Letter from Ellie to Mr. Easterby thanking him for his book, page 2 / closing

Second and final sheet of Ellie’s letter to Mr. Easterby (continued from page 509). On lined paper in pencil. She concludes that the book is ‘an incontrovertible testimony to the much misunderstood & often maligned character of our people & civilization,’ and expresses pleasure that the Charleston Library Society, S.C. Historical Society and the College of Charleston are associated [through you — interlinear insertion above ‘associated’] with a work of this magnitude. She wishes that [Mr. — interlinear insertion above ‘Nathaniel’] Nathaniel Wright Stephenson could have lived to rejoice in it. The struck-through word above ‘much misunderstood’ is clear (the writer began ‘clear’ and replaced it with ‘much misunderstood’). The struck-through word after ‘magnitude’ is and. The bottom of the page (writing rotated 180° relative to the body, in different ink) carries the album-compiler’s later notation ‘Ellie & Mr. Easterby’ — identifying the correspondents for posterity. The middle of the page is blank ruled lines. The foot-of-page annotation ‘Ellie & Mr. Easterby’ is written upside-down (the compiler labelled the letter when re-arranging it in the scrapbook). This is the final page of the p509–p510 letter to J. Harold Easterby (1898–1960), Charleston historian and director of the South Carolina Archives. Stephenson (1867–1935) was a Charleston-connected historian and professor at the College of Charleston; his death in 1935 establishes the earliest possible date for this letter.

The book Ellie is thanking Easterby for is almost certainly his A History of the College of Charleston, Founded 1770 (Charleston, 1935) — the work that ties together the three institutions she names (Charleston Library Society, S.C. Historical Society, College of Charleston) and that fits the historian Nathaniel Wright Stephenson’s 1935 death as the earliest plausible date. J. Harold Easterby went on to become the founding director of the South Carolina Archives in 1949.