Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Sollie was a strange fellow, stuck with the imposing name Solomon because he had been born during a visit by his mother’s brother, Presbyterian minister Solomon Stevens. He had an extremely flat nose and the same flaming red hair that added flair to Lucy’s appearance. A sensitive, peculiar child, Sollie was embarrassed by both his name and his nose. His mother shielded him, which only served to magnify his shyness. Lucy felt he “never seemed fitted for the battle with life, shunned society and clung to home.” To his credit he read a great deal, and he was very conscientious and obedient. He was so shy, he would cross to the other side of the street to avoid anyone he knew so that he would not have to speak, and when the family marched up town to have their picture taken, Sollie went by a side street to avoid the crowd.

Sollie labored to reshape his nose. However, no amount of rubbing or pushing with artificial supports would make it look normal. To try to appear more intellectual, he began shaving back the hair on his forehead so it would seem higher. These desperate measures achieved nothing.

Recognizing that the problem needed attention, the family decided to rename Sollie, thus to relieve him of one of his burdens. Instead of bearing the name of his mother’s brother, he now bore that of his father’s brother and was Henry Stevens Seaman or “Harry.” But an introvert by any other name remains shy, and the problem deepened with the passage of years. When Lucy was seventeen, the family tried another solution, and sent Harry on a trip under the care of his sister to see the mines on Lake Superior.

The Dead River Silver and Copper Mining Company of Cleveland had first staked a claim near Marquette on Michigan’s upper peninsula back in 1846. Six years later, the first iron ore was hauled down to Cleveland in a half dozen barrels on the ship Baltimore.³⁹ As the mines expanded, the miners multiplied. Each miner meant two feet that needed boots, and soon the manufacture of heavy miners’ boots was a chief part of the Seaman and Smith business. Lucy marveled at the huge packing cases destined for Marquette and beyond.

With Harry in tow, she took ship with one of the freighter captains, off on an adventure designed to bring her brother out of his shell. As Lucy put it, she was the “man” of the party, handling all the money and leading her brother like a little child. Harry shut himself in his cabin, refusing to come out for anything, and Lucy had to carry his dinner in to him. No coaxing would get him out on deck until they reached a stopping place, when he left the steamer, refusing to go any further. Lucy left him in a hotel, and completed the trip herself, traveling across Lake Huron and a third of Superior. Past Marquette, she went deep into the earth to see the men dig copper. Upon her return, she discovered that Harry had fled homeward, so with his unused ticket she took the trip to the mining area all over again, before returning to Cleveland.

At one of the stops, she met some boys from her neighborhood, with whom she had a score to settle. They used to taunt her, asking for a lock of her flaming red hair, promising to keep in a tin box so it would not start a fire, and it was time for revenge. In the sweetest and most innocent voice Lucy could muster, she told them about the exciting underground tour she had been given, by a mining foreman named Ben Blucher. As she described going deeper and deeper into the earth, the boys got more and more excited, and they begged her to tell them how they could have the same adventure as she. Lucy said she was sure Ben Blucher would love to guide them down below, too, and they should just go to the mining camp and ask around for him. All they got for their troubles was scorn and laughter, because Ben Blucher was really just the mining foreman’s pet dog.

For a time, Lucy attended the Cleveland Female Seminary, a private high school of very high quality founded in 1854. The first headmaster, Samuel St. John, was a professor from Western Reserve College who set up the seminary as if it were a college, established extremely attractive pay rates, and recruited twenty talented faculty. They offered instruction in arithmetic, botany, chemistry, physiology, ancient and modern languages (Latin, French and German), English, drawing and painting, music, and penmanship. Some girls boarded at the school, at a cost of $250 a year, while day students like Lucy paid $40 to $50. These modest fees and the high teacher salaries doomed the school to financial instability.

Every Monday, Lucy and the other girls recited Bible lessons, and they practiced giving sermon abstracts. Every week, Lucy wrote a composition, and the girls looked forward eagerly to the Wednesday classes in which they read their essays aloud to responsive audiences. Sadly, the library was rather bare, although the drawing room that stretched from the front to the rear of the main part of the building boasted an expensive crimson carpet, a silver water-service on a marble-topped table, and furniture covered in red silk.

Among Lucy’s favorite art forms was the tableau: a group of costumed performers would hold perfectly still, motionlessly acting out a dramatic scene as if they were figures in an oil painting. One time the girls created costumes representing the nations they had been reading about, and another they personified the seasons of the year.

One of Lucy’s teachers described the spirited atmosphere of this excellent school: “A volume of romance might be written, with the strictest truth, on the personal history of the young girls who filled the Seminary halls and grounds with their maiden frolic, hurried to and fro to chapel or recitation, and dreamed their dreams of home and the future looking out from those windows. Variety was given to the schoolroom exercises by the abstracts and the newspaper items each one was expected to furnish. Questions on these brought up the leading events and ideas of the time, the situation of foreign countries, the advance of inventions, the politics of Mr. Buchanan’s Administration, — only it would not do publicly to touch upon slavery.”⁴⁰

On Sundays, Lucy would often bring home from the school a sweet, sensible girl named Lou Barr, one of the boarding students, whose father ran a stove company in Erie, Pennsylvania. Despite his shyness, brother Harry began to take an interest in Lou, and with a little coaxing from Lucy the two began a courtship that would eventually lead to marriage.
Religious Movements
Lucy's family developed a close friendship with the radical Shaker religious commune at North Union, eight miles east of their home in what later became the suburb of Shaker Heights.⁴¹ “They were among my father’s customers, and would drive to town in cumbersome wagons to do their trading. Once, at my father’s store, a young Shaker woman was taken ill, and in his big-hearted way, my father sent her to our home where my mother cared for her for several days. This led to an invitation being given us to visit them, and I was allowed to accept. It gave me an understanding of their queer customs and an intimate acquaintance with their scrupulously neat houses, the braided mats, also a share of the good fare of the community table. The fertile land owned by the Shakers produced marvelous rye, wheat and barley, while their cows gave richer cream and their gardens bigger strawberries than any other in the vicinity. They would often send my mother gifts of most delicious butter and berries.

“The Shakers rigidly upheld the laws governing their religion. Their belief did not sanction marriage; the men and the women were supposed to have no interest whatever in each other; they had occupations apart, they did not sit together at meals, the brothers having one long table and the sisters another. Yet, within my recollection, romance somehow crept in between the rules. This same young sister who spent some days at our house was the community school-teacher. The duty of keeping the wood-box full was no doubt hard for her and a young brother offered to help. Then one dark night they ran away and were married, in spite of all the rules and commandments of the Shaker religion.”⁴²

Other radical religious movements swirled around Lucy during her teen-age years. When Spiritualism swept the country, even the Shakers were affected, many of the young women being seized by spirits and whirling through Shaker Heights like toy tops. The financial panic of 1857, coupled with astrologers’ predictions of the end of the world, triggered revivals across the nation. In Cleveland, Plymouth Congregational Church took the lead with early morning services each day for businessmen, and after the YMCA joined in, as many as three thousand citizens were worshipping at crack of dawn.⁴³
The Lady Doctor
Cleora’s health declined, and as Lucy put it, “her body which was never very strong gave way under the strain of life,”⁴⁴ so that winter she visited Philadelphia for a water cure. Many of the woman at the spa read light fiction or did embroidery to while away the time between treatments, but Cleora was not interested in these pastimes, so her doctor suggested she walk down to the new Women’s Medical College nearby, where there was a medical library and lectures she found she could appreciate. Whether from the water treatments themselves, the exercise of walking to the college, or from the new ideas she gained there, Cleora began to feel much better.

Her return to Cleveland coincided with the death of her darling little daughter, five-year-old Cora Gussie. With baby Walter gone, and now baby Cleora, Lucy’s mother had little to do at home except fret about her health and contemplate the loss of four of her eight children. Lucy’s father urged her to carry on with the medical education she had started, and she enrolled in the Western Homeopathic College, which at the time was the only medical school in Cleveland willing to admit a woman. John fitted up a private space for her in the gallery of the lecture hall, with a comfortable armchair and footstool, with curtains at the sides so the male students would not be overly conscious that there was a woman in their midst. Of course, the other students could not really ignore her sitting there above them, and they joked that she was their guardian angel. Cleora studied hard, and she often invited other students to gather at her home to go over the lessons and consume bountiful suppers. For instance, on January 4, 1860, the Cleveland Leader reported, “The entertainment was given by Mrs. Seaman, who is attending the course of lectures, and will no doubt deservedly win the title of M.D. at Commencement, a title the intelligent and studious lady will certainly wear with grace as well as usefully.”⁴⁵

Homeopathy was a drug therapy invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century by a German named Samuel Christian Frederick Hahnemann. Conventional physicians possessed few effective remedies, and their treatments often added to the sufferings of the patient while failing to cure the disease. Therefore, an ineffective medicine that did not at least make the condition worse would be an improvement, and Hahnemann deserves credit for inventing one. His first doctrine was similia similibus curentur — like by like may be cured — and each medicine was selected because it appeared to produce symptoms like those of the disease. This dangerous tactic was countered by the second principle, that homeopathic pharmacists should produce extremely dilute solutions, so weakened that perhaps not a single atom of the active substance remained. Finally, for good measure, the third principle was that only one medicine should be administered. Paradoxically, homeopathy was the ineffective cure that defended the patient against harmful cures.⁴⁶

These teachings had been brought to Cleveland by W. R. Adams about when Lucy was born, and by 1845 a small number of families were silent followers of a homeopathic doctor named John Wheeler, firm in their faith but unwilling to proclaim it because of strong public feeling against their deviant brand of medicine. The next year, B. H. Bartlett opened the city’s first homeopathic pharmacy a few doors from John Seaman’s shoe and boot emporium. Despite strong opposition and denunciations, Wheeler progressively converted more and more families to homeopathy, until he was sufficiently well established to found a medical college, hoping to make Cleveland the center of homeopathy in the west. At the peak, the city would possess twenty-six homeopathic physicians, two hospitals, and the Hahnemann Life Insurance Company which had D. H. Beckwith, a homeopathist, for its medical examiner and chief stockholder.⁴⁷

In the spring of 1860, the Western Homeopathic College graduated fully nineteen doctors, eighteen men plus Cleora. Until the last minute there was great doubt she would actually be permitted to gain a degree, but she did so well on her final examination that nothing could stop her. The Cleveland Leader announced Cleora’s success, saying “We rejoice to record that Woman’s right in the highway of Science and Art is fast becoming better understood, and appreciated in this Country, and now some of the most flourishing institutions of learning make no distinction between sexes in classes, and degrees.”⁴⁸ Cleora bravely pioneered the right of women to practice medicine, but she was not the first woman doctor in the city, having been preceded in 1852 by Myra King Merrick, a native of Cleveland who had studied water cures and other treatments in Rochester.⁴⁹ Cleora continued to be very active in the church, local charities, and the social life of the community, so she did not have much time to devote to doctoring. Furthermore, John’s income from his large business made it unnecessary for her to earn a living. Thus her medical practice was a cross between charity work and experimentation.

John added an extension on their house where patients could be treated; the “Lord’s Room,” they called it. The central feature was a bathtub, because Cleora still believed in hydropathy, but now she experimented with the high technology of her day. She convinced the local telegraph operator, the only man in the neighborhood with much knowledge of electricity, to wire the tub so that anyone who sat in it would receive a small charge. Needing a female subject for her first tests she experimented upon Lucy.⁵⁰ A competitor at 117 Ontario street saw to it that the newspapers treated him kindly: “Dr. Gibson’s improved negative and positive electro-chemical baths is now the best treatment in the world for the permanent cure of rheumatism, scrofula, liver-complaint, colds, fever, asthma, consumption, insanity, delirium tremens, etc.”⁵¹ One newspaper made fun of the Seaman enterprise, calling Cleora “the lady of the tub.” But patients began to come, including the girls who worked in John’s small boot factory,⁵² especially women who felt their complaints had not been appreciated by male doctors.

Cleora’s friends laughed at the electrified tub, but they had laughed before when she had purchased the first sewing machine in Cleveland. And the solid social status of the Seaman family protected them from extreme ridicule. At first, Cleora would not accept any payment from her patients, but eventually she asked the more prosperous women to contribute to the work with impoverished patients, and women of all social stations visited for advice and treatment.

Lucy explains, “Those of her patients who came to her in a depressed and morbid state of mind were taken to a room gaily decorated in red, with red window panes, red coverlet on the bed, and red hangings. The highly excited and nervous patients were placed in a room where the sunlight streamed in through yellow glass, with bed coverlet and hangings of yellow, as a quieting and calming influence.”⁵³

One case was Mrs. Kromak, the butcher’s wife, who lived on Academy Lane, right behind the Seaman property. When she began treatment in the Lord’s Room, she was a helpless invalid, bedridden and in great pain. Whether from arthritis or emotional causes, she kept her ankles bent up to her hips. Daily immersions in the electrified tub gradually unbent her legs, and before long she was able to get around on crutches.

Throughout her life, from that moment when she fell in the fire, Cleora had suffered from real physical ailments. A sensitive and intelligent person, she found the challenges of a mid-nineteenth century woman highly stressful, and some of that stress may have added an emotional component to her physical complaints. Cleora had glimpses of a future in which medicine might have prevented her children’s deaths. Thus all her hopes and her daily experience of discomfort in a body that functioned imperfectly impelled Cleora to seek new cures. With the unswerving support of her husband, she mustered the courage to assume the role of physician, treating others while she sought cure for herself.

Death and Demoralization
Cleora's surviving children grew to adulthood, George first of all. Cleora worried that he was falling under unhealthy influences, and when she saw that he was beginning to gamble she said to Lucy, “Daughter, I want you to learn to play cards so as to play with George in the evening. We have got to fight the devil with his own weapons.”⁵⁴

Lucy found nothing of the Devil in her older brother, who “was a loving, large hearted boy and very thoughtful. In those days our home supplies of butter, eggs, etc., were brought to the store by farmers who came to buy shoes and small dealers from villages who had need of leather. My brother would watch that my father did not get the heavy loads and would carry home bundles and boxes and jugs so to relieve father, and at an age when a young man is apt to have false pride.”⁵⁵

At the end of April, 1860, George boarded the J. F. Warner, a merchant ship laden with wooden staves, sailing across Lake Erie, through the Welland Canal, amid the “Thousand Islands,” and out the Saint Lawrence river. Cheerfully, he wrote home, “The Panorama presented as we dropped down this, the grandest river of this world, was beautiful beyond description. We never lost sight of village or town, and our progress was so rapid that these towns, villages, and cities seemed to fly by us for our especial entertainment till we halted at Montreal, two weeks out from Cleveland.”⁵⁶ After quick sights of Montreal, and a peek at Quebec City, he and the staves were crossing the wide ocean that separated the New World from the Old.

On the sixth of June, 1860, Mr. C. N. Johnson, the assistant marshal for the county, came to 65 Seneca Street to take the census. In a clear hand, he wrote down that John Seaman was a merchant, with $4,000 in real estate and $800 in personal estate. George, now 24 years old, was officially listed as a clerk and no longer attending school. Honora Fitzgerald was described as a domestic servant possessing $200 in personal estate. Sollie was now called Henry S. Seaman, and the family was completed by Charles and Lucy. Another native of Ohio, Lizzie Hogan, was also living in the household.⁵⁷ Cleveland was growing explosively, and its population of 43,417 was two and a half times what it had been a decade before.⁵⁸

George, meanwhile, had reached Scotland, and began a tour of Britain, enjoying the exotic experiences and comparing them with life in Ohio. “At Dumbarton, I saw old Scottish ensigns, Wallace’s sword, Bruce’s battleaxe, but neither would do as much work as Abe Smith’s shot gun.” When he arrived at the Glasgow depot, he saw a company of rifle volunteers drilling in the square. “Their uniform is homely when compared with the Cleveland military.” He delivered letters from relatives in Cleveland to three old ladies in Glasgow, and to Billy Quiggin on the Isle of Man, on his way to Paris.⁵⁹ It was a grand trip, with slight romantic adventures, offers of maritime employment, and little concern for the great conflict that was mounting at home.

With the election of Abraham Lincoln, southern states began to leave the Union. On his way to inauguration, Lincoln passed through Cleveland and devoted a few hours to his many loyal supporters. Guns fired, flags waved, and four mud-splattered white horses drew his open carriage through rain and raw wind to the hotel. He ascended to the balcony and told the throng, “To all of you, then, who have done me the honor to participate in this cordial welcome, I return most sincerely my thanks, not for myself but for Liberty, the Constitution and the Union.”⁶⁰

Hearing that Lincoln would meet a group of Cleveland elite that evening, Lucy decided to join them. Her brother tried to discourage her. “This reception is for the distinguished citizens. It would not look well for a girl to go.”

“But father has been here since Cleveland was a village,” she retorted, “and everyone knows his record. Surely he is distinguished enough, and as his daughter I could go, and I mean to go, and I am going to shake his hand. So there!”

She put on a blue dress, which with her red hair and white skin seemed quite patriotic. Then for good measure she added red, white and blue ribbons. When Lucy reached the front of the reception line, Lincoln took her hand in both of his, holding it warmly for a moment. She felt the smile on his homely face made it quite handsome, and then he spoke. “Daughter, I am right glad to see you.” For days afterward, Lucy kept her right hand wrapped up so she would not need to wash off the touch of the great savior of the nation.⁶¹

When George returned from Europe, his father prepared to make him a full partner in the business. But before arrangements could be completed, George fell victim to typhoid fever. In typhoid, the victim's temperature slowly rises over a period of weeks until it reaches 104º Fahrenheit or higher. Other symptoms are headache, abdominal pain, weakness, diarrhea, rose-colored spots on the chest, nosebleeds, and even intestinal bleeding. The progress of Typhoid can be very slow, and a victim who recovers may be a carrier of the disease for months and even years. George and Lucy were very close, and he begged his sister “Lutey,” as he had called her in childhood, to stay with him and tend him in his illness. This she did, caring for him, talking with him, and singing to him every day.

George, who had always been a thoughtful and caring son, was deeply moved by his father’s plan to make him a business partner. “I never knew father, I never dreamed he cared so much for me. Oh, how I wish I had realized it when I worked with him; he has got such a big heart and I didn’t know it.”⁶² The homeopathic cure for a fever is to administer an infinitesimal dose of a medication that might cause a fever in larger doses; that could do no harm, but it did not help George. They buried him in Woodland Cemetery, sixty new acres of graveyard with a fine grove of trees and an ancient, sixty-foot Indian mound. They transferred the other Seaman corpses to lie in graves beside him.⁶³

Always a reticent man, John Seaman became even more reluctant to express his feelings after the death of George. For many years, he would not show love to anyone. Cleora by now had lost five of her eight children, and she wondered which of the remaining three might be taken from her next. Lucy fell into deep despondency, not only because she had lost her beloved brother, George, but also because she was convinced that she herself would soon die. She thought of Cora Gussie, Uncle Solomon who had simply dropped dead one day, her favorite Buffalo cousin named Helen who had died about the same time, and of George — all gone within the space of two years. Lucy lost heart and waited to die.