Project #1655
W. W.
Dixon, Winnsboro, S. C
ELIZABETH VANDERVILLE DARBY
(white) 84 YEARS OLD.
Elizabeth V. Darby lives with her half
sister, Mrs. Edward D. Sloan, and her niece, Margaret Sloan, on the
southwest corner of Vanderhorst and Moultrie Streets, in the town of
Winnsboro, Fairfield County, South Carolina. She in vivacious,
intelligent, a good talker, and an attentive listener. She is one of
the interesting personalities of Winnsboro.
"It is quite a pleasure to see you again.
I have been longing to see you and ask you about the particulars of
the death of my friend, Bill Ellison. His death was so sudden. He
was on the streets Saturday, cheerful and full of life, and early
Sunday morning the news came that the silent angel of death had
visited him and taken him away in a moment. And here I am old enough
to be his mother and still living.
"How old am I? If I live to see the 24th
of next September, I will be eighty-four years old. I was born
fourteen miles from Wilmington, N. C., at Long Creek, a small post
office place in New Hanover County, but the county has been changed
to Pender County since then.
"My father was a physician and surgeon,
Dr. S. S. Satchell; my mother, Elizabeth Vanderville Satchell, died
when I was three years old. I was the only child by mother. When she
died, father married Anne Moore. There were four children by this
union, James, S. S., Jr., Paul, and Margaret. Margaret is the
present Mrs. Sloan, with whom I make my home. Again my father was
bereft of his wife, and he embarked in the last matrimonial
adventure. This time he was joined in wedlock to Sarah Bell. He had
one child by this marriage, Quincy Bell Satchell.
"My father was indulgent toward me as a
child. I commenced to learn my A. B. C.'s at his knee. There were no
public schools in North Carolina when I was a child; so, with the
best of intentions, my father sent the necessary money to D.
Appleton & Company, publisher and they sent him the blue-backed
speller. He began teaching me the alphabet. The book ceased to be
interesting to me, a child, after I had absorbed all the tales of
the pictures in the front and back; pictures of the bear, the fox,
the boy in the apple tree, and the vain girl, with the pail of milk
on her head, going to market. In fact so tedious and tiresome became
the ba (bay), bi (by), be (bee), and bo (bow), that one day father
rode off to see a patient in the midst of a lesson, and I crept out
to the well in the yard and threw the Yankee blue-book (as I called
it) to the bottom of the well.
"Father gave up the task of teaching me
and sent me to a private school, taught by a Mr. Richardson in
Wilmington, N. C. Here I found the blue-backed speller again and
went through it with just appreciation, as the dunce cap hung on a
nail back of the teacher's chair and three hickory switches stood
admonitory in the corner of the schoolroom, evident signs of
compulsory education in that day and time.
"In my ninth year I was sent to the
Moravian School, and it's a God's blessing I was. The school was in
charge of a Mr. de Schweinitz. The teachers were kind in
disposition, conscientious and thorough in their training, and the
knowledge and wisdom I acquired there have been useful all my life.
I remained at school until the end of the war.
"Anent that war, my father enlisted in
the regular troops but was soon detached and placed in charge of one
of the base hospitals as physician and surgeon. He was under General
Ransome, brother to 'Mat' Ransome, who became U. S. Senator after
the war, that is when he first enlisted. The general's name was
Robert Ransome.
"On the day the Yankees entered the town,
the school bell was tolled for assemblage of the pupils in the
chapel. We were, as a body, cautioned that our welfare and treatment
by them would depend much on our decorum of respect and politeness
toward them. The first one who appeared was on horseback. He was
alone; I remember his frying pan and cooking utensils were arranged
about his saddle. Then two came and inquired about the location of
the post office and disappeared.
"The next day many strolled and lolled
about the school yard and promenade grounds. In a bevy of girls
there always is a pert one or two. Some remarks of an ill nature
passed between the girls and a young officer with more bravado than
brains, perhaps, and he secured a U. S. flag and put it flying above
the school building. The girls wanted it torn down, but Moravians
are the kind of Christians who, in their meekness, submit to
persecution. The flag remained flying until the Yankees
departed.
"Our school ran out of tea, coffee, and
sugar. The substitutes used were red sassafras roots for tea, which
we liked; ground okra seed and ground parched corn for coffee, and
molasses took the place of sugar.
"The Yankees did no burning or damage to
property that I remember. In fact there was a good number of people
in the locality who did not believe in secession and a few who
thought slavery should be abolished.
"The next school I attended, for three
years, was the convent school in Wilmington, N. C. Leaving here, I
went to my mother's people, the Vandervilles, in New Jersey. They
secured me a position to teach in the public school at Summerville,
N. J. The school hours were from 9 a. m. to 4 p. m. with an hour's
intermission for recess and dinner. I remained here until the death
of my father's second wife; then he had me to return home, keep
house, and govern the four children, my younger brothers and
sister.
"When my father married the third time, I
went back to New Jersey and was governess in a home of four children
until I married a prosperous young lawyer, Frank Darby. We were
married nine years, but had no children. His mother got the bulk of
his property. I consented to receive as my share,
$3,700.00.
"Soon afterward, I secured a position as
bookkeeper and cashier of Gailord & Co., in Wilmington, N. C. I
studied stenography during my idle hours, and became the
stenographer of Governor Russell of North Carolina in 1897. He was a
Republican but a fine, nice gentleman. Afterward, I worked under my
brother, Paul, in Washington in the employ of the [Sou. Ry.?] [Co.?]
Next, I worked for my brother, S. S. Satchell, Jr., in Philadelphia,
until General Otis went to the Phillipine Islands and the company
sent my brother there. Following this, I lost all I had saved in a
Building and Loan Association while acting as bookkeeper for a real
estate and insurance operator, J. O. Reiley, in Wilmington, N.
C.
"I next became housekeeper for Father J.
A. Gallagher, a Roman Catholic priest, and remained in his household
thirteen years, at Newbern, N. C. Then I came to Winnsboro in 1924
to my sister, Mrs. E. D. Sloan, and have resided with her family
ever since.
"My brothers S. S., Jr., left the railway
employment and obtained Government service in the Phillipines, and
he was afterward on the Pacific coast in the service. He helped me
until he died in the Presidio Hospital, out in
California.
"On my mother's side I am descended from
the first white child born in New Amsterdam. He was a de Rapalje
child, and his father a de Rapalje built the first house on Staten
Island. When the English took charge of New Amsterdam, they changed
the name to New York. You see that still leaves me a
knickerbocker.
"Yes, I remember the firing on Fort
Sumter, near Charleston, I was in my seventh year. General
Beauregard had twice made a demand for its surrender, and the third
time he told them that the 12th day of April would be the last day
of grace. Everybody was solemn on that day, something like the
expectancy of an impending total eclipse of sun, which I witnessed
afterward in the late 90's. There was no playing on that day, but
there was sad, anxious faces all around. News came that the fort had
been fired on, and, soon afterward, war was declared. My father went
out in Capt. Clingham's company, but he was soon transferred into
the hospital service. He didn't face any bullets afterward, but he
had to meet smallpox and diseases which carried away as many
soldiers as grape shot.
"As the war went along, the matter of
women and girls' dresses received much attention. There was no new
cloth available. Old dresses were changed, sometimes turned wrong
side out or remodeled. Grown folks' clothes were re-cut and
fashioned into girl's dresses, dyed, and retrimmed. The girls wanted
to look fresh when the boys came home on furlough. Dyes and
dye-stuff was a problem. Madder, copperas, barks, and roots were
used to produce various shades of coloring. Designs were nearly
impossible; stripes predominated. Economy had to be observed and
considered. Well, the styles then were long dresses with trails. You
must know that in those days it was the height of immodesty for a
woman's ankle to be seen by a man; and a man never knew the color of
his sweetheart's stockings until the night they got married.
Dresses, before the war, required fourteen yards in the making.
Women in those times wore shawls, each had an ambition to own and
wear a cashmere shawl. They were lovely things, costly in material
and beautiful in delicate embroideries. One of the everlasting
griefs to the womanhood of the South was the searching for and
taking away of these shawls when the Yankees made their other
depredations in their march through the Confederacy.
"I am an old woman now. I have played in
the sunshine, walked underneath clouds, and trudged in the rains of
troubles that seemed about to overwhelm me, but I have come out of
it all, chastened and resigned to the will of our Heavenly
Father.
"The first of next month I'll make my
annual visit of three weeks to the Convent of the Sacred Heart, at
Belmont, N. C. I shall be very glad to send you a postcard after my
arrival, and it will please me to hear from you and my friends in
Winnsboro occasionally while there."
Source: Library of Congress - American Life
Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940.
