Martha L. Brogan
Family Values
Lessons in material culture
Part I | II | III

III.

Almost a year has gone by since my original discoveries. My father has remarried and is preparing to move into a condominium in the village. The house at the Cat’s Den is empty and on the market—its contents either distributed among family members or sold.

Meanwhile, I am reconstructing my family’s history. I have transcribed more than two dozen of John’s letters gathered from six repositories nationwide; read his essays in the Wabash Monthly, at the Robert T. Ramsay, Jr. Archival Center of Wabash College; obtained his compiled military service file and pension records; examined his scrapbook and military affects at the Vigo County Historical Society; located the correspondence of fellow soldiers in the Fourteenth Regiment; identified relevant citations in the U.S. War Department’s massive War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; and read scores of letters at the Cincinnati Historical Society.

Who was the young man in the portrait, really? How are we ever to know his complete story?

I have learned that it was my great-grandfather and his brother who donated John’s military affects, which eventually found their way to the Vigo County Historical Society from the G.A.R. Morton Relief Corps No. 11 in Terre Haute. My grand-aunt gave them his scrapbook, letters, epaulettes, and lieutenant’s bars. Thanks to a gift from the estate of my great-grand-uncle, Charles Amory Blinn, given by his daughter in 1955, the Cincinnati Historical Society Library received more than twenty-seven hundred letters, constituting "The Blinn Papers," dating from 1787 to 1948. The curator’s preface to the inventory advises, "The Blinn Papers have a limited value. Most of the correspondence concerns strictly personal matters with only occasional reference to public life and activity," noting that "all letters and items written by prominent persons have been extracted and placed in the Society’s manuscript file."

Among the miscellaneous papers, the society’s inventory lists Horace Blinn’s diary, dutifully kept during his perilous five-month expedition from Terre Haute to the California gold fields in 1850, offering context and substance for the 1851 letter book my mother had kept. On a scrap of paper so trifling that I am amazed it survived, Horace scribbled the addresses of his relatives in Manhattan; Williamsburgh (Brooklyn); New Britain, Connecticut; and Chester and Cleveland, Ohio—giving me new clues about when and where the family dispersed in the mid-1800s. Later, I would use historic New York City directories to find where John’s mother grew up.

At the society, I also located a half dozen more of John’s letters, including one written to Amory on November 16, 1860, describing the circumstances of their father’s death. "With a sad heart," John explains that Horace had been on a turkey-hunting expedition in Illinois with four friends. "Father was standing up in the wagon drawing the charges of small shot from his gun and reloading with larger," John writes, "when it is supposed that the wagon’s crossing some rough place caused him to stagger and strike his gun against the bead causing it to explode. A charge of buck shot passed through his brain killing him almost instantly."

Within a few years, Dorothea, the unfortunate widow, would have to write Amory "with a hand bleeding to the very core" about John’s death. Vividly describing her arduous journey to Gettysburg—made "almost impossible" because the "Rebels had destroyed the rails & bridges"—she recounts her great difficulty in finding John once she arrived, his jubilation upon seeing her, his progressive lapses into a state of delirium, and his final blessings to friends and family.

Fig. 5. Gold eagle, five by ten inches, framed with shard of broken glass, from private family collection. Photograph courtesy of Dean Johnston.

When I returned to New Haven, I called my cousin, whom I knew shared my interest in family history. "Oh," he replied, "Yes, Captain Blinn. I know about him." In 1968 when Dean attained the rank of Eagle Scout & Order of the Arrow, our grandmother had given him a gold eagle that once belonged to the young officer. Her inscription reads, "This emblem was found among the gear of Captain John Blinn of Terre Haute, Indiana who died of wounds at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was your great, great, great uncle. May it ever remind you of your fine American Heritage. Helen Blinn Johnston."

I now realized what I had denied before, that my mother must have also known about Captain Blinn. Why neither she nor my grandmother nor my grand-aunt ever told me about him, I will never know. I would question my own faulty memory—perhaps I did not pay attention—but none of my siblings or my father recollects ever having heard about him.

It has taken me months to be able to interpret the letters and artifacts that I brought to New Haven from Chagrin Falls. However, now when I look at the broken photograph of the interior of a heavily furnished Victorian home, I have concluded that it must be John’s sister, Charlotte’s living room. Horace and Dorothea hang on the wall to the right—my grandmother replaced their pictures with mirrors, retaining the oval gilded frames, one of which I now have. Amory’s portrait is above the piano and Julia’s is to the far right. And to the left, there is a flag-covered shrine Charlotte kept in tribute to her lost brother.

Fig. 6. Photograph, presumably of Charlotte Blinn’s living room in Terre Haute, c. 1920, from the author’s private collection.

Among the newspaper clippings preserved at the Vigo County Historical Society, I copied an interview by Ruth Agnes Abeling that appeared in the Terre Haute Post around 1920, in which Charlotte explains her dedication to John’s memory. "You see," she says, "I never married and I have no family for which to think of the future, so I live in the past." Abeling explains, "And to her the past is her brave brother, Captain John Blinn, from the time he was a newsboy, carrying the ‘Prairie City’ to the day he was buried in Woodlawn cemetery after his death at the field hospital at Gettysburg, Pa."

During this interview, Charlotte recalls the vibrant young man inside the uniform: "Everybody loved John," she remembers, "and oh, the parties they gave when he came home from Wabash college! He was such a handsome boy and how he could dance!" Turning to an oil painting on the wall, she says proudly, "That is his picture." According to the reporter, Charlotte’s eyes sparkle as she gestures toward it. "It was painted," she says, "from just a few sittings he had while here a few days awaiting replies for orders he was carrying for General Lew Wallace—just a boy of 21 he was, but with the keen eyes and determined mouth of men of many more years."

The portrait was a gift from John to his mother—a surprise birthday present. I had read about it in a letter at the Cincinnati Historical Society. As one cousin wrote another, his mother "knew nothing of it until she opened the Parlor door & found it hanging before her." In the photograph that remains, propped up against the flag next to the sword, stands the oval framed picture that I now know to be John. Who painted it, I wonder, and where has it gone? Could it possibly have been an early work of James Farrington Gookins, a close Terre Haute friend and fellow college classmate, who joined the Eleventh Indiana Zouaves under Colonel Lew Wallace, but soon became a correspondent artist for Harper’s Weekly, sketching Indiana Civil War soldiers among others? Was it the portrait given by my great-grandfather and his brother along with John’s military equipment to the G.A.R. post all those years ago? Did it suffer the fate of other relics left behind in Terre Haute’s Memorial Hall—unclaimed, abandoned, looted—according to local lore? Who was the young man in the portrait, really? How are we ever to know his complete story? John’s obituary, appearing in the Terre Haute Express on July 21, 1863, looks forward to the day when "some able pen will write his biography in full," trusting "that it may constitute a part of the history of this War for the Union & a justice to his memory & splendid deeds."

Fig. 7. Digitally enhanced photograph of the missing oil painting of Captain John J. P. Blinn (1841-63). Technical work by John Pelverts, Photoland, New Haven, Connecticut.

Though, ironically, my quest began in a village named Chagrin Falls, these objects of material culture now hold much more than sentimental, aesthetic, and monetary value for me. Knowing their provenance has given me a deeper connection to my family’s past along with stories of hope and hardship to pass along to my sons. After a peripatetic childhood, I better understand where I am from and now see the larger pattern of our family’s geographic dispersal over time. My immediate family extends from Connecticut to California and from Minnesota to New Orleans with Ohio and Illinois in the heartland. And now the artifacts of our collective past are scattered ever more widely. No wonder family memories fade and disappear.

But beyond its family value, the combination of heirlooms, photographs, and letters form the basis of a projected wider exploration into a hundred-year period of American history. The story has a natural coherence more compelling than any narrative structure that I might impose—beginning with the birth of John’s grandfather, Hosea Blinn, on the Fourth of July 1776, in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and concluding with John’s death on July 14, 1863, at Gettysburg. Horace Blinn straddles the generations, actively taking part in westward expansion from Connecticut to Indiana to the gold mines of California. From the modest archive contained within my parent’s home, my research has expanded to include materials as far afield as Washington D.C., Maryland, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Connecticut, New York, Vermont, Maine, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Texas, and California. I imagine how new media might illuminate the past, bringing these resources together in a digital archive for the first time.

Certain mysteries remain. What happened to John’s Civil War diary, last owned by his nephew in Kansas in the 1920s? What would it reveal about his participation in battle and his relations with fellow officers? Will I find among Governor Morton’s official correspondence the answer to a central and vexing question: if John was so brave and proficient, why was he repeatedly overlooked for promotion? Was John correct to attribute his frustration to rivals with better political connections? I reserve decisions about how to present my findings and where to donate the collection until I have fuller answers to such questions. But about one thing I am certain: the two worlds I used to inhabit—the world of libraries and archives and the world of family—are not so far apart after all.

III.

Further Reading: