Rand McNally to the Chicago River: Agnes Lee's Eastland Story

The Eastland disaster didn't vanish into the Chicago River — it scattered into poems, magazines, archives, and family research, waiting for someone to go looking.

In this episode, I push back on the idea that “history forgot” the Eastland disaster. History didn't forget. The records are there in abundance. What’s missing is the willingness to look past the easy summary and find them.

We return to Agnes Lee, a major voice in Chicago's literary scene, with a newly uncovered Eastland poem and a deep dive into her life and work. Then the trail takes an unexpected turn — straight to The Prison Mirror, a prisoner-run newspaper out of Stillwater, Minnesota. It's not a detour. It's a reminder that the most important sources often live outside the places we assume to search.

From there, I introduce Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine, and explain how her "open door" editorial policy preserved an entire community of writers responding to tragedy — Agnes Lee and Carl Sandburg among them.

You'll hear two of Lee's Eastland poems, "The Divers" and "Eastland Waters" — works that belong in any serious conversation about the 1915 disaster, Chicago history, public memory, and the ethics of retelling.

If you enjoy learning about overlooked voices of the Eastland disaster, subscribe, share this episode, and leave a review so more listeners can find Flower in the River.

Resources:

• Lee, Agnes. “Eastland Waters.” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  (February 1916)
• Lee, Agnes. “The Divers.” The Bookman 42 (September 1915–February 1916)
• The Editors, “Harriet Monroe & the Open Door,” Poetry Foundation, n.d., accessed June 24, 2026.
• Rand, Martha Agnes, and Agnes Lee. "The Knife and the Leaf." The Prison Mirror [Stillwater, MN], vol. 3, no. 5, 12 Sept. 1889, p. 1.

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Transcript

Welcome To Flower In The River

Natalie Zett 0:07

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie. Welcome to episode 172 of Flower in the River. As always, I hope you are doing well. The

The Eastland’s Long Paper Trail

Natalie Zett 1:00

Eastland disaster did not end at the river. It continued through all sorts of artistic expressions, including articles, poems, novels, parish histories, memoirs, photographs, archives, and public memories. Some of the people who carried it forward became well known, famous even, such as Carl Sandberg. Others vanished. But every one of these people, they were all part of the disaster's very long paper trail, and they've all been waiting to be discovered again, and they have so much to teach us. So last week we discussed how poet, author, and musician Carl Sandberg responded to the Eastland disaster. This week we'll keep the focus on poets and writers and take another look at Agnes Lee, who I first discovered and then featured in a December 2023 episode called Eastland Waters, Melody, Verse, and Lithuanian Legacy in Chicago, when I was just getting started with this research project, as I called it. And because of the Carl Sandberg episode, I decided to revisit Agnes Lee's work. And I'm glad I started searching again because I came across another undiscovered poem that Agnes Lee wrote about the Eastland disaster. So this is another world premiere of sorts. And I also conjecture that she most likely knew Carl Sandberg very well, since they both contributed regularly to Poetry Magazine. When it comes to these modern retellings of the history of the Eastland disaster, not only is Agnes Lee omitted, but also Carl Sandberg is omitted for the most part.

Why Retellings Flatten The Story

Natalie Zett 3:31

It's not that the Eastland story vanished. So there is a version of the Eastland Disaster history, and I call this version the limited revised edition. It's like the Cliff's Notes version of the Eastland Disaster. It's still presented as the full story. Now, if Cliff's Notes is unfamiliar, think of it as a Wikipedia summary, but in this case, much of the critical and crucial information is missing. In tandem, there is this phrase or variations on this phrase that keeps getting repeated. I often hear that history forgot them. Actually, history didn't forget. It's people who drop the ball. It's people who commodify tragedies and flatten the narrative to fit some kind of branding or marketing initiative. That seems to be what has happened. However, remember that the actual history of the Eastland disaster is in excellent shape. It's just that these retellings and repackagings have removed so much detail, or maybe they never included it in the first place. I don't know. And that brings us back to Agnes Lee, who was very much a part of the Eastland disaster history in terms of her contributions, and was also very much a part of the literary scene in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.

Who Was Poet Agnes Lee

Natalie Zett 5:15

Agnes Lee was born Martha Agnes Rand in 1868 in Chicago. And if the Rand name seems slightly familiar, there's a good reason for that. She was the second daughter of William H. Rand of Map Publishers Rand, McNally and Company. She was educated in Switzerland, and in 1900 she married Francis Watts Lee, settling with him in Boston. In 1911, she married Otto Freer, a Chicago surgeon, and returned to Chicago. In addition to her debut collection, The Legend of a Thought, 1889, published under the name Martha Agnes Rand, her books of poetry include The Border of the Lake, 1910, The Sharing, 1914, Faces and Open Doors, 1922, and New Lyrics and Old Ones, 1931. And she's the author of a collection of children's verse, The Round Rabbit. And since she was fluent in several languages, including French, she did a lot of translation work as well. And

The Prison Mirror Surprise Connection

Natalie Zett 6:35

here's some Agnes Lee trivia. As I was researching, I found a newspaper that she had contributed some poetry to. It was available from the Minnesota Historical Society's website, and it was, wait for it, a publication from Stillwater, Minnesota called The Prison Mirror. It was a publication primarily written by prisoners at the Stillwater Prison as it was called back then. But today it is the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater. It is Minnesota's oldest prison, and it was built in Stillwater, Minnesota as a territorial prison in 1853. Besides being the site of multiple rebellions, it also publishes The Prison Mirror, the publication that Agnes Lee contributed to, and this is likely the oldest continuously operating prisoner newspaper in the United States. Its tagline is It Is Never Too Late to Mend. And Agnes's poem appeared in their September twelfth, eighteen eighty-nine issue. There has to be a backstory for this one. Actually, I learned that Stillwater did admit women, but I don't think Agnes was doing time there. She probably got involved through some sort of charitable effort. And yet, one of the things that I have learned in this journey is never assume anything. But I'm not going to jump into that rabbit hole, at least right now. Agnes Lee, Carl Sandberg, and so many other poets published in Poetry Magazine in Chicago. And in 1926, she won the magazine's Garrenter's Prize, which had been previously won by Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a selection of letters to her from Edgar Lee Masters, an admirer, is archived at the Newberry Library in Chicago. Agnes died in Chicago in 1939.

Harriet Monroe Builds Poetry Magazine

Natalie Zett 8:59

I want to introduce us to Harriet Monroe, born in 1860 and died in 1936, because she was the founder of Poetry Magazine. And had she not founded Poetry Magazine, I think so many voices would have been lost, not just in regard to the Eastland disaster response, but poetry and literature in general. Harriet was an American poet, editor, literary critic, and patron of the arts, whose founding of poetry, a magazine of verse, in 1912, fundamentally transformed modern American poetry. Over her 24-year editorship, she shepherded into print some of the most consequential voices of the 20th century, earning the magazine recognition as the principal organ for modern poetry of the English-speaking world. Harriet Munro was born on December 30, 1860, in Chicago into a prosperous family headed by her father, Henry S. Munro, a well-known attorney. Her father's extensive personal library became the formative influence on her literary imagination. In her posthumously published autobiography, A Poet's Life, Seventy Years in a Changing World, published in 1938, she recalled finding in those bookshelves, quote, friends of the spirit to ease my loneliness, end quote, immersing herself in Shakespeare, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Thackeray from an early age. Monroe received her secondary education at Dearborn Seminary in Chicago, and then at the Visitation Convent in Washington, D.C., graduating in 1879. Upon graduation, she reportedly declared her determination to become, quote unquote, great and famous as a poet or playwright, a youthful ambition she would spend the next five decades pursuing. For much of the 1880s and 1890s, Monroe supported herself through journalism, working as an art and drama critic for the Chicago Tribune, and contributing freelance articles to various publications. Encouraged by prominent literary figures, including Robert Lewis Stevenson and William Dean Howells, she published her first poetry collection in 1892, which established her as a promising voice in American verse. Her most significant early recognition, though, came in 1891 when the Committee on Ceremonies for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition invited her to write the official dedication poem. The resulting Columbian Ode, a sweeping 2,600-word poem, was performed at Dedication Day ceremonies on October 21, 1892. And get this, the poem's journey also produced a landmark legal victory when the New York World newspaper surreptitiously obtained a draft manuscript and published it without her permission. Munro sued and won a precedent-setting copyright lawsuit receiving a $5,000 verdict. At the age of 51, Munro embarked on the project that would define her legacy. Frustrated by the scarcity of outlets for serious innovative poetry, magazines of the era bought verse to mainly fill leftover space. She set out to create the first American journal devoted entirely to poetry. Her fundraising model was simple but bold. She canvassed approximately 100 Chicago civic leaders, asking each to pledge $50 annually for five years, thereby securing a reliable operating budget outside conventional commercial publishing. The inaugural issue of Poetry, a magazine of verse, appeared in October 1912, featuring two poems by Ezra Pound. Monroe's editorial manifesto was equally ambitious. As the magazine's motto, she adopted a line from Walt Whitman, quote, To have great poets, there must be great audiences too, signaling her belief that cultivating readership was as important as publishing poets. In the second issue, she proclaimed what became her guiding editorial principle, the open door policy. Quote, the open door will be the policy of this magazine. May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut or half shut against his ample genius. And one of Munro's most consequential editorial decisions was appointing Ezra Pound as poetry's foreign correspondent in London beginning in 1912. Pound exchanged more letters with Munro than any other editor, debating artistic merit, championing unknown writers, and steering some of the era's most important work toward the magazine. Their relationship was famously turbulent. Pound once accused Munro of being, quote, too stupid to understand his cantos, to which he fired back that the recently published installment would be the last of your political manifestos, which poetry will care to have the honour of printing, end quote. Despite constant friction, the alliance was extraordinarily productive. Pound used his London network to funnel work by H. D., T. S. Elliot, William Butler Yates, and others to Chicago. The most celebrated example of this partnership was the publication of T. S. Elliott's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in June 1915, a poem that Monroe reportedly published at Pound's urging and that went on to shape the course of English language poetry. Under Munro's editorship, poetry published work by virtually every major modern poet writing in English, including Carl Sandberg and Agnes Lee. Munro deliberately resisted aligning the magazine with any single aesthetic school, insisting on openness to both formal verse and radical experiment. And she also insisted, unusually for the era, that poets be paid for their work, believing that writers deserve the same financial dignity as other artists. Encyclopædia Britannica would later conclude that during Harriet Munro's tenure, poetry quickly became the world's leading English language poetry journal. She remained a tireless advocate for poetry and the arts throughout her life and continued editing poetry well into her 70s. In September 1936, at age 75, Monroe was returning from a pen congress in Buenos Aires when she detoured to Peru, intending to view the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage on September 26, 1936, in Peru, where she was buried.

A Literary Community Responds To Disaster

Natalie Zett 17:50

Harriet Monroe didn't just launch a magazine. She built a community. And when the Eastland went down, these poets didn't grieve in isolation. They had a community that they were a part of where they could talk about their reactions to what happened, to write them down, and to share with the world their thoughts and their perceptions. That's the thing about a literary community like this. It doesn't just collect voices, it amplifies them, it makes them influential by exposing them to the world. Another benefit to having a magazine like poetry is that it spawned or inspired other similar poetry magazines. One of these was a literary magazine called The Bookman. Now whether poetry inspired this magazine to come into being or not, I'm not sure. But it's a contemporary of Poetry Magazine. And in the 1916 issue, Agnes Lee published another Eastland poem called The Divers. And here it is.

Agnes Lee Reads The Divers

Natalie Zett 19:27

Our weighted forms pierced the maze of a myriad swarming creatures. A twinning, grappling, headlong humanity. We saw young girls pinned to the mire of the murky, the charnel river, like fair fresh flowers on the filthy breast of a hag. Beautiful babes nestled within the dregs of the sluggish river. Shadows, shadows, shadows, fading and looming, rose and re-rose. Manhood, womanhood, childhood turning together, one human fish, up wavering shoal on shoal, down again and down again, and up with living or dead again. For we are divers, the eastland divers, divers of souls. What did you see amid the waters? The murky waters, confusion, fallacy. You, the divers, the eastland divers. Our searching eyes pierced the cold intrigue of the powers of error, of shadows, shadows, shadows gliding and fading. We pierced Greed's rule. We saw Greed's hand, immune of abomination, push faith down to its death in the circling doom. Sorrow we saw. It shall go pleading forever down the years, telling the pitiless price of the frantic lesson. And still we saw the dream of a higher law for a higher people, the dreams no charnal river shall wash away. Down again and down again, and up with a slimy truth again. For we are divers, the eastland divers.

Agnes Lee Reads Eastland Waters

Natalie Zett 21:56

I'm going to read Eastland Waters by Ag. It was first published in Poetry, a magazine of verse, in the February 1916 issue. Before I read, I should let you know that this is a dialogue of sorts going on between three people. Niels, that's N I E L S, that's a guy. Mary and Anna. Eastland Waters by Agnes Lee. Neils. Now girls Now girls, cling on with all your might. Cling steady to this plank. Don't lose your grit. Mary Neils, will they all be saved? Niels, be sure of it. They can't be drowned. Anna for everything's in sight. Mary and we could almost touch the houses there. See how the steamer sank upon her side like a huge beast? Anna Listen A baby cried. Neils Don't turn. Don't listen. Don't look anywhere. Mary The human fish See how they haul them in? The slimy fish Oh this is awful, Niels Anna. They're everywhere. How cold the water feels Niels Keep up your nerve. Be the brave girls you've been Mary. Soon we'll be safe. Nothing can harm us here, with all those little windows looking on. I feel your courage, Niels. My fear has gone. Neils. Steady there. Steady. Now the dock is near. Anna. Oh Neils, I wish I had your arms around me. It came. I didn't mean to tell. Mary, you never dreamed. We kept it well. Neils thought we mustn't speak it out. He bound me Neils. Hush, hush Anna, he bound me not to say a word, not to let others guess it in my face. But who could keep a secret in this place? And Mary, I am glad at last you've heard. And Mary, you shall fasten up my veil and hold my book for me. Why, everything seems wonderful. Even here I want to sing. We'll have a little flat in Carbondale. Neils, Anna, don't chatter on like this, I say. Mary, I meant to make it clear to you. Mary Anna. Oh look, her lips are blue. Neils Mary Anna. Oh look! Her hands have slipped away.

Why These Poems Still Matter

Natalie Zett 25:21

You just heard two poems by Agnes Lee about the Eastland disaster. The first was The Divers, and the second was Eastland Waters. I have no comments because Agnes said it better than I ever could. I also hope you enjoyed learning about Poetry Magazine. If it weren't for Poetry Magazine, poems like The Eastland by Carl Sandberg and Eastland Waters by Agnes Lee might never have been written, or if they had been written, they might not be available to us today. They'd be sitting in someone's drawer or perhaps even destroyed by now. But because of this magazine and because of other literary magazines of that time, we have these records. I'll say it again, the history of the Eastland disaster, the history of the people of the Eastland disaster is very much alive and well. It just has not been explored or researched all that well. But we're changing that. So stick with us, and we'll be back next week with more stories of the people of the Eastland disaster. Please take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Stay safe, and I'll talk to you next week.

Subscribe, Support, And Farewell

Natalie Zett 26:54

Hey, that's it for this episode, and thanks for coming along for the ride. Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerintheriver.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money, and that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of 1915. Goodbye for now.