Galveston Unscripted | Free. Texas History. For All.
Galveston’s award winning history podcast. Listen to us transform Galveston into the world’s largest free museum. Be sure to check out the Galveston Unscripted free audio tour at galvestonunscripted.com!
Galveston Unscripted | Free. Texas History. For All.
The Strange Little Island with James Valentino
Lucy Parker Shaw was an early American settler who played a notable role in the development of Galveston, Texas, during the Republic of Texas era. Born in Eastport, Maine, she was the daughter of Jonathan Weston, a prominent local figure. In December 1838, Lucy, her husband Joshua Clark Shaw, and their two-year-old child relocated to Galveston, joining a group of fellow New Englanders seeking new opportunities in the burgeoning republic.
James Valentino is the author of From Maine to Galveston: The Life and Letters of Lucy Parker Shaw, a book that compiles and contextualizes the personal letters of Lucy Parker Shaw, an early settler in Galveston, Texas. While specific details about Valentino's personal background or any familial connection to Lucy Parker Shaw are not readily available, his work indicates a scholarly interest in early American history, particularly the experiences of settlers during the Republic of Texas era. His compilation provides valuable insights into the challenges and daily life of that period through Lucy's firsthand accounts.
James Valentino's Website: https://www.jamesvalentinobooks.com/
From Maine to Galveston, Republic of Texas https://www.amazon.com/Maine-Galveston-Republic-Texas-Letters/dp/1532307101
Subscribe to Galveston Unscripted on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for more historical insights and stories from this remarkable island: https://www.galvestonunscripted.com/podcasts
Check out the podcast and audio tour that is transforming Galveston into the world's largest free museum! https://www.galvestonunscripted.com/
Support the show! Buy me a book! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jrshaw409
Galveston Unscripted Digital Market: https://www.galvestonunscripted.com/store
You have macro history, what we usually learn in school George Washington, benjamin Franklin, american Revolution. You know all these big things, big personalities, but the stories of the individuals you have to dig for that. That's where you learn what people's lives were actually like. The mosquitoes were just horrific. There was a sailor who jumped off a ship one day because he couldn't take it anymore. People will be shocked to find out. Sam Houston was not loved by everyone. Death is always around every corner.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Galveston, unscripted. In this episode today I sit down with historian and author Mr James Valentino. We discuss his work and research into those early days of Galveston back in the 1830s and 1840s. One big reason I wanted to have James on the podcast is because of one of the books he's published and that is From Maine to Galveston, republic of Texas, the Life and Letters of Lucy Parker Shaw. James stumbled upon these letters while doing genealogical research and once he discovered the beautifully written descriptions of early Galveston he knew he needed to do something about it. So he published these letters a few years ago and we sat down to discuss what he discovered along the way. What I really enjoy about the letters in this book written by Miss Lucy Parker Shaw are the beautiful, long-winded descriptions of what the island was like back in the 1830s and 40s. They really capture the grit of frontier life and what it was really like back in those early days right here on Galveston Island.
Speaker 1:Welcome to Galveston Unscripted those guys are not book buyers, though the girls are. Though what group are the biggest book buyers for you? Well, definitely the girls. There have probably sold a fourth of them a book you know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Something like that, yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably one out of every four people there bought a book, which is a big deal, you know, percentage-wise I think. Yeah, Even in Maine I didn't sell a lot of books and everyone in Eastport where I give the talk, very interested. They were very interested in Texas and even though I was doing the talk was about this girl who came from their hometown. They were more interested in Texas and Galveston and what happened there and I was. I found myself talking more about the Texas City disaster and the hurricane of you know, 1900 hurricane. Then I was talking, then I was doing with the talking about her You're trying to talk about 1838.
Speaker 2:I was trying to talk about 1838 and they wanted to talk about yeah.
Speaker 1:They were just fascinated by Texas and this kind of stuff actually.
Speaker 2:Oh, I got you a water by the way. So one of these waters is for you if you want it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I drag all that. What's the oh the Patriot?
Speaker 2:Oh, the Patriot, yes, yeah, the Patriot movie.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know what movie they should have done instead of the Patriot? The Bernardo de Galvez story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that might be something interesting.
Speaker 2:The way Bernardo de Galvez and his team moved across the Gulf Coast during the American Revolution. For Spain it's so important to the American story. It's literally pivotal to the American story for Spain. But it's so important to the American story, yeah, it's literally pivotal to the American story to get the British off of the Gulf Coast, but nobody ever tells that story. You know, yeah, I know it's one of those swept under the rug.
Speaker 1:It's interesting what catches on in history and really what doesn't. There's a lot of hidden stories out there, like Lucy Char, whatever kind of like things that just people. I don't know for what reason. Maybe it's just his name, bernardo de Galvez.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if only they named a city after him, that'd be nice. Yeah, that would be nice if they did name a city after him.
Speaker 1:Nobody even thinks about the name, of how Galveston got his name, do they?
Speaker 2:Not really. Not really, but it's, I mean, it's obviously from him.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:James, could you tell us a little bit about yourself before we get into it here?
Speaker 1:I was born in, actually, san Leon, but then, as I was a kid, little bitty kid, like three years old we moved to Bayview. This is like we thought of my parents. My mom insisted on moving. My father was a commercial fisherman, and so he was a shrimper. He also, though, worked for shell dredging companies in the 50. And that's where he really made. He made a living. I mean, that kind of made him, in a way. He still continued in that business, and he and my brother bought into Eagle Point. So I had been around that life. At one point.
Speaker 1:My dad had two Gulf boats, where he fished them out of Grasso's, which is down from 19th Street you think of the Mosquito Fleet there and all that. Grasso's was a little farther down. I can't remember the street 14th somewhere along in there. All I remember farther down. I can't remember the street 14th somewhere along in there. All I remember is sitting on his boat looking across the street at the. What they used to tell me was the insane asylum or whatever, the psych ward with the big red building or whatever they call it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so kind of, I always kind of got in. You know, that was something that was always there, and so when I got out of high school I bought a boat and I did all that kind of stuff. You know I bought and sold oysters for a few years, made a little money doing that. That was a hard business. For a while that kind of business kind of started getting a downturn. I really couldn't keep up with it anymore. I was getting older and I went back to school with the money I sold and leaning on my wife's income. She was making more money all the time. So I went back to school and I got my bachelor's degree and then my master's degree. And what the hell do you do with a worthless history degree? Oh no, I started hired on at College of the Mainland as an adjunct, and I've been doing that ever since. And in the meantime, hired on at College of the Mainland as an adjunct, and I've been doing that ever since. And in the meantime I would because of the research you know you have to learn how to do research and all this kind of stuff which I kind of really enjoyed.
Speaker 1:And I started writing little stories and I first thing, one of the first little books I have is a book about Eagle Point. That's the piece of property, and I found some very interesting things and I wrote a little thing about it, self-published it. It really was just more for, I guess, practice or fun. It's a little thin book about Eagle Point. And then I wrote another book that's just stories that my dad told me or this or that about Galveston Bay stuff that my dad told me, or this or that about Galveston Bay stuff. And then I've read, I wrote this and of course I realized if anybody else is going to be interested in my stuff. It wasn't really the first two things. Really, honestly, although I didn't like my book of stories, I think there's some good stuff in there.
Speaker 2:What put you on my radar is I was doing research on a couple different things and I don't remember exactly what it was. Whether I was doing research on a couple different things and I don't remember exactly what it was. Whether I was doing research on Shaw, the one of the men who named the strand. His last name was Shaw, Cause my last name is Shaw and I think I was Googling or just looking Shaw Galveston just to see if there were any connections, Cause my mom's from Louisiana, my dad's from Michigan, but I was like well, maybe there are extended connections somehow trying to tie me back to Galveston.
Speaker 2:But of course, this was probably 2020 and your book had been out for a few years, so it started to show up in the Google results. I saw your book and I was like I've got to get this. So I went down to the bookstore over here and bought From Maine to Galveston, republic of Texas. For those who don't know, it's a series of letters from a woman named Lucy Parker Shaw, who moved from Maine to Galveston in 1838.
Speaker 1:They're all letters to her mother in Maine. We don't have her responses back and we don't have all of the letters because there's two or three gaps in there of two or three years that are just. There aren't no letters and I don't. Obviously I don't know where they are, if they even exist. They were kept by the Love family in Houston because they were related to Emily. That's how they kind of traced back To Emily. That's how they kind of traced back. I believe that's how they traced their lineage back through Emily, which was her infant daughter that came with them. Her husband, joshua, was from Bath. Yeah, they arrived in 1838. She died in 1850 in the Tremont Hotel, the one that burned down in 1865. And so they run for those about 12 years. The last letter she wrote, I think, was a few months before her death.
Speaker 2:And this book is absolutely fascinating if you're interested in not only Galveston history but Texas history and the way it connects the other parts of the world to Galveston history, but Texas history, yes, and the way it connects the other parts of the world to Galveston in Texas, because you got to wonder why so many people were leaving Maine at that time and coming down here. Hey, if you're still watching, I just want to say thank you very much. If you enjoy podcasts or history content like this, be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, head on over to the YouTube channel and make sure to subscribe. We've got hours and hours of Galveston, texas and American history content on that YouTube channel. All right back to the show, but really what I want to start at is your interest in even writing this book. How did you, what was the thread you pulled to get you in?
Speaker 1:on this. I started the project when I was doing other research at Rosenberg. So I used to go in there quite often and doing research for various things. You know my Eagle Point thing at first, and then other projects. I would go down there and ask for things. And one day I was looking I don't even remember what it was, but I was looking through their card catalog thing. You know you pull in to look through the little index thing and I saw a Shaw and I said you know what?
Speaker 1:Somebody, one of my relatives told me they were related to some people in Galveston named Shaw, didn't know anything about any of that and I saw this one and it said Lucy, 30 letter or 30, 29 letters, whatever it was, and I said, oh OK, so I had them pull it for me and I sat there and I started reading through a few and I thought it's interesting. And then when I came back, you know, a week later or so, I had them pull it again. Week later or so I had them pull it again and over a period of probably looking at them five or six, seven times, reading through them, I kept coming across people that she knew and people that she met, historical events, things like that, and realized this is not just mundane ideas of you know, just general talk about your neighbors or things like that. But she was mentioning things to her mother about what was going on on the Galveston, that she called her strange little island.
Speaker 2:It is, it hasn't changed.
Speaker 1:It's still a strange little island, and so she describes the island and things that are happening in the political events that are happening and she describes it in a way is very exciting, but I can also see where it was a very troubled place. She'd left out a lot of the danger you get to realize in the letters. She didn't want to upset her mother too much about what was going on. But she does talk about political events and the death of people that they knew, some people from Maine as well as people around here. Her child when she dies is a very touching letter to tell her mother that her infant died.
Speaker 2:I read that part today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's sad, very sad. She talks about, let's say, for example, the death of Ambassador Flood. That's also pretty interesting. The charged affairs from the United States to the Republic of Texas stayed in the Tremont when they were running it and so he knew her, she knew him, she knew lots of people and I have a list of all just the interesting people that she talked to. I mean it's impressive A list of people that she met. You know, running a hotel like this where people stay in there. And the thing about Lucy if you read her letters, these are not an uneducated woman. She knows her stuff. She has political ideas, political notions she lets you in on occasionally, if you read carefully enough social ideas about religion and education. Of course, her father, jonathan Weston, was an attorney in Eastport. As a matter of fact, if you want to read an early history of Eastport I know everyone is out there would want to instantly read this history of Eastport.
Speaker 2:He wrote a history about it.
Speaker 1:Oh, really.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But he died in his 30s. He was a young man when he died. He was a lawyer and he sent her and her brother she had a brother named William and he sent them to boston and she was tutored there by a tutor. He paid for them to get educated, so there's some indication she knew her greek and latin and, like a lot of people back then, the key to being an educated person right.
Speaker 2:It comes across really well that she's very well educated.
Speaker 1:She is very well educated.
Speaker 2:The long-winded, not in a bad way, but the long-winded descriptions.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Almost paint a picture of what it was like here in 1838, 1839, 1840.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And you're like, wow, you can almost imagine. You know the flat sandy island that this was at that time, you know so why were people moving from Maine to Galveston?
Speaker 1:A couple of reasons when you study that period of time. Actually, pre-revolutionary War on New England was getting full. England was getting full. We don't think of it like that. But even Maine is either timberland, the farming prospects in Massachusetts, maine, vermont you think it's all so great. No, it's lousy. The ground is purely poor. It's either forest land the arable land is really not a lot, and as people were born, this is why New England was spilled over, of course, back into Ohio and why people were moving out that way.
Speaker 1:A little sidebar that I tell my class about that they seem to enjoy hearing, is that illegitimacy rates before the American Revolution were quite high in New England. The reason being a father would require that any suitor for his daughter be ready to take over and provide her with a suitable income and home and whatever show that he could take care of her and children. Guys couldn't do it. There wasn't any land to buy. What land there was, you couldn't grow anything on and you know in Maine they grow a lot of potatoes because you can grow a potato anywhere.
Speaker 1:As the population kind of grew, like in Greece, they had to get off. That's one thing. Another thing is that in 1837, we had a banking collapse in 1837. This has ruined the administration. Martin Van Buren wasn't reelected because the economy took went to garbage and they blamed it on him. So people were moving around right. They went bankrupt. My guess is that Joshua, whose father founded basically Bath, maine, found that his prospects weren't very good. He had he and his brother, james, had come to this part of the world a year or two earlier, I guess looked around. James stayed here. Joshua went back and got his wife and numerous other relatives Okay. His father had passed away, so he got his second wife and they just came here a new place to go.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you've got to think I guess the revolution had just happened a couple years prior to them arriving. Yes, yes.
Speaker 1:James Joshua's brother was the secretary to Commodore Moore in the Texas Navy.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, well, that makes a lot—he was probably involved and definitely involved.
Speaker 1:Yes, and then later on she talks about even later, when she was here and they had this expedition against the Indians or something Right, and and he was off on it. I never found out, never been able to find out what happened to James.
Speaker 2:You found these letters at the Rosenberg Library and obviously you're reading into and you really enjoy the picture they're painting of Galveston.
Speaker 1:I've been fascinating as an historian, what I'm discovering in them. Famous people are people that I realize that I should know but I don't really know that much about. So I started looking into different varying figures that were in there. I needed to print them out. I did not know what to do with them. My first idea I started writing notes on each letter, thinking you know, there's a lot of so much information and the people are interesting and she's mentioning Sam Houston and Dr Smith and the Cyrus Hamlin guy and I started, you know, investigating them and McKinney and all these people in Galveston people. So I started making notes on them and excerpts and I figured out this is going to be forever. I'll never be able to do this. I need the letters, and so why try to write something in an abbreviated form about the letters? Just publish the letters.
Speaker 1:I started looking around and found out that there was a woman named Miss Henson, a professor at University of Houston, clear Lake, when I went there. That had passed on but she had collected them. She was a Texas history buff and she wrote letters. I mean, she wrote books and things about Texas history. She wrote letters. I mean, she wrote books and things about Texas history and she had the letters and had donated all of her stuff to Texas A&M Galveston.
Speaker 1:So I went to Texas A&M Galveston. As soon as I told them they were like oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we got them things, we're over here, you want us to print a few? I said no, how about print them all of them? Okay, so that's where I got the letters. The letters had been transcribed from the originals. The loves a family that were related to lucy were interested in that history, their their family history, and they had the letters. They were not in maine, they were in houston or pasadena where they lived, and somebody had transcribed them, type them out. And so I didn't have to go and try to transcribe those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's got to be tough, that handwriting is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. I found one other letter. I was in contact with people in the Eastport Historical Society and somebody who belong, who had a home there and had relatives who had lived there but would now is living in California. A family law judge, of all things, in a town outside of San Francisco contacted me and I got to talking to her, texting her back and forth, and she had a letter. She wanted the letters right because she didn't have them. So I sent them to him and she said there's one that I have that you don't have. So I got one extra one from her nice yes, mary grove in california.
Speaker 2:So I actually have one letter that they don't have but in this book you don't have any of the return letters that she received.
Speaker 1:No, never been able to find, never have found them and never found either letters, and that probably is more on me, because but it would require me to travel.
Speaker 2:Of course, yeah.
Speaker 1:If somebody else has them, they're not going to be kept. I'm not going to find them in Houston because the loves give up everything that they're whatever they had. Mary Grove had one, but that kind of left me. It led me to believe that there may be others out there, because if Mary had one, there may be others. They're either held somewhere. I looked in the Eastport library. They have nothing, but I didn't go through the Calais Maine library. She knew people in Calais Maine so I'm thinking they have a bare historical society. They're somewhere. I really do believe that whoever kept them kept them, if that makes any sense. Yes, it does, and there must have been missing years. They're missing years and there's a reason for that. I don't know why they got moved around or somebody. I think somewhere those letters are out there.
Speaker 2:You know, it kind of highlights the significance of keeping old documents, sometimes like old documents, like letters and notes, because you never know the insights they can provide.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. As time goes by, times change, you know, you've seen is how history just goes on and on. One thing that I think is interesting about this type of history you have macro history. What we usually learn in school, the big things you get George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, american Revolution, george III, you know about Franklin Roosevelt, you know it'll be. You know all these big things, big personalities, wars, depressions, movements, things like that. But the stories of individuals we don't really know very much about. You have to dig for that and that's kind of like the micro history and that's where you learn what people's lives were actually like.
Speaker 1:And you not only get some of the big picture thing in these letters because she talks about you know she talks about things that are happening in the Republic, for good and for bad, but then her day-to-day lives, you know, you get to see how life really was and you begin to realize through those letters. Number one the first thing it hits you is that life can be short. You know Death is always around every corner, whether it's a storm or somebody's going to shoot you or a yellow fever, or you just get sick and there's nothing to help you. There's no antibiotics. She discusses probably five different doctors that she had. She likes doctors, she's a kind of scientific mind. She wants to do what's latest in everything and yet many times there's really nothing that they can do to help. Her child dies and she brings in two or three doctors and there's really nothing that they can do.
Speaker 2:I read that section today and one of the doctors had been quarantining for some illness or some type of you know sickness that was going around the island at that time.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So doctors were going in and getting sick and it's one of those things that paints that picture. And even when she's writing that letter, it's only maybe a week removed from when her child dies, but the way she's writing about it you don't really feel. You feel sorrow, right, you can feel the sorrow Right, but I can't imagine writing a letter like that a week removed from my nine-month-old dying, you know Right.
Speaker 1:You know it's but you know what. You have to go on. You have to move on. We know that that's your life. This could always be the last day. We take that a little bit for granted, thinking, oh yeah, well, they'll rush you to the hospital, give us some blood, give us some whatever and pump us up and it'll be all right. Death is a shock today, when it does happen, you know for most of when people die young. But back then people died like that all the time.
Speaker 1:She talks about suicide. People think suicide would be something more contemporary and yet suicides were quite common in that era. You don't have painkillers that like you do today, or think to ease your pain or whatever. Yeah, people just can't live with it no more and end it. And so she talks about a couple of sides that happen in there that are kind of shocking. You know she describes a buggy ride or something on the beach, and sometimes they're different. It's kind of lovely, right. But she also describes all of the rattlesnakes on the island, the mosquitoes that are, literally. I think. At one point she wrote a letter to her mother, said you can't imagine they're. They torment you day and night. Without a mosquito net you can forget it. She claimed that there was a sailor. I don't know if you read that, but there was a sailor who jumped off a ship one day and drowned himself because he couldn't take it anymore. The mosquitoes were just horrific.
Speaker 2:Yeah, she describes. Even when they leave Maine she's writing back to her mother talking about the journey, and then when they arrive at the opening to Galveston. Bay on the ship. They had to hail a pilot to get them into the channel and they have to wait a couple days, I believe, and then they end up talking to another ship that's coming by, I think from England or something, and they end up towing them partially and then they get a pilot on board or something like that. But it's really descriptive.
Speaker 1:By the way, I've never had anybody buy the book for this reason. But if you're just interested in shipping, I kept a list. I wrote all the ships down. It's probably in my index if you want to go through there. She mentions dozens of ships that were entering the port and different things at different times, including a British, the first iron ship that was ever built. It was coming from Brazil or something. It landed in Galveston or something.
Speaker 1:That's what I was just going to say, and they were invited on board, so she got to go and tour it or whatever man that is so cool and what I've done.
Speaker 2:I've read the first probably 30 or 40 pages. But because this book sits out normally in here, because I've used it just to kind of paint pictures in my videos, right, I'll read sections and then use descriptions that Lucy Parker Shaw uses and to paint those old 1830s, 1840s pictures in people's minds. But I'll skip through, I'll just pick it up and read a letter here and there.
Speaker 1:That's a good deal about the book. You can do it. You can just read it like a narrative all the way through, or you can just read here or there and get ideas about you know.
Speaker 2:And you do an amazing job adding historical context in between most of the letters.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of the figures and stuff I really didn't know much about. And so I said, yeah, I try to tell you. I know, if you know, I've got an American history degree if I'm really for sure who these people are, right, then I try to tell you, yeah, well, let's see, this is who she's talking about. This is not a nobody, by the way, you know kind of thing, of nobody by the way, you know kind of thing. So when she talks about, like some of the, some of the figures like Dr Ashbell Smith is one of her doctors Well, even in Texas history he's a huge figure. I don't know how many people, he's not that big anymore, but at one time he was one of the you know, a key figure in Texas history.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and his building right down the street here at UTMB is the flagship building of University of Texas Medical.
Speaker 1:Branch it is. He's known as the founder of the Texas University. Texas is, you know, it's kind of his yeah and so, yeah, he's an educator, by the way, the founder of Prairie View. He had Texas legislature pass a bill that established Prairie View University for Freeman.
Speaker 2:I had no idea. That's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so, in the process of going through these letters and preparing them to be published, you also had to do a lot of research to add in the historical context.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was most of my time was just researching and a lot of this was not that difficult to research. It wasn't a deep dive. You'll see my the reference that I use. You know the things that I cited. Some of them are really rather common. You know Texas Historical Society, you know stuff like that. It's just out there very easy, but some of it was, you know it was a lot deeper dive into finding out who are these people and what the hell's going on here.
Speaker 1:I like the part she, for example. The politics is. Something that people will be shocked to find out is that Sam Houston was not loved by everyone At one time. Sam Houston dissolved the Texas Navy. She talks quite a bit about that. That people were very in Galveston, very upset because in this and I didn't know anything about the details of the battle but the Texas Navy beat the Mexican Navy, the Bay of the Campeche I mean the Battle of the Campeche or whatever and in Galveston that was thought as something that saved them, because they expected the Mexican Navy to invade Texas and they were going to land in Galveston, burn the city down. There was no defense that they really had and they said the Texas Navy saved them and Sam Houston went and got rid of it. Not only that, had a rest warrant for Commodore Moore, which in their minds was the hero and she talks about. They held a meeting, meetings about it, and her husband was involved in that. And then they had a big. They all met one night and they hanged Sam Houston in effigy.
Speaker 2:You know, know and all that hated his guts and everything kind of kind of stuff. It's like sam houston. He's the man he won the battle of san justino, he demand and then and then you get into like galveston history.
Speaker 1:You're like, yeah, people around here didn't like him very much towards the no in the 1840s, especially when the mexican navy was still harassing the te, the Texas coast through that entire period I learned that that was, by the way, that battle was the not the last time, the only time a fleet under sail beat a steam powered fleet. Lucy not only meets a lot of interesting people and you can tell her education in the thing throughout the book but it's also very kind of heart-wrenching. One of her doctors some of the people from Maine are interesting. She talked pretty early in this book. She mentions a doctor, dr Cyrus Hamlin. Dr Cyrus Hamlin. Now see, this is what. If you just go over something like this and you just see the name, you don't think anything about it. Right, we just move on.
Speaker 1:Well, my job was to wonder who was Cyrus Hamlin. Well, it was pretty easy to find out who he was because he was the brother of Hannibal Hamlin, lincoln's first vice president. They lived in Paris, maine, and his practice originally was in Calais, maine, which is up the St Croix River. From Eastport you go around the corner and go up this river. It's a border between Canada and Maine and that's where his practice was. When I gave a talk in Calais, maine, you could go out. Their historical society was in his home where he had his medical practice. They claimed he was buried there too, you could go see his grave. But I said too, you could go see his grave. But I said they must have moved it because he died in galveston and she records him being buried oh, so they were all at his funeral, so he's here somewhere he's there, he's he, he should be here somewhere and we don't.
Speaker 1:And I've never been able to find where, never for sure where they were burying people. They just said it was outside the city one time. That's all I know.
Speaker 2:It's probably like 30th Street or something these days I don't maybe something I don't really know.
Speaker 1:You know she doesn't identify exactly where the burying ground was. Now she is buried in city cemetery out here. She's not buried with her husband, by the way. She's married with her mother -in-law, because when they came, joshua brought his wife, their infant emily, and then he also brought his sister, his stepmother and, I think, one other person that comes up occasionally that I had a hell of a time finding I think it was his aunt. Okay, so he came with a crew and a lot of stuff they brought with them. Okay, because they were setting up shop here and Joshua was a carpenter.
Speaker 1:I say carpenter, he built houses. Everyone knows. Well, everyone doesn't know, but the Menard House, one of the oldest buildings, was a prefab house right from Maine and I've always been wondering if Joshua didn't have something to do with that, because when he got here he built houses and then later he got the job of managing the Tremont. So he and his wife moved into Tremont and then they built a hotel for themselves and then suddenly, two years go by, they're back at the Tremont and I have no idea what happened to their hotel. But there's a lot of things. It got me involved, the idea that she comes here with her husband and she's educated.
Speaker 1:Like I said, and I'm not so sure as much about Joshua, I did throw one of his letters in there because I had it and I just wanted you, I wanted the reader just get a little taste. He's writing, I think, his son, william, because she ends up she does have a child that dies. She comes with Emily and then she has two other children, william and Annie, william, her son. There's easy to find stuff about him. Find stuff about him. He ended up during the Civil War. He joined I don't know, it was Galveston Rifles or something like that and then he got out of that and joined the Confederate Navy. He actually went to the Confederate Naval Academy. The only service I could find and this, by the way, was when he passed away the Masonic Lodge. He was a Mason, so they had a bit on him and supposedly he was on. He served on the cruiser whatever, tallahassee, it was a Confederate raider.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:That sailed up the East Coast. It took 19 prizes. It was in one trip. It was a big deal. It really harassed yankee shipping up there a little. I think is an interesting side note, and again I'm not for sure, I have to kind of dig into it a little bit deeper. They took a ship off massachusetts main, somewhere in there. They recorded it in their log. They took this ship and the master of the ship was a guy named Captain Marston. The Marstons are related to the Shaws and so ergo, what I'm saying is he might have been on a ship that took a ship that was captained by a relative of his. Uh-huh, you know what I mean, that's a pretty common Civil War story, though.
Speaker 2:Right you know, brother fighting, brother father fighting son.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, we've got the story in Galveston about the. You know the what?
Speaker 2:was the deal about the.
Speaker 1:Battle of Galveston.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Edward and Albert Lee father and son. Yeah, yeah, father and son, both on separate sides. Right, both on separate sides, I think the son was on a Union Navy vessel that had taken Galveston for a few months and then, the father was on the Confederate side and they battled each other right here, two blocks away from where we are. Okay, do you know anything about Saccharap?
Speaker 1:I looked into it briefly, it's named after Saccharap Falls. It's a beautiful little, very iconic little main town, right, and they have a historical society and I I sent them off, them in in you know queries. So this what history tells me is we have this filibuster age and we know the filibusters were in Bolivar and if you read anything about the Bolivarian revolts you think this is only Latin Americans. It was not. Many. Many Americans were involved in these revolutions in South America and Central America, right, some of them for nefarious reasons of trying to gather some sort of little kingdom or something, but others just because they thought it was the right thing to do. It was a patriotic kind of American kind of thing, because the idea of why does Bolivar revolt? Right, because the model was the United States did it Right.
Speaker 1:We're going to do the same thing. So a lot of Americans were fighting against Spain, and so that can be one reason, you know, is just this idea. They were drawn down here during this filibuster era and or it's new land, it's arable land. There's things they can do, although Joshua and them, he's a merchant. They're merchants, you know. They're typical. Like Yankees, I was telling my previous class audience, lucy is the prototypical Yankee. Everything she believes in is like New England of that era, puritan ethics, right. They're founding members of Trinity Episcopal Church, but she also befriends another Presbyterian minister named William McCalla that later on, my research found out in that era was a very famous churchman, that era was a very famous churchman.
Speaker 1:Okay, he founded churches, he started the second college in the Republic of Texas and he was really well known and he visited Lucy when you know, when he came down here. So they were very kind of religious, they really. And she mentions religion occasionally and mentions getting religious books for her daughter, you know, and children they need to be educated, you know this is part of their education. She knew Gail Borden. She mentions Borden several times. People who know anything about old Galveston history know Gail Borden. You know Borden milk guy and all that Talks about his garden, because he was into that horticulture thing. She was too. And also she started a school with gail borden and she taught in this school until things got going and she got busy and couldn't do it anymore. But she helped gail borden start a school, right, her husband was an alderman, he was head of the wars board. You know what I mean. There are all this kind of New England-y, yankee kind of way of looking at the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, and so my previous talk kind of centered on that idea that what is she bringing to Galveston?
Speaker 1:What is her and her husband, but particularly her, because the letters are from her Is there bringing this civilized kind of like saying right, you know people, this is a whole idea of the frontier. You know the Frederick Turner thesis and all this that this, this country, was settled in waves and there was always the frontier. Ok, you know, you start with trappers and explorers and it moves on to and then it moves on to more wild kind of settler, and then the farmers and then the merchants and there's a pattern, and so they kind of fit into this pattern of taking this wild place and making it a livable place. She's interested in science, she's interested in science, she's interested in medicine, she's interested, like I said, in religion, the civics of it making a place. If you really look and you see who created the government here in the early eras, you're going to find most of them were people from that era, that area, right, not just Maine and Massachusetts, but you know what I mean.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maryland and Pennsylvania, new York. A lot of New Yorkers settled in in Galveston so they bring this whole merchant class, this trading class, this organization bureaucracy and all that to Galveston.
Speaker 2:Is there anything else you wanted to say? Any parting thoughts?
Speaker 1:Let me read this. I'm just going to read this little passage by Eric Hoffer, okay, because it's about history and it's about the importance of studying individuals and their lives, their lives, death, how they approach life, how they look at things, society and all that, but also how they make us feel. As eric hoffer wrote, it is the individual only who is timeless. Societies, cultures and civilizations, past and present, are often incomprehensible to outsiders, but the individual's hungers, anxieties, dreams and preoccupations have remained unchanged through the millennia, through the millennia. Thus we are up against the paradox that the individual, who is more complex, unpredictable and mysterious than any communal entity, is the one nearest to our understanding, so near that even the interval of millennia cannot weaken our feeling of kinship. If, in some manner, the voice of an individual reaches us from the remotest distance of time, it is a timeless voice speaking about ourselves.
