by Karen L. Cox
The truth of the matter is that Duncan Gustine Minor, another of Jennie’s cousins, was pursuing her at the same time. She had known Duncan since childhood. Their mothers were first cousins. On his father’s side, Duncan’s ancestry could be traced directly to Stephen Minor, who served as the last Spanish governor of the Natchez District. And, like Jennie, he was related to the Surgets, whose wealth was unsurpassed by other families in the area. When Duncan’s parents married, his mother, Kate, brought considerably more assets to the union. She had inherited several valuable plantations around Natchez, which mostly she, and not her husband, managed with much success.23
Duncan and Jennie were both born in 1863, the same year that Union troops took possession of Natchez.24 Yet unlike the Merrills, who fled north to wait out the Civil War, the Minors remained, at least until late 1864. Much to the chagrin of their Confederate-sympathizing neighbors, John and Kate Minor remained unabashedly loyal to the Union. According to Kate, her husband considered the war “a lost cause from the beginning, and that it was foolish of them [Confederates] to undertake it.” As she recalled, “We had been North in 1860, and we both went home impressed with the folly of such an undertaking.” During the Union occupation of Natchez, from August 1863 through the end of war, the Minors’ home, Oakland, became a gathering place for federal officers. Thomas H. Spain, the Minors’ former overseer, noted that “in a week after [U.S. troops] came to Natchez, John Minor’s house was a perfect hotel for [Union] Officers, Generals & all; and remained so” until war’s end. This not only irked neighbors but also raised the ire of local Confederate guerrillas and required John Minor to request “a guard to keep his house, to keep the Confederates away,” especially since he had been entertaining “Yankee officers.”25
Local women were civil but cool toward Kate Minor. According to Julia Nutt, also a loyalist, the ladies of Natchez “were compelled to be polite to her” because of her wealth and status in the community, but “there was little visiting between her and the ladies.” In late 1864, the Minors received a pass to head north like other loyalists from Natchez. They waited out the war in New York, most likely at the home of Kate’s uncle Jacob Surget.26
Duncan Minor at twenty. (Courtesy of the Dicks Family Collection, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Miss.)
There were consequences for maintaining such loyalty to the Union. Kate Minor remarked that her husband felt “that his treatment from his old friends and associates had been such that he didn’t care whether he lived or died.” And following the war, his health worsened. During the summer of 1869, he traveled to New York seeking a reprieve from the Deep South’s heat, and perhaps its hatred. There, after a terrible fall at his hotel, he sustained a head injury and died. Kate Minor carried on the family’s business as she always had, managing her large plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. Business-savvy and intelligent, she petitioned the Southern Claims Commission in 1871 to compensate her for Civil War losses. The commission, set up by the federal government, determined the validity of claims made by loyal southern Unionists regarding property loss. Kate’s original claim was for more than $64,000, of which she received little more than $13,000 after nearly a decade of litigation.27
Still, Minor’s finances exceeded those of many of her former friends in Adams County. In addition to the lands she owned at her husband’s death, Kate inherited several more plantations from her uncle Jacob Surget and eventually formed a partnership with her brother James to administer their properties. Throughout her life, U.S. Census takers listed her as either a “Planter” or “Plantation Manager.”28
Once he became old enough, Kate’s son Duncan assumed responsibility for managing his mother’s plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana. His mother first sent him north for an education, continuing a decades-old tradition among elite planter families. Duncan attended St. Paul’s School, a college preparatory school in Concord, New Hampshire. He later enrolled at college at Princeton. It was a brief foray away from Natchez, after which he returned to the family home, Oakland, where he assisted his mother with the management of her extensive landholdings, much of which he eventually inherited. And there he remained — enamored of Jennie Merrill.
From the time he was a young man, Duncan Minor loved Jennie Merrill. While no letters attest to her feelings in return, his intense devotion to her lasted a lifetime. In one of his earliest surviving letters to her, dated April 1883, he had just returned to Natchez from New Orleans, where he spent time with her. Both were nearly twenty years old, and though he was smitten, his letter indicates that she did not feel the same. “It was such a trial to leave you for I was having such a nice time, notwithstanding the fact how little I saw of you, and I think if I had remained there longer I should have become bold there as [in Natchez],” he wrote, suggesting that she kept him at bay when they were away from their hometown. Yet Jennie had clearly reprimanded him prior to his leaving New Orleans, which caused him to offer her reassurances. “I see the senses of what you told me and will do all in my power to please you in all things,” he wrote. “As for smothering, I feel sure that I will never do it again, for it is foolish for a man to smother by [love] as I have been doing lately.”29
When Jennie visited Natchez in the spring of 1885, she stayed at her family’s home, Elms Court, where Duncan sent her notes daily. In one, he hinted at the ritual that became theirs when Jennie eventually returned to Natchez.
My Precious One
I trust that you are able to be up this morning as I had so hoped that you would be yesterday. I have been thinking about you and wondering how you are ever since I got up this morning.
So please let me know how you are and I will be on my way this evening.
With my whole love —
Always yrs.
Duncan G. Minor
Restless as ever, Jennie went to New Orleans two weeks later and left Duncan behind to pine for her in Natchez. “I can’t tell you how blue this separation makes me,” he pouted. Even when she remained in town at Elms Court, she could be distant. Failing to see or hear from her, Duncan was beside himself. “Please write me how you are my Love, and stop this thru word business [allowing others to tell him how she is doing], as my heart is so full that it is nearly breaking, and it is only you that can give me comfort.”30
By the time Duncan’s surviving letters to Jennie picked up again in 1889, she was back in New York and moving from place to place. She was quite independent, and it becomes clear that his letters and impatient love for her have proven irritating. In letters that used to begin with “My Precious,” there are no longer salutations. Not able to determine her whereabouts, he wrote to her in November 1889:
Is there any need of saying the letter contained in your card was a great surprise to me and cause of deep regret, but it is well deserved and you cannot be blamed for it. I hardly know if you desire these lines to ever reach you, as you send no address but will send to the same one as before hoping that they will [be forwarded]. Judging from the first mark I take it that you are in Baltimore; although I do so trust not ill, as the handwriting would seem to indicate.
For fear of erring to [an even] greater degree (if it is possible) I will send no more, but if there is any mercy for such as I, write me upon receipt of this.
Duncan Minor31
As the years passed, it became more obvious that his feelings were unreciprocated. Again, during another of her visits to Natchez, she was distant. “Why do you write me such miserable little,” he complained in one note; “you must know that it would make me anxious to know your reason why you do not wish me to come over before Sunday.” Finally, in the last letter from Duncan known to exist, dated August 24, 1900, he writes, “Why is it there is nothing from you, the days pass by, each one increasing my anxiety and still no missive of any kind to allay my fears?” The last line of his note, though, suggests that Jennie may have toyed with Duncan. On the one hand, she ignored his attempts to communicate with her, which caused him great consternatio
n. On the other hand, she made him feel guilty if he failed to write. As he told her, “Of course, you will say that my not writing sooner is proof [I don’t care] but you are mistaken if intentional on your part.”32
Jennie Merrill returned to Natchez for good, sometime in the late 1890s. But why? In the earlier part of that decade, she was an avid tenement reformer in New York who supported the work of Jacob Riis and led a life with purpose. She also had such an independent streak that neither Walter Goodman nor Duncan Minor was able to convince her to marry. But when Riis died in 1896, perhaps her career as a speaker and reformer died with him. Wealthy as she was, she could have continued to travel, but she had inherited plantations in Louisiana and perhaps needed to return to manage them. She had never really lived full-time in Natchez, and after leading such an exciting life as a young woman in both Belgium and New York City, returning to Natchez, a small town seemingly bypassed by modernity, must have been a disappointment. Yet return she did. By now Elms Court had new owners, so she rented Gloucester, a nearby house. A few years later, in 1904, she purchased Glenburnie, a house built in 1833 that sat on several acres of land just across the Kingston Road from where she was born. This probably pleased Duncan, who still lived with his mother, Kate, and it is about this time that he began his evening ritual of saddling his horse at Oakland and riding to Glenburnie around dusk, where, after more than twenty years of waiting, he could finally spend time alone with Jennie.33
By all accounts, Jennie became increasingly reclusive. Until the day she died, she continued to wear the fashions of the 1890s, as she had when she lived in New York — dresses with mutton sleeves and Princess Eugenie hats. Her primary human interactions were with Duncan and local black men and women she hired to cook for her and maintain her property. As needed, she went into town to do her banking, and eventually she purchased a 1919 Model T Roadster for basic errands around Natchez, running through stoplights and stop signs as she went. “Every policeman in Natchez knew [she] never waited for a red light, but nobody gave her a ticket,” her mechanic would later say. She lived a discreet life until early 1916, when she acquired new neighbors on the adjacent property, Glenwood. Little did she know that their arrival next door would mark the beginning of a relentless, years-long feud that would disrupt the quiet solitude she had sought.34
Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery may never have moved to Glenwood had Duncan Minor had his way. When Dana failed to pay property taxes on the estate for 1911, the county tax collector sold it at public auction. Duncan Minor was the highest bidder and acquired Glenwood and its forty-five acres for the sum of forty-six dollars in 1912. Yet only a few years later, probably at the suggestion of Octavia Dockery, local attorney Laurens Kennedy sent Minor a letter asking him to reconvey the property to Dana because he had no place else to live. “It is believed that your and Mr. Dana’s friendship in the past will cause you to do this, as you will not lose anything thereby, and it is his home,” he wrote.35
Minor was unmoved by this appeal. Three years had passed since the sale, long past the two-year statute of limitations for reconveying property to the original owner. Besides, owning the estate offered both him and Jennie privacy, as Glenwood sat adjacent not only to Glenburnie but also to land he owned as well. As far as he was concerned, the case was closed.
What Duncan did not anticipate was Octavia Dockery. Though not married to Dick Dana, she came to his defense by filing a bill of complaint in January 1916 to force Minor to reconvey the property to Dick Dana. The case, entered into court as R. H. C. Dana by his next friend, Miss Octavia Dockery, Complainant vs. Duncan G. Minor, Defendant was significant. As “next friend,” Dockery was acting on Dana’s behalf because he was unfit to look after his own interests. The case against Minor, in fact, rested on Dockery’s argument that Dana had been “in ill health of body and mind to such an extent he was and is incapacitated to attend to his personal affairs, business or otherwise.” As a consequence, she asserted that the tax deed that Minor purchased was null and void and that the land and house should be returned to its rightful owner — Dick Dana. The property was Dana’s inheritance, and though he had only lived there intermittently since his youth, personal circumstances required that he be able to return.36
Octavia proved she was a worthy opponent in court. Minor’s attorneys alleged that when he purchased the property for the taxes on Glenwood, Dana was in “truth and fact . . . sane and of sound mind” and still was. But in his “lunacy” hearing on February 6, 1917, a jury declared that “R. H. C. Dana” was non compos mentis and appointed chancery clerk Pat Mulvihill Jr. his guardian. Glenwood and its grounds, sold for taxes in 1912, could now be redeemed despite the fact that Dockery filed a suit on Dana’s behalf well after the two years provided by law. Why? Because a clause in the state’s property statute provided a redemption for persons of unsound mind. For the time being, Dockery had saved Glenwood for her friend Dick Dana and for herself. If she had failed, not only would they both be homeless, but Dana may have spent the remainder of his days in one of the state’s so-called lunatic asylums.37
Now the pair had rights to Glenwood. Octavia put out a small garden and raised chickens to sell their eggs. She also acquired some hogs and goats that proved to be as wily as Dick Dana. They ambled throughout the woods on the estate and could be difficult to round up. They also made themselves comfortable on the neighboring property. Sometimes the owner shot at them, but most of the time she held them for damages and reported the trespassing to the sheriff. Octavia had never met Jennie Merrill, but she resented her just the same.
Jennie’s Glenburnie estate was about half the size of her neighbors’. It included the house, two ponds, and some outbuildings, including former slave cabins. The only livestock she owned was one milk cow. Her plantations in Concordia Parish may have been for farming, but not her town estate. The land around her home was largely planted with bushes and flowers. She seemed particularly fond of lespedeza, a Japanese clover, which flowered and grew well in Natchez’s temperate climate.38
Much to her chagrin, her new neighbors’ hogs also enjoyed the lespedeza and regularly ambled over to Glenburnie to forage. From the time Dick and Octavia moved next door, Jennie Merrill had a hog problem. And she would soon come to find out that she had a foe in Octavia Dockery. During the years they were neighbors, Jennie filed several lawsuits against Octavia for the damage caused by hogs — to her corn patch, her ponds, and finally her lespedeza. For every infraction, Merrill phoned the sheriff’s office. She made so many complaints that Sheriff Mike Ryan told her attorney, Abraham Geisenberger, that he had “made so many trips out there [to Glenwood]” he could not recall them all.39
When hogs trespassed onto her estate, Merrill would write a curt note to Dockery and send one of the men she hired to do her yard work to deliver it. On one occasion, for example, she made Henry Rollins take a note to Octavia demanding that she pay a fee for keeping the hogs fed and watered. Another time the hogs trespassed, Jennie simply sold them. Octavia generally paid the fees but also filed complaints of her own.40
As far as Jennie Merrill was concerned, Octavia Dockery was not her social equal. Under oath, she stated, “I have never spoken to Miss Dockery in my life.” This was intentional. When Jennie communicated with her neighbor, she either sent a note by a servant or called the sheriff to take care of disputes, clearly signaling that the woman next door was beneath her. As someone descended from Surgets and Merrills, Jennie simply never dealt personally with the likes of Octavia, despite Dockery’s own claims to an Old South lineage.41
After a year of troubles with her neighbors’ hogs, Jennie Merrill filed another suit against Octavia Dockery in April 1917. Angered by the damage the swine caused to her property, Merrill again contacted the sheriff’s office. As he had done many times before, Sheriff Ryan drove out to Glenwood, but this time he issued a writ of seizure for the hogs, described as “four black and white sows, one black and white barrow, and 14 more or less shoats.”42 It might have been
a simple case of resolving a dispute between two neighbors, but neither of these women was simple.
The case — of damages caused by trespassing hogs to Jennie’s lespedeza and one of her ponds — eventually made its way to Mississippi’s state supreme court and in the process would reveal the ongoing battles between the two women to be as much a conflict about class as it was over hogs.
The attorneys in the case had their hands full with Jennie and Octavia. During questioning, Jennie’s responses were brusque and impatient, perhaps because she had filed so many complaints to no avail. Her response to Laurens Kennedy, Dockery’s attorney, was typical. In trying to determine the alleged damages to her property, he asked, “Did you show me and him [the justice of the peace] that pond?” Her reply was combative. “That is the pond in the corn suit where the hogs came over and destroyed every bit of my corn. This is another suit entirely,” she snapped. “I wish you would get these suits straight in your head. You don’t seem to know what you are trying.” And when asked if she had any hogs, she shot back, “No, sir. I have never had one and I wouldn’t have one in 25 miles of me if I could help it,” adding, “I can’t do anything over there for her hogs. I am tormented to death with them.”43
Octavia, on the other hand, proved to be a cunning witness in her own defense. She knew exactly how to elicit sympathy among the jurors and, as it suited her purpose, selectively failed to recollect conversations and events. When asked where Merrill lived, she replied, “I understand she lives next to me — on the North of me.” And in a follow-up question, she took the opportunity to suggest something about Jennie’s social mores. “I understand that Miss Merrill and Mr. Minor lives over there — that’s the best of my understanding.” Dockery essentially testified that they lived together — unmarried.44