Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge



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Sister Ohio
-book manuscript-
(c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Table of Contents


1. Genesis

2. War between the States

3. Tenting through the Holy Land

4. The Calm Before the Storm

5. Westward to the Far East

6. From Glory to Disgrace

7. Helping the Helpless

8. Her Strong Staff

9. Turning Points

10. Desperate Cases

11. Bethel
This manuscript is a sociological biography of Lucy Seaman Bainbridge, 1842-1928, who was a nurse in the Civil War, toured American Protestant missions in Asia 1879-1880, and was the head of the Woman's Branch of the New York City Mission Society 1891-1906. Each chapter ends with a brief analysis from the standpoint of the New Paradigm in the sociology of religion.
One of her four books, Helping the Helpless in Lower New York, is currently available from Google Books at:
http://books.google.com/books?id=aOMkAAAAYAAJ

Chapter 1:

Genesis
Lucy Elizabeth Seaman was born on January 18 in 1842, the year without a winter. The strange warmth of that month was an ambiguous omen, more an overturning of the natural order of seasons than a promise of mildness. Clasped between the river and the lake, Cleveland was a small town of just eight thousand, its dirt streets turned to mud by the heavy rains. With a sound like great waves breaking upon a rocky coast, millions of passenger pigeons soared overhead that year, and it was said a single bullet fired straight up would bring down half a dozen. No one could have imagined that Lucy would long outlive the swarming birds, hunted to extinction by the eve of the First World War, or that she would escape Ohio to make the entire world her home.1

In the beginning, she was a “little eager girl, who came into the world with open eyes and an open mind and a great capacity for loving.”2 The conventional choice for a girl was to learn manners, gain domestic skills, and win a supportive husband. But that was a dangerous course, because everything would depend up on his virtue and his sanity, and it would not take account of her tremendous energy and desire for independent accomplishments. As Lucy's life unfolded, the husband she leaned upon would collapse, she would be forced into great achievements of her own, and she would shape her son into a “strong staff” to provide support and redeem honor. Her course would be a twisting path through the valley of the shadow of death, as she learned to relish sights that left weaker souls paralyzed in horror, and to endure profound defeat with hope.

Lucy’s father, John Farmer Seaman, had been born in Ballston Spa, New York, November 6, 1804. His father, Sylvanus Seaman, fought in the American Revolution, serving as a private in the 4th Ulster County Militia under Colonel Hardenburgh, and he was drawn to Ballston by Doctor Valentine Seaman, who analyzed the effervescent waters around Saratoga Springs and pronounced them curative.3 While still a boy, John apprenticed to Deacon Sage, a Baptist and a shoemaker, moving with him to Rochester.

Lucy’s mother was born Cleora Augusta Stevens on June 9, 1814, in Middlebury, Vermont. The doctor wanted to name her after Queen Cleopatra, but her parents, Lucy and Levi, felt this was too long and fanciful, so they shortened it to Cleora. When she was quite tiny, Cleora fell from a roof into the hot ashes of an open fire, suffering terrible burns to her back. For months, her mother tended her on a pillow, and she carried deep scars for the rest of her life from her neck to the base of her spine. Too frail with dyspepsia and pelvic trouble to attend boarding school like her sisters, she became better educated than they through her own efforts and tutoring by her cousin, John Stevens, who taught Latin and Greek in Middlebury College. Her precarious health drove her to learn all she could about hygiene and physiology, and her lively mind explored many intellectual subjects not taught in the conventional schools.4

Cleora was still a girl when cousin John Stevens convinced the family to move to Rochester, New York. There, Cleora worked in a milliner’s shop and for a time lived with the Sage family where she met John Seaman. They married on October 10, 1831, Cleora just seventeen and nine years younger than her husband. They soon went west to Ohio, where cousin John was helping to found Denison University. In later years, Cleora would describe the stage-coach trip so vividly that Lucy always held a bright mental picture: “I can imagine what a pretty bride she must have been with her brown hair and large blue eyes looking out from under a great big calash, the fashionable bonnet of the time.”5 Made of green silk and whalebone, the calash folded like an accordion, and in color it matched Cleora’s cloak.

When John and Cleora Seaman settled in Cleveland, it was a village of hardly more than a thousand souls.6 At first they lived in a white house on Bank Street, where their first child was born and died unnamed. They then moved to a large home at 65 Seneca Street, where John set up a cobbler’s shop in the barn. He started a shoe and boot business with Horatio Ranney, but after a year they dissolved their partnership.

John asked William T. Smith, a former fellow apprentice of Deacon Sage, to join him in Cleveland, and they formed a new partnership that was to last nearly half a century. Smith’s wife, Louisa, had worked in the Rochester millinery shop with Cleora, but there was no special friendship between them. As Lucy judged it in retrospect, the partnership was a union of opposites: “Mr. Smith was a man who was either very hopeful, buoyant, chatting and welcoming trade or down in the depths ready to assign, just on the verge of ruin. My father went steadily on, was a very careful buyer and excellent judge of leather, saw ahead of present clouds and kept the business ship off many a rock.”7

The Seaman family joined a tiny community of Baptists and helped them establish the First Baptist Church of Cleveland.8 Three years earlier, Benjamin Rouse and his wife Rebecca had arrived, working as agents for the American Sunday School Union with the mission of establishing a religious book depository.9 They began holding meetings in the upper part of the Academy school house late in 1832, renting space for sixty dollars a year. In the middle of the following January, on a quiet, cloudless day that seemed more like midsummer than the depths of winter, they sang a hymn in the school house, heard a sermon by a visiting preacher named Taggart, and marched to lake Erie where they cut a hole in the ice to baptize four courageous new members by total, bone-chilling immersion.10 When the articles of faith of the new church were adopted in February, John Seaman was the fifth man to sign his name.

By 1835 they were able to begin construction of a fine brick church at the corner of Champlain and Seneca street, 55 feet by 80 feet, costing about fourteen thousand dollars. The spire, looking like a conical tower of Pisa, reached 150 feet upward and enclosed both a bell and a town clock. The builders liked to think the architectural order of the exterior was Tuscan, and the interior, Doric. Iron tie-rods suspended a full gallery from the ceiling. The entrance went through the spacious basement, so going to the gallery was like ascending from Hell to Heaven.11

At its fiftieth anniversary, an historian of the congregation would recall, “The membership of the church was made up of young men, tradesmen, mechanics, lawyers, clerks, etc., who had come to the rising city hoping to make money. They were all comparatively poor; there was not a wealthy man among them; but they were brave, and trusted in God, believing He would help them, if they would make a strong effort to save themselves.”12

As proof that this was a sore struggle, they used to say that they were even forced to mortgage the pulpit lamps. The church fell seven thousand dollars in debt, a huge sum for such a modest congregation. Creditors attached the bell, but Sylvester Ranney personally bought it back. “The lamps and chandeliers were once in danger, but Brethren Seaman and Smith took good care that they should remain in their places. It was said of Brother John Seaman that he gave more thought to the finances of the church than to his own business. Illustration: Some crisis in the matter of church finance had come needing prompt attention. One morning, as he came into his store he said to his partner, ‘Smith, you go to the meeting to-night, and put me down for a thousand dollars, and you put down a thousand, and go over to Sylvester Ranney and tell him to put down a thousand. Each of us will take a third. That will be about right, I guess.’”13 Both Ranney and Seaman were elected deacons in 1837.14

John Seaman seldom spoke in church meetings, but his constant, quiet spiritual support was valued highly by the congregation, beyond the dollars he contributed. Fellow Baptists called him blameless, vigilant, and punctual.15 Of himself, he said, “I am a man of the people and not a leader.”16

Cleora’s sweet voice sang in the choir, and she was more ready than her husband to speak “magnetic words” in church meetings. Lucy recalled, “Some times when there were evil influences at work among the young people of the Church I have seen my mother rise in the prayer meeting and speak as though inspired.”17 Mrs. S. W. Adams called her temperament hopeful, her intellect noble, her nature warm and generous, and her character blended from moral courage and nervous force.18 She helped found the Female Sewing Society in 1834, which made clothing for the needy and did some work on commission for Ranney and Seaman. This evolved quickly into the Woman’s Missionary Society, and from its very beginning the church looked to the wider world beyond Ohio.

At 65 Seneca Street, Cleora gave birth to a daughter, Frances, named after her deceased sister. Then came two sons, George and Solomon. At an early age, Frances tumbled down the stairs to her death. Cleora’s parents, Lucy and Levi Stevens, moved from Rochester to a frame cottage on Academy Lane, just behind the Seaman house. A month after the birth of Cleora’s second daughter, Lucy Stevens died. In tribute to both her mother and her still-living mother-in-law, Elizabeth, Cleora named the baby Lucy Elizabeth Seaman.

Grandmother Lucy Boynton Stevens had always been a woman of great religious faith, which she and her daughter needed to assuage their grief from the many deaths in their family. After the death of her first husband, Samuel Foster, she suffered great poverty until her marriage to Levi Stevens in 1794. Her father, Nathan Boynton, was run over by a horse and carriage, when he was on the way to church, dying from his injuries after a long struggle. Levi was not a religious man in the early years of his marriage, but when an illness brought him to death’s door, she said, “I have prayed and I believe God will answer that my husband will not pass away until he has accepted Christ and become an acknowledged Christian.”19 He recovered, became active in the church, and lived just five days beyond his wife, adding a second death to the Seaman household in the second month of baby Lucy’s life. The illness that ended both lives was pneumonia, assisted by the unusual weather of that rainy February.


Early Childhood
Lucy had blue eyes. Her hair was on the gold side of flaming red and very striking. In the four weeks they were both alive, Lucy Stevens gave Lucy Seaman a string of gold beads, which Cleora later had made into a ring for the diamond she gave her daughter. Like her mother before her, Lucy was a delicate child, and Cleora taught her at home rather than trust her to a school until she was nine years old. John regularly made special calf skin shoes to protect little Lucy’s feet, but the leather was much thicker than most girls wore, and she suffered their heat and their weight.

John’s work prospered, evolving into a wholesale business that supplied shoes and boots in quantity, leather to be made into other things, and large lot sales of Frank Miller’s leather preservative.20 For most of Lucy’s early years the business was at 84 Superior Street, opposite the Commercial Bank, near the public square within a short walk of home.21

On the seventeenth of August, 1850, the census taker visited the Seaman household, with his big book of enumeration schedules, not merely to count heads, but to collect many kinds of data. Each of the nine persons in the household got a line of information, and together they constituted an appreciable fraction of the 17,034 persons living in Cleveland on that day22. John Seaman was listed as a 45 year old white male, a tailor by profession, owning $6,000 of real estate, and born in New York. Cleora was 35 and a Vermonter. Four children followed in order: George aged 13, Solomon aged 12, Lucy aged 8, and Charles aged 2. Then came Delia Davis aged 22 from Canada, Norah Fitzgerald aged 17 from Ireland, and Horace Pettingill aged 16 from New York. Columns of the census form inquired if there had been any marriages in the past year, whether children were attending school, and whether any adults were incapable of reading and writing. The census taker quickly marked no recent marriages, all children in school, and no illiterates. He left blank the section of the form asking if any residents of the household were deaf, dumb, blind, insane, idiotic or convicts.23

Fitzgerald was a servant who lived with the family for many years. Although the census-taker did not record the fact, Horace Pettingill was a member of the family. One of Cleora’s sisters had married a Pettingill and moved west. When her sister died later in the decade, Cleora brought her daughter Fanny to Seneca Street to raise like one of her own children. Lucy recalled, “Father was a generous man; he brought up and educated his sister’s only daughter; he helped his brother; he made a home for his nephews and was always ready to do his part in the cause presented to him.”24

In a big old house next door to 65 Seneca Street lived a very successful physician, Charles D. Brayton, and Lucy admired his family’s prosperity. The doctor and his wife had three children, Maggie, Nettie, and Charlie, who dressed well and entertained a great deal. Their garden was especially beautiful, and they all radiated wealth. Nettie, whose formal name was Antoinette, was about Lucy’s age, handsome and possessing a strong voice. Mrs. Brayton was treasurer of the Cleveland Ladies’ Temperance Union, which was directed by the wife of the minister at Lucy’s church, so there was no possibility that wealth had produced immorality among the Braytons.25 Sometimes Lucy would play in the Braytons’ house, and she used to watch the more fashionable life they lived as one reads a love story.

Dr. Brayton died in 1851, but the prosperity did not abate, because he had left his widow and children a considerable inheritance.26 Although she knew little of her own father’s background, Lucy understood that his mother had been a widow for many years and had struggled with poverty. Thus to see a prosperous widow was an impressive thing. This lesson was not lost on Lucy, who would always recall the elegant life of the doctor who lived next door, and the survival of that elegance after his death.27

Beyond the Braytons lived two other prosperous physicians, one of them born in France, and a successful merchant named Kepler from Germany. On the other side lived a family whose children were burdened by names from classical antiquity: Junius Brutus, Brutus Junius, Caius Cassius, Cassius Caius, Lucius Marcius, Marcius Lucius, Lucia Marcia, Marcia Lucia, and Daniel. At the time, Lucy and her playmates thought these were perfectly ordinary names, but years later she could not help laughing whenever she remembered them. Their last name was Cobb. When Lucy was ten, three of the sons acquired a book firm, which they rather prosaically called J. B. Cobb and Company.28

Lucy’s favorite game was “City,” played in the Seaman back yard where there were trees, grass, and a huge arbor with trellis and abundant grapevines that were stripped of fruit by the boys as fast as it could grow. The children marked off imaginary streets between the arbor and the Braytons’ fence, creating shops and a post office. One child would be the mayor, and others took other adult roles. Lucy always pretended to be a happy widow with a beautiful garden.

She had her own house, set under a damson-plum tree, a small structure of humble origins. A privy had been moved from the rear of the lot, painted and decorated with wallpaper inside, to become her playhouse. Its green door actually locked with a key, and curtains hung in the only window. She was the first girl in the neighborhood to have her own cook stove, and she delighted to invite other children for feasts. The boys sat waiting for her tiny hot cakes, which disappeared so much faster than she could bake them.

The Seaman family had little contact with the less prosperous people who lived behind them on Academy Lane, but one of the boys from the lane developed a crush on Lucy. “He was at the age of nine when he ventured into our backyard carrying two grimy valentines for me to select the one I would rather have. I think I must have appreciated the implied compliment that whoever was to receive the second came also second in his affections. In any case, I have never forgotten that little boy with smudges on his face and tokens of his regard in a dirty hand.”29

Having no sister at the time, Lucy enlisted her brother Sollie to play house, making dolls out of old white cloth and cotton batting. Often they played under the dining table, which they covered with cloth and called their wigwam. After the cobbler’s shop had been removed from their barn, they played in the hay, with a cow and sometimes a horse for companions. When she was nine or ten, Lucy sang in a fairy concert as maid to the queen, inordinately proud of her long-necked dress. The first stirrings of religious awareness caused her to worry that Jesus might ask her to sacrifice this prized possession for him.
Education
Cleora taught Lucy to read and to cipher some, but when the girl was nine

Cleora enrolled her in a tiny private school run by a lady who lived down the street. Each morning Cleora would stand at the gate and watch her daughter walk to her education. Reading opened the whole, wide world, and the Seamans possessed a diverse library. “In the old bookcase behind the silk curtain was a book that strongly fascinated me, and I would often take it and sit alone studying the many illustrations. It was a work on China, and described the queer customs of that far-off land. It held and thrilled me, and I promised myself that, some day, I would go there and see it all.”30

The family strictly observed their church’s annual day of fasting, with its week of prayer, and there was no cooking in the house that day. In the morning, they went to church, servants as well as family, and returned to a cold meal prepared the day before. But it was more feast than fast, because the dinner included delicious cold boiled ham, apple pie, cake, and sweet baked beans. The children were excused from school so they could spend the day in church.

When someone questioned Cleora about the children being kept from school, she said, “I consider that the training of my children’s souls is worth more than the valuable training even of their minds.”31 “School is important,” she told her family, “but it is more important that my children make themselves ready for eternal life.”32 At dinner, Father Seaman always led a prayer and gave a blessing, and when he was away, Mother Seaman took charge of the religious rituals.

Lucy came to feel that her mother was unduly concerned with her brothers’ spiritual welfare. They were good boys, she felt, but her mother didn’t seem happy unless they were in church. She also went to great lengths to perfect their bodies. “Hydrotherapy was the medical subject of highest interest in that day, and in her earnest efforts for the health of her boys they were obliged every morning to take a shower bath by turning a pail of water over themselves, even though they had to break the ice which had formed over night.” Cleora experimented with every medical fad. “In the attic were all manner of braces which had been urged upon her growing children,” Lucy remembered, “so that they would have strong bodies and straight spines. Perhaps the boys with their ice-water shower baths, and the daughter upon whom was tried various spinal adjustments, did not sympathize as much as they should have, for one of the memories of the latter is the writing of a school composition on ‘Our Attic,’ showing only the humorous side of the discarded braces and cure-alls.”33

Not all fads ended badly, and Cleora was an early proponent of that radical innovation, whole wheat breakfast cereal. “She had to hunt up a mill, and there bought the wheat, the whole kernel; then improvised a sort of double boiler — one kettle within another. In this boiler the wheat was slowly cooked on the back of the stove from thirty-six to forty-eight hours. When served with cream it was more delicious than any breakfast food ever invented.”34

At the very beginning of the 1850s, Cleora gave birth to another son, Walter, and her life-long health obsessions were only strengthened when he died at the age of two. Soon, another Cleora Augusta Seaman was born, or “Cora Gussie” as they called her, and she quickly became Lucy’s darling.

Throughout the decade, progress came to Cleveland in halting steps. In 1853, the City Council decreed that Seneca Street was to be dug up in the name of modernity, so that a sewer line could be laid from Champlain Street to the lake. Soon, a ditch reached nearly as far as Lucy’s house, twelve feet deep, ten feet wide at the top and four feet at the bottom, before the huge pipe was laid and the earth closed. When the winter weather made digging impossible, the work stopped, leaving an immense pile of unused material on the corner of St. Clair Street, right near the Seaman home. The next spring, nothing further was done, and the eyesore remained for fully seven years.35 Later, the City Council told residents to put stone sidewalks in front of their houses, and it levied an annual charge of thirteen cents a foot on property abutting the street to pay for a horse-drawn wagon with a big tank to sprinkle the dirt street with water in summer to hold down the dust.

The Seaman and Smith shoe business continued to gain customers. A newspaper explained, “Their wholesale trade is very large, and their customers in Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio find that purchasing shoes in Cleveland makes a favorable difference in the profits. Seaman and Smith are enterprising and reliable men, and their success in business is attributable in a large degree to their straight-forward and honorable way of dealing.”36 Before long, their business moved from 84 to 174 Superior.37 When famine stuck Kansas, and the people of Cleveland rallied to help the distant sufferers, the substantial contributions of the city were collected and forwarded by Seaman and Smith.38

When the Seaman boys reached the proper ages, Cleora made sure they were baptized. Lucy felt left out, when she heard that her brother Sollie was scheduled to meet with a group of other converts at the home of Pastor Adams. She demanded to be included, and shortly she, too, had been baptized and accepted for formal church membership.


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