Amy FitzSimons Walker, who built this album

The compiler of these scrapbooks rarely appears in them as a subject. She is everywhere as a hand. Almost every photograph in the two bound albums and the loose-keepsakes book carries a pencilled caption naming the sitter and the year, and almost every one of those captions was written by Amy Ann Perry FitzSimons — Mrs. James Pickens Walker — over the four decades in which she assembled the material. She is the album’s author in the older sense of the word, the one through whom everything in it has passed.

The girl at Mount Hope

She was born on 4 February 1888 in her grandmother FitzSimons’s house on Greenhill Street in Charleston, daughter of Samuel Gaillard FitzSimons Sr. (1856–1930) and Mary Annie Perry, and was christened at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church on Church Street — the oldest religious congregation in South Carolina, founded 1681 — see the caption in her own later hand beneath the cabinet photograph of herself as an infant at Book 2, p38. The picture postcard of Church Street showing St. Philip’s white spire that she later mounted at Book 2, p256 is the same church.

Her childhood happened ten miles below Adams Run, on a bluff above the Edisto River. The opening of the long handwritten memoir she wrote in old age begins not with a date but with a remembered image — “Trouser legs, and a nurse’s big white apron! I think that must be my first memory — I have a vague picture of a board wall — a white building — men’s voices — my father’s laughter — and the long skirts of a baby dress —” — see Book 2, p1. The nurse was Becky, a freedwoman who had nursed her and whose tipped-in carte-de-visite shares the page; Amy records Becky telling her once that she had been three days old “the last time Genl. LaFayette came to Chas’.,” fixing Becky’s birth to mid-March 1825.

Her father first planted at Rock Spring for his uncle Theodore Barker, then was pulled into a partnership with his elder brother Christopher (Uncle Kit), who had bought Mount Hope, Oak Hurst, and Rosemont. Mount Hope — “now known as Willtown,” she notes in the memoir at Book 2, p4 — became the family seat from 1893. The Mount Hope memories surface most vividly in her writing: a goat chewing the brim of Becky’s straw hat at the foot of the porch steps; the morning Beck upset a lamp and set the house on fire; an aunt’s wedding at which Amy and her father were the only attendants and she wore a gold forget-me-not ring tied on with thread because it was too large for her finger.

The first year at Mount Hope was 1893, the year of the Sea Islands hurricane. “Dad ploughed Mt. Hope in 1893 for the 1st time. A bad year to begin,” she wrote at Book 2, p6 — “for one of the most disastrous storms on record came that year. Time and dates were reckoned from ‘93.’ … A big 2 masted schooner was washed high up in the Mt. Hope rice field. My riding horse ‘Storm’ was so named because of being born during the storm of '93.” Two pages later in her memoir she records the death of her younger brother Dunkin, the only one of her siblings who did not survive childhood.

Schooling and a Charleston debut

She was sent north for her education in the conventional pattern for a girl of her circle. She attended Peabody School in Washington, D.C. — the public elementary school on Capitol Hill named for the philanthropist George Peabody. Her later annotation under a Washington cabinet photograph of her future husband at Book 2, p37 shows she had absorbed the school’s chronology well enough to caption a child’s portrait from it forty years later. From Washington she went to St. Mary’s School in Raleigh — the Episcopal girls’ finishing school founded in 1842 — for 1901, 1902, and 1903; her own album page at Book 2, p45 carries an oval studio portrait and three outdoor snapshots of her in a long dark skirt and white shirtwaist, the caption first written as 1898–1900–1901–1902, struck through, and rewritten as the corrected 1901–1902–1903. She left after her sophomore year.

The Lowcountry photographs of her at fourteen and sixteen, mounted together at Book 2, p51, show a slight dark-haired figure against a stone wall, then in profile in a long pale dress holding a wide-brimmed hat, then a small figure standing at the foot of a live oak draped with Spanish moss. She made her debut at the Charleston St. Cecilia Society.

A Walker, a railroad, three children

She married James Pickens Walker Sr. (1883–1960) on 20 October 1908. The album preserves a group photograph at Book 2, p52 captioned in her hand “James Pickens Walker — B. + O. Engineers. With B. + O. — 1903–1906,” alongside a small print of his mother Mrs. S. C. Walker with his sister Anna in a flowering garden. The Walkers were a railroad family, and the household moved with J. P. Walker Sr.'s Atlantic Coast Line career: Charleston, then Savannah, and finally Jacksonville, where they arrived in 1933 and where he served as a news editor of The Florida Times-Union.

There were three children. James Pickens Walker Jr. — “Bo” or “Pickens” — was born in 1912 and predeceased his mother in January 1969. Emma Dee Walker Corbell — “Dee” — was born on 18 October 1915. Mary Ann Walker McEwan, the youngest, was born in 1918 and would settle in Orlando.

The compiler at work

It is one thing to keep a scrapbook. What Amy did across forty years is a different and more sustained kind of work. She gathered wedding clippings and debutante invitations and school report cards and baby photographs and letters and obituaries and memorial cards, pasted them in roughly chronological sequence, and — page by page — wrote out in pencil under almost every item the names and dates required to make the document legible to a stranger. She corrected herself when she could: at Book 2, p45 the earlier dates are struck through and the right ones written cleanly below. She standardised “FitzSimons” in her own captioning, and solicited certified excerpts from parish registers when memory was not enough — the Grace Church, Camden, documents at Book 2, p242, drafted in 1969, are the kind of supplementary evidence she sought out late in life.

Her handwriting is the substrate of the whole archive. Where a date or a name has been supplied in pencil in the compiler’s hand, that hand is hers. The captions on the photographs are not transcriptions of older labels; they are the only labels, written from her own memory and her own correspondence, and without them most of the album’s faces would now be anonymous.

She died in an Orlando hospital on 1 December 1973, aged eighty-five, after a long illness, and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery — the Rev. Stanley Bullock of the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd officiating; see her obituary at Book 2, p246. She had lived in Jacksonville for more than forty years before moving to Orlando in 1972. Her son had predeceased her; her surviving daughter Mary Ann followed sixteen months later, in March 1975 — see Book 2, p247 — and the albums then passed to Mary Ann’s daughter Nancy McEwan Green, whose stewardship gives the archive its working name. The cursive in pencil that runs under every photograph in this collection was put there by a woman who did not expect to be read outside the family. The album holds her in the only place she meant to keep herself: between the captions.