Delaware Valley Archivists Group

From Margaret: Marriott Morris used the phrase “virtually my diary” to describe a letter to a friend in which he relates thoroughly his daily activities in Bermuda. He and his family conscientiously wrote to one another nearly every day when they ventured from their Germantown homes. Visuals in the form of homemade sketches and commercial postcards enliven the prose. Here are samples from the Papers. Bar Harbor, Maine Stay 1882 Beulah Morris Rhoads (1829-1923), sister of Elliston Perot Morris, wrote and drew her reactions to the resort town of Bar Harbor on Mount Desert Island in Maine one summer. She made the “letterhead” for the following letter to her niece, Elizabeth (“Bessie”) Canby Morris. 1882 Letter from Beulah Morris Rhoads to Bessie Canby Morris Bar Harbor 8 mos. 24th [18]82 My dear Bessie, I was very glad to receive thy letter before leaving home and, thinking that a reply from Mt. Desert would be more interesting to thee, deferred writing till now. This place is entirely different from any of our imaginary pictures of it. We had heard that it was a blending of Mt. and ocean scenery, and so it is, but the choice views are to be gained by drives & boating and then we find all one can desire – meanwhile there is beauty on every side of us – and the little pictures from my chamber window are a constant delight. Our room is a corner room. To the east we look out upon “The landing” where steam boats, row-boats, and canoes & sloops, can be hired at reasonable prices – and, from which point parties are constantly going & returning. At night even the picture is a pretty one for each sloop must hang all night at its head a light which gives a very pretty effect … “The little sketches which is at the top of sheet” is of the view from Green Mountain overlooking the village of Bar Harbor with the Porcupine Islands beyond. Beulah made her own “postcards” by drawing on back of her calling cards. Front of Beulah Morris Rhoads' mock postcard[caption id="attachment_166" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Back of Beulah Morris Rhoads' mock postcard"][/caption]Hotels and cottages at the foot of mountains are visible in this sketch made for “Sister Martha” of the “View seen from our South window, Bar Harbor, 8, 1882 – Green and Newport Mountains.” Home was not far from her mind: the cottages’ “Swiss and English” styles reminded her of Bryn Mawr. European Honeymoon, 1897 After a lengthy relationship which initially Jane Rhoads wished to remain a friendship, she and Marriott Morris were married in Germantown and then made the European “Grand Tour.” Jane’s desire to update her family regularly preyed upon her mind as evidenced in her message on this anthropomorphized Matterhorn postcard: 1897 Matterhorn Postcard In sight of the above – Aug. 2nd ‘97 It is hopeless to attempt to write just now, I am days behind. We don’t have dinner til 7 wh[ich] leaves no time. We are in the Alps — at the top of Gemmi Pass. [H]ave walked 12 or 14 mi. up today & spend tomorrow a.m. on a glacier starting at 5 a.m. Beautiful here! JRM Her next missive speaks of how she and Marriott — joined to other travelers and their guide by ropes around their waists — climbed the glacier. She bravely says that the footing was safe “if you do not go into deep cracks.” On the descent, they sat down “as if on a toboggan” and slid on the slick surface at some places. They picked edelweiss to testify to their “Alpine climbing experience.” National Tragedy at Exposition, 1901 Bessie Morris traveled with fellow Society of Mayflower Descendent members to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. A highlight was to be a banquet of the Society the evening of 6 September 1901. After one day of “doing the Pan,” she heard about the shooting of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz at the Exhibition that very day. Her opening paragraph – a run-on sentence — in the letter to her family the next day conveys her shock: I scarcely know where to begin so much has happened since we left home, and we are all in a tremble with this terrible attack on the President had it not been that the Mayflower banquet [that] came last evening and we were resting up for it, we too would have been in the crowd at Music Hall yesterday and might have been crushed, and not only th[at] but the papers say that the trolley cars coming in from the grounds were stopped by the mobs but no one was hurt. She sent the Society banquet menu to her parents: Banquet Menu, 1901 …and wrote that she wished to be taking a refreshing dip in the ocean at the family summer home in New Jersey. President McKinley died 14 September. From Dana: In many ways, these examples of travel correspondence are quite diverse—as we read Beulah’s peaceful contemplation, Jane’s happy exhaustion, and Bessie’s excited anxiety, we see individuals traveling to different places with different purposes and experiencing different emotions.  Taken together, however, these letters can help us to understand a bit more of what it was like to be an American traveler at the turn of the nineteenth century.  During this era, why did people travel and what did they hope to find on their journeys? Many nineteenth century travelers went forth with the desire to experience the beauty of the natural world, perhaps in response to their increasingly mechanized society.  In Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century, John F. Sears writes that “travel writers wrote disapprovingly of the American obsession with utilitarianism.  Tourism, they hoped, would encourage a greater regard for beauty and for the leisure to enjoy it,” (8).  People feared that a sense of awe was somehow being lost in the clash of industrialism, and experiencing the beauty of the natural world was one way to recapture that emotion. Even in these short excerpts from Morris family correspondence, this focus on the importance of beauty and scenery is evident—Beulah Morris Rhoads’ note that “there is beauty on every side of us,” and Jane Rhoads Morris’ breathless exclamation, “Beautiful here!” both speak to this phenomenon. Bessie Morris’ letter from the 1901 Pan-American Exposition, while understandably overshadowed by the tragedy of President McKinley’s assassination, may also be connected to this awe for scenery.  The Pan-American Exposition’s location in Buffalo, New York was chosen in part for its proximity to Niagara Falls—one of America’s preeminent tourist attractions, then and now.  The Niagara Falls represented true beauty, a connection to the sublime, and even, for some tourists, a kind of religious experience (Sears 13).  Travel guides of the period often reflected the importance of the search for beauty.  For example, a passage in F. H. Johnson’s 1863 Guide to Niagara Falls and its Scenery, describes a run of rapids near the Falls with language evocative of the sublime: “These are grand and impressive; thousands, in the summer season, particularly when the sky is clear, stand upon this bridge, and gaze upon the angry flood as it rushes past them in all its wild and tumultuous fury, filling the mind with emotions of awe and indescribable grandeur.  Let the visitor look up the rapids as far as the eye can extend; the river appears very much like the ocean dashing upon the beach after a gale,” (7). While this search for the sublime may have described travelers the world over, it took on a special meaning for Americans, especially when visiting natural attractions like Niagara Falls or Yellowstone National Park.  Sears writes that “from the beginning, Americans had sought their identity in their relationship to the land they settled,” (4).  As a young nation without the cathedrals, ruins, and castles of Europe, American equated the natural history of the land with their history as a nation.  By visiting these wonders of the natural world, Americans would help to formulate a national identity for generations to come.  While many Americans continued to travel to Europe, as evidenced by Marriott and Jane Morris’ European honeymoon, by the end of the nineteenth century American travelers were being exhorted to “See America First!”  This movement, which is described in detail in Marguerite S. Shaffer’s See America First: Tourism and National Identity, depicted tourism as an American’s patriotic duty, an exercise that would formulate them into better citizens and increase national pride.     Focus on scenery may have also bolstered the popularity of postcards during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards, authors Christraud Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb refer to the turn of the century as “the golden age of the postcard,” (5).  More widely varied tourist destinations, advances in printing, and the cumbersome nature of cameras all helped to make postcards a popular option for travelers.  As Jane Rhoads Morris’ postcard of the Matterhorn and Beulah Morris Rhoads’ mock postcard of Bar Harbor show, travelers were eager to share with their families all the beautiful things they had seen on their journeys.