackery."

I also came across this on the Tennessee Encyclopedia website:

Despite physicians’ efforts to professionalize medicine, an informal 1850 census conducted in East Tennessee indicated that of 201 practicing doctors only 35 had graduated from a medical school. The others possessed professional training ranging from one course of medical lectures to no formal training whatsoever. Clearly, many of the physicians were self-proclaimed. Without licensing procedures, which did not become law in Tennessee until 1889, anyone could declare himself, or herself, a physician. Although the Medical Society of Tennessee had the power to confer licenses, rarely did anyone apply. Initially, the state society languished before physicians’ lethargy, geographical considerations, and the Civil War.

Well, it looks like pretty much anyone could become a "Dr. Joe" back then in Tennessee, doesn't it?  

So anyway, it looks like maaaaaaybe Erasmus Miller Owen might have possibly (I know, can I get any more non-committal?) actually attended medical school in Tennessee, like his grandson Leon thought, but instead of it being Vanderbilt University in Nashville, it was the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis.  

I've been going back and forth between writing this and doing a google search to find more information about the place, and my persistence finally paid off, because I found this preview on Google Books:

Kindly Medicine: Physio-Medicalism in America, 1836-1911

by John S. Haller Jr.

If Erasmus did attend this medical college, he would have learned anatomy, physiology, pathology, surgery, medical theory, "materia medica" (another name for pharmacy), obstetrics and the diseases of women and children, chemistry, and medical law.  The school was supposed to be state-of-the-art with a library, modern instruments, and an extensive collection of specimens and illustrations.  Now, this also says that the "course of instruction lasted four months" at the cost of $80 (plus $25 in fees).  When I first saw that I was like, Holy cow!  That is not enough time to learn any one of those things!  And so cheap, too!  Of course, when I put the amount into the inflation calculator, it came out to an equivalent in today's money of about $4,100.  That also sounds pretty inexpensive for a college education, but let's talk about the term "course of instruction" for a minute.  This book makes it sound like a person could pay the required tuition and fees and become a doctor in four months' time.  I don't think that's what it means, though.  The book about the medical school in Louisiana was talking about the fact that there were a lot of complaints at the time that a school term lasted only four months, and the student was expected to sit through something like five or six lectures every day.  The founders of the New Orleans school had a five month term - November through March - and they required three years, whereas most medical schools of the day only required two.  So, at the very least, a student would have to pay the tuition amount twice.  

You might still think that is not a lot of money for medical school, but consider that (according to the 1849 Shelby County tax rolls) the cheapest town lot in south Memphis was valued at about $300.  And according to this University of Missouri website, the average price of an acre of land in Shelby County, Tennessee in 1850 was $11.00.  The average monthly wage for a Tennessee farm hand (with room and board included) was $8.67.  That means it would have taken a farm hand more than an entire year's wages to pay the fees for one term of medical school.  Now it sounds a bit more expensive, doesn't it?  

I decided to do a bit more investigating to see if I could find out anything else about the school, and it dawned on me that I should look in old newspapers.  Look what I found:

Circular from the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis
The Tri-Weekly Memphis Enquirer
July 2, 1846

This advertisement for the new college says that each course of instruction would last four months, and have thirty-five or more lectures each week.  So that would be like taking seven or more college courses in less than one semester, which is a lot of information to master - especially for somebody who is expected to hold other people's lives in their hands!  It also says that the students would have to complete two courses of lectures plus a two-year practicum under a "respectable physician" or one course of instruction with a three year internship instead.  So, I guess if you could afford both terms, you could chop a year off the time it took to become a doctor.  (And did you all notice that, in addition to the tuition and fees, each student was expected to purchase eight medical textbooks, which I'll bet cost an arm and a leg themselves.)

Now, it seems that I am always second-guessing myself, maybe because I am actually publishing my ideas, but I decided I'd better double check that book I showed you all a minute ago and make sure it didn't list some other Tennessee medical school that the timeline on the blog didn't mention.  I found something, which led to another search, and it turns out that between 1847 and 1851 - the exact time we are looking at - there was a rival medical school in Memphis called the Memphis Institute.  According to this journal article, the founder was "disappointed with the direction taken at the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis" and wanted a school that would include other arts and sciences as well as law.  I actually saw a newspaper article in one of the editions of a Memphis newspaper advertising that new school, but it sounded like it was just being formed and medicine was not one of the subject areas listed in the advertisement, so I thought it did not have a medical school.  

And guess what?  Apparently there was a third medical school in Memphis at the same time!  While trying to find information about the Memphis Institute, I ended up back on the Tennessee Encyclopedia website, and it turns out that I just didn't read far enough the first time because it also said that the Memphis Medical College opened in the same year as the Botanico-Medical College of Memphis.  I had actually found an 1848 newspaper article advertising that school, but the headline read "Medical College of Memphis" so I thought that it was the botanic college and that they had raised their rates.  I did a new newspaper search and found advertisements for this other one in the newspapers of other states:

The Weekly Mississipian
July 15, 1846

This medical school was a bit more pricy - equivalent to almost $4,800 in modern money even without the graduation fee.  I read through several of the articles about this school and discovered that, although it was a traditional medical school, it took issue with the fact that the older, more famous schools focused too much on surgery.  Its philosphy was that, because surgery is so rarely performed and can be dangerous in cases where "a fever" is present, the daily application of medical care is much more important to be taught.  So, that makes it sound like their school was a lot closer to the botanic one in their ideology.  I also discovered that there was a bit of a controversy over how young one of the instructors was, but the school countered with the argument that many instructors in the famous institutions had never even practiced medicine at all.  From reading the articles, I found two other bits of information that were particularly interesting.

First, the school made a big deal about the fact that they were going to train doctors who could treat diseases and conditions "peculiar to the regions" in which they lived, meaning the South and the frontier.  Also, it emphasized the fact that men from the South would be more comfortable in a Southern school, where abolitionist ideas weren't being pushed.  (It's a perfect example of how early the tensions that led to the Civil War were ramping up.)

What else?  The "public of both sexes" were invited to attend the series of introductory lectures free of charge, so I guess those Southerners were progressive in some of their ideas at least. 

And here is something that might be particularly important to our line of research:  In March of 1849, one article stated that "the low price of cotton and consequent scarcity of money" had "diminished the classes" in most other Southern medical schools.  Although the Memphis Medical College had not yet seen a decline in enrollment, perhaps this situation was the reason that Erasmus Miller Owen never finished formal medical training.  Maybe he completed one term and two years of internship and not only couldn't scrape up the money for another term, but for some reason was also unable to complete a third year of practice under a doctor.  Maybe the hard economic times are what prompted him to move to Texas and explore new opportunities.  It would certainly fit the legend of "Dr. Joe," wouldn't it?  

And, if anyone is still skeptical about the fact that a person could just call themselves a doctor and practice medicine without a degree or license, the Kindly Medicine book says that, because botanic medicine was not accepted by the mainstream medical establishment, and also because its founder was anti-formal education anyway, branches of their professional organization (The Friendly Thomsonian Botanic Society) were encouraged to grant their own "licenses" (which of course were not official licenses), allowing botanic practitioners to become doctors: 

Sample "Family Practitioner" License
from the Friendly Thomsonian Botanic Society
Kindly Medicine, pg 34

I am finding the idea that Erasmus Miller Owen was this sort of doctor more and more believable by the minute.

Other researchers investigating this mystery have also speculated that Erasmus Miller Owen was a practitioner of alternative medicine.  Gail Fail, a fellow Ancestry researcher, wrote:

Erasmus’ obituary says that he “was a Baptist minister and also practiced medicine.” This is interesting, because his grandson Samuel Elias Shults did something similar, calling himself a magnetic masseuse or chiropractor, as did Samuel’s son, my father-in-law Denman Shoultz. Erasmus’ granddaughter Josephine Owen Morrison also claimed to be a chiropractor, an unusual profession for a woman. Both Sam and Josephine were of an age to have learned from their grandfather Erasmus before he died.

The period between about 1860 and 1900 is called the “free trade era” of medicine. There were few requirements for a medical practitioner, and even those men who trained in an actual medical school didn’t know much. Conventional medicine involved purging the body (with emetics and laxatives), bleeding, use of toxic mercury-based medicines, blistering the skin, and other inhumane and useless activities.

During the Civil War, so many men died of botched surgeries or infections, doctors got an even worse reputation.

As a result, hundreds of unlicensed people in America simply called themselves doctors. All of them claimed to be able to cure disease. Generally in the mid to late 1800’s a patient was better off with a gentle, well-meaning but poorly educated healer than with a college educated doctor.

By the 1870’s Americans could choose from many different non-conventional medicinal practices. Some relied on herbs and steam baths. Homeopathy, osteopathy, massage, faith healing, use of therapeutic magnets, chiropractic and naturopathy all emerged. None of these was based on science, but then neither was conventional medicine at that time. I believe that Erasmus and his descendants did more good than harm.

I went through the 1870 census pages for San Saba County line by line, looking at all of the occupations that were reported.  Out of the 192 households, only two people reported their occupation as "Physician."  I am assuming that those two men were "actual" doctors with a medical degree.  Erasmus was not one of those - he reported his occupation as "Minister of the Gospel."  I wonder how many others like him were out there.

During one of those days that I was trying to find something with Google searches, I came across a book called Surviving on the Texas Frontier by Sarah Harkey Hall.  It is the memoir of a woman who grew up in San Saba County, Texas during the time when Erasmus was living and practicing medicine there.  She tells about the death of her mother in 1869:

Surviving on the Texas Frontier (pg 23)

Concerning her own illness a few years later, she recounts:

Surviving on the Texas Frontier (pg 42)

If you read through the book, you will see that, in addition to folk healers like "Mama Brown," there were a whole handful of different "doctors" available in the sparsely populated community.  From the description, some seemed to be doctors in the traditional sense, and others were those who used alternative medicine.  I guess the 1870 census didn't give us a clear picture of what was really going on.

But back to the legend about Erasmus himself.  Where did the idea that he studied medicine in New Orleans come from?  My guess is that that version of the story was adopted by more recent "amateur genealogists."  And by that I mean those of us descendants who look around online (or if they were looking in pre-internet times, who went to county courthouses and the National Archives) trying to fill out a family tree and maybe a family data sheet as well.  Maybe somebody realized that Leon Owen had his information a bit off, and so they looked for the next closest medical school that existed in the late 1840s and came up with New Orleans.  Or maybe that story is post-Ancestry, meaning that they decided to investigate the Dr. Joe thing and did a search for "Joseph Owen" in Tennessee or Texas on Ancestry.com.  I did that, you know, just to cover my bases before deciding that "Joe" was most likely just a quirky nickname.  I got some hits on the tax rolls, but they were in the wrong places.  I got some hits on the census records and city directories in Tennessee, but those were all for years after our Erasmus had left.  I got a Civil War hit, but I looked up the regiment and it was mustered from counties nowhere near San Saba, not to mention that our Erasmus said he joined the Texas Home Guard, not the Confederate Army.

Then, I got a hit from the Mexican American War.  That one was interesting.

Mexican American War Muster Cards for Joseph Owen
Ancestry.com

These muster roll cards show a Joseph Owen who signed up as a volunteer in Nashville in 1846.  He was appointed as a "hospital steward" before mustering out in New Orleans in 1847.  So there you go.  Joseph Owen.  Two years.  Pre-1849.  Medical practitioner.  Nashville and New Orleans.  It checks all of the boxes, right?  Could this be where the more recent version of the Dr. Joe story came from?  And the bigger question - is this Joseph Owen the same man as the one we know as Erasmus Miller Owen?

I don't think so.  In 1846, Erasmus would have been only fourteen years old.  Not necessarily too young to enlist if he lied about his age, but to be appointed hospital steward?  Well actually, a hospital steward is not what it sounds like; it isn't somebody in charge of a field hospital.  It turns out that the hospital steward was just the assistant to the field surgeon, who helped with surgeries and whatnot and administered medications.  Huh.  I guess a fourteen-year old boy could do that.  But, why would our Erasmus have gone to Nashville, 212 miles from home, at fourteen years old to enlist in a war?  That makes even less sense than you might think because:

In the summer of 1846, state officials employed a lottery system to determine who among the overwhelming number of volunteers would serve and who had to return home. Approximately 1,000 men from Middle Tennessee counties formed the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel William Campbell. Volunteers from the western part of the state comprised the Second Tennessee Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel William T. Haskell, while a contingent of dragoons hailed from East Tennessee. (https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/mexican-war/)

Apparently, 2800 men were called for, but 30,000 volunteered.  So not only would Erasmus have had to be chosen in the lottery, but he would have been assigned to the infantry unit for men from the western part of the state, not in the First Regiment, in which the muster cards above show that Joseph Owen served.

Not only that, but if you look at the muster-in and muster-out dates, this person was only enlisted for one year, not the two Erasmus supposedly trained for.  And, as we've seen, he would have been too young to then do a year of medical school in New Orleans after mustering out there.  In addition, we do find some Joseph Owens in Tennessee after this date, so it is much more likely that one of those men was the one in these documents who had returned home after the war.  

So where does that leave us?  If Erasmus' grandson Leon believed that his grandfather had attended medical school, I think it is likely that he had at least some formal training.  At the very least, it could have been that he simply attended the free introductory lectures that were offered at the beginning of each term.  If all three medical schools in Memphis offered such a thing, it is possible that he could have attended 18 lectures for free each fall.  Considering that many "doctors" of the time had no formal training, that might very well have been interpreted as "attending school."  

And, although this medical mystery did not definitively clear up the name question, it offered no evidence to confirm Joseph as Erasmus' given name, so I'm going to lay that question to rest now.  One thing is certain though - if Erasmus' own obituary (which I have not been able to find!  Can anybody help me out with this?) said that he practiced medicine, then I guess that legend can be moved into the "history" category.

                                                                                                                                                - Therese