by Karen L. Cox
Octavia also displayed a dry sense of humor, especially when it came to the suggestion that her hogs had been “trained” to do their foraging at Glenburnie. “I never could train a hog, except train them to eat,” she answered, adding, “If I owned all [the hogs] reported to [be mine] out there, I would be rich.” The implication about riches was not lost among the jurors.
In fact, when her attorney questioned her about how she made her living, she made sure to distinguish herself from her wealthy neighbor. “I am about [like] the old hen said. ‘I have to keep scratching to make a living.’ I sell country produce, milk, eggs, in fact everything that can be made on a farm, I make it and sell it.” Her response was one that the jurors, who were not descendants of planter elite, could appreciate.45
Much of Jennie’s case rested on the writ of seizure issued by Sheriff Ryan. Here, Dockery was very cagey. She recalled that the sheriff served her “a paper” and, she testified, that “he read it by the lamp light to me.” Yet when she was told that the writ described the several hogs she owned, her memory seemed to fail her. “I don’t remember nothing about it,” she answered. According to the sheriff’s testimony, he intended to seize the hogs, but Dockery claimed they were not hers. When Jennie’s attorney asked about it, she answered his question with a question. “You can serve anything by lamp light, but can you seize anything by lamp light?” Then when asked if she accompanied Sheriff Ryan to look for the hogs, she demurred, “I am not accustomed to walking around over the country with a man after dark.”46
When her testimony centered on the messages Henry Rollins delivered to her at Glenwood, Dockery took the opportunity to slight Merrill again. “Did you ever tell that old colored witness [Rollins] these were your hogs trespassing over there?” Geisenberger asked. To which she replied, “He come over and told me there [were] some hogs over there, and that he despised her.” While Geisenberger ignored her comment and continued his questioning, it turns out that there may have been some truth in what Dockery said about Rollins’s feelings toward Jennie Merrill, because it was rumored in the African American community that “Miss Merrill would work her help holding a .22 rifle over them.”47
Testimony from the justice of the peace weakened Jennie’s case further. He had accompanied the sheriff to Merrill’s property numerous times to view the alleged damages, but not only did he not see any damage, he also was unable to recall individual visits to Glenburnie because “there [have] been so many suits between Miss Merrill and Miss Dockery . . . [that] I can’t keep track of them,” he said.48
Merrill’s suit for damages was unsuccessful, resulting in a judgment for the defendant. And in the years to come, Jennie’s neighbors’ hogs continued to trespass while their home fell further into wrack and ruin.
Duncan continued his nightly horseback rides to see Jennie at Glenburnie. By 1930, Jennie, now sixty-six, took in a live-in maid named Effie Stanton. She didn’t socialize as she had in her youth and preferred Duncan’s company or that of her relatives at Elms Court. She went into town on rare occasion to shop or conduct business with the bank, but on the whole she spent most of her time at home.
Just two years later, journalists would represent Jennie to the public as an “aristocratic recluse” whose father had been the Belgian ambassador. They would also write about her in relation to the woman who had become her late-in-life nemesis. The woman with the hogs — and, apparently, more than a few goats.
CHAPTER TWO
THE RESIDENTS OF GLENWOOD
The first time Odell Ferguson visited Glenwood, Dick Dana was swinging through the trees on a grapevine. Ferguson and his father were cutting timber when they spotted the tall and lanky Dana perched on a limb high above them. As soon as Dick saw them, Odell recalled, “He let go of the grapevine, fell to the ground, got up and ran into the house.” Odell was fourteen years old, an age when boys still liked to climb trees and swing on grapevines. Dana was a grown man of fifty-three.1
If bloodlines were guarantees of success, then the boy who was born Richard Henry Clay Dana had plenty to draw from. The Danas became household names during the nineteenth century. They included Richard Henry Dana, an attorney and the popular author of Two Years before the Mast (1841), a classic account of life at sea, and Charles Dana Gibson, the artist famous for his drawings of women popularized in the image of the “Gibson Girl.” There was also Charles Anderson Dana, assistant secretary of war in Abraham Lincoln’s administration who later became editor and part owner of the influential New York Sun in 1868. During the paper’s heyday, Dick’s older brother, also named Charles, became a writer for the Sun in November 1889. As he explained in a letter to Dick, “Through the influence of Mr. Charles A. Dana I was appointed on the editorial staff of the New York Sun. I started with a little better salary than is generally paid to new men, since then I have been promoted and now I am doing very well.”2
Many of Dick Dana’s direct ancestors were involved in the ministry. After graduating from Dartmouth University in 1828, his father, Charles Backus Dana, received his divinity degree from Andover Theological Seminary in 1833. Following a brief tenure as an instructor at the Presbyterian-affiliated Mount Hope College in Baltimore, he became rector of one of the most famous Episcopal churches in the country — Christ Church of Alexandria, Virginia. Famously known as “Washington’s church” because George Washington and his family worshipped there, it was also the seat of worship for another important Virginia family — the Lees. Beginning in 1834 Dana served Christ Church for twenty-six years, ministering to the faithful, which included Robert E. Lee and his family, with whom the rector became friends.3
Dick Dana’s father, the Reverend Charles Backus Dana, in his vestments, n.d. (Courtesy of the Earl Norman Photograph Collection, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Miss.)
Charles Backus Dana cut a stern figure in his portraits and photographs. Dressed in his vestments, he had a receding hairline of dark brown hair and sported mutton chops. Whether it was his humorless appearance or his dedication to the ministry, Charles did not marry until he was fifty-four years old. When he did, it was to a woman half his age. Elvira Close, a parishioner originally from New York, was only twenty-seven when she wed the rector in Alexandria in July 1860. At the time of their marriage, two other women were living in the rector’s home, including a sixty-five-year-old white housekeeper and a young mulatto slave woman. Less than six months after their union, the newlyweds left for a new parish far away from Alexandria in the Deep South state of Mississippi. There, Charles became the rector of St. James Church in Port Gibson, a small town about halfway between Natchez and Vicksburg. Why he left after serving Christ Church for nearly three decades is a mystery, though his marriage to a parishioner half his age perhaps did not sit well with his congregation. A new church in a faraway parish offered the rector and his wife a fresh beginning.4
The difference between states was stark. As rector of Christ Church, Dana had served a large congregation of well over 150 parishioners, but at St. James his flock numbered fewer than 75. As a consequence, Dana ministered twice per month to a second, and much smaller, church in nearby Grand Gulf, spending much of the rest of his time trying to expand the number of communicants at St. James. Yet more pressing challenges lay ahead. Dana and his wife, Elvira, arrived in Port Gibson in mid-January 1861, just as sectional tensions between North and South were heating up. A few months later, the Civil War erupted, and it had a demonstrable impact on the couple as well as on the churches Dana served. Although Dana’s 1862 report to the Diocese of Mississippi revealed that “a considerable addition [had] been made to the number of communicants,” he also conveyed that because of “the disturbed condition of the country, and the stringency of its monetary affairs,” he was forced to postpone building a new church. The couple also experienced personal changes that year as Elvira Dana became pregnant and gave birth to the couple’s first son, Charles, in August.5
Less than a year after Charles Jr. was born, the Danas bore wi
tness to the Civil War firsthand. As part of General Ulysses S. Grant’s plan to take control of the Mississippi River, his troops made their way toward the Danas’ new hometown. During the Battle of Port Gibson in early May 1863, Union forces engaged and defeated Confederate troops who were less than half their number, demonstrating both the strength of the Union army in Mississippi and the inability of Confederates to defend against it. Ultimately, the Union victory paved the way for the fall of Vicksburg.6
According to legend, Grant considered Port Gibson “too beautiful to burn,” sparing it the destruction other southern towns experienced during the war, but this was no consolation to Reverend Dana. Following the war, in 1866, the family moved to Natchez, where Charles Dana began his tenure as rector of Trinity Episcopal Church. It, too, had experienced hardship, and when he arrived there in January, the reality of what the war had wrought could be seen in the congregation itself.
In his 1867 report to the Mississippi Diocese, Dana described the dire state of Trinity Episcopal in Natchez after the war. “The condition of the parish,” he wrote, “was greatly depressed. Many families that had previously belonged to it had removed to other parts of the country, or were residing in Europe, while of those who remained in the city, comparatively few could do much to sustain the Church.” Membership had dropped significantly from 253 communicants in 1861 to just 120 in 1866. Many of them had left during the occupation of Natchez, few had come back, and still others never returned. Despite this, Dana remained hopeful. The number of church members was growing, and the coffers showed signs of recovery.7
Dana’s own finances improved when he moved to a larger church with a better rector’s salary. He purchased a large home, called Glenwood, on the outskirts of town. Built in 1841, the wood frame house stood two stories and had four chimneys, a large front veranda, and a balcony that spanned the entire front of the home. In 1871, while living at Glenwood, the Danas welcomed another son, Richard, whom they called Dick. By now the rector was sixty-five years old. He barely had time to enjoy his new house in Natchez and scarcely had time to get to know his infant son when, in 1873, he died.
Elvira was now a widow with two young sons — Charles, eleven, and Dick, two. She and her boys stayed on at Glenwood for several more years, at least until her death in February 1886 at the still youthful age of fifty-three. Dick, now fifteen, was orphaned. He had never really known his father, and by the time of their mother’s death, his brother, Charles, had already left Natchez for New York. After four years in the army, Charles took up a career as a journalist, following in the footsteps of other Danas by going to work for the New York Sun.8
Charles enjoyed several years with the newspaper during its heyday. Then, when the United States declared war on Spain for sinking the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor — a war that the Sun’s editor vocally supported — he determined to join the army, just ten days after the official declaration of war. He enlisted at Fort Slocum, New York, on May 5, 1898, and signed on for a potential three years of service, but his service ended swiftly after just three months. Charles died in Puerto Rico, not from battle wounds but from disease. Just thirty-six years old when he died, he had never married, nor did he have any offspring. Glenwood, the family home in Natchez, now belonged solely to his younger brother, Dick.9
It is unclear who cared for Dick Dana following his mother’s death. He did attend the Chamberlain-Hunt boarding school in Port Gibson to complete his secondary education. When he came of age, he enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, attending for just two years, between 1888 and 1890. Dick was an accomplished musician, and according to local legend he followed his brother to New York, where he pursued a career as a concert pianist. While there is no evidence proving that he went north, one fact is clear: if he went, he did not stay long. Another legend suggests that he returned to Natchez following an injury to his fingers — said to be have been caused by a fallen window sash — which ended his musical aspirations.10 Whether he had any real career to pursue is questionable, but it is true that an injury left the fingers of his right hand deformed. By 1900, Dick Dana, now twenty-eight, lived in Natchez, but not at his family’s home of Glenwood. Instead, he boarded in the home of local musician Duncan Baker, along with his family, on Pearl Street.11
By 1906, Dick had moved on from the Bakers’ home to board in the home of Richard Forman and his wife, Nydia, on Main Street.12 Among the residents were Forman’s daughter, Sadie, born to his first wife, and another boarder, Archibald Dickson, a bookkeeper with a local lumber company. Nydia’s unmarried sister lived there, too. Her name was Octavia Dockery.
Octavia was not a native Natchezean. This alone may have given Jennie Merrill sufficient reason to dismiss her socially. She was from the very rural town of Lamartine, Arkansas, where she was born in 1866. Her grandfather John Dockery and his family, which included Octavia’s father, Thomas, moved to Arkansas in the early 1850s. Like so many families, the Dockerys had migrated west from states in the Upper South to take advantage of the antebellum cotton boom. Originally from Montgomery County, North Carolina, in the 1840s, they first moved to Hardeman County, Tennessee, just east of Memphis. They farmed there several years before eventually making the move to Columbia County, Arkansas, where John Dockery became one of the area’s largest land and slave owners. He named the area where they settled Lamartine. When he died in 1860, his wife, Ann, and their son, Thomas, now twenty-seven, assumed management of Dockery’s plantations and slaves.13
By 1860, John Dockery’s investment in land and slaves left his family in exceptional financial shape. Ann’s real estate was valued at $15,000, and her personal property, which included forty-five slaves, was worth $75,000, which meant they were among the wealthiest families in the state.14 Thomas’s personal property, including the eight slaves he inherited, was worth $10,000. This was nowhere near the wealth of planters in Natchez, several of whom owned hundreds of slaves; nonetheless, the Dockery family was still quite successful. But families like theirs, who had not invested beyond slaves and land, had the most to lose — and did — in a war to end slavery.15
As of 1860, Thomas Pleasant Dockery, who married Mississippian Laura West the year before, was a new father with a sizable inheritance. Like other southern men his age, he looked forward to expanding his investments in the cotton and slave economy of the Arkansas delta. The Civil War changed all of that.16
Thomas Dockery’s commitment to protect his state and property led him to put his life on the line as an officer in the Confederate army. As a colonel, Dockery commanded two different Arkansas regiments — the Fifth Infantry and, later, the Nineteenth Infantry. Colonel Dockery’s troops participated in the Battle of Port Gibson and were later captured during the siege of Vicksburg. Having ascended to commander of his brigade after the death of his superior, Dockery was captured by Union forces on July 4, 1863, where, after taking an oath of loyalty to the U.S. government, he was paroled. His loyalty was not worth the paper on which it was signed, however. Promoted from colonel to brigadier general just a few weeks later, Dockery returned to Arkansas on August 10, 1863, where he led his men in several engagements against federal forces until the spring of 1865, when Confederate troops in the state finally surrendered.17
Like many former Confederate officers, Thomas Dockery would always be associated with his military exploits and addressed publicly by his military title. Yet General T. P. Dockery, as his name often appeared in print, felt Confederate defeat on a bitter, personal level. He had lost his property, including slaves, and the war ruined him financially. When he returned to Lamartine at war’s end, he and his wife, Laura, would soon welcome another daughter, Octavia. Dockery turned to civil engineering to try to rebuild his fortune, and for a few years he worked to establish a railroad between Little Rock and Shreveport. But the project was unsuccessful. In 1874 he made a failed bid to be the Arkansas secretary of state, and a few years later he left the state for Texas, where he found work with the city of Houston
.18
When the former Confederate general left home, he did not take his young family with him; he instead situated them with a relative while he sought to resuscitate his finances. Laura and their daughters, Nydia and Octavia, moved to Laura’s native Coahoma County, Mississippi, where they lived with Pleasant Thomas Mask — a young maternal uncle of Thomas Dockery. Mask, a physician, was just forty-seven years old and already a widow. He took in Thomas’s wife and their two young daughters, supporting them for a few years until Laura died in September 1880.19
Thomas Dockery, now a fifty-year-old widower, moved to New York, taking Nydia and Octavia with him. There he worked as a stockbroker investing funds for the city of Houston, Texas. Nydia was in her early twenties by this time, and her younger sister was a teenager. Octavia always claimed that she attended the Comstock School for Girls — a private boarding school located on West Fortieth Street in Manhattan — and there is no reason to believe she did not. It must have been an exciting time for the young ladies from rural Arkansas, though any happiness they may have enjoyed soon turned to sorrow as they witnessed their father’s personal decline.20
The former Confederate general did not fare well in New York. Only a few months after Laura’s passing, he quickly married a young woman from Copenhagen, Denmark, named Frederika Toelle, described as “fair, slim, and ladylike” yet “timid” with a “sad face.” Wed in Connecticut, the couple moved to the city, where she found work in a private home as a seamstress. A short two months later the marriage fell apart — as did Dockery’s life. For three days in a row in March 1884, the New York Times reported on his public outbursts. The headline for March 22 announced “Gen. Dockery on the War-Path: After Thrashing Two Men He Thirsts for More Blood.” The following day it read “Accused by His Wife: Gen. Thomas P. Dockery Arrested for Abandonment.” Then finally, on March 24, the paper noted “Mrs. Dockery in Hysterics: The General Declines Mr. Jackson’s Offer to Fight,” indicating that the former general’s life was swiftly unraveling.21