Charles W. Chesnutt to Minnie E. Jones, 16 May 1932
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[1]
May 16, 1932
Mrs. Minnie E. Jones,
1209 Cook Street,
Denver, Colorado.
My dear Mrs. Jones:
I have not yet acknowledged your response to the wail which I wrote you during the Christmas season. I am glad you saw Bishop Stearly,1 and that both of you enjoyed the meeting. He was always a very fine fellow, and we see him occasionally here in Cleveland when he conducts a service at our church. Our rector of several months ago, Reverend Kirk O'Farrell,2 is now dean of the Detroit cathedral, and is undoubtedly on the way to a bishopric, as I have told him several times in a joking way.
I am awfully sorry to know that Grace was in the hospital with somewhat of the same trouble that you had many years ago. My daughter Helen3 was in the hospital for three separate major operations a couple of years ago, but has entirely recovered and seems to be in vigorous health, which she will keep if she does n't work herself to death.
I am glad to know that our old friend Grant Ward, the husband of Eda Brockwell -- if I have the name right -- is sufficiently prosperous to be able to place a bank account at your disposal.4 Your following that statement in your letter with these words, "Can you beat it?" No, I can't beat it, can't even equal it, and it keeps me scratching to pay the interest on some $40,000.00 of notes which I owe the Union Trust Company5 and the Cleveland Trust Company.6 However, if I go into that, it will only increase the depression "so far as I am concerned."
My sympathy with you in the loss of your brother Lyman. I read the other day in the newspapers that he had died. He was always nice to me, and I regret his passing.7
I imagine we will start for Idlewild8 for our vacation around the first15th of June, if not sooner. We have carried up there with us for the last three or four summers little Johnnie Slade,9 my daughter Dorothy's son.10 Her husband is a physician, but he got into it rather late, and only opened up his office last fall.11 We shall probably take Johnnie with us this summer. He has reached an age where he can be useful. He is seven years old, quite brilliant intellectually, and when he behaves himself, a joy and delight to us all.
2
The weather here yesterday and today has been very hot.
I guess I could have dug up a square meal for you if had come to Cleveland, as I am still eating. I still draw some income from my office, but not very much, as I am not working very hard, hardly at all, although I go down to the office several days a week.
I am trying to hold on, but stocks keep dropping lower and lower, and I shall indeed be lucky if I can hang on.
With regards to Fred and Grace, I am,
Yours sincerely, CWC:MKCorrespondent: Minnie E. Bothwell Jones (1865–1941) was a White woman born in Ohio. In 1886, she married Frederic C. Jones (1865–1939), a pharmacist who later ran an insurance agency. They had one daughter, Grace E. Jones (1887–1967), who became a public school teacher and remained single. The family's connection to the Chesnutts was likely through Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cleveland. By the census of 1900 the Joneses had moved from Ohio to Denver.
1. Wilson Reiff Stearly (1869–941), a White Philadelphian, was Episcopal bishop of Newark from 1927 to 1935. From 1900 to 1909, he had served in Cleveland as rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church, the church where the Chesnutts worshipped, before accepting a rectorship in Philadelphia and then in Newark. He married Helen Barcroft Neuhauser Stearly (1873–961) in 1895. With his wife, he visited Denver to attend the Episcopal Annual Convention, which was held there from September 16–30, 1931. [back]
2. Kirk Bassett O'Ferrall (1888-?), originally from near Miami, Ohio, was the rector of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Cleveland, where the Chesnutts worshipped, from 1922 until 1930, and was then chosen as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in Detroit. [back]
3. Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880–1969) was Chesnutt's second child. She earned degrees from Smith College and Columbia University, taught Latin (including to Langston Hughes) at Cleveland's Central High School for more than four decades starting in 1904, co-authored a Latin textbook, The Road to Latin, in 1932, and served on the executive committee of the American Philological Association in 1920. She became her father's literary executor and first biographer. [back]
4. Grant Simpson Ward (1869–1949) and Eda Emily Brockman (1865–1947) were married in Cleveland in 1891 and were acquaintances of Fred and Minnie Jones and of the Chesnutts, possibly through Emmanuel Episcopal Church. By 1920, they had moved back to Eda's hometown of Webster Groves near St. Louis, Missouri, where Ward worked as a detective for the Wabash Railroad. [back]
5. The Union Trust Company was the third-largest Cleveland bank trust, by 1920 a large nationwide bank following several mergers. In 1924, Chesnutt's company began renting offices in the brand-new Union Trust Building that housed the bank's headquarters. Many of his investments were also with Union Trust. After the stock market collapse in 1929, he had to service a $18,500 loan for which the collateral had been stock market shares that were now worthless; the company also held the mortgage for his home at 9719 Lamont St. and for at least one rental property he owned (11900–02 Superior Ave.). Union Trust survived the early years of the Depression, but was not allowed to reopen after another collapse of the Cleveland banks in February 1933. [back]
6. The Cleveland Trust Company was a large nationwide bank, founded in 1894 as the second-largest bank trust headquartered in Cleveland. Its depression-era collapse did not happen until February 1933, along with most other Cleveland banks, but unlike its rival Union Trust, Cleveland Trust reopened. Both Chesnutt and his business partner Helen Moore (1881–1963) had large loans with the bank after the collapse of the stock market. [back]
7. Lyman Dutton Bothwell (1856–1932), an older brother of Minnie Jones (1866–1941), died on May 9, 1932. He had worked in the Cuyahoga County tax auditor's office for over 50 years (1879–1932) and was chief of its tax accounting department at the time of his death. [back]
8. Starting in 1922, the Chesnutts spent every summer until Chesnutt's death in Idlewild, in Lake County, Michigan, about 380 miles northwest of Cleveland. Idlewild was a popular lakeside resort for hundreds of Black families from the urban Midwest from the 1910s to the 1960s, when racism excluded them from many resort towns. In the spring of 1924, Chesnutt purchased a plot of land, where he had a summer home built in 1925. [back]
9. Chesnutt's grandson "Johnnie," John Chesnutt Slade (1925–2011), spent much time with his grandparents as a small child, since he and his mother, Dorothy (1890–1954), lived with them until the fall of 1931, when her husband John G. Slade (1890–1976) completed his medical degree at Howard University. He and his mother also spent the summers with his grandparents in Idlewild, Michigan. [back]
10. Dorothy Katherine Chesnutt Slade (1890–1954) was the youngest child of Charles and Susan Chesnutt. After attending the women's college at Western Reserve University from 1909 to 1913 and working as a probation officer for two years, she began teaching junior high school French and English at Willson Junior High School in Cleveland. She married John G. Slade (1890–1976) on March 29, 1924; they had one child, John C. Slade (1925–2011), known as Johnnie. [back]
11. John Galamiel Slade (1890–1976) was born in Scioto, Ohio, and married Dorothy Chesnutt (1890–1954) in 1924. Their son Johnnie (John Chesnutt Slade, 1925–2011) was born the next year. Slade received a doctorate in veterinary medicine at Ohio State in 1919 and continued his studies there, but then completed a medical degree at Howard University in 1930 and began to practice in Cleveland in the fall of 1931. [back]
