Gene Stratton-Porter Live at the Indiana History Center

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Thank you, Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. We are
recording this episode live at the Indiana History Center, and

(00:22):
I'm figuring out the best place to put my papers,
which I thought I had figured out earlier. One of
the current exhibits that's running here until October twenty sixth
of this year, twenty twenty four, is called Limberlost and Found,
and it's about Jean Stratton Porter. She was one of
the best selling authors in the United States in the

(00:43):
first quarter of the twentieth century, and an illustrator and
a nature photographer and a naturalist and a film producer,
so so many things we are going to be talking about,
among other things in this episode, farm life and the
world of nineteenth century naturalists. So there's gonna be some

(01:05):
harm to animals that comes up in this episode. This
is stuff that Jean Strattonporter was trying to prevent. Also,
I didn't write this on the outline, but you know,
we're in in Indiana and probably there are folks in
the room that are very fond of Jean Strattonporter. If
you don't know about the books that she was writing

(01:25):
in California, brace for that part of today's episode. Not
all was awesome. That's okay though, Yeah so yeah, But
there's plenty of fun so. Geneva Grace Stratton was born
on August seventeenth, eighteen sixty three, on a farm in
Wabash County, Indiana. Her parents were Mark and Mary Stratton,

(01:49):
and she was their twelfth child. She was born six
years after the birth of her next oldest sibling, when
her mother was forty seven and her father was fifty.
Little bit of a surprise baby. They really thought they
were done having children before she came along. Here is
how her father described her mother about the time they
got married, which I find lovely. A quote, ninety pound

(02:13):
bit of pink porcelain pink is a wild rose, plump
as a partridge, having a big rope of bright brown hair,
never ill a day in her life, and bearing the
loveliest name ever given a woman, Mary. He also said
that God had fashioned her heart to be gracious, her
body to be the mother of children, and as her

(02:36):
special gift of grace, he put flower magic into her
fingers and that flower magic, of course, was a green thumb,
and both of her parents, both Mary and Mark, really
loved nature and art. May we all have such things
written about us. It's a right, I'm so sweet. But
Mark's description of his wife wasn't entirely true regarding her health.
By the time their youngest daughter was a toddler, Mary

(02:59):
contracted while nursing some of the children through it, and
she was chronically ill for the rest of her life
as a consequence. So Geneva's care and upbringing were left
mostly to her father and her older siblings, who I
said that oddly like I was choking. I'm fine. Her
father was a farmer and a minister, and at least
until it was time for Geneva to start school, this

(03:20):
upbringing was simultaneously very religiously devout and also kind of haphazard.
So later on, Jeane herself described it this way quote
By the day, I trotted from one object which attracted
me to another, singing a little song of made up
phrases about everything I saw while I waited, catching fish,
chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with

(03:44):
a hair in its beak. Much of the time I
carried the inevitable baby for a woman child frequently improvised
from an ear of corn in the silk wrapped in
catalpa leaf blankets. Or, in the words of an early
biographical sketch that was printed along with some of her books, quote,
this youngest child of a numerous household spent her waking

(04:04):
hours with the wild. She followed her father and the
boys afield, and when tired out, slept on their coats
in fence corners. Often awaking with shy creatures peering into
her face, She wandered where she pleased, amusing herself with
the birds, flowers, insects, and plates she invented. So Geneva
developed a deep affinity for all the birds that lived

(04:27):
on the farm, including the ones that her father thought
should be destroyed because they were predators or because they
ate the crops. So when he said that the woodpeckers
should be killed because they ate the cherries from the trees,
Geneva offered to stop eating cherries so that the birds
could just have her share. Right When her father shot

(04:51):
a chicken hawk because it was a predator and she
found it injured but alive, she begged to be allowed
to rescue it because it was never going to fly again,
it wasn't going to hurt the animals on the farm.
She took it into the barn and she tended its wounds,
and it survived, and afterward it followed her around the
farm like a pet. Right. I mean, I can't be

(05:15):
the only one envisioning foghorn like horn, right, like I
and his little chickenhok friend. Eventually, though, her father told
her that he was giving her the quote personal and
indisputable ownership of all of the birds on his land.
She tried to learn about all of these birds and
where they lived, and then, charmingly, she chose sixty four

(05:37):
of the nests on the property that she visited every
single day, carrying pockets full of tidbits to feed the
babies in them, after having figured out what each species ate,
and the family started calling her little bird woman. Right,
that's my response to everything in this episode. When Geneva

(05:58):
was nine, though, the family experience as a series of tragedies.
Two of her older siblings had previously died of illnesses
while they were still children, and then in February of
eighteen seventy two, her sister Maryanne died after an accident,
and then on July sixth of that year, her brother Leander,
who was known as Laddie, drowned while trying to swim

(06:20):
across the Wabash River, and then another boy named Wallace Kurnitt,
who had tried to save him, drowned as well. This
was of course completely devastating for the entire family. Geneva
had really adored Laddie and almost kind of idolized him,
and she was absolutely inconsolable. But he had also been
the only one of her brothers who had any interest

(06:42):
in taking over the family farm. Her father was turning
sixty at this point, and this meant that he really
no longer had the help that he needed on the farm,
and he also no longer had a plan for its future. Ultimately,
the Strattons sold a lot of their possessions and they
rented out a farm, and they moved to the town
of Wabash to live with Geneva's older sister Anastasia and

(07:04):
her family. This gave her mother Mary, some more consistent
access to medical care than they'd had back on the farm,
which was about ten miles out of town. But Mary
died on February third of eighteen seventy five, at the
age of fifty eight, and that was just a few
months after making this move, and then after her mother's death,
Geneva became a bit more rebellious. It had taken her

(07:26):
a very long time to reconcile herself to having to
put on layers of dresses and underclothes and shoes that
hurt her feet, just as she could go to school
every day, and once she got there to not contradict
her teachers even when she knew they were wrong. She
continued to struggle, and she didn't really fit in with
her peers, who made fun of her. She was a

(07:47):
farmer's daughter, and for a lot of the eighteen seventies
the nation was in an economic recession, which meant she
was also particularly poor in addition to feeling like an
outsider at school. She wanted things, but for a long
time they just couldn't afford, like lessons in music and painting.
By high school, though, she'd become a better student and

(08:08):
a lot of the subjects that she was taking, except
for math, and according to her own account, which I
have some questions about, but we're just going to take
it at base value, she learned that she had a
knack for writing after turning in a paper on her
favorite novel instead of the math paper that she had
been assigned. But this paper was so good that the

(08:32):
teacher summoned the school superintendent to hear her read it,
even though it was not even the assignment. After this success,
she spent more and more time writing and pursuing her
own interests, less and less time on her actual schoolwork.
Later on, she said that she had left school to

(08:53):
take care of her dying sister, Anastasia in the last
months of her life, which she did take care of
her sister, but her grades were really beyond repair before
that happened. She did still really like to learn, though,
and she made regular summer visits to the Island Park Assembly,
a Chautauqua gathering on sylvanlink. Did I say that correct?

(09:13):
You did good? It's not something I encountered as a child.
The Chautauqua movement was an adult education movement in the US,
although different communities arranged these assemblies and gatherings in different ways.
Indiana's Western Chautauqua had started out as a conference for
Methodist Sunday school teachers before expanding into both religious and

(09:35):
secular lectures and activities, as well as posting social events.
So when Geneva Stratton attended the Island Park Assembly in
July of eighteen eighty four, when she was twenty, she
was using a cane and wearing dark glasses part of
the time because she had slipped on the ice and
cracked her skull the winter before. While there, she caught

(09:56):
the attention of Charles Dorwin Porter, who was about thirteen
years older than she was. They did not actually speak
to each other at this assembly, but he noticed her
from afar. They kind of passed by each other at
various points, and in September he wrote her a letter,
and we're just going to read a couple sentences from it,
but it is indicative of the tone of all of it. Quote,

(10:20):
having been rather favorably impressed with your appearance, I venture
the forwardness to address you, barring the rules of etiquette
and asking your pardon, I would respectfully solicit a correspondence
from you. So the idea of a young, unmarried woman

(10:42):
writing letters to a strange man that she and her
family had never been introduced to was scandalous, but Geneva
was really not one to care about such rules, and
so she wrote back. The two of them exchanged letters
over the next several months before for meeting and actually
having a conversation in person. They did that at the

(11:04):
next Chautauqua gathering in eighteen eighty five, and within a
few months of that first in person meeting, they were engaged.
So these letters do seem to like they genuinely grew
very fond of each other. She had reservations about the
idea of marriage, though before her correspondence with Charles, she
had never shown any particular interest in boys or men,

(11:26):
and in one of her letters to him, she spelled
out how she thought marriage meant something different for men
than it did for women. Quote. I regard the pure
and lovable wife as the best safeguard for a man's
honor and purity, the comfortable and happy home as his
rightful and natural resting place, and every loving environment that

(11:49):
springs from sessa tie one step nearer the heart of
Earth's dearest and best that's for the man and for
every such home. Some woman is the sacrificial flame that
feeds the altar. I take notice that my girlfriends who
have been engaged a year and those who have been
married a year look vastly different, and it sets me

(12:13):
to pondering all the differences between a man's engaged love
and his married love. So, even though she was suspicious
and thought marriage might be shady, they did get married
on April twenty first, eighteen eighty six, and they had
that ceremony at her sister Ada's house. And by this point,
Geneva had started going by the shortened form of her name, Jean.

(12:37):
That was even the name that was printed on the
calling card that was sent along with the invitations. And
although she published under the name Jean Stratton Porter in
her day to day life, she was more often known
socially as missus Porter. We will talk about her life
more about getting married. After a quick sponsor break. After

(13:05):
her marriage, Jean Strattonporter and her husband, Charles moved to Decatur, Indiana.
Charles I think my read on it is that he
genuinely loved Jane and he wanted her to be happy,
and he thought this would be the best place for
her to make a home. He was a druggist and
sort of a self made businessman. He owned stores in Geneva,

(13:27):
Indiana and Fort Wayne, Indiana. Decatur was kind of in
between them approximately, so it was also the county seat.
It was somewhere that he thought she would find friends
and have a social life. But Jeane had never really
fit in. According to a biography that was written by
her daughter, in her youth, she always had some particular

(13:47):
intimate girlfriend, but the other children often made fun of
her clothes and her demeanor. They didn't really know what
to make of this girl who looked after a continual
stream of orphaned and injured birds and so tromped around
in the woods and swamps. She just didn't fit the
social marase of the day. And then as a grown
woman and decaturs, she didn't know anybody and she didn't

(14:08):
really relate to the social standards for women in the
nineteenth century. Charles was also away most of the time,
commuting to Geneva or Fort Wayne to look after his businesses.
And then things got a little bit better after she
gave birth to their only child, Jeannette, on August twenty seventh,
eighteen eighty seven. Jeane loved being a mom. She delighted
in her daughter, and this gave her something to focus on,

(14:31):
but she still struggled a little bit. In eighteen eighty eight,
Jane convinced Charles to move to Geneva. That was where
the larger of his two stores was. He also had
other businesses there, and this drastically reduced how much time
he spent away from home. He was no longer spending
all of his time commuting by train to one of
these two cities. It also meant that Jane was surrounded

(14:54):
by a natural landscape that was a lot more like
what she had grown to love in her youth. They
moved into a cottage that had a chicken coop and
an orchard, and it was close to the Wabash River.
Then soon she had a whole new collection of pet birds.
A lot of them were ones that she had rescued
or rehabilitated after some kind of injury. And then they

(15:14):
also had a pet parrot. She played the piano and
she tried to teach all of these birds to accompany
her on it. She also did needlework and painted. She
had finally gotten some art lessons as a child back
in Wabash. Sadly, Jean's father, Mark died on January tenth,

(15:35):
eighteen ninety and he died without a will, and his
estate was not settled for almost two decades, and that
whole process involved a huge amount of family and in
law drama, and there's a big focus on how Jean
Strattonporter defied gender expectations. But she was also very devoted
to her family and she was often the first person

(15:57):
to show up when there was some kind of problem.
So the ongoing issues with her father's estate were just
one of many things that was pulling at her attention
over the years. Another thing was money. As the child
of a farmer and minister, Jean had grown up without
much of it, and then marrying Charles had definitely been
an economic step up, but he also didn't have as

(16:20):
much money as she'd sort of expected based on his
track record as a successful businessman. Often the money existed,
but it wasn't like liquid cash he had access to.
He would invest it into other things, like he invested
a lot of money in starting a bank. That was
something the town of Geneva really needed, but it meant

(16:40):
that they didn't then have a lot for luxuries, not
a lot of liquidity. In the wake of her father's death,
Jean started writing, both to try to deal with her
anxieties and with the hope that maybe she could maybe
earn a little bit of money of her own. It's
possible that she was the author of an anonymously published
book called The Strike at Shame, which was written for

(17:01):
an American Humane Education Society contest in eighteen ninety three.
That story bears some similarities to Stratton Porter's life and
the people that she knew, but all of the evidence
that she wrote it is really circumstantial. We don't know
for sure. The family's financial situation also changed with the
oil boom in the area. There was oil under land

(17:24):
that Charles owned, and that land would ultimately become home
to sixty oil wells. The income from all of this
oil meant they were able to start building a new home,
which they called Limberlost Cabin thanks to its proximity to
Limberlost Swamp. Construction on this home started in eighteen ninety four,
and they moved in in eighteen ninety five. Not long

(17:46):
after their move to Limberlost Cabin, Stratton Porter once again
demonstrated how she was just not what people expected a
woman to be. A fire broke out in Geneva one night,
and since there was no fire department, she was the
one who organized the bucket brigade she was wearing her
slippers and a skirt that was thrown on over her nightgown.

(18:06):
She did not stop even after embers burned through her slippers,
and she was later commended for her actions. That fire
was a major disaster for Geneva, and most of the
buildings were both wooden and underinsured, and that meant that
they burned and Charles's money was a major part of
the town's recovery. Jean's daughter, Jeanette, gave her a camera

(18:28):
as a Christmas gift in eighteen ninety five. Jean became
an avid photographer, developing her pictures in the bathroom with
towels shoved under the door to block the light. Apparently,
she became so good at developing pictures and her cobbled
together set up that one of the manufacturers of photographic
paper sent somebody out to her house to see how

(18:49):
she was doing it. That camera turned out to be
just an extremely fortunate gift. Stratton Porter had been trying
to publish articles about nature and wildlife in outdoor magazines,
but her work had been rejected because it wasn't illustrated
and people wanted to see pictures. Overwhelmingly bird illustrations that

(19:10):
were done at the time were based on dead taxidermy birds,
and Jean Strattonporter hated that entire idea. She both didn't
like the fact that the birds were dead, and she
also thought it resulted in just poor quality illustrations. For example,
she said that John James Audubon's bird illustrations looked like
they had been cut out with a scroll saw a

(19:34):
big fan. We can all hate on John James Audubon.
A camera, though, meant that she could photograph the live
birds she was writing about, and a few years later
she described her process in her book What I Have
Done with Birds, Character studies of Native American birds, which,

(19:55):
through friendly advances I induced to pose for me or
succeeded in photographing by good fortune, with the story of
my experiences in obtaining their pictures. Uh are you like Tracy?
Were you in love with this woman? At this point?
I sure was quote The greatest thing possible to do

(20:15):
with a bird is to win its confidence. In a
few days work about most nests the birds can be taught.
So to trust me that such studies can be made
as here are presented of young and old, male and female.
I am not superstitious but I am afraid to mistreat
a bird, and luck is with me in the indulgence
of this spear. In all my years of fieldwork, not

(20:37):
one study of a nest or of any bird has
been lost by dealing fairly with my subjects. If a
nest is located where access is impossible without moving it,
and exposure is not attempted, and so surely as the
sun rises on another morning, another nest of the same
species is found within a few days where a reproduction
of it can be made. Also addressed the criticism that

(21:01):
because she was a woman, she should not be doing
this kind of field work, and her thoughts on this
are an example of simultaneously defying and also reinforcing gender roles.
She wrote quote recently, in summing up the hardship's incident
to securing one study of a brooding swamp bird, a
prominent nature lover and editor said to me most emphatically,

(21:22):
that is not women's work. I do not agree with you,
I answered, in its hardships in waiting, swimming, climbing, in
hidden dangers, suddenly to be confronted in abrupt changes from
heat to cold and from light to dark. Field photography
is not a woman's work, but in the matter of finesse,
in approaching the birds, in limitless patients, in awaiting the

(21:46):
exact moment for the best exposure, in the tedious and
delicate processes of the dark room, in the art of
winning bird babies and parents. It is not a man's work.
No man has ever had the patience to remain with
a bird until he secured a real character study of it.
A human mother is best fitted to understand and deal

(22:07):
with a bird mother. This is the basis of all
my field work, a mute contract between woman and bird.
You can find various papers about how gender works in
all of their writing about her work and what she
thought about men. A lot of this field work took

(22:29):
place in Limberlost Swamp, and that's something that Charles was
really upset about when he learned she was doing it.
The swamp could be dangerous and disorienting, and according to legend,
it was named for a man known as Limberjim who
had gotten lost there. To kind of give you a
sense of its reputation. For a while, Jeane promised to

(22:50):
stay out of the swamp, but then she heard that
someone had found a black vulture's nest deep within the swamp.
Charles went with her to find it. I think he
understood that if he did not go with her, she
was gonna go anyway. And like we said, I do
think he wanted her to be happy. And they found
the nest. Day after day went back as she photographed

(23:12):
the nest and the egg in it, and the baby
vulture that hatched out of it, which they named little chicken.
That sounds cute, and in fact there's a picture of
the baby vulture in the exhibit upstairs. It is very cute.
But this was also not pleasant. This was way deep
in the swamp. There were a lot of bugs and
dense underbrush, and since vultures feed on carrion, it smelled horrible.

(23:39):
Both of them wore hip waiters to do this, and
they carried firearms in case they ran into any venomous snakes.
Stratton Porter's first published essay came out in the magazine
Recreation in nineteen hundred. It did not include pictures, but
it was about birds, specifically the wildly popular nineteenth century
practice of wearing bird feathers, bird wings, and entire taxidermy

(24:04):
birds on women's hats. She wrote, quote, all my life.
I have worn birds and parts of birds as hat decorations,
and have given the matter no thought. Had I thought
on the subject, I should have reformed long ago. For
no one appreciates the beauty of the birds, the joy
of their songs, or the study of their habits more
than I do. And few have spent more time in

(24:25):
the woods and along the water studying and photographing them.
The war recreation has waged against the slaughter of birds
for millinery purposes has so impressed me that I have
decided never again to buy a bird, or any portion
of a bird, for hat or bonnet trimming. She started
to have some success after publishing her nature writing and

(24:47):
wanted to move into fiction, but she wrote of this quote,
being so afraid of failure and the inevitable ridicule in
a community where I was already severely criticized on account
of my ideas of house key, being, dress, and social customs,
I purposely kept everything I did as quiet as possible.
It had to be known that I was interested in

(25:09):
everything afield and making pictures, also that I was writing
field sketches for nature publications. But little was thought of it,
save as one more peculiarity in me. She got a
post office box so her publishing correspondence wouldn't go to
Charles at the bank, and she intentionally submitted her work
to magazines that he did not subscribe to. Her first

(25:31):
published work of fiction that we know about for sure
was Laddie, the Princess and the Pie that was in
Metropolitan magazine in nineteen oh one, and it was of
course inspired by her late brother. She continued to publish
both fiction and nonfiction in magazines, and her first novel,
The Song of the Cardinal, came out in nineteen oh three.

(25:52):
This was the story of a loving pair of cardinals
that had grown out of a short story she had
written after finding the body of one that had been shot.
She dedicated this novel to the memory of her father,
who had once said that he would rather have one
of his children write a book that he could be
proud of than to sit on the throne of England.

(26:12):
And this book was generally well reviewed, with one reviewer
even saying that it might do for birds what Black
Beauty had done for horses. But it just didn't sell
very well. So her next book, which was titled Freckles,
was about people and it had a lot of the
traits of most of Jean Stratton Porter's novels. It was
set in the Limberlost Swamp area, and it was heavily

(26:35):
infused with the natural world of this part of Indiana
and her experiences there, including the discovery of that vulture
nests that we talked about a moment ago. It featured
a very sentimental story with a happy ending, including an
orphaned boy who turns out to be the nephew of
a lord. That brings up some complications though since it
raises class issues with the book's other primary protagonist, who

(26:58):
is a brave teenage girl known only as the Swamp Angel.
Freckles became a bestseller, and eventually Jean Strattonporter worked out
a deal with Doubleday, Page and Company to alternate writing
non fiction books on nature with works of fiction, with
those novels also including a lot of nature in them.

(27:19):
Sometimes these alternating books kind of dovetailed into each other,
like A Girl of the Limberlost, which was another bestseller,
tells the story of el Nora, whose mother is a widow,
and Elnor earns the money to pay for clothes and
books so that she can go to school by selling
moths specimens. A Girl of the Limberlost came out in

(27:40):
nineteen oh nine, and people were so interested in all
these moths that Stratton Porter followed it with Moths of
the Limberlost with watercolor and photographic Illustrations from Life in
nineteen twelve. And this book included extensive studies of moths
that she had made in her conservatory, starting with the
cocoons that she collected out in the swamps and the

(28:02):
woods and the fields, and she would observe and photograph
them through every stage of their life cycle. Jean Stratton
Porter's books made her both famous and quite rich, and
we're going to talk about all of that after we
first have a sponsor break. By nineteen fourteen, Jean Strattonporter

(28:28):
and her husband moved from Limberlost Cabin to a new
home that she'd built in Rome City on Sylvan Lake.
She had paid for this with her own money. She
had wanted more privacy as she had become famous, she
was facing endless interruptions from curious readers who kind of
showed up at Limberlost Cabin to meet her. Don't do that.

(28:54):
On top of that, by this point, a lot of
Limberlost swamp had been drained or cut down, and she
was deeply saddened by this loss, and she wrote about
it in her book Moths of the Limberlost, expressing gratitude
for how much time she had spent in the swamp
immediately after moving there. Quote, it was a piece of
forethought to work unceasingly at that time. For soon commerce

(29:17):
attacked the swamp and began its usual process of devastation.
Canadian lumbermen came, seeking tall, straight timber for ship masts
and tough, heavy trees for beams. Grand rapids followed and
stripped the forest for hardwood for fine furniture, And through
my experience with the lumberman freckles story was written. Afterward,

(29:38):
hoop and stavemen and local mills took the best of
the soft wood. Then a ditch in reality a canal
was dredged across the north end through my best territory,
and that carried the water to the Wabash River until
oil men could enter the swamp. From that time, the
wealth they drew to the surface constantly materialized in macadamized roads,

(30:00):
cozy homes, and big farms of unsurpassed richness. Suitable for
growing onions, celery, sugar beets, corn and potatoes, As repeatedly
has been explained in everything I have written of the place.
Now the lumber loss exists only in ragged spots and patches.
But so rich was it in the beginning, that there
is yet a wealth of work for a lifetime remaining

(30:22):
to me in these and river thickets. I asked no
better hunting grounds for birds, moths and flowers. The fine
roads are a convenience, and settled farms of protection to
be taken into consideration when bewailing its dismantling. It is
quite true that one man's meat is another's poison. One
of the things that Strattonporter did at her new home,

(30:45):
which she called the Cabin at Wildflower Woods, was to
try to save as many plant species as possible from destruction.
She worked with a tree surgeon to restore the forest
on their property, and then also transplanted wildflowers and other
plants from Indiana's rapidly diminishing forests and swamps, going from

(31:05):
swamp to swamp ahead of drainage plans and bringing back
as many plants as she possibly could. A number of
species that she replanted at the cabin at wildflower woods
are endangered today. She also protested against the ongoing draining
of swamps and other wetlands, which had become widespread after
the passage of the Federal swamp Land Act of eighteen fifty.

(31:29):
This law gave states the right to reclaim and drain swamplands,
including allowing the sale of federally owned swampland to private owners.
She protested legislation passed by the Indiana General Assembly in
nineteen seventeen which allowed the drainage of state owned swampland.
That legislation was repealed in nineteen twenty. Aside from that success,

(31:52):
the nineteen teens were pretty difficult for Jean Strattonporter. There
were a number of deaths in her family, including her brother,
whose name was spelled Lemon, but he might have said
it Laman. He died of heart disease in nineteen sixteen.
Jean took in his teenage daughter, Lee Mary, who she loved,
but this meant she was going back to being a parent,
years after her own daughter had gotten married and had

(32:16):
children of her own. Paramount released a silent film adaptation
of her book Freckles in nineteen seventeen, which she really
did not like. Then, after the United States became involved
in World War One, her employee, Bill Thompson, who had
been sort of part driver, part handyman, part chauffeur, and
part field assistant, he went off to war, and because

(32:38):
of the war, she couldn't really replace him because Jean
Strattonporter couldn't drive. This meant she was stuck at home
a lot of the time, but once again people had
figured out where she lived. She not only was annoyed
by all of these unannounced intrusions into her privacy, but

(32:58):
also a lot of these visitors seemed content to just
trample all over her carefully transplanted and well tended plants.
In nineteen eighteen, at the age of fifty four, Jean
went to the Clifton Spring Sanitarium and Clinic for the
sake of her health, and this had become a retreat
that catered to the wealthy and famous. She went with

(33:19):
her secretary and she stayed there for about a month
and seemed to be feeling better when she left. But
then in nineteen nineteen, she contracted the pandemic flu. Perhaps unsurprisingly,
once she recovered from the flu, she wanted to make
a change, and in the spring of nineteen nineteen she
went to California. She had siblings who already lived there,
and this also put her in proximity to the silent

(33:41):
film industry. She kind of went back and forth between
the two places for a while, but she eventually moved
there permanently, and her husband, Charles didn't come with her.
He wound up living in a boarding house in Geneva.
None of the sources used in this episode really shed
much light onto the state of their relationship at this point.

(34:02):
My just sort of gut sense of it is that
it seems like he was really supportive of what she
wanted to do with her life, and she kind of
got left behind at this point. Eventually, her daughter did
come to live with her, along with her grandchildren. That
was after Jeanette's own marriage had ended in divorce, and

(34:23):
Stratton Porter found that the things that had made her
feel like an outcast in Indiana really did not seem
to raise eyebrows very much in California. She had more
friends there than she had had at any point in
her life. She also loved the light and the flowers,
and she started to think about how to make a
California version of her cabin at Wildflower Woods, complete with

(34:44):
its own nature preserves. She also continued writing, and in
nineteen twenty one she published a novel called Her Father's Daughter.
Unlike her previous novels that were mainly set around Limberlost
Swamp and really drew from her deep knowledge of the
natural landscape there, this one was said in Los Angeles,
where she'd only been for a couple of years. She

(35:05):
dedicated it to her niece's husband, James sweetsir Lache, and
she said, quote to whom I owe all that I
know about the flowers of California. So one of the
plot lines in Her Father's Daughter is about its protagonist,
Linda Strong, and her white classmates and their antipathy for
a Japanese student who is at the top of the class.

(35:27):
Linda talks a lot about the so called Yellow Peril,
the idea that Asians presented a threat to white society,
and starting on the first page, she repeatedly references her
Japanese classmate using a slur that was in widespread use
at the time, and she makes unquestionably bigoted statements about
people of other non white races as well. Eventually, in

(35:51):
the story, the Japanese student is revealed to be a
grown man who has pretended to be a high schooler
for nefarious reasons, and after being discovered, he tries to
kill Linda and some of her classmates by crushing them
with a boulder, but instead he falls from a cliff
and dies. It just keeps getting worse. It's like every

(36:12):
sentence of the synopsis is worse than the one before it.
Jean Strattenporter wrote this book at a time of intense
and escalating prejudice and racism against Japanese people in the
United States. This was particularly pronounced on the West Coast.
This is something we have many episodes referencing in the archive.

(36:34):
And overall, this book, which sounds horrific, was really well
received in this climate. Her Father's Daughter reached number two
on the publisher's weekly bestseller list, and ads for the
book that ran the following year said that it had
sold a million copies. A number of reviews by white

(36:55):
writers were really positive. They described the book and the
character of Into Strong as her best one so far.
The one exception that was found by various sources used
for the episode was in the Bookman, an article titled
the Why of the best seller by Yale English professor
William Lyon Phelps. He described the book as quote sadly

(37:20):
marred by anti Japanese propaganda, continuing quote, somebody in California
has been stuffing our novelist, who is more gullible in
international politics than in the study of nature. An article
that was published in nineteen seventy one speculates that Stratton
Porter took inspiration from a real Japanese student who was

(37:40):
a commencement speaker at his graduation in Riverside, California, in
nineteen oh five. His speech was on his birthplace of Japan,
which he had recently visited. Meanwhile, one of the other
speakers was a white student named Nelly, who spoke on
the so called white man's burden to carry the load
of inferior races. And there are a couple of later

(38:02):
publications that have picked up this speculation, which is just
that as though it were fact. Yeah, a Japanese student
with good grades and a white girl being racist seemed
to be the extent of the similarities between this high
school graduation that happened in real life and Jean Stratton
Porter's novel. And there's not really like evidence to back
up the idea that this could have been her inspiration.

(38:24):
It's not clear how she would have known about it,
that graduation ceremony in Riverside that had happened for real.
That was almost fifteen years before Jean Strattonporter moved to California.
Stratton Porter had also started writing and publishing more poetry
while she was in California, and in nineteen twenty two
she wrote a book in Verse called The Firebird that

(38:45):
was inspired in part by the photography work of Edward S. Curtis.
Curtis published photographs of Indigenous people between nineteen oh seven
and nineteen thirty. Eventually this total twenty volumes and was
thousands and thousands of pictures. Curtis has his own complicated legacy.
He was working from the perspective of someone who thought

(39:06):
he was documenting vanishing peoples, and to that end, he
staged photos that used cultural objects and items without regard
to whether they actually belonged to the communities that he
was photographing. This had some similarities to The Firebird because
Stratton Porter seems to have intended this as a sympathetic
depiction of Indigenous people, but she was appropriating their stories

(39:29):
and intermingling aspects of different indigenous traditions into one work.
By nineteen twenty four, Stratton Porter had started her own
movie production company, Jean Stratton Porter Productions. This was one
of the first movie production companies in the United States
to be owned by a woman. One of the directors
she employed was James Leomeihan, who had married her daughter

(39:50):
Jeanette in nineteen twenty three. Here is Jeannette's description of
her mother's efforts to get her books made into movies. Quote.
Mother encountered the same difficulties with her first pictures that
she did with her first books. She was assured by
producers that they would not be popular because there was
not sufficient action. There were no hair raising thrills, there

(40:11):
were no violent sex problems, and there was too much
nature and too much sugary romance. But mother went serenely
on her way with her same old motto of be
sure that you are right and then go ahead, and
she trusted people to like the pictures just as they
liked the books. Time has proved that she was eminently correct.

(40:32):
I heard the quote about no hair raising thrills and
no violent sex problems in short documentary about her, and
I was like, I've got to go find more of this,
more of this quote. One of her last novels, Keeper
of the Bees, was written with the specific goal of
turning it into a movie. This told the story of
a World War One veteran recovering from the physical and

(40:54):
mental after effects of the war by becoming a bee keeper.
One of its character is a plucky girl named Little Scout,
who was patterned after Stratton Porter's granddaughter, Jean, to whom
she also dedicated the book. Jean Stratton Porter Productions made
this into a film in nineteen twenty five. In nineteen
twenty four, Jean Stratton Porter started building a mansion in

(41:16):
what would become bel Air, which would have separate quarters
for her husband, Charles, as well as a vacation home
on Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. I said,
Los Angeles with a tea. I don't know what's going
on there. I'm gonna make it fencey. But on December
sixth of nineteen twenty four, she died at the age
of sixty one when the chauffeurd car that she was

(41:37):
riding in collided with a street car. Initially her body
was held in a temporary vault before being buried in California. Then,
in nineteen ninety nine, the remains of both Jean Stratton
Porter and her daughter Jeanette were exhumed and reinterred in
a monument on the grounds of the Cabinet Wildflower Woods.
This was done after years of fundraising and with the

(41:59):
involved of Jeanette's sons. At the time of her death,
Jean Strattonporter was one of the most famous and best
selling writers in the United States. During her lifetime, she
wrote twelve novels, seven nonfiction nature books, and numerous poems, articles, columns,
and essays. Her work was translated into more than a
dozen languages. Seven films had been made of her books

(42:22):
prior to her death, and then there were many, many
more of them later on. Her books reached an estimated
fifty million readers, and people like Rachel Carson cited her
as an influence. Her impact on people's interest in nature
and conservation was compared to that of Teddy Roosevelt, but
her work was not really taken seriously by literary critics.

(42:44):
They saw it as formulaic and overly sentimental. Here's an
example of what she had to say to someone who
called it molasses fiction quote, what a wonderful compliment all
the world love sweets a field, bears as well as
flies would drown in it. Molasses is more necessary to
the happiness of human and beast than vinegar, and over

(43:05):
indulgence in it not nearly so harmful to the system.
I am a molasses person myself, So is my family,
So was my father's family. So are most of my friends,
all of them who are happy. As a matter of fact.
So I shall keep straight on writing of the love
and joy of life I have found in the world.
And when I have used the last drop of my molasses,

(43:27):
I shall stop writing. Her work as a writer started
out when she and her husband were living largely on
oil money, which can feel a little contradictory, and she
also wasn't taken seriously by most naturalists and ornithologists because
she had no formal training and no advanced education. But
she spent so much of her life carefully and lovingly

(43:51):
documenting the flora and fauna of Limberlost Swamp and the
surrounding areas, and advocating for conservation in the environment. In
addition to laws allowing the drainage of state owned wetlands
that we talked about before. She wrote to President Calvin
Coolidge advocating against a plant to drain Mississippi bottom land.
She advocated for preservation of things like eagle habitats. She

(44:15):
didn't really know the science behind it, but she correctly
connected the mass destructions of forests and wetlands to the
disruption of rainfall patterns and a warming climate. She had
actually tried to get the state of Indiana to purchase
Wildflower Woods as a nature preserve before she moved to California,
and that sale did not happen at the time. But

(44:37):
today the Cabinet Wildflower Woods is Jean Stratton Porter State
Historic Site and it includes one hundred and forty eight
acres of gardens, fields, and forests. The cabin preserves much
of her furniture and decor, including her collection of moths.
There have been efforts to reverse the draining of parts
of Limberlost Swamp and to protect and conserve these and

(44:59):
other wetland. This includes Limberlost Historic Site, Limberlost Swamp Wetland Preserve,
Music of the Wild Nature Preserve. It's named after some
of her work, I Think and lob Lolly Marsh Nature
Preserve and that is Jean Stratton Porter. So that was

(45:22):
our live show that we recorded in Indianapolis. Thanks so
much to the staff of the Eugene and Marylandlick, Indiana
History Center. They have been such a treat to work
with both times we have been there. In lieu of
regular listener mail, I also just wanted to shout out
to every single person who came to the meet and

(45:42):
greet and talk to us beforehand. Yes, we had such
a good time. I know we were not one hundred
percent awesome at meeting out how much time people got
in the beginning, so some of it at the end
got kind of a rushed experience. I also wanted to
make sure there was someone that did not come to
the meet and greet, but they hand it off gifts
for us. Yeah, to our contact, and I believe their

(46:05):
name is Carol. I think Carol is what it looks
like on the on the bag. Yeah. Mine. I couldn't
read very well to begin with, and then in the
ride home some of it got rebuffs. So Carol, thank
you so much. It is so thoughtful and sweet and
I'm sorry we weren't able to collect those in person
and the person who brought us stickers. Also, the stickers

(46:25):
are in my bag, so I cannot refresh my memory
on their name either, but thank you. Also, yes, stickers
key to my heart. Yeah. So thanks everyone who came
to the show. Thanks everyone who came to the meet
and greet. Thanks again, staff at the Eugene and Marylyn
Click Indiana History Center. If you would like to drop
us a note about this or any other podcast or

(46:46):
history podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com and we're all over
social media at miss and History. You can subscribe to
our show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd
like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

(47:07):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Tracy V. Wilson

Holly Frey

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Missed in History Class

2. Dateline NBC

3. Crime Junkie

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Gene Stratton-Porter Live at the Indiana History Center