yeoldenews:

A few updates in my ongoing project to read and transcribe letters written by Rachel, a wealthy girl on the East Coast in the 1890s, to her cousin Will, a pre-Law student at Yale…

• Rachel graduated from Ogontz School for Young Ladies in June of 1898,
  just after her 20th birthday. Despite several letters worth of detailed
  planning (I now know which rail and coach lines to take from NYC to
  Philadelphia and how much they cost) Will was not able to attend commencement. He did however send her a Yale pin she had been pining after for her birthday.
• I have my personal suspicions that the pin may have also been an apology for the ‘I’m going off to war don’t tell anybody’ prank as it was apparently very expensive
• The pin may have backfired slightly
• “You shouldn’t have spent so much money on my pin
  and then perhaps you could have come here.”
• One of Rachel’s most pressing concerns about the Spanish-American War is that it’s going to interfere with her plan to set Will up with her roommate (Margaret #2)
• There seems to be some running inside joke that Rachel can’t buy shoes unless Will is with her
• I finally figured out that Mary, who is mentioned in the letters quite often, is a young woman who was taken in by Rachel’s parents as an adolescent and is pretty much Rachel’s adopted older (11 years older) sister. Mary often serves as a chaperon for Rachel and her friends during various trips and outings.
• Will is spending the summer in Europe before he starts law school and Rachel asks him to send her a postcard from Venice because “I want to know how my pigeons are.”
• Rachel, Jack, Mary, ‘B’ and Margaret #1 are trying to plan their own trip to Europe for the spring of 1900. I haven’t gotten far enough in the letters yet to know whether they were successful or not.
• Rachel goes to Florida with her mother and is “dying to stay” because she wants to go on the last hunt of the season with Alligator Joe.
• Rachel is on a quest to see Maude Adams, but has so far been unsuccessful. “It makes me tired that I haven’t seen her.”
• The “new house” which has been under construction for over two years is finally finished and seems to be impossibly full of guests at all times. “We have been having stacks of company but only have 15 in the family at present.”
• I am really curious how many bedrooms this house had.
• The vast majority of the letters Rachel writes between June and September are essentially 19th century phone tag trying to arrange plans for when people are coming to the house in Chautauqua.
• I have also started reading letters from Rachel’s cultured globetrotting spinster Aunt Lilla.
• Lilla does more interesting things in a week than I have done in my entire life.
• Even when Lilla is doing nothing she is such a delightful storyteller that it still feels like an adventure.
• Today I read three pages Lilla wrote about wallpaper and thoroughly enjoyed every word of it.
• At least half of Lilla’s friends and acquaintances have Wikipedia pages.
• I’m probably going to be talking a lot more about Lilla.