This, my first contribution for Women's (Family) History Month, is a brief introduction to my third-great-grandmother, Caroline Wright Pitt, an ordinary woman who passed through some extraordinary experiences, whose life was both exemplary in its way, and unremarkably typical of working-class immigrant women's experiences in 19th-century America.
Genealogy & Family History Community
|
|
Leave the blood feuds at home
|
|
|
|
Market Square, Willenhall, Staffordshire
Caroline Wright was a Staffordshire girl, born on October 19, 1820 to John Wright and Ann Perry Wright. At 19 she married a 23-year-old keymaker, John Pitt, with whom she had eight children. Both the Wright and Pitt families had for several generations made their living — fathers, mothers and children alike — in the Staffordshire metal trades centered in Willenhall. In 1850 the Pitts, along with several of their neighbors, joined the LDS Church. From a pioneer history:
The [Pitt] family was desirous of emigrating to Utah but not having sufficient funds to do so it was decided that Priscilla, the eldest child, should go first. Accordingly on May 21, 1864, Priscilla Pitt, then seventeen years of age, bade her family and friends goodbye and set sail on the ship General McClellan in company with over eight hundred other Saints...
Two years later — after sixteen years of planning, saving, yearning for
Zion — the family would reunite in America.
I'm lucky to have a brief character sketch of Caroline Pitt in old age, as remembered by one of her grandsons in 1948:
She had snow white hair and a curl hanging from each temple in front of her ears. She had a pleasant countenance which earned a ready smile. If I happened to be there at breakfast time I was sure to get a nice piece of toast. On Christmas morning there was always plenty of candy and nuts for the grandchildren.
Grandmother Caroline could neither read nor write, as in her day she had to work instead of going to school. She was very ambitious and apt in knitting and in her latter years after Grandfather died, she used her time in helping her children. She would go from one to the other, knitting and darning stockings and patching and mending clothes. She made their soap, peeled their potatoes and the fruit if they were bottling.
Grandmother Caroline was always welcome for she never interfered but entertained us with stories of her life. As I think of Grandma Pitt I remember the times when Aunt Hannah Winn used to visit us. Aunt Hannah was full of fun and she and Grandma used to match wits and Grandma would laugh till the tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks. It was an inspiration to see her so completely filled with joy. I do not remember when her flour bin was not filled with flour, as she used to make yeast for her neighbors and give a quart of yeast for a quart of flour.
I suspect that a good-natured unselfishness was deeply embedded in her nature. William Grant, a Willenhall friend of the Pitt family, wrote in his
Autobiography and Diary of Caroline and John's neighborliness during the journey from Staffordshire to America in 1866:
Our dear friends, the Pitt family, were all going and we had promised to go too. Economy was the motto. We denied ourselves all luxury and barely took the necessities of life. Worked hard & harder.
The time soon arrived for leaving and we got our notice to come to the ship. We were told it was several pounds more to pay and that cast me down for it left me without a penny to sustain me and family on such a perilous journey to the Far West but I must go at any risk. So at the latter end of April we commenced to pack up and wish our friends goodbye. We moved to Brother Pitt's the last 2 or 3 days and held many counsels together how to raise means to get necessities for the journey. We were informed that we needed one pound for necessaries at Liverpool and here we was with only one day more in England and only half of the pound that we needed. But an aunt of Harriet's, Mrs. Banks, came and gave us 10 shillings to help her on the way and we decided on the good promise of Brother and Sister Pitt to use their cooking utensils, &c. all the way. This was hard, but there was no way out of it so we went around and wished our parents and brothers & sisters a last goodbye, many of them never to see anymore in this life. We had "God bless you" from many and all wished us well.
At last, on the 30th of April at 4 a.m. we put our little all in a cart with Brother Pitt's folks, jumped aboard, and turned our backs on our native town, a family of 5 of us. I took one long look back as at the break of day this scene passed from my sight. Thousands of circumstances crowding my mind of things in the past but they were soon forgotten in thoughts for the great future, some 9000 miles of travel was here before us...
The China Trade clipper
John Bright was one of eleven ships
chartered by the Mormons for that year's emigration out of Liverpool. The voyage was fairly typical: a fearsome storm in the Irish Sea, a worse one mid-Atlantic, but otherwise mostly smooth sailing. They saw "many large fishes such as sharks, porpoises, &c.", and held concerts, dances and worship services on the main deck. Most of them were seasick; one woman gave birth, another met her future husband; but there were no deaths.
The emigrants disembarked at Castle Garden in New York City on June 6th, 1866. After a very odd, circuitous journey (by way of New Haven, Montreal, Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago and St. Joseph, Missouri!) they formed into wagon trains near Omaha for the last leg of the trip west. The Pitts settled in Nephi, Utah, where they were taken in by daughter Priscilla and her new husband (in a two-room adobe) until they could set up their own household. (In a practical adaptation of his earlier trade, John became a fairly successful blacksmith.)
Caroline survived John Pitt by 20 years (she died in 1911 at the age of 90). Her son, Meshach, married Charles Price's daughter Mary Alice in 1871; their daughter, Lillie Geneva Pitt, was my great-grandmother.
I saved this poem for the end, but it was actually the inspiration for my post. It was written in 1943 by Ann Woodbury Hafen, the wife of former Colorado State Historian LeRoy R. Hafen (and an accomplished historian herself). It seems like a fitting tribute to Caroline — and indeed to all hardworking women, of the West and elsewhere, whose stories we're still learning to honor. I relish the excuse to share it here.
My Mother’s Hand
Today I looked on a map of the West – my mother’s hand.
Flesh geography of the old frontier was there
In the strong blue veins that ridged the furrowed skin.
In the eddied knuckles, weathered nails, and gullied palm,
I saw how the raw West shaped a woman’s hand
As that hand shaped the West.
A picture map deep etched – this hand that worked a hoe,
That scythed alfalfa bribes for evening milk,
That carried ’dobes for the long-dreamed house,
That scrubbed out irrigation’s mud and sweat.
This steady hand that pressed the danger trigger,
Delivered newborn, needled shrouds, and washed the dead.
Through ninety beauty-hungry years,
Through four generations of weddings the small hand moved –
A self-willed dynamo that generated
Sixty stitches to a minute,
Twenty pieces to a quilt block pattern,
Forty blocks to a quilt
Of rainbow wedding rings to warm the matings.
In an Old World garden, this hand, velvet-white,
Secreted seeds in a young bride’s deepest pocket,
Guarded them from hunger’s blind devouring
Through six thousand hungry miles
And fed them at last to the black volcanic ash
Of the Rocky Mountains.
Out of a woman’s bended labor,
Watered by a widow’s tearful prayers,
Stirred by courage of a mother’s hand,
The sleeping land awoke to food and flowers.
Flesh geography of the West I touched today
In the seamed erosions of a weathered palm.
I saw the raw West shape a woman’s hand
And that hand shape the West.