Nagel - Ernest Hemingway

JAMES NAGEL

YOUNG WILLYS WAS SICK when Harriet Hemingway opened her new diary on January 1, 1852, and the next day Dr. Woodruff came to the house and administered leeches. Testifying to the efficacy of the treatment, the boy quickly recovered. The Hemingways were living in Plymouth, Connecticut, that year, and they had a complex family. Harriet was not Allen Hemingways first wife; he had married her aunt Marietta in 1833, and that union had produced five children: Rodney (b. 1835); Riley (b. 1836), who died at the age of three, the first of many tragedies in a family with more than its fair share; Mary Ann (b. 1837); Rocelina (b. 1839); and George (b. 1842), the same year his mother died. Six months later Allen married Harriet, the daughter of Anson and Harriet Tyler. So when her own son (the paternal grandfather of Ernest Hemingway) was born on August 26, 1844, she named him Anson, after her father. Willys followed in 1847, and a daughter, Harriet Lucretia, in 1850. The Hemingways were never very inventive about names, using the same ones, or variations, generation after generation.

With seven children living in the household, and with Allen established as the postmaster for nearby Terryville in addition to running the general store, the family would seem to have been firmly settled. From the indications in Harriets diary, they knew everyone for miles around, they were surrounded by relatives, Church on account of misconduct with Mr. Atwaters daughter.

But most of her diary covers the mundane responsibilities of running a large household, with a special stress on travel to neighboring communities (particularly Hartford), her deep love for her husband and children, financial transactions, and her tendency to see her life in historical perspective, observing the anniversaries of significant family events well in the past. She seems to have deeply enjoyed a trip to Boston in September 1852, staying at the Pearl Street Hotel and touring the Museum of Fine Art, and it is clear that it was a buying trip for Allen, restocking the store. She ended her diary for that year on a typically reflective note: And now the year is about to close and what great reason have we to be thankful that our family have enjoyed very good health the most of the year and that we are all permitted to see the close of this day as well as year. Lord help us all to live as we shall wish we had done when we come to die.

The following year passed in Harriets diary without major incident, although in October 1853 Harriet bore her last child, Adelbert Porter Hemingway, called Delly within the family.

But 1854 brought an end to this phase of the life of the Hemingway family, for Allen, for the first time, announced his intention to move the family to Illinois: Mr. Hemingway is quite engaged about going out West to buy a farm for his boys, she wrote on January 18. The motivation for the move seems clearly to have been the need for employment for his sons, for Rodney was already nineteen, George was twelve, and there were three younger boys. Land was expensive in Connecticut, the fields were flinty, the weather uncertain. Opportunity lay in the Midwest, with its level expanse of rich soil. A man with a steady job in Chicago could do worse than to purchase a farm for his boys. Harriets hesitation about the idea seems to have more to do with her need for her husbands constant companionship than for her devotion to Connecticut, as when she recorded that Mr. Hemingway is talking some of going to Illinois in the course of a few weeks. I can hardly consent to have him go (January 26, 1854).