The Angel of Grief

The Angel of Grief by William Wetmore Story is one of the most evocative stone carvings of the late nineteenth century. It became so famous that the term has become synonymous with many grave stones erected in Story’s style. William Wetmore Story was born in 1819 in Boston, educated at Harvard and his father was Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story. A child of privilege; as his life developed he was surrounded by influential people like Robert Browning, Thackeray, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hans Christian Anderson, Henry James, and James Russell Lowell. William had a successful law career and was a published poet and essayist, but also pursued sculpture as a hobby. The hobby took on new meaning in 1845, when he was commissioned to execute a monument in memory of his father. This commission combined with a bout of typhoid fever caused Story to leave his law practice and pursue sculpting full time.

William W. Story ca. 1885

In the 1850s, Story moved his family to Rome where he completed one of his most famous works, Cleopatra, in 1858. With this statue, he moved American sculpture toward a new romanticism that combined realism and psychological drama that proved to be in sync with the Victorian tastes of the day. Pope Pius IX so admired Cleopatra that the Roman government paid all shipping costs in order to exhibit it in 1862 at the Roman Court of the International Exposition in London, where it made Story's reputation.

William Story married the love of his life Emelyn Eldredge in 1843. Together they had three accomplished children and their home in Rome became world famous for its hospitality. Their hospitality was helped by the fact that their “home” was a forty room apartment in the Barberini Palace, one of the most important examples of Baroque architecture in Rome. It was begun in 1625 and built according to the desires of Urban VIII, the Barberini pope.

Among the world famous guests who visited Mr. and Mrs. Story were Lew and Susan Wallace. The Wallaces visited the Barberini Palace in 1883, and the two couples developed a significant friendship. In a letter Anne Hampton Brewer, who was in attendance when the Wallaces were visiting the Palace, wrote “how the General literally charmed us all last evening at Mr. Story’s with his brilliant conversation. It is so seldom that a fine writer is a fine talker.”

In 1884, William Story penned a letter to: My Dear Mrs. Ben-Hur. In this letter Story noted how touched he had been by a letter from Susan Wallace and he apologized for his delay in responding. He blamed his delay on the desire to finish reading Ben-Hur before writing. He said that with all of the interruptions of his life he just could not find time for the book until he and his wife decided to read the story aloud to each other. They developed a deep and sustained interest in the vivid prose and both felt great regret as they finished the last page.

The relationship continued through letters between the families. In 1886, Mrs. Story wrote in a long letter to Susan Wallace: “Many a time, impatient of the silence which has come between us, have I wished to break it on my side, but so vague was my knowledge of your whereabouts that I was frightened about launching into infinite space my little skiff. Your most kind letter came and helps me to find you out. . . . The book of books [Ben-Hur] of this age read aloud for the second time has lost none of its rare charm and it is beyond words to say how greatly we prize it. All our English friends to whom we have introduced it join in this chorus and its reputation is fast growing there as in America. . . . I do not like you to think that being snugly settled in your old home, ‘outre mer,’ we are not likely soon to see you in Rome, but we cling to the hope that it is not impossible. . . .How pleasant had we hope of seeing you there [Plazzo Barberini] this winter, I do not like to wait too long for my good things, but am impatient in my old age to snatch them up lest the escape me altogether.”

Angel of Grief created by William W. Story
to mark the grave of his wife.

When Susan wrote her book, Along the Bosphorus, she wrote warmly of William Story, describing him as one of the finest people she had ever known. She went on to say “Of the friends we left in Rome, Story was among the last to join the silent majority. The loss of the wife of his youth whom he survived but a year, was a bitter blow, and with her passed his interest in affairs. It was only when his children suggested that he should make a monument to her memory that he consented to resume work: the design he chose was the Angel of Grief and it is wrought to exquisite finish, . . When this was done he left the studio never to return. The illness which began shortly afterward was long and severe. Soon he was forced to stay almost continually in his room, and strength waned till time became a burden too grievous to be borne. His best lover would not have held him back from the unseen land of which he wrote so tenderly.” Story died in October of 1895, just a year after the death of Emelyn. The monument he created for her marks their graves in Rome and became one of the most powerful and touching illustrations of love and loss in the Victorian era.

Sources

Letter from Anne Hampton Brewer to Susan Wallace, March 11, 1883
Articles by Joann Spragg, Journal Review, August 18, 2000 & September 21, 2000
Susan Wallace, Along the Bosphorus, Rand McNally & Co., New York & Chicago, 1898.

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum celebrates and renews belief in the power of the individual spirit to affect American history and culture.

Exhibiting Excellence: Challenges to Finishing a Museum Exhibit

Associate Director: Collections
Amanda McGuire places exhibit text

Last week, I posted about how a museum exhibit is built. Associate Director of Collections Amanda McGuire took some time to talk with me about what goes into choosing an exhibit theme and content. Today, I'd like to tell you all a little more about the challenges we face when we're preparing our exhibit.

What are some of the challenges you encounter when putting together an exhibit?

Anything and everything.  Sometimes you have too much information, sometimes not enough.  Sometimes you can’t find artifacts to help tell the story and sometimes it is hard to decide what to leave out.  We print a lot of things in house and technology doesn’t always cooperate when you need it.

We have also had guest curators in the past.  In 2009, for the exhibit “Embattled”, Gail Stephens wrote the text.  She has studied Wallace’s military career extensively and wrote the book “Shadow of Shiloh” so who better to write the exhibit text on Wallace’s military experiences

Do you only use artifacts that belong to the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum collection?

No.  We use as much of our own collection as we can but it is very limited so we often look to other individuals or institutions for loans.  We have borrowed items from the Ramsey Archives at Wabash College in the past and last year we borrowed some items from Wallace Scholar Roger Adams.  We do not have any artifacts relating to Wallace’s time in Cincinnati in 1862 and that was a big part of our exhibit last year so we knew we needed to have some objects to help tell that part of the story.  Roger graciously loaned us several items that helped fill the gap left by our collection.  This year we borrowed a jacket and kepi that belonged to Henry Wallace as a young boy from the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.  One of the curators there attended a meeting here and told our Director about the items in their collection.  When we decided to do the exhibit about the family, we knew this was something that we wanted to include because we really don’t have a lot of objects related to Henry.  Our Associate Director: Collections got in touch with the curator and started the process of obtaining the loan.

Are there challenges related to the amount of space or the shape of the exhibit room?

Of course!  There is no straight wall in the carriage house so it is hard to get the exhibit cases level and the labels to appear straight on the walls.  The large exhibit case only has two places that it can sit and be level (this year is actually the first time it will be in a different location) so that limits how we can display items as well as the flow of the exhibit.  If you use a level to hang the labels or the large acrylic quotes, they look incredibly crooked due to the slope of the ceiling so it all has to be done by eye and what looks straight instead of what actually is straight.

What factors do you have to take into consideration when planning an exhibit?

You have to think about how much space you have, where artifacts and labels can go to make the exhibit flow well and how to tell the story in an interesting way. Another important factor is the balance of artifacts and text. Visitors at a museum learn from the information on labels, but an artifact can often convey more emotional impact than text, so it's important to have a good balance.

What are some challenges that occurred specifically with “Generations”?

World War I US Marine Corps
uniform belonging to Tee

We didn’t know a whole lot about some of the family members.  At first we didn’t know how we were going to talk about everyone.  It looked like it was just going to be biographies about everyone but that is kind of boring.  After doing some more research we found that there were a lot of similarities so we decided to explore those more.  Making the connection of shared characteristics with Lew and Susan tied the exhibit together.  Once we figured that out it was a little easier to focus the research and ask the family the right questions.  We also did not have a lot of artifacts for some people.  We have a lot of stuff related to Lew’s grandson Tee but it is all centered on his military career.  We barely have any artifacts related to Henry (other than his photographs) and his other son Lew Jr.  Some members of the family like Josephine and Lew III, we had never seen pictures of or only had baby photos.  Members of the Wallace family were kind enough to scan some for us to use in the exhibit.

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Our exhibit officially opens tomorrow, so be sure to stop in and check it out! We're also running a Facebook check-in special to kick off our exhibit opening. If you visit, make sure you check in on Facebook to receive a 10% discount on all gift shop purchases!

International Women's Day

"The destiny of the whole race is comprised of four things:

Religion, education, morals, politics.

Woman is a religious being; she is becoming educated;

she has a high code of morals; she will yet purify politics."

- from "Women's Ballot a Necessity for the Permanence of Free Institutions"

by Zerelda Sanders Wallace, 1887

Today is International Women's Day, celebrated since the early 1900s to mark achievements and milestones for women around the world. While Lew Wallace died before the idea took root, he might have liked the idea of such an event, since he was raised by a strong woman and married another.

Zerelda Gray Sanders gained an education in medicine by accompanying her father on his frontier physician rounds. When her family moved to Indianapolis in 1830, they became charter members of the Central Christian Church, where she got an early taste for temperance and suffrage ideologies. In 1836, Zerelda married Lew's father, David Wallace, and became a stepmother to three, later raising six of her own children.

She became the first president of the Indiana chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. As a result of being met with "open contempt" by the male legislators of the Indiana State Senate, she became, at age 56, a crusader for women's suffrage. She traveled around the nation, working alongside such leaders as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lew wrote of her, "In all the states of the Union...there are good people who know and speak of her as Mother Wallace, sweet-tongued apostle of temperance and reform."

She died without being able to cast a ballot, but she was a driving influence on the American suffrage movement. She provides an excellent example for women today.

Exhibiting Excellence: How a Museum Exhibit is Built

We are all getting excited about our upcoming exhibit. "Generations: The Descendants of Lew and Susan Wallace" opens to the public Tuesday, March 12. If you visited us today, you would find the Lynne D. Holhbein Education Room mostly empty, which just a handful of vinyl labels and an artifact or two. But show up on March 12 and you'll find a full-fledged exhibit!

Since this is my first time behind the scenes of putting together a museum exhibit, I was fascinated by the process behind putting an exhibit together, and wanted to give you all a behind-the-scenes look at how we put together the story you'll see in a couple of weeks.

How do you decide on a theme for an exhibit? Is it done by the whole staff or a single person?

It is usually a staff decision.  We talk about what we have done recently and what questions we get frequently from visitors.  Sometimes the exhibit decides itself.  For example, in 2010 when the Study was closed for renovation, we still wanted visitors to see the iconic pieces of the Study and still be able to tell Lew Wallace’s story without them actually going into the Study.  That led to us doing the exhibit “Sanctuary”.

Right now we are in the middle of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, so last year it made sense to talk about what Lew was doing in 1862 since that was big year in the war for him.  He really didn’t do a lot as far as the Civil War goes in 1863, so we decided to take a year off from talking about the war. We wanted to focus on the rest of his family because that is something visitors frequently ask about, and we wanted to learn more about them as well.

What factors are involved in deciding what the exhibit should focus on?

It helps to already know something about the topic.  Even if we don’t have a lot of information to begin with, as long as we have a starting point, we can usually fill in the rest later.  We also have to think about what artifacts we have to go along with the exhibit topic.  Objects sometimes tell a better story than what we can do through exhibit labels. If we don’t have artifacts in our collection, is there somewhere or someone out there that does have them?

We also have to think about how big of a story it is.  We have a very small exhibit room so we have space limitations to deal with.  No one wants to stand in that room for an hour reading exhibit text, so we need to be able to tell the story we want to tell in a short and concise way that is interesting.

What is the research process for an exhibit?

We always have an exhibit fact sheet for each exhibit.  This tells us the logistics of who is responsible for what, what the budget is, who the audience is, what the thesis of the exhibit is and what impression we want visitors to walk away with.  This really guides where our research should go and what we want to tell our visitors.

Research often starts a year or two before we actually install an exhibit.  We start with what we know and what has already been written about that topic.  Sometimes we have interns who have already researched and written up papers on it. An intern last summer researched Lew Wallace and the Henry Wirz trial and wrote up a paper on it.  We will start with this when we plan our exhibit for next year.  

We also look at Lew’s own words about a subject by looking at his autobiography.  That usually leads to more information or even more questions that need to be answered.  We have a group of Wallace scholars that are always willing to answer questions.  You never know where you are going to find an answer to a question. 

Our Associate Director: Education (Erin Gobel) often does research on the internet and ends up finding some obscure piece of information completely unrelated to her original search.  We always file these away so we have them when we need them.  The Indiana Historical Society has a huge collection of Lew Wallace material so we usually look to see what information they have as well.  For this year’s exhibit, Amanda and Erin spent a day looking through records to find out more about the Wallace family.

Who picks the artifacts that are used in an exhibit? How do you make those decisions?

This is usually done by the Associate Director: Collections (Amanda McGuire) with input from the rest of the staff.  She looks through the collections records and compiles a list of artifacts that are relevant to the exhibit subject and shares that with the staff.  Then it is a matter of logistics and what makes sense.  There are some things that are just too big to fit in our exhibit cases.  Often times these are items that are already on display in the Study so we just make sure to point them out on tours and relate them back to the exhibit. 

If something is in really poor condition, we try not to put it out on exhibit.  If we can, we make a replica to display instead.  This is often done with photographs or letters.  We also try to avoid putting the same things on exhibit year after year.  When we talk about the Civil War again next year we will try to have different items on display than we had out last year.

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Stay tuned for the next post in our series on exhibits, when we'll talk about some of the challenges we face when putting an exhibit together!

Wallace, Trustin Kinder & the Battle of Buena Vista

“A victory so great, so unprecedentedly glorious, could not have been purchased without loss on our side. Among the 700 heroes who were slain and wounded on that bloody day we who knew him from infancy have to mourn the death of Captain Kinder. Poor Truss. The glory which shall forever shine upon the field which was thy deathbed, which shall reflect luster upon thy name and fate, is but sorry consolation for the loss this death inflicts upon his country and friends. Peace, though, to his name. When we reach Saltillo we will mark his resting place and save it from obliteration and disrespect.”
Lew Wallace, age 20, writing to his “Friend Chapman” on March 12, 1847 regarding the Battle of Buena Vista fought on February 23, 1847.

Lew Wallace about the time he served
in the Mexican War

Trustin Kinder, Truss to his friends, was born in 1822 and grew up in Indianapolis. He graduated from Asbury College (DePauw University) in 1845. He returned to Indianapolis, but soon moved to Paoli, the county seat for Orange County, where he practiced law. In letters back home to friends in Indianapolis, he described Paoli as “. . .a very pretty little town of about six hundred inhabitants who are very kind and clever people. The scenery around the town is delightful. Indeed, it is quite romantic and I am inclined to think that if I was given to writing poetry that it would be an admirable location. But my genius not inclining that way, I just stand and look out and think upon the subject.”

When the Mexican-American War broke out, he volunteered for service and was voted First Lieutenant of Company B, 2nd Indiana Regiment of Volunteers. Kinder was a talented young lawyer and a gifted speaker. In support of the war, he delivered a speech of considerable length and great strength declaring that he “. . . would leave his bones to bleach on the sunny plains of Mexico rather that see his country’s flag dishonored and trailed in the dust.”

By the fall of 1846, Kinder’s letters were being posted from distant locations like Camp Belknap in Texas and Monterey in Mexico. On January 1, 1847 he wrote his parents to wish them a happy new year from a camp near Saltillo, Mexico. He detailed the march to the new encampment, the countryside, and some of the skirmishes that had raised excitement in the area. In letters Kinder also discussed activities of Lt. Governor Paris Dunning who was serving in Mexico but was also engaging in personal business that brought him financial gain such as selling liquor to soldiers at exorbitant prices. Kinder’s charges were quickly reported in Hoosier newspapers and created a stir but Kinder and other officers stood by the comments.

By early February of 1847, Kinder’s letters are reflecting increased fighting between the Mexicans and Americans. He also noted that members of Congress who were not supporting the war effort were doing a favor to the Mexicans noting that “In fifteen years they will deny their opposition to this war. They had better back out in time to save their credit, if they have any to save.” Finally, he wrote that rumors were afloat that reinforcements would be arriving and his regiment might be headed home in early April.

News of the Battle at Buena Vista did not reach Indianapolis for almost a month after the fighting on February 22 & 23. Although Lew Wallace’s letter was written just two weeks after the battle, with slow mail delivery, it did not reach home for several more weeks. In the Battle, General Zachary Taylor with 4,600 men faced Mexican General Santa Anna with over 15,000 men. During the fighting, the 2nd Indiana was given orders to retreat and some men left the field of battle in confusion leading Taylor and his son-in-law Jefferson Davis to later accuse them of cowardice. Kinder was wounded in battle and placed in an ambulance wagon. As the wagon was leaving the field it overturned when it fell into a shallow ravine. Before it could be righted it was attacked by Mexican lancers who killed and robbed Kinder. Although Taylor was considered victorious at Buena Vista, it was a hard fought and bloody win.

On April 5, the Indiana State Sentinel published a lengthy tribute to Trustin Kinder, saying in part: “. . . It is not for us to tell the merits of the departed one—for many know him, and many a weeping eye and heavy heart responded to the news that the open and noble-souled Kinder was gone.”

Kinder was buried in Mexico, but in an unusual effort his elderly father travelled to Mexico and in June made arrangements for the body to be shipped back to Indiana. It was announced that a procession would be formed at the Palmer House (hotel) which would proceed to the city limits to meet the remains and escort them to the Orange County Courthouse. After a short time in Paoli, the body was removed to Indianapolis.

Until the death of Oliver P. Morton in 1877, the funeral was the largest seen in Indianapolis and included a lengthy procession from the Kinder home to the State House Square where the body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda on July 12, 1847. A funeral train under military escort then took the body to the City Cemetery in Indianapolis. Kinder was considered the first war hero from Indianapolis and was the only casualty from the capital city to be returned from Mexico. His mother had the body moved to Crown Hill Cemetery in the fall of 1864 shortly after Crown Hill was established. This made Trustin Kinder the first man to die in service of his country to be interred in Crown Hill.

The Battle of Buena Vista affected Wallace deeply. He quit his father’s Whig party and joined the Democrats because of his contempt for the comments made by General Taylor, a leading Whig, regarding the actions of the 2nd Indiana. In 1861, Wallace served as adjutant general for Indiana at the outbreak of the Civil War. After barely two weeks of service with his initial mission accomplished Wallace resigned and Governor Oliver P. Morton placed Wallace in command of the 11th Indiana Volunteer Infantry regiment as its colonel.



Harper's Weekly image of Lew Wallace and his
11th Indiana Volunteers at the Indiana State House
in May of 1861 swearing to "Remember Buena Vista!"

 Before the regiment left Indianapolis, Colonel Wallace had his men march to the Indiana State House, where he had them kneel and swear an oath to avenge their comrades whom Wallace believed had been unjustly accused of cowardice at the Battle of Buena Vista by none other than Jefferson Davis. Wallace had his regiment take as its battle cry: “Remember Buena Vista!” This stirring scene was captured in a full-page illustration by the influential magazine Harper’s Weekly and circulated nationwide. Although Kinder was not singled out by Wallace at the time, he certainly would have reflected on his friend killed fourteen years earlier who had been lauded in the press as one whose “. . . memory will forever live; for he was of the number who nurtured the rose around which our affections twine—and who by his frank and noble nature secured the love of all with whom he daily walked.”

Thanks: Sharon Gerow for flagging Wallace’s letter in a book during her inventory of Wallace’s library.
www.griffingweb.com/trustin_brown_kinder.htm, Crown Hill Heritage Foundation

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum celebrates and renews belief in the power of the individual spirit to affect American history and culture.

Employee Appreciation Day, Lew Wallace Style

Today is Employee Appreciation Day! If you're a manager, take a moment to say thank you to your staff. If you're an employee who hasn't received appreciation today...take heart. Even the great Lew Wallace didn't always receive thanks for his brilliant job performance.

As he wrote in his autobiography:

There can be no question, I think, that my services were fully appreciated except in Washington and the executive office in Indianapolis. Acknowledgements pour in upon me from every quarter save the two, silencing my detractors, especially such of them as had made light of the danger and my methods of meeting it and the other set who had sought to displace me.

General U.S. Grant, in particular, was less than appreciative of Lew's services, largely because of their misunderstanding at the Battle of Shiloh. It wasn't until the end of Grant's life that he acknowledged his condemnation of Lew might have been mistaken.

Regardless of official appreciation during the Civil War, Lew went on to do great things, including serving as a territorial governor, receiving several patents, and writing the best-selling novel of all time.

1895 Speaking Tour

On October 14, 1895, a local news item announced that a lecture bureau out East had arranged for a lecture tour. Lew Wallace was named as one of the important people to be a part of this tour. The tour was unusual because of the diversity of the assembled speakers. In addition to Lew Wallace, the speakers included Max O’Rell, C.E. Borchgrevick, and Robert E. Peary. Each of these men was considered a “hot topic” of the day. The diversity came with the two others named to the tour—a woman, Rose G. Kingsley and an African American, Booker T. Washington. The details of the tour are not specified, but it is clear Lew Wallace was a highly sought after speaker to be included with this group.


Max O’Rell was born Leon Pierre Blouet in Normandy in 1847. He moved to Paris at the age of 12 and eventually graduated from the conservatoire and the collège in Paris and went on to take a B.A. degree in 1865 and a B.Sc. in 1866 at the Sorbonne. After 1866, he enrolled at the École Militaire which he left in 1869 with the rank of lieutenant in the French artillery, spending five months in Algeria and, after a short stay in the Versailles garrison, was called up to fight in the Franco-Prussian War. Wallace surely would have found this military career fascinating.

Max O'Rell

Blouet left France and secured a position teaching French at the prestigious St. Paul’s London boys’ school. Like Lew Wallace, he wrote on the side, but unlike Lew he published his works under a pseudonym in an effort to protect his teaching position. He published a book of sketches and observations about England under the name Max O’Rell that gave an overview of English customs, peculiarities, and institutions. He discussed everything from British colonial ambitions to the Anglo-Saxon concept of home. His book went through 57 editions within two years, eventually selling 275,000 copies in England and over 200,000 in America.

In 1885, he resigned his teaching post and began working full time as an author and lecturer. In seven lecture tours—including the one announced in 1895, he spoke over 2,600 times. Earlier in 1895, O’Rell and Mark Twain had a heated exchange about French morals that the world press documented even hinting at a physical altercation between the two men. Although he fell out of the limelight later in life, to American and British audiences, O'Rell served as a reference for everything French and he had great impact on public discussions of political, social and cultural matters. He continues to be of particular interest to cultural historians studying the presentation of gender roles.

C.E. Borchrevick

C.E. Borchgrevick was a famed Anglo-Norwegian explorer of the Antarctic. At the time of the 1895 announcement he had just returned from a Norwegian whaling expedition, from which he brought back a collection of the first specimens of vegetable life from within the Antarctic Circle. Like Lew Wallace, Borchgrevick was child with a restless nature and a passion for adventure. Born in Norway, he studied forestry in Germany and worked in Australia for four years, where he became interested in polar exploration. His first expedition to Antarctica came in 1894. On August 1, 1895 just weeks before he was hired for the lecture circuit, he addressed the Royal Geographical Society in London announcing plans to develop a research station that would overwinter in Antarctica. His enthusiastic but brusque presentation did not result in financial support from the Royal Geographical Society so he used the 1895 lecture circuit to raise both awareness of and funding for continued polar expeditions. He continued his explorations for years including some to the Caribbean for the National Geographic Society.

Robert Peary

Perhaps to balance Borchgrevick and Antarctica, the 1895 selection of speakers included Robert Peary who was an explorer at the other end of the world. Peary’s explorations that would ultimately take him to the North Pole in 1909 began in the mid-1880s with trips over Greenland’s ice caps in an effort to determine whether or not Greenland was an island. His explorations captured the public imagination throughout the 1890s and turn of the twentieth century.

Rose G. Kingsley (no image available) was famous first as the daughter of the Reverend Charles Kingsley, Canon of Westminster in the 1870s and widely known at the time as a professor, historian and novelist. Perhaps his most famous work was a tale about a chimney sweep entitled The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (1863). Retaining its popularity well into the 20th century, the story demonstrated his concern for social reform and dealt with the scientific debate over human origins, as Kingsley was one of the first influential religious leaders to embrace Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. With a curious and learned father, it was no surprise that Rose Kingsley was an adventurous spirit.

Rose moved from England to Colorado Springs in 1871, just one year after it was founded. For a young woman raised in affluence, life on the frontier was challenging, but Rose soon helped establish the Fountain Colony Club for natural sciences which served as a vehicle to counter some of the rougher elements on the frontier. She soon began her own writing career with her book South and West which was published in London in 1874 and detailed her experiences in Colorado and New Mexico. The book was illustrated with sketches of local scenes drawn by Rose and hers are the first sketches made of Colorado Springs. By the 1890s, Rose was gaining notice for her books on nature and gardening.

The final speaker listed in the 1895 lecture program was Booker T. Washington. As the newspaper notice said: “The world is moving very rapidly these days, when an eloquent and brainy negro is named in the same list with eloquent and brainy white men as platform favorites.” Washington was born into slavery but went on to become an educator, author, fund-raiser, orator, and advisor to Republican presidents. As the first leader of Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, he became the dominant leader in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 until his death in 1915.

Booker T. Washington

Although much respected and admired, Washington was not without controversy. In October 1895, when he was included in the lecture bureau, he was in the news for his Atlanta Exposition speech delivered at the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition. This speech, delivered just four weeks earlier in September, was viewed as a revolutionary presentation at the time it was delivered. Although the Exposition was opened by President Grover Cleveland, it was and still is best remembered for Washington’s speech.

In this speech he advocated a “go slow” approach to integration to avoid a white backlash and emphasized the need for blacks to concentrate all their energies on industrial education, accumulation of wealth, and conciliation with the leadership of the South. He thought these skills would lay the foundation for the creation of stability that the African-American community required in order to move forward. He believed that in the long term "blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens." His approach advocated for an initial step toward equal rights, rather than full equality under the law. Ultimately this philosophy would put him at odds with many in the black community who felt disenfranchised and placed in subordinate roles in society.

Each of these speakers announced in the 1895 lecture tour was either at or approaching the pinnacles of their respective careers. Their names were widely known and their topics would have been of great interest. Given his broad personal interests Wallace would have certainly appreciated the opportunity to travel with and privately discuss the pressing issues of the day with this distinguished group. While Wallace was widely recognized as a gifted speaker, it is intriguing to wonder if sharing the stage with some of these other gifted orators inspired him to install the roll-out full length mirror in his Study that was under construction in 1895, so that he could practice his speeches and refine his presentations.

The General Lew Wallace Study & Museum celebrates and renews belief in the power of the individual spirit to affect American history and culture.