Books: Brown Study

GRANDMOTHER BROWN’S HUNDRED YEARS—Harriet Connor Brown—Little, Brown ($3). As it must to all men and women, as it did even to Methuselah, Death came last January to Grandmother Brown. She was 101 years, nine months old. One of her daughters-in-law wrote this book about her. It won the Atlantic Monthly $5,000 Biography Prize.

Grandmother Brown (Maria Dean Culver) was born in Athens, Ohio, in 1827. John Quincy Adams was President. Grandmother Brown’s forbearers were old Massachusetts stock who had moved west after the Revolution. She married one Daniel Brown, set up house with him in Amesville, Ohio, where he ran a general store. There four of her eight children were born. Then “Dan’l got the Western fever,” and they moved to Iowa, to a farm near Keokuk.

In Iowa four more children were born; one, a girl, died in childhood.The farm made money, but Grandma never liked it; she was glad when they moved in to Fort Madison. The Civil War did not touch the Brown tribe very nearly. None of Grandma Brown’s sons were called to the colors; Morgan’s raiders threatened once, but never appeared.

Grandma Brown’s last baby (the author’s husband) was born when she was nearly 43, and her hair had turned gray. When their progeny grew up and left home. Grandma and Dan’l began to go places and do things: “in ’93, like everybody else,” they went to the World’s Fair in Chicago. But Dan’l was getting along. He had a stroke, then another; soon he was almost helpless. Grandma Brown used to wash his feet for him. “But he would say to me, ‘I hate to have you wash my feet.’ And I would answer, ‘Why, that’s according to the contract, Dan’l.’ And he would say other nice things to me. He told me he was a better man for having lived with me. Dan’l seemed sort o’ mellowed all those last years.”

When Dan’l died in 1906, Grandma mourned him, then went on her travels. She visited her scattered family. She saw the sights of Washington. She went up Lookout Mountain and had dinner there.

Said she pithily: “A car goes up slanting.” In 1920, at 93, she had pneumonia and erysipelas, but pulled through. Her 100th birthday was triumphantly celebrated with a party in her honor, at which she said a lengthy grace in a firm loud voice, while 41 descendants bowed their heads. Nearly two years later she died quietly in bed.

The greater part of this narrative of an unadventurous but representative life is given in Grandma Brown’s own words. Says her daughter-in-law: “Recording her story in her own pungent speech, I have hoped to catch and preserve for Grandmother Brown’s descendants some of the flavor of her personality; her aspirations, her achievements, even her limitations; her innocent vanities; her lovable animosities; her patient endeavors.”

Grandma Brown had a great scorn for doctors. “With any fair treatment,” she thought, her child that died of diphtheria would have recovered. When she wanted medical advice, “whatever the ailment, from hiccoughs to tapeworms,” she took from the shelf Dr. Gunn’s House Physician. Grandma Brown was a stout Republican; before the Civil War an Abolitionist; though she never held with smoking or drinking, she did not approve of her daughter Lizzie’s behavior as a Temperance Crusader, which involved hymn singing in front of Billy Pranger’s saloon on Front Street (“with big loud voices. Like calliopes.”).

The Author. Harriet Connor Brown, born at Burlington, Iowa in 1872, specialized in history at Cornell, studied in Berlin, worked on newspapers in Buffalo, Manhattan, Washington, D. C., intended to be a professor. IInstead she married Herbert, Grandma Brown’s youngest. She and her husband have both been in government service: he as head of the U. S. Bureau of Efficiency, she as editorial clerk in the U. S. Geological Survey. They have two children. Mrs. Brown, active pacifist, was put on the late Dearborn Independent’s famed “spiderweb chart” as one of many U. S. women “in the pay of Soviet Russia.”