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Biography/History:
Elizabeth Hatheway Larrabee, the daughter of Joshua and Elizabeth Lord Hatheway, was born in Rome, New York, on November 17, 1799, and she died at sea on April 17, 1867. Her brother, Jay Hatheway, was born in Bennington, Vermont, on January 28, 1792, and he died in Rome, New York, on June 8, 1869. Elizabeth Hatheway married a Major Larrabee. They had one son, Charles Hatheway, born on November 9, 1820. Major Larrabee and his son moved to Ohio, where Charles Larrabee eventually attended Granville College to study engineering and law. Charles Larrabee was admitted to the bar in 1841, and he moved to Pontotoc, Mississippi, to begin his law practice.In the summer of 1842, Elizabeth Larrabee also moved to Pontotoc, where Charles Larrabee was planning a new business venture with his college friend, Lyman Draper. Draper had come to Mississippi in 1841, not only to work as an editor for The Spirit of the Times, a weekly Democratic newspaper in Pontotoc, but also to pursue his avocation: collecting oral histories of frontiersmen and Revolutionary War veterans. After less than a year, the newspaper failed. The subsequent business and farming ventures Draper and Larrabee began in 1842 also failed. Draper left Mississippi late in the summer of 1842 to rejoin his relatives in Buffalo, New York. He returned briefly in the summer of 1843, but Draper left that fall for Baltimore, Maryland, where he pursued his collecting full-time.
Elizabeth Larrabee bought a homestead and remained in Pontotoc until she contracted "the ague" in 1844 and went to live with her brothers in Wisconsin. Charles Larrabee also left Pontotoc in 1844 and moved to Chicago, Illinois, to continue his law practice. He later moved to Wisconsin in 1847, where he eventually became a circuit judge, a United States congressman, and a Union colonel. Lyman Draper moved permanently to Wisconsin in 1854 at the insistence of Charles Larrabee who had found him a job as executive officer of the newly created State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. Draper held this position until his death on August 26, 1891. In 1864, Larrabee moved to the West Coast, practicing law in California, Oregon, and Washington. Charles Larrabee was seriously injured in a California railroad accident, and he died on January 20, 1883.
Scope and Content:
This collection consists of an eight-page letter written by Elizabeth Hatheway Larrabee to her brother, Jay Hatheway, postmaster of Rome, New York, after she had moved to Pontotoc, Mississippi, to live with her son, Charles. Larrabee traveled to Memphis on the steamboat, Belle of the West, and made the trip from there to Holly Springs, Mississippi, by carriage. She stayed several days in Holly Springs until she was able to travel by carriage to Pontotoc. Larrabee wrote the letter from Pontotoc on July 9, 1842, recounting in vivid detail her journey there. The letter describes her trip, the houses at which she stopped, and the swamps and countryside of the region. Larrabee’s letter also discusses her plans to settle in the Pontotoc area with her son and Lyman Draper. The letter was sent postage-free, as it was addressed to her postmaster brother.Series Identification: