Petticoat Press: #4: Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie

Petticoat Press: #4 Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Becky Brown

Miriam Folline [Follin] Squier Leslie (1836–1914)

Above: many but not all her names: Miriam Florence Follin Peacock Squier Leslie Wilde as well as Frank Leslie. She legally adopted her husband's name after he died in 1880.

I don't know that Miriam Leslie ever actually wrote a newspaper column in her life but her story in publishing is so good we must include it. The divorce plot is our theme here but the women we are looking at this year were very different in character, personality and career. We can contrast last month's stern and plain Jane Cannon Swisshelm with her opposite, a woman we shall call Miriam Leslie.

Betsy Prioleau who wrote a recent biography of Miriam

must have had a wonderful time trying to track her through all those names.

See a preview of Diamonds & Deadlines: A Tale of Greed, Deceit & a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age:
https://www.amazon.com/Diamonds-Deadlines-Deceit-Gilded-Female-ebook/dp/B09FNYRDZ7?asin=B09FNYRDZ7&revisionId=a548ac32&format=1&depth=1

A brief summary based on Prioleau's research:

Miriam was probably born to merchant Charles Follin of New Orleans and one of his enslaved women. Raised by Susan Danforth Follin, possibly a Follin legal wife, Miriam seems to have spent some time in a New York City bordello as a young woman in the late 1850s. 

In 1854 she was ordered at 18 to marry a man, perhaps a customer. David C. Peacock soon obtained an annulment. Her next husband was a social step up. In 1858 she married Ephraim G. Squier, an anthropologist who took a position with the Frank Leslie publishing firm as an editor. When he could not carry out his duties (ill or out of the country on an expedition) she covered his editorial work.

During the Civil War Miriam was named editor of Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine and Gazette of Fashion. She later was appointed editor of all the Leslie's women's magazines.

Her acquaintance with Squier's boss Frank Leslie was soon intimate. Leslie, the publishing tycoon of his day, was born Henry Carter in England. The young artist and wood engraver became superintendent of engraving for the Illustrated London News. He brought his technological skills, wife Sarah Ann Whelan and three children under five when he emigrated to the U.S. 

Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Jeanne Arnieri

After divorces from their antebellum spouses Frank Leslie and Miriam married in 1874. The divorces were unpleasant. Leslie refused to support his wife whom Miriam remembered years later as "A sickly, uninteresting, irritable creature." Miriam's ex Squier was institutionalized in an insane asylum soon after his divorce.

Lincoln's assassin on the cover of Frank Leslie's, May, 1865

When her publisher husband died in 1880 she changed her name to his to better manage her new role as female press tycoon, one who it was said “monitored every facet of the company, from balance sheets to make-up and distribution."

The grieving widow in 1883

Starry Path for Miriam Folline Leslie by Denniele Bohannon

And then she married Oscar Wilde's brother Willie!

Aesthetes Oscar and Miriam's husband William Charles Kingsbury Wilde (1852-1899)

1892 Divorce from Willie Wilde

"The Baroness de Bazus"

After the fourth marriage Miriam was reluctant to go back to any name too prosaic so she began calling herself the Baroness de Bazus, based on her research into her French ancestry. The Baroness managed to keep a good deal of the money she earned over the years and the cash from the husbands. She left a huge bequest in her will to Carrie Chapman Catt to support the women's movement in 1914.

Starry Path by Becky Collis

The Block

Starry path from the Alice Brooks syndicated column, 1936

BlockBase #2346

Miriam seems to have followed a starry path, one she charted herself.

E.G. Squier edited a collection of Leslie's Illustrated Civil War pictures. The original sketches for some of these newspaper engravings are included in a large collection at the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/sketches-for-frank-leslies-illustrated-newspaper-138-original-drawings#/?tab=about&scroll=2

Civil War Quilts: Miriam Squier Leslie's Civil War

Madeleine B Stern did a biography Purple Passage: The Life of Mrs Frank Leslie in 1953---but she didn't have the access to sources we have today.

New York Sun, 1895

Sarah Whelan Leslie's obituary with plenty of gossip

Starry Path by Elsie Ridgley

Becky Collis is alternating the sampler blocks with a double nine-patch

and sashing them with a narrow strip and cornerstone.

Eliza Trigg Brents's Civil War

 

Kentucky Historical Society

Attributed to Susan Mary Cheatham Smith Montgomery (1846-1910)

Silk quilt pieced over paper templates in a hexagon design

with added embroidery on the borders. 

Kentucky had a reputation for "fine and costly quilts" after 1840 or so. Twenty-three year old Eliza Trigg Brents seems to have been among the most skillful and productive of the makers. Above the black-bordered hexagon is a typical Kentucky show quilt but not by Eliza. We have no surviving quilts attributed to her. But we have evidence in fair records that she made many award-winning quilts over the years.

Prize records Kentucky State Fair in 1863
(Eliza's name is Brents with an S.)
She won premiums for a silk quilt and a worsted (wool) quilt plus
a piece of embroidery that year.



Again two entries: a silk comfort and a patch-work
woolen quilt


Perhaps her worsted quilt looked like this one
attributed to Mary Redman Parris of Cynthiana, Kentucky by Jeffrey Evans Auction.
There certainly was a Kentucky style. Much mosaic piecing and added embroidery...



Attributed to Sallie Pinnick of Columbia, Kentucky,
Recorded by the Florida project and the Quilt Index.

....Until crazy quilt fashion took over in the 1870s and changed
the emphasis from piecing over paper templates to crazy randomness.
Kentucky style still favored the embroidered border.



This may be Eliza with her husband and children about 1870
in front of the house her father bought her as a wedding gift.

When the Civil War began in April 1861 32-year old Eliza Trigg Brents was 5 or 6 months pregnant with her first (recorded?) child although she'd been married for 7 years to 43-year-old Samuel Worley Brents. 

His first wife had died after childbirth leaving two surviving children. At War's beginning Eliza's stepchild Mary Elizabeth was about 12 and Samuel II about 8 years old.

Eliza Trigg, a native of Barren County, Kentucky, had lived in the county seat Glasgow all her life. She was from a wealthy family; the Trigg National Bank with the arch is pictured above in the early 20th century. When she lived there Glasgow had about 500 citizens, a good many of them enslaved by the Trigg family as the 1860 census Slave Schedule shows:

TRIGG, A(lanson) (farmer): 1 male 60, 1 male 55, 1 female 49, 1 female 48, 1 female 32, 1 female

                35, 1 female 17, 2 females 1, 1 female 12, 1 female 9, 1 female 5 (unnamed born 15 Apr

                1855), 1 female 7, 1 female 6 (Agnis born 1 Aug 1854, daughter of Permelia), 1 female 5,

                1 female 3, 1 female 2 (unnamed born 1858), 1 female 3, 1 male 13, 1 male 10, 1 male 9,

                1 male 8, 1 female 4, 1 male 12, 1 male 8, 1 male 5 (unnamed born 15 Mar 1855), 1 male

                1, 1 male 3, 1 male 23, 1 male 21, 1 male 20, 1 male 18, 1 male 16. 

      

Samuel and Eliza were probably also slave holders. A reference to a boy who died in 1853:

"BRENTS, Linsey, age 12 yrs, male, slave, born and resided Barren Co, Samuel Brents owner, died of unknown cause 1853."

 

Linsey might have been an early victim of the worldwide cholera epidemic of 1853-4, which was fatal to people enslaved by the Triggs as this schedule of African-American deaths in 1854 Glasgow shows.

TRIGG, Aggy, female, age 70 yrs, born VA, slave of A(lanson) Trigg,1 Apr 1854,old age

TRIGG, Aggy, female, age 62 yrs, born VA, slave of A Trigg, cholera 25 Oct 1854

TRIGG, Anderson, male, age 5 yrs, slave of A Trigg, 15 Apr 1854, scarlet fever.

TRIGG, Barney, male, age 50 yrs, born VA, slave of A Trigg, 23 Oct 1854, cholera

TRIGG, Fanny, female, age 5, slave of A Trigg, 1 Aug 1854, consumption

TRIGG, George, male, age 75 yrs, born VA, slave of A Trigg, 1 May 1854, old age

TRIGG, Joe, male, age 8 yrs, slave of A Trigg, 15 June 1854, consumption

TRIGG, No First Name, female, age 3 months, slave of A Trigg, 15 Apr 1854, flux

             

Alanson Munson Trigg (1795-1873) bought this house,
which still stands, for Eliza in 1854.

Western Kentucky University Collection

Late-19th-century quilt with initials of Emily G. Marks (1839-1923) in the center.

The fabrics look to be wools; the worsteds Kentuckians often fancied

for their show quilts. 

Which side were the Triggs and Brents on? With Kentucky's civilians it's tough to tell.

(1833-?)

Union Army Major J. A. Brents (apparently only distantly related) spent time in Barren County. In his 1868 memoir he recalled: "Glasgow is a pretty town: the Union people are very clever. There are many disunionists in the county." 

The S.W. Brents family may have been among the "disunionists." It looks like Eliza's brother Alanson Curd Trigg was one of "Morgan's Boys," perhaps killed fighting in 1863. Another clue to the Brents's loyalties is their son born in July, 1861 who was christened John Hunt Morgan Brents.

April, 1917
Obituary for J. Morgan Brents from the Scottsville, Kentucky Citizen Times.

Morgan Brents spent much of his adult life in Seattle. He was named for the famous guerilla but the Confederate raiders did not occupy Glasgow until the end of 1862---a name change?

John Hunt Morgan (1825 -1864)

John H. Morgan became a scourge in the area with his guerilla fighters known as Morgan's Raiders. 

Morgan's Christmas Raid through Kentucky in 1862

Eliza's son Morgan was born 18 months before the Glasgow Raid.

Mary Moss Brents Caldwell (1865-1930)

Eliza's daughter Mary Moss arrived in the last year of the War.

Through these years Eliza continued to stitch prize-winning quilts she showed in fair season. In 1863 her "worsted patch-work quilt" won a second prize at the the Kentucky State Fair. After the war she won four premiums for embroidery and quilts at Barren County's 1867 fair and the following year three at the Simpson County fair for the best patch-work woolen quilt, best silk quilt and best silk comforter.

Confederate Memorial erected in 1905

There were enough "disunionists" in Glasgow that the women of the Kentucky Women’s Monumental Association sponsored a Confederate memorial installed at the courthouse.

The 1880 census shows Eliza living with her family. Husband Samuel is a boarding house keeper---apparently they rented out rooms in that big house. Morgan and Mary Moss are teenagers at school. They had one male servant Robert Chapple and Eliza's mother Mary Trigg lived next door.

Daughter Mary Moss inherited her mother's artistic talent.

1897 Louisville Courier-Journal

Eliza died at 58.

Where are Eliza Trigg Brents's prize-winning show quilts today? We might guess that daughter Mary Brents Caldwell inherited them. A research trip to Glasgow to talk to some of the older residents might reveal some lost masterpieces.

Silk show quilt from 1848 with Julia D.L. Bass's name in the center.

These show-off quilts often showed off the maker's name.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41508012/samuel-worley-brents