But not even the crowning event to celebrate and promote Ohio’s greatest economic engine could overcome the fear afoot from Lake Erie to the Ohio River and the Indiana to the Pennsylvania borders.
Springfield leaders tried to suppress fear of the Asiatic Cholera by requiring the bodies of Irish railroad workers felled in the cut west of town be hauled through the streets only at night. But that failed to hide a truth commonplace enough to be found in letters exchanged in everyday people like the Rev. Charles Meredith and Sarah Eliza Simmons.
On that July 12, the month after their whirlwind, largely socially distanced courtship appears to have begun, Sarah informed Charles that struck next door, claiming the life of a young man 15 hours after he first showed symptoms.
“Also taken away,” she writes, was “a brother beloved, a co-laborer of yours … the Rev. Martin Wolf,” whose wife and child also perished.
Like the Rev. Wolf, Charles was a circuit-riding preacher on America’s western frontier. In spreading the word of salvation to small groups often crammed into tiny cabins, he was at high risk for the spreading disease, though the mechanism of spread was not known at the time.
At least in the early stages of the 1849 epidemic, its cause was thought to have been much what Miami University in Oxford’s professor of natural philosophy John W. Scott pronounced it to have been 16 years earlier in his pamphlet: “Cholera: God’s Scourge, the Chastisement of Nations.”
Through cholera, he argued, God was punishing the United States for its unfaithfulness to Him on several scores. Among them were permitting slavery, the mistreatment of North America’s aboriginal citizens, intemperance, extreme political partisanship and a failure to keep the Sabbath holy.
The Springfield newspapers of the time echoed Scott and the prevailing opinions of the day. The papers reported the disease visited judgment most harshly on the “colored population” and the Irish – the latter thought to have brought the disease, along with whiskey, from their native land.
None of this hindered Charles and Sarah’s path to the altar that Dec. 4. The only doubt about their ultimate future together was raised by a former circuit riding preacher who by then was a past presiding elder of the Springfield District of the Methodist Church: Sarah’s father.
We know this because Charles and Sarah’s letters were discovered in 1976 among other family memorabilia in the attic of a home on Stewart Road near the Clark County hamlet of Plattsburg.
Some in 1976 would still have remembered the Meredith’s highly respected grandson C.P. “Palmer” Meredith. Lauded in the newspapers after his death in 1963, he had been long before pictured in the paper when the Springfield Reception Committee welcomed Amelia Earhart to the airport that is now the site of the Clark County Fair.
Others mighty have remembered the Charles and Sarah’s son, Palmer’s father William Simmons Meredith. A business and religious leader, he had been treasurer and general manager of Steele and Meredith Co. and a pillar of the High Street Methodist Church.
The Merediths all are recalled today because Charles and Sarah’s great-granddaughter, Ann Meredith Wilson, combined the record of the courtship with surviving images to create the “Meredith Family History: Photos and 19th Century Letters of Sarah Eliza Simmons Meredith.”
Mrs. Wilson, who died in Australia, April 2, where a part of her family had migrated long ago, as the project she had dedicated herself to came to fruition.
Kasey Eichensehr, curator of collections at the Heritage Center, said her casual conversations with the family “didn’t prepare me” for a book “so thoughtfully put together.”
The letters are able to reach their highest potential, she said, because of background the book provides about the 1849 outbreak, particularly about the feverish religious tenor of that era’s “Second Great Awakening.” This material was added by John Wilson, Ann Wilson’s son and the couple’s great-great grandson
Presented in proper historical context, the letters don’t merely “confirm the facts we read in the history books, Eichensehr writes, “they breathe life into those facts” – and, of course, the Merediths’ lives. One harsh fact of frontier life played a crucial role for Sarah.
Born June 22, 1828, at Horseshoe Bend, her maternal grandparents’ home in Clermont County, Ohio, she was “barely 3 three years old” when her mother, Mary Simmons, died Oct. 11, 1831.
Although – or maybe because – she, too, was the daughter of circuit riding Methodist preacher, Mary had struggled with the idea of marrying Sarah’s circuit riding father, the Rev. William Simmons.
“A person calculated for such a station should profess a double portion of religion to enable them to bear the cold looks and the many trials they have to pass through,” Mary writes in one of her courtship letters.”
Her generation of Methodists would have remembered the Revolutionary era, during which Methodist preachers were at times tarred and feathered by American mobs suspicious the Methodists’ origin in England made them political supporters of the Crown.
All knew the infamous story of the near tar-and-feathering of Philip Gatch not for political controversy, but because a husband angry that his wife had converted to Methodism, decided to take his revenge on the next Methodist preacher to come down the road: Gatch.
All that had passed by Sarah’s birth. But her mother’s death did deprive her of a loving hand to guide her through the sometimes darker shadows of religious doubt preachers’ children can encounter.
After his wife’s passing, the everlasting stakes made Sarah’s religious future Rev. Simmons’ chief concern when, “conscious of my mortality … and often impulsed with the thought that my departure from this world may be sudden,” he wrote his will.
After directing the sale of his horse and other goods toward a $100 contribution to the Bible Tract and Sunday School Societies of the church, a grief-chastened Simmons directed the remainder be left to his daughter “in case she should live to need it.”
Though the comment can seem morbid, it is well to remember that, as a frontier preacher, he not only suffered through but often consoled those who suffered through the hazards of frontier life in a time before antibiotics. It seems likely that same experience made him wonder about the wisdom of his daughter’s plans to marry in the heat of an epidemic.
His will years earlier about his instructions for her upbringing, should he himself pass are peppered with “shall nots.”
“I do not wish her to be taught painting or instrumental music, as I have always believed these things tended to excite and increase vanity. So, she is never to read a novel of any kind on any account. I do not wish her raised what is falsely called a lady without knowing how to attend to the duties of a housewife, but to be brought up in industry.”
The will indicates his self-judgment was no less dour.
After confessing “I have been a very unfaithful servant and have no hope of reaching heaven in consequence of any good work,” he writes that “but for the sake of Jesus Christ, my atoning high priest and great mediator, I do not hope to be raised to the joys of my divine Master in Heaven.”
The preacher’s daughter proved to be as “religiously impulsed” as her father anticipated, and in similar emotional shadings.
In a 1904 autobiographical sketch, she said that, as a child, that impulse was “more of a fear than a conviction for sin.”
Three sentences in that sketch read as though they might be plucked from a Stephen King novel: “I remember at Marietta hearing a minister preach on the judgment. It aroused my fears so I could not sleep. I got up and went to the window several times to see if it was coming.”
At age 11, she joined the church her father was then serving in Portsmouth but at times struggled mightily.
“Methodists believed that damnation could only be avoided through heartfelt conversion,” says a note Eichensehr added to the book.
So, when at the end of a heartfelt discussion, a woman identified as “Old Mrs. Anner Hudson” told Sarah, “I don’t believe you are converted,” Sarah cried out “I know I am not” and collapsed into tears.
The tension built until a night “I was so oppressed, that I arose and kneeled beside my bed (and) consecrated my soul and my body’s power to the Lord,” she writes. Once back in bed, “such a divine fire went through me , I had never felt anything like it before. The next day it seemed to me that I was in the other world. Such a sense of divine power, I said little about it, it seemed too sacred to talk about.”
Still thinking “it could hardly be possible that I have this great blessing, I opened the Bible” and landed on a verse that sang to her: “Behold now is the day of salvation. I have heard thee in a day accepted.”
For Sarah, “that settled it.”
The girl who, on one evening wagon ride home after church wrote that the trees seemed to “sparkle with diamonds,” was a true convert.
Today’s first installment of this story ends with a final historical observation.
Ohio is host to many colleges founded in the 1800s by religious denominations.
Just as a Presbyterian minister founded Oberlin College in 1833, Lutherans founded Wittenberg College in 1845, and the United Brethren in Christ founded Otterbein 1857.
All were built to educate ministers to save souls in the rapidly expanding Northwest Territory.
Methodists, who founded Ohio Wesleyan College in 1842, put the most saddlebag preachers in the field.
As a result, Eichensehr says, the denomination “grew hand-in-hand with the Midwest” and Ohio’s largest.
“Religious beliefs aside,” she adds, “in a time before mass media and instant long-distance communication,” circuit riders as a whole – and Methodists in particular, -- were “one of the threads weaving America’s widespread, isolated settlements into a common culture.”
And it was in 1849 that Charles and Sarah Meredith, both steeped in Methodism, fell in love as cholera invaded the settler culture of the Ohio and Kentucky countryside.
Next week: A reversal of fortunes on the frontier.