thomas leverett weblog

Hillsdale, part I

I recently finished transcribing an eighty-page, single-spaced autobiography of one of my great-great grandfathers. Whereas I have generally done most of my research on the Leveretts, father's father's fathers etc., this guy was my father's father's mother's father, an early pioneer in the state of Michigan. To make a long story short, he grew up, became Treasurer of Hillsdale College and one of its first students, and then his life was ruined by a theological professor who had it in for him.

My first reaction to it was that he was an extremely careful writer, who never used contractions, always kept it interesting, and had good sentence-style choices - a discipline that I badly need at this point. I review what he did with amazement that he could be so clear and careful about everything.

At the same time, he doesn't seem to answer the crucial questions: why does this theological professor have it in for him? How could his career be so thoroughly destroyed, just because one man ran him out of there? What is up with that?

I wrote Hillsdale College twice. I told them, if you want a real clear version of the history of the college, here you go. They are all about free speech and the open marketplace of ideas. I'm not sure if they're totally into some guy's bitter version of how the nineteenth century played out in the small town of Hillsdale, though. They should be, but they might not be. Anyway, they didn't even respond to my first e-mail. This could of course be a mistake. I have failed to respond to several emails in my life. And it's more likely to happen when you're busy, when there's a pandemic, or when you just simply don't know how to respond. I understand. But I'll stick with it. I'm not letting them off the hook.

Bitter as he is, my great-great grandfather will get his story out there.

Deep on the web, there is a very interesting book. He, Lorenzo Reynolds, wrote it. It's called "The City of Hillsdale" (1915?) and it's a classic example of early printing and typesetting. He has photographs of such things as each church, each city block, the college, that kind of thing. And they're good photographs, too. I'm beginning to think, it's a shame letting this stuff sit there on the web, deep on the web, and not bring it up to the surface somehow where people can have a new look at it. In terms of my family, it's probably the best published work out there, in terms of the print media (my sister makes killer cd's, though she's kind of out of the business). My brother wrote chess books. I gruel away at short stories and little books of meaningless drivel. But this guy, bitter as he was, wrote what was probably the best public relations for the town of Hillsdale ever printed (though thoroughly in and of its time, which was just moving into their own pandemic).

I think the college owes it to me to at least respond to my e-mail. I'm a writer, I can handle rejection. They don't have to print his bitter complaints. But they should at least say something...

Labels: hillsdale

posted by tom @ 9:57 AM