He Built the House Before He Sent for a Mail Order Bride — She Walked In and Called It Home

 

In the autumn of 1879, a man named Daniel Marsh, no relation to our Eleanor, though the name is a common one in those stories, built a house on 320 acres of Kansas grassland that he had filed on under the Homestead Act 2 years prior. He built it himself with help from his neighbor Ezra Briggs for the roof beams. And he built it well.

Four rooms, a proper fireplace with a stone hearth. Two windows on the south side to catch the winter light. A front porch long enough for two chairs. He built two chairs. He put them both on the porch before the house was finished. His neighbor Ezra came to help with the roof beams and saw the two chairs sitting on a porch that had no roof yet, looking out at the Kansas grass, and said, “Daniel, you don’t have a wife.

” “Not yet,” said [music] Daniel. “You’re pretty sure about this,” said Ezra. “I’m sure about the chairs,” said Daniel. >> [music] >> “The rest will follow.” This was the kind of man Daniel Marsh was, practical, forward-thinking, [music] possessed of a certainty about the shape of his future life that other people sometimes found strange, and that he simply found clarifying.

 He had homesteaded his 320 acres [music] with a clear vision. He would farm wheat, raise some cattle, build something lasting on this ground, and he would not do it alone. He had seen what loneliness did [music] to men on the frontier. He had watched it in his own father, who had pioneered into Missouri in the 1840s and spent 20 years building something admirable and largely empty.

 Daniel intended to build something that was full. He placed his matrimonial advertisement in the Kansas City Journal in November of 1879. He had thought carefully about what to write. He was 31. He owned his land outright, or would when he finished his 5-year homestead requirement. He was healthy, reasonably literate, and possessed of what he considered a reasonable temperament, meaning he did not drink, did not quarrel unnecessarily, and kept his word.

 He listed these qualities plainly. He added [music] one sentence that was not practical at all. The house has a porch with two chairs and a view [music] of the grass that goes on until it meets the sky, and I would very much like someone to sit in the second [music] chair. That sentence produced 43 responses. Among the 43 women who wrote [music] to Daniel Marsh was one named Catherine Howell, who was 26 years old, the daughter of a Philadelphia printer, and [music] working as a compositor at her father’s shop.

A profession considered unusual for a woman, but which she had taken up [music] naturally from the age of 12. Having grown up surrounded by type blocks and ink, and daily organized production of language. Catherine was not romantic in [music] the conventional sense. She had no patience for sentimentality or for the performative courtships she observed around her, which seemed to involve a great deal of looking at the floor and saying things no one quite meant.

 She was direct, intellectually curious, physically capable, and had determined at some point in her mid-20s that she was not going to find what she was looking for in Philadelphia, which was a city where everything was already decided. She had been reading matrimonial columns for 6 months with a researcher’s detachment, taking notes, evaluating the advertisements the way she evaluated type for errors, looking for the one that was genuinely, precisely what it claimed to be.

 

 Most failed this test immediately. Then she read Daniel Marsh’s advertisement and came to the [music] last sentence. The house has a porch with two chairs and a view of the grass that goes on until it meets the sky. And I would very much like someone to sit in the second chair. She read this sentence three times.

 Then she took out a sheet of paper and wrote the most direct, unflattering, honest letter she had ever written. She described herself as a compositor, which she knew many men would find off-putting. She described her father’s shop, her lack of any particular domestic skill except organization, her habit of reading until very late at night, and her conviction that the West was a place where a person might be allowed a wall to be exactly what they were without the city’s opinion of what that should look like. She did not mention

the chair directly, but she thought about it for a long time after she sealed the letter. Daniel Marsh read Catherine Howells’ letter with the attention he gave to everything important. He read it twice, which was his standard for documents he considered worth his time. He noticed that she had not described her appearance, which he found refreshing.

 He noticed that she had described her mind, [music] which he found interesting. He noticed the phrase allowed to be exactly what they were, which resonated with something he had been trying to articulate to himself for years about why he had come to the frontier. He wrote back that day. He told her about the wheat, which was experimental.

He was trying a variety called Turkey Red that a Mennonite family from Russia had brought and that some of the older farmers swore by. He told her that he thought language was probably the most important invention humanity had ever produced, which was not a typical thing for a Kansas homesteader to say, but he had been thinking about it since reading her description of [music] growing up among type blocks.

 He told her about the two chairs. “I built them before I built the house proper.” He wrote. “I am aware that this is a strange order of operations, but I have found that if you know what you are building toward, the practical steps tend to arrange themselves. The chair was the point. The house is infrastructure.” Catherine read that letter in her compositor’s chair at the shop after her father had gone home for the evening and the press had gone quiet.

 She read it in the particular focused way she read things that were worth reading completely, without distraction, [music] going back for individual sentences. The chair was the point. The house is infrastructure, she thought. This is a person who thinks. This is a person who knows the difference between the point and the infrastructure.

 This is possibly She was careful with herself here, careful not to want it too quickly. This is possibly the person. They wrote to each other for 5 months. Their letters grew longer as the correspondence progressed until by the third month they were writing what amounted to essays on language, on the frontier, on what it meant to build a life deliberately versus having one happen to you, on the specific quality of light in different geographies, on dogs.

 He had a cattle dog named Copernicus after the astronomer. Because he had, Daniel said, a heliocentric view of himself. On the particular pleasure of working with your hands and on why honesty was, both of them agreed, [music] the only interesting policy in human relationships. In the fourth month of their correspondence, Catherine’s father had a stroke. It was not severe.

 He recovered his [music] speech and most of his movement within 6 weeks. but it left him unable to manage the shop’s press himself. Catherine was the only person who could run it. She knew the work better than anyone. She had, without discussion, become the shop’s actual operator. She wrote to Daniel about this honestly.

 “I cannot,” she wrote, “in good conscience leave my father without [music] the means to run his business when he is still recovering. I do not know when this will change. I wanted to tell you immediately because you told me in your second letter that you intended to always be told things immediately, and I find that I have adopted this [music] preference as well.

” Daniel’s response arrived 7 days later. >> [music] >> “I understand. I will wait. The second chair is not going anywhere. I put good wood in it.” A pause in the letter, evidenced by a slight change in the pressure of the pen. “I want to say something that I hope is not forward. I believe, based on 5 months of letters that have been, I think, more honest than most conversations I have had in person, that you are the person I built the chair for. I am not certain of this.

 I have never met you, but I am certain enough to wait. And I am not in the habit of being certain about things I am not reasonably sure of.” Catherine read this letter at the press with ink on her hands and the smell of paper and metal around her, and felt something move in her chest that she recognized as emotion of the serious, inconvenient, >> [music] >> and irreversible kind.

 She waited eight more months. Her father recovered well enough by the following autumn to take on a young man named Franklin as assistant compositor. She had trained Franklin herself. She had, she admitted privately, been training him since the spring with this specific moment in mind. On the day Franklin printed his first solo run without a single error.

Catherine walked [music] home, wrote a letter to Daniel Marsh, and told him she was ready. She arrived in early November of 1881, two years after his advertisement had appeared. The Kansas sky in November was a particular shade of blue she had never seen in Philadelphia, so intensely clear it almost hurt to look at.

 And the grass was the color of old gold. And the air smelled like cold and wheat straw, and something she could not identify that she later understood was simply the smell of the plains, which has no equivalent and no substitute. [music] Daniel was at the station. He was taller than she had imagined with the kind of quietness that she now recognized from his letters.

The quietness of a person who used words carefully because they respected what words were for. He looked at her with an expression that she would spend the next 40 years trying to describe precisely and never quite managing. Recognition is the closest she ever got. The expression of a person who has been looking for a particular thing and has found it, and is now allowing themselves to believe it. “Miss Howell,” he said. “Mr.

Marsh,” she said. “I understand there’s a chair.” He drove her to the ranch in the wagon. The house was exactly as he had described it. Four rooms, south-facing [music] windows, the stone fireplace, and on the porch exactly where he had put them, the two chairs. She sat in the second one.

 She looked at the grass going on until it met the sky. She thought, “He was right. This is the point. Everything else is infrastructure.” “Well,” she said. “Well,” he [music] said. Copernicus the cattle dog, who had a heliocentric view of himself, came to investigate her with the focused attention of a scientist evaluating [music] data, and then sat down next to her chair and placed his head on her knee which Daniel later said was the most conclusive endorsement the dog had ever given [music] anyone.

They were married on December 3rd, 1881 by the county judge in the front room of the house. There was no ceremony to speak of. Both of them preferred it that way. The judge said the words. They said the words back. Daniel put a ring on Catherine’s finger that he had commissioned from a silversmith in Wichita.

A simple silver band with a small wheat sheaf engraved on it because he had thought it was appropriate that she should carry something of his work with her always. Catherine Marsh settled into the ranch the way water settles into a landscape. Not forcefully but completely, finding the natural channels and filling them.

She brought her compositors precision to the farm’s record keeping which had previously been conducted in Daniel’s careful but idiosyncratic shorthand. Within a year their accounts were the most organized in the county and Daniel had discovered things [music] about his own operation that he had not known because he had never had a clear enough picture.

 She also brought her compositors habit of making [music] things available to others. Within two years a small lending library had appeared in their front room. Books she had brought from Philadelphia. Books she ordered from Kansas City. Books that neighbors had left and never reclaimed.

 By 1885 it had a name, the Marsh Library. By 1890 it had its own room built by Daniel [music] specifically for it with proper shelves he built himself. The Turkey Red Wheat [music] succeeded. In the drought years of the 1880s when other homesteaders [music] crops failed the Marsh farms diversified approach wheat, cattle, [music] and a kitchen garden that Catherine managed with the same organized attention she brought to the type blocks kept them stable when stability was not guaranteed.

 They were not wealthy, but they were solvent and they were, in the specific way that matters, full. They had three children. Each of them grew up in a house where books were treated as necessities and words were taken seriously. And both parents sat together on the porch in the evenings when the work was done in the two chairs that had been built before the house was, watching the grass go on until it met the sky.

 Catherine Marsh outlived her husband by 11 years. Daniel died in 1918 at the age of 69 of a heart that had worked very hard for a long time and had earned its rest. >> [music] >> She sat in her chair on the porch and watched the sun go down that evening and thought about 40 years and what they contained, which was too much to summarize and too much to hold and exactly the right amount.

 Going through his desk afterwards, she found, as people often find in the desks of people they have loved, things she did not know existed. A letter from his mother that he had kept for 30 years, his homestead filing papers carefully preserved, a small notebook in which he [music] had, apparently over many years, written down sentences from her letters.

Not all of them, just the ones that had particularly struck him. She read them and heard herself from 30 and 40 years ago and found that she had been smarter than she remembered and more frightened than she had admitted. And at the bottom of the [music] desk, in a small paper folder, a single sheet in his handwriting.

 It appeared to be a draft, heavily revised, crossed out, and rewritten of the last line of his matrimonial advertisement. She could see that he had tried many versions before landing on the one that had been printed. The versions before it were practical, informational, conventional. And then, in the final draft, in handwriting that was slightly different, more deliberate, as if he had known what he wanted to say, the sentence he had written and that she had read in a print shop in Philadelphia on a gray winter evening in 1879.

The house has a porch with two chairs and a view of the grass that goes on until it meets the sky, and I would very much like someone to sit in the second chair. Below it, in different [music] ink, a later edition she had never seen. She came. She sat in it. I was right about the chairs. Katherine held the paper for a long time.

 The prairie was absolutely quiet except for the wind, which had always been there, which would always be there, which was one of the things she had come to love about this place. Its indifference to everything except [music] the truth of what was present. She folded the paper carefully and put it in her pocket. Then she sat down in her chair and looked at the grass going on until it met the sky and thought that she had been right all those years ago to recognize the point and trust the infrastructure.