Capitalists with greenbacks thronged to the site, wages and board were exorbitant, land brought fantastic sums. Western Pennsylvania of the 1860s seemed even more promising than California of 1849. Many fortune seekers subleased fractions of wells for hundreds of dollars. Others just skimmed oil that ran off hillsides and floated on the surface of streams and sold this runoff to get their start in the oil business.
When the Civil War ended, the idle, the needy, and the avaricious were all lured by the promise of wealth to be made in “Oil Dorado.” In September 1865, when Ida was nearly eight, Pithole’s population was estimated at between twelve and sixteen thousand and the post office required seven clerks. Hotels, theaters, saloons, and public halls popped up like cutouts in a children’s book. Derricks rose to heights of forty-eight feet, and guards stayed on duty lest whole structures be spirited off to other sites in the night.
To spare his wife and children the vulgarity of Pithole, Franklin Tarbell rode his horse the few miles each way. Ida, eyes round with excitement, stayed up at night with her worried mother to await his return, envisioning her father as a sort of Paul Revere figure, pistol in one hand, reins in the other, his pockets bulging with thick, tempting rolls of dollars.
But the frenzy passed. Pithole’s reserves were drained in five hundred days and its denizens departed. Meanwhile, the small world of Ida Tarbell was occupied by events more central to herself. When she was six her sister Sarah Asenath, named for her grandmothers, was born, and Ida had her first responsibility—she was told by the midwife to take tea to her mother and see the new baby. As an old lady, Ida remembered holding the cup tightly and carefully, fearful that a drop might spill, thinking that this duty was the most important, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to her.
Two years later another brother was added to the household, but just before Frankie Junior’s second birthday he and Sarah were stricken with scarlet fever. Sturdy Sarah fought it off but little Frankie’s screams continued to grow worse. Helpless, eleven-year-old Ida stood outside the closed bedroom door, clamping tight fists over her ears to keep out the sounds of her baby brother’s pain, but afraid to leave him. She clenched her knuckles so hard that they were still white days after he died. She was seventy-eight years old before she could bring herself to dredge up this fearsome incident and begged to be allowed to omit it from her autobiography.4 Ever after the loss of that little brother, Ida panicked when her siblings were sick.
Those days of childhood also brought the pleasure of friendship with Laura Seaver, the daughter of her father’s business partner.5 Laura was a few years older, but the girls visited each other often, playing with dolls and practicing tying back their hair. Then they would look at the Police Gazette that Ida Tarbell found lying near the workmen’s bunkhouse. These pictures in the Gazette portrayed the things her parents alluded to with disapproval and which her mother could hardly bear to explain, and the two girls studied them with fascination. “If they were obscene we certainly never knew it. There was a wanton gaiety about the women, a violent rakishness about the men—wicked, we supposed, but not the less interesting for that.” Ida wrote this years later, but to an adult looking at the illustrations a hundred years later, the dance-hall girls looked remarkably anxious.
The Seavers lived in Petroleum Center, which grew rowdier and more raucous as oil strikes grew greater and the population boomed. When Ida rode there she looked up in the night sky to study the constellations, but walking through the streets she pretended to ignore its saloons and dance halls. At night she tiptoed from her bed to look across the way to a brothel where the laughter and curses were loud and the songs were never those she had learned to play on her parents’ Bradbury square piano. Esther had told her nothing about sex, but Ida knew that in this forbidden place occurred the too-shocking-to-be-told things that men and women did to each other in the dark.
As a grown woman past menopause, Ida would draw on her own sheltered experience to complain that a child was steered from the facts of life as if they were something evil. She noted that a girl breathed from babyhood the atmosphere of unnatural prejudice and misunderstanding that surrounded procreation and that this miasma grew thicker until in a “mischievous and sometimes snide” way she learned about sex.
To keep her mind on higher things, there was the church. The Tarbells attended services on Sunday mornings and weekday nights, participated in “class meetings” where small groups of Methodists met for spiritual discussion, and took part in the annual revival.
In the Tarbells’ day, these conferences were more sedate than the early backwoods camp meetings that engendered them, but a fervid atmosphere remained. When Ida was ten or eleven, she decided to “go forward” and declare herself a Christian as everybody else was doing. She left her pew to kneel before the preacher at the “mourner’s bench.” This bench, or “anxious seat,” where the repentant engaged in varying degrees of emotional display from tears and shouting to choked silence, was the center of attention for the congregation, which joined in earnest prayer for the converted. For Ida, it was a chance to show off the crimson ribbons that cascaded from her hat onto her cream-colored coat. But that night, tucked in bed and praised for her pure white soul, she knew herself to be a sinner. “The realization of that hypocrisy cut me to the heart … and the relief I sought in prayer was genuine,” she remembered.
In the days that followed the revival, the girl observed that often when she said the polite and proper thing, her attitude was sharp and without charity. “For a long time it made me secretly unhappy thinking that in me alone ran an underground river of thought. Later I began to suspect that other people were like this, that always there flowed a stream of unspoken thought under the spoken thought. It made me wary of strangers.”
Although she was beginning to value independent thinking and to question the ironclad assumptions that had governed her upbringing, she took seriously the disciplines of her religion where right doing was toted up against too much backsliding and favors were not to be accepted unless they could quickly be repaid.
With Laura Seaver alone Ida shared her thoughts. Ida described her as “probably the most intimate friend I ever had.” As reticent as her descriptions of them were, Ida’s friendships were for life. Most of her early companions remained in Pennsylvania where she attended their weddings and funerals and they read her books and articles.
Much as she valued these relationships, the time she spent alone was especially rich. She loved to go on solitary picnics and to bring home from her rambles flowers to press in books, insects to house in bottles, and stones to add to a growing collection of interesting things. She would often lose herself in stories by William Makepeace Thackeray and Mary Ann Evans who later called herself George Eliot. Sometimes Ida would be so engrossed in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend that she would be horrified to discover she had spilled lemon pie on the family’s Harper’s Monthly where these serialized works appeared. Such afternoons gave Ida a very different impression about Rouseville than the one her mother had. She felt such fondness for it that whenever she passed through it on the train, even in her old age, she would peer through the window and look up the hillside for a glimpse of the first house her father had built for them. She was not happy when, in her twelfth year, Franklin Tarbell moved his family to Titusville, the area’s cultural capital. An incorporated city of ten thousand, it had a police force, and its citizens encouraged the mayor to suppress the kind of vice and ungodliness the boomtowns fostered. The only public boisterousness permitted was harness racing on Main Street, the dust-raising feature of Sunday afternoons.
Titusville was a bustling city. Drains defeated the mud, plank walks stretched in all directions, and at night the streets were lit by gas. There were six large churches, two banks, three newspapers, two public houses, four hotels, a paper mill, a high school, and even organ grinders on the sidewalks. With the completion of the Titusville Oil Exchange, buying and selling moved indoors.
Ever
ywhere the scent of new lumber mingled with the smell of oil. In the summer of 1870, three hundred houses were erected. Of these the Tarbells’ was one of the most interesting—it was made from the lumber and ornamentation of a Pithole hotel. Franklin Tarbell, who had admired the long French windows and broad verandas of Bonta House, offered to buy it for six hundred dollars when the Pithole oil run played out in 1869. The owners, who had built it for sixty thousand dollars, were glad to accept. And so it was reincarnated among other commodious dwellings on East Main Street, a two-story, three-sectioned house topped by a tower.
One can easily imagine that Esther, given her sense of self and family, must have felt they were finally taking their rightful place among genteel society. Having shielded her children as best she could from the roughness of an oil town, she was relieved to think they would at last have a law-abiding community and a decent education.
Ida did not perceive Titusville’s advantages in this light. She thought of her school only as a crowded room. At the small Rouseville school with the dirt floor, Mrs. Rice had been Ida’s friend. Here the teacher, whom she secretly admired, did not seem to know who she was. Ida’s response to feeling lost and overlooked was to skip class and go for long walks in the hills of Titusville, wondering to herself how she could have changed from the once so well-mannered child to the currently naughty one. “I must have discovered what fun it was to have a good time. I pursued it with absorption, played truant when I felt like it, never knew my lessons and didn’t care,” she said.
Thirteen-year-olds often lash out at themselves and the world with a force and tactics that astound even themselves. Being the “new girl” was exceptionally difficult for a proud, shy child. Her rebellious truancy ceased one day in class when the teacher, Mary French, told her it was a disgrace that a bright student like Ida never knew her lessons and was too wild to go to school. Ida was startled that anybody could say those things about her and particularly shamed that they could be true. After that she became a model pupil.
She soon entered high school and found a friend in Annette Farwell, a girl in her senior year. Ida felt uneasy over finding someone to take Laura’s place until she learned that Laura had also made a new life. A few years older than Ida, Laura had gotten married. Relieved of guilt, Ida still felt abandoned.
Annette Farwell, whose father was a driller and contractor, shared Ida’s love of learning. Annette recalled their pastimes as “the things girls naturally do,” but they also spent summer vacations reading Shakespeare and French together. Annette would imagine Ida as Rosalind, the forthright heroine of As You Like It who disguised herself as a boy. Ida was regarded as musical and at recitals was probably better at solo performances than duets. Once when she was performing with Phoebe Katz, who tied with Ida as first in her class, one made a mistake. Hearing the false notes, they stopped and treated their audience to a discussion about who was to blame before starting all over at the beginning.
Esther insisted on religious songs to entertain company, but Ida would have preferred livelier rhythms. Now a teenager, she reclined on the couch feigning sleep to hear conversations not meant for her ears, read books intended for adults, and lay awake nights planning elopement with a bank clerk whose name she did not know. Throughout her life, men and boys she did know were less capable of inspiring flights of fancy than males she could create in her mind.
Besides the anonymous bank clerk, Ida’s girlhood crushes were mainly on her father’s friends, and she later recalled that she had no thought of actually conversing with them. Annette Farwell remembers Ida as having been popular and high-spirited, but never interested in one particular boy. One can only wonder how a beau would have been received in the Tarbell home, for Franklin had a strict code that ruled out such things as cards, square dances, and cotillions. Instead, Ida played the piano so her little sister could dance with her playmates.
Friends said Ida got on well with her siblings. Her personality was such that she would have savored the role of elder sister instructing the others in how to behave. Sarah, two years younger than Will, was an unruly child who romped and capered and played with her dolls. Little enough to be the family pet, delicate enough to miss school often, she had been strong enough to have survived the scarlet fever which killed Frankie, and for this favor was allowed to go undisciplined.
While Ida dutifully applied herself to her lessons, Will was off hunting or fishing for the area’s oily-tasting trout. Will was a brilliant student who seemed to grasp instinctively the lessons his elder sister needed to study. It was Will’s place to go to the oil fields with his father while Ida participated in the family business only by asking questions.
Ida was rewarded for her academic diligence. In her first year of high school she was one of three with a grade average over ninety-nine. She was amazed that simply by doing what was expected of her, she had made it to the top of the class. She knew that she would have to be there consistently, for she had proven that she was capable of doing such work.
Of her school books, Colton’s Common School Geography gave her the most pleasure with its many woodcuts of islands and deserts, waterfalls and tropics. She promised herself that before she died she would see Vesuvius and the natural bridge in Virginia. History seemed to her unnecessary, except for Smith’s History of Rome, which she read over and over, and her father’s books, which he began to acquire as soon as he could afford them. A favorite was John Clark Ridpath’s A Popular History of the United States From Aboriginal Times to The Present Day. Ida savored the phrase “Aboriginal Times” as the most imposing one she had ever heard.
Grammar, rhetoric and composition yielded the pleasure of uncovering the underlying form. “Outlines which held together, I had discovered, cleared my mind, gave it something to follow. I outlined all my plans as I had diagrammed sentences. It was not a poor beginning for one who eventually, and by accident rather than by intention, was to earn her living by writing—the core of which must be sound structure.”6
But above all, science opened the world to her. Frogs, beads of water on a tabletop, and budding twigs had always intrigued her. In high school she learned she could study them as zoology, chemistry and botany. She became preoccupied by pebbles and plants, collected leaves, minerals, and insects. Now she had an excuse when her mother asked why she wandered off by herself before breakfast or buried her head in books when she should have been sweeping the stairs. The birds’ eggs and nests she kept in boxes in her room weren’t littering up the house—they were useful in school.
When she learned of Darwin’s data showing that the horse had started out as a fish and that the human was cousin to the monkey, she was torn between the demands of her two worlds—the questions raised by science and the solid faith of her religion. Never again would she regard anything as absolutely final until she had tested it herself. “The quest of the truth had been born in me—the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s quests,” she recalled. She knew at last what she wanted to be—not a mother and a wife like all women, but a scientist who would uncover the beginnings of life.
Secret passions and scientific ardors filled her, but she still went to Thursday night prayer meetings where the smell of wool drying by the furnace mingled with figurative whiffs of brimstone. Ida began teaching the infant class of Sunday school to repent for her doubts but held to those doubts just the same and set about to prove evolution with a fervor that rivaled a saint’s quest of God.
She could not bring herself to reject totally the Bible her parents believed in so much. She recalled taking from Scripture the notion of goodness as a practical approach to life. Not to say or do what would hurt others was a principle at home where people did not articulate their feelings. When injured, one was silent until the household made a determined but unspoken effort to soothe the pain. Each felt he knew what was in the other’s heart and responded to what he considered the other’s reaction.
Of them all, Esther was the most outspoken and
the one who first gave way to her feelings. She expressed her discontent in physical ways. When the church, one of her societies, or the household displeased her (as once the coarseness of Rouseville had done), she would be flushed and irritated until she worked out her grudge in rows of knitting. She would repair to her rocking chair and her needles after complaining of the amount of time her husband devoted to his Sunday school class of girls, or after Esther and Franklin’s loud discussions about money.
Domestic economy was an idiosyncratic business generally. Husbands did not discuss their financial situation with their wives—it would not be seemly or appropriate—yet the wives were to manage household operations that naturally depended on finances they knew nothing about. No one applied the notion of budgets to housekeeping; women either asked their husbands for money or charged items to monthly accounts.
Esther was conscientiously, perhaps compulsively, economical. Her prudence was often unnecessary in fact, but since Franklin did not inform her of financial details, Esther never knew how little or how much money they actually had or how much she could spend or buy on credit.
Ida herself tested the limits of this practice when her parents were out of town. They had arranged for Ida to attend the opening of the local opera house and the girl, feeling a special outfit was called for, charged a wide pink sash and yellow kid gloves at the local dry-goods store. It was less comic when Esther made an expenditure for herself or the household only to discover that Franklin was in the midst of a financial squeeze.
Ida often saw her parents at such cross purposes, especially when it came to keeping up appearances versus the cost of doing so. Twice a year a dressmaker took up privileged residence at the Tarbell home. The Grover and Baker sewing machine was overhauled, shears and buttonhole scissors sharpened, and numerous bobbins wound. The Tarbell women spent days at the store comparing fabrics as Esther insisted on pure wools and silks and fine cottons.
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