Letter inviting Ellen to Hendersonville and Brookland, 9 November 1909
Book 1, Page 533 ·1909
Transcription
Hendersonville N.C.
November 9. 1909
My dear Ellen.
I do hope that you will come over to Hendersonville & Brookland before you go down to Charleston. There are several matters I wish to talk to you about, which cannot be considered on paper — leaving out altogether sentiment, which means that your Aunt Louisa and I wish so much to see you and to have you with us at this Especial time —
The increasing probability that you will not find us here another year stands out most prominently in the lame Effort of us poor mortals to anticipate our futures — If the lives of your Aunt Louisa and me shall be prolonged and we shall be permitted by fate to live on many years, still the certainty confronts us, that we are rapidly growing older and weaker, and that when you come again to Brookland and find one or both of us
AI Notes
Single sheet, handwritten in brown/sepia ink in an elderly, careful hand. Dated ‘Hendersonville N.C. November 9. 1909’ and addressed ‘My dear Ellen.’ The writer (an older uncle of Ellen M. FitzSimons; signature not preserved on this sheet) urges Ellen to come over to Hendersonville and Brookland before going down to Charleston, observing wistfully that he and ‘your Aunt Louisa’ are rapidly growing older and weaker and cannot be sure she will find them there another year. Letter continues on a sheet not preserved here.
Letter continues on a sheet not preserved here.
The writer is almost certainly Maj. Theodore Gaillard Barker (1832–1917), Charleston attorney, Confederate veteran, and Ellen’s maternal uncle (her mother Susan Milliken Barker FitzSimons’s brother); “Aunt Louisa” is his wife Louisa Preston King Barker. “Brookland” is their Hendersonville-area summer house. The 1909 letter is one of his last to his niece — he died eight years later — and reads as a quiet plea to come while he and Louisa were still living.