30 August 1871 • Elmira, N.Y. (MS: Franke, UCCL 00648)
I wish your note had arrived a day sooner, & then it would haugh Ⓐemendation have caught Ma, Pamela & Annie here. They left yesterday for their home in Fredonia, N. Y. I will forward the note to them. My wife & I came down here some five months ago to visit my wife’s mother, & have never been able to get home since. First my wife lay sick three months, & now our child has been ill two months. To-day its life is almost despaired of.3explanatory note
Pamela has been here some time at the Water Cure, for her health is very bad. But Ma is hearty. She has been visiting Orion at Hartford, Conn., (where I put him last year in an editorial position under my publisher). I found her in Hartford, & was surprised to see how hale & hearty she is getting.
Every time I am in New York or Boston I try to remember & get some photographs taken, but always fail. I doubt if there is a small-sized picture on hand, but think I have some large ones at the house. Will look as soon as I go up.4explanatory note
And I will go now, inasmuch as my errand is done & I have found the doctor.5explanatory note
With the warm regards of an unworthy but exceedingly well-meaning Cousin—
Mrs. Samℓ. E. Smith | Fort Smith Ford | Sugar Loaf. 6explanatory note Ark. return address: return to mcintyre coal company, elmira, n. y., if not delivered within 10 days . postmarked: elmira n.y. sep 1
The McIntyre Coal Company, established in 1870, was a bituminous coal subsidiary of J. Langdon and Company, formed in partnership with William K. and Cornelius Vanderbilt, “who were engaged in an urgent search for fuel coal for the steam locomotives of the New York Central Railroad which they controlled.” Mining operations were based in Ralston and McIntyre, in Lycoming County, Pennsylvania, but offices were at 6 Baldwin Street in Elmira, along with the parent company. By mid-November 1870, Charles J. Langdon, who had been the secretary of the McIntyre company under his father, became its president, with John D. F. Slee later assuming the vice-presidency. The company’s “large scale operations” included the building of “a village with 300 small homes, a school, a church, and several small business establishments. For 16 years, mining was carried on with an annual output of over 200,000 tons moving by rail to destinations in New York and Canada” (Jervis Langdon, Jr., 10–11; Boyd and Boyd, 17, 156; CJL to SLC, 15 Nov 70, CU-MARK; 15 June 74 to Brown, NN-B).
Ella Trabue (Mrs. Samuel E.) Smith was Clemens’s second cousin (her mother, Mary Paxton Trabue, was Jane Clemens’s first cousin). In the late 1880s Clemens assisted her financially on at least one occasion. The note which elicited this response has not been found (Selby, 14, 41, 42, 143; Smith to SLC, 26 Sept 88, CU-MARK).
The crisis had brought Clemens from Hartford on 29 or 30 August.
If Clemens enclosed a photograph, it does not survive with the letter. He apparently had exhausted his supply of the photographic cartes de visite he had taken in Buffalo and Washington in 1870 (20? May 70 to Paigeclick to open link; 8 July 70 to OLCclick to open link).
Presumably Clemens was waiting at the office until a J. Langdon and Company employee found the doctor. The closest doctor was Henry Sayles, the Langdon family’s friend and Jervis Langdon’s former physician, at 35 Baldwin Street (Boyd and Boyd, 188).
The revision of the address is in an unidentified hand.
MS facsimile. The editors have not seen the MS, which was owned by Mrs. Paul W. Franke in 1982.
L4 , 451–452.
Until 1972, the MS was owned by Mrs. Franke’s mother, who provided a photocopy to CU-MARK in 1967, courtesy of Claude S. Brinegar.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.