proposal

We tend to think of peo­ple whose writ­ings date from the ear­ly 1900s as “old” folks–ossified cit­i­zens of Danville who were “set in their ways” and as per­son­able, humor­ous and emo­tion­al as a mar­ble stat­ue that we touched as a child. Fre­quent­ly, in the course the course of clas­si­fy­ing fam­i­ly doc­u­ments for the Danville His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, I come across one that offers insight that shows that they were not much dif­fer­ent that teenagers are today.  Had I read only Flo­rence Johnson’s 1907  let­ters to Her­bert Stan­ton (her hus­band only a year lat­er) I would been con­firmed in a strait­laced con­trol­ling stereo­type of an all-know­ing spouse-to-be. In the fol­low­ing let­ter, Her­bert was con­fined to home with mumps.