Private Life in the Back Country

So much can be gleaned about an ancestor by reading between the lines in those few letters preserved from past generations. Fortunately, the Ashtabula book quoted liberally from several such sources, affording me the chance to glimpse what my third great grandfather might have been like.

In the 1850s, as had been the practice well before that point, the young ladies of old Pendleton attended school at an institution run by two sisters named Bates. According to Louise Ayer Vandiver's Traditions and History of Anderson County, students of the area arrived at school "in all kinds of conveyances, buggies, sulkies, carriages, carryalls, and even wagons." Since the boys attended a separate school from the girls, brothers and sisters from one family would ride together, the boys first dropping off their sisters before continuing on to their own school.

In the case of the Broyles family, since they were so close, not only as friends but also as neighbors, to the Maverick family, it was no surprise to learn that the children of that household would "call for us in their carriage and we would go to school together."

Sometime when Ozey Broyles' eldest daughter Margaret was in her late teens, Miss Bates decided to remove her Female Academy from Pendleton and re-establish it in Charleston. Margaret's father allowed her to attend the school in Charleston, despite the distance from home requiring her to board in the city.

Judging from a letter he sent to Margaret in the spring of 1852, however, Dr. Broyles had changed his mind about that arrangement, writing, "I only write now to apprise you of our wish and arrangement for you to come up...next week."

He continued, by way of explanation of his decision,

You have seen enough for one winter, and enough I fear to turn your brain, and disqualify you for the humbler walks of private life in the back country. I fear you will have even less fancy for the Valley, and by a strange and perverted taste, be found to admire the arts and embellishments of proud fantastic man even more than the country with all its mountains, rivers, deer, planned and executed by the great Architect of the Universe. I hope to see you plain and unaffected in your manners, and deportment, and totally uncontaminated by those false refinements always practiced in the social circles of City life.

As he drew toward the closing of his letter, he reminded his daughter, "All is not gold that glitters."

While that may have sounded like a drastic change of plans for the young Margaret's life, as it turned out, other changes back home provided another unexpected turn, as well.