James Robert Henry ([June 22, 1897])

#1996: Willa Cather to James Robert Henry, [June 22, 1897]

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Tuesday My Dear Mr. Henry¹;

Since you will not come to tell me good bye I must write it. I have looked for you for several Tuesday nights and am beginning to believe Lyda³'s charge that you are fickle. I go Wednesday and will be gone for a month. I have finished Gibbon⁴! Drop me a line at Red Cloud Nebraska⁵ and tell me whether you have done as much. I will carry home many pleasant memories of your kindness, for you have been awfully kind you know, and I do not foget such things. You were the first real friend I had in Pittsburgh². "I was a stranger and you took me in."⁶ When I come back I am going to join your Sunday School class if you'll let me. Good bye and the best that life has to give be yours always. You have the kind Christianity which makes a pretty gloomy world brighter and I honor you for it. Again good bye!

Faithfully and Cordially Willa Cather. Rev. J. R. Henry¹ Spahr St. East End Pittsburgh² PITTSBURG, PA STA. A.² JUN 22 97 1230 PM

Information about this letter:

Source File:: cat.let1996.xml
Letter identifier: 1996
Contents: Document is one leaf, handwritten on recto and verso. Includes one handwritten envelope.
Person to whom letter was written: James Robert Henry¹
Date letter was written: [June 22, 1897]
Place letter was written: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States²
Location of original letter: Willa Cather Collection (Adams 140), Drew University Library, Special Collections and Archives, Madison, NJ

Person Annotations

0342

Henry, James Robert (1865-1930). American Presbyterian minister. Born in Georgia, the son of a Cumberland Presbyterian minister, Henry earned his B.D. from the Theological Seminary of Cumberland University in Tennessee and was ordained in 1886. He attended Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1892-93 and Mansfield College at Oxford University in England in 1893-94, traveling in Europe in the summer before returning to serve as pastor of the Shady Avenue Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh, PA, from 1894 to 1902. Cather met him through her employers, the owners of the Home Monthly, in 1896. Allusions to him in her letters suggest he may have been a prototype for the good-hearted, Gibbon-reading minister who has been to New York in “‘A Death in the Desert’” (1903).

0601

Poynter, Clara Eliza Axtell (1876-1952) (“Lida”). Cather’s Pittsburgh acquaintance. Born in Waynesburg, PA, to James W. Axtell and Mary Helen Minor Axtell, Lida Axtell graduated from Vassar College in 1902. When Cather stayed with the Axtells in Pittsburgh briefly in June 1896, Lida was visiting her aunt, an absence Cather claimed was a ploy to keep Lida away from Cather’s “contaminating influence” (#0025). By 1900, the Axtell family had moved from Pittsburgh to Nashville, TN, where Lida Axtell married physician Charles William McCorkle Poynter in 1907 and moved with him to Lincoln, NE. After the birth of their daughter Helen in 1913, the Poynters relocated to Omaha, NE, where Lida remained until her death.

Place Annotations

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States

Red Cloud, Nebraska, United States

Work Annotations

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 to 1788) by Edward Gibbon

The Bible