Pictures of Adopted Hoosiers

Comedian Herb Shriner famously said, "I wasn't born in Indiana but I moved there as soon as I heard about it." He wasn't alone. Since its beginnings, the Hoosier State has been a destination for pioneers, settlers, refugees, migrants, escaped and manumitted slaves, industrial workers, and just plain, ordinary farmers, workers, artists, and others. Early on, people must have sensed that nothing better would await them beyond the rich and generous lands of Indiana. And so they stayed.

Johnny Appleseed was an adopted Hoosier. Born John Chapman on September 26, 1774, he was a native of Leominster, Massachusetts. Like Abraham Lincoln a generation later, he was orphaned with the death of his mother. His father remarried. Later in life, the elder Chapman pulled up stakes and moved to Ohio. Johnny had gone west before him, first to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio. It was in Ohio that John Chapman earned his nickname, Johnny Appleseed.

Johnny Appleseed lived a long life. In his later days, he lived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and that's where he died after reaching his allotted threescore and ten. Johnny's end came on March 18, 1845. He was buried in Fort Wayne, though no one knows exactly where.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was probably the most famous adopted Hoosier. He was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1809. In the fall of 1816, when Abe was just seven years old, his father, Thomas Lincoln (1778-1851), moved his young family to what was then the Indiana Territory. Not long after, on December 11, 1816, Indiana became a state. Like Johnny Appleseed before him, Abe Lincoln's mother and a younger brother died when he was young. Nancy Hanks Lincoln (1784-1818) lies buried in Indiana, near her Spencer County home. Her son said of her, "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."

Abe Lincoln spent his formative years in the Hoosier State, raised there by his parents and his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln (1788-1869). In March 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois. He had just turned twenty-one. Kentucky and Illinois have their claims upon the Great Emancipator, but Indiana has its claim, too. I might be biased, but I would call it equal.

In 1964, Scholastic Books published a children's biography, Johnny Appleseed, written by Eva Moore and illustrated by Judith Ann Lawrence. Born in 1942, Eva Moore lives or has lived in Montauk, New York. Also known as J.A. Lawrence and Judy Blish, Judith Ann Lawrence is an author and an artist. She was married to the science fiction author James Blish (1921-1975). Judy has a new book out. You can find out more about it by clicking here.

In 1948, Walt Disney released Melody Time, an animated musical featuring seven short films. One of these is "The Legend of Johnny Appleseed."  I had hoped to find a Hoosier, either native or adopted, who contributed to "Johnny Appleseed," but to no avail. In any case, Simon and Schuster published a children's book adaptation in 1949. It was printed by Western Printing and Lithographing Company as one of its Little Golden Library series. The pictures were by the Walt Disney Company. (There might be a Hoosier hiding in there somewhere.) The adaptation was by Ted Parmalee, about whom I know nothing at all. 

Here's an interior illustration from Disney's Johnny Appleseed. This is romanticized of course, but not by much. If you have been in Appalachia and to the American Midwest, you might have seen scenes like this one. We had a storm just like it yesterday.

Rand McNally & Company of Chicago had its own line of children's books, including those in the Weekly Reader Children's Book Club series. Here is one called Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance, written by Frances Cavanah, illustrated by Paula Hutchison, and published in 1959. I have cleaned up the image a little, as the original I have is a little worn. I found this and the two books above on Johnny Appleseed at the local secondhand store about three weeks ago.

Frances Cavanah was a Hoosier. She was born on September 26, 1897, in Princeton, Indiana, to Rufus Oscar Cavanah and Louella "Lula" Neale Cavanah. Educated at DePauw University, she worked as an editor at Child Life magazine in Chicago. (Sometimes people come to Indiana, and sometimes they go away from it.) Frances wrote dozens of books and lived in Washington, D.C., later in life. She died in May 1982.

The illustrator, Paula A. Hutchison, was born on December 19, 1902, in Helena, Montana. She worked as a teacher, illustrator, and fine artist. She was married to Michael John McGrath (1905-?) and lived in New Jersey. She illustrated many children's books, most of which seem to be biographies and other nonfiction. Paula died on November 5, 1982.

In the fall of 1816, Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana. Part of the reason for the move was for him to get away from some land disputes, but part was also to relocate to what would soon be a free state versus the slave state of Kentucky. Making the trip with him were his wife Nancy and their two children, Sarah and Abe. That made Abe's sister, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby (1807-1828), an adopted Hoosier, too. The illustration is from Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance.

The endpapers of Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance together make this map of Lincoln Country. Plum in the middle is an image of Pigeon Creek Farm, the place in what is now Spencer County where Abe spent his childhood years, from age seven to age twenty-one. Here he was formed and here his mother lies.

Original text copyright 2021, 2204 Terence E. Hanley

Abe Lincoln and Garo Antreasian

Today, February 12, 2019, is the 110th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln. He was born in Kentucky, but in the late fall of 1816, just a few weeks before Indiana became a state, he came with his family to the future land of Hoosiers. Abe spent fourteen years in Indiana before moving on to Illinois. That state may rightly claim the title of "the Land of Lincoln," but it was in Indiana that he grew up.

Outdoor Indiana, the magazine of the Indiana Department of Conservation, now the Department of Natural Resources, featured Abraham Lincoln in its issue of June 1963, one hundred years minus a month after the twin Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The art on the front and back covers is from a design by Garo Z. Antreasian of Indianapolis. As you can see, the cover design is actually a photograph of a mosaic mural made from over 300,000 pieces of imported Murano glass, set by Ralph Peck and Mrs. Charles Pitts. It is located in the Indiana Government Center North, then called the Indiana State Office Building.

Garo Antreasian was born on February 16, 1922, in Indianapolis to parents who survived the Armenian Genocide of 1915. He attended Arsenal Technical High School, which was known for its programs in arts and graphics, and the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis. (1) During World War II, he served as a combat artist with the U.S. Coast Guard. Afterwards he taught at Herron before moving on the teaching jobs in Los Angeles and New Mexico. Mr. Antreasian retired in 1986 and died only recently, on November 3, 2018, eight days before Veterans Day. He was ninety-six years old. So today, in the month of their birthdays, we honor Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, but we may also honor another man of greatness who honored him.

Note
(1) Arsenal Technical High School, usually just shortened to "Tech," got its name from its use as an Civil War-era arsenal. The arsenal was closed in 1903. The school was opened in 1912.

Text copyright 2019, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln by John Tinney McCutcheon

One hundred fifty years ago today, an assassin shot Abraham Lincoln as he was watching a play in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C. Carried across the street, Abe died early the next morning. His shooter likewise fell with a bullet to the head eleven days later.

The Civil War had effectively come to a close only a few days before the president was shot, when General Robert E. Lee of the Confederacy surrendered to General U.S. Grant's Union Army at Appomattox. The war had begun a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated. The official end to the insurrection came a little less than a month after his death. This season, we are busy observing the sesquicentennial of the end of a war in which hundreds of thousands of Americans perished so that millions more might be free.

Abraham Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. He was the second child of Thomas and Nancy Hanks Lincoln, their daughter Sarah Lincoln, born in 1807, being the first. The Lincolns were what might be described, perhaps in a condescending manner, as poor. The conditions of their lives became the subject of John T. McCutcheon's cartoon of February 12, 1929, shown above.

Abe Lincoln--nicknamed "Honest Abe" and "The Railsplitter" and "The Great Emancipator"--was born in Kentucky but spent his formative years in Indiana. His mother died there and lies buried in Indiana soil. John Tinney McCutcheon, the cartoonist, was also a Hoosier. He came into the world on a farm near South Raub on May 6, 1870, about halfway through Reconstruction and only three months after the Fifteenth Amendment, the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments, was ratified. His father, John Barr McCutcheon, had fought in the Civil War. The younger McCutcheon, known as the dean of American cartoonists for his longevity, died on June 10, 1949.

John T. McCutcheon drew his cartoon in observance of Abe Lincoln's birth. His commentary is thick with irony. Lincoln rose up from his humble origins to be one of our greatest presidents and one of the greatest men in American history. In this anniversary week of the surrender at Appomattox and the death of the president, I would rather celebrate his life than mourn his death, a life that began in a backwoods Kentucky cabin and against any odds made by poverty or disadvantage, which proved to be of no great significance at all.

Abraham Lincoln's life began with unlimited potential, as all lives do. The irony in the cartoon is that the Lincolns' new baby--despite his birth into humility and poverty--would go on to preside over a nation at war against a great moral evil, the defining moral issue of the nineteenth century in America. There is an added irony in that McCutcheon's cartoon--without his intent or awareness--also touches on the great moral issue of our day, an issue with more than a few parallels to slavery.


In February 1862, at about the time of Abe's fifty-third birthday, The Atlantic Monthly printed Julia Ward Howe's lyrics for "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The first stanza and the first refrain end with the same words: "His truth is marching on." Abraham Lincoln carried the banner of truth. He has fallen, but we can take up that banner and carry it forward, and those after us can do the same. With or without us, truth will, nonetheless, march on.

Text copyright 2015, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Abraham Lincoln in Indiana

Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky and lived as an adult in Illinois, but his formative years were spent in what is now Spencer County, Indiana. Young Abe arrived in Indiana in the autumn of 1816, not long before the territory became a state. He was then just seven years old. When he was nine, Abe's mother died of milk sickness, a mysterious disease we now know is caused when cow's milk is poisoned by white snakeroot. Abraham Lincoln of course went on to be a lawyer, a U.S. representative, and, as the first Republican president, the Great Emancipator and the savior of the Union. He wrote: "All that I am or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother--blessings on her memory." Nancy Hanks Lincoln lies buried in Hoosier soil, near her home on Little Pigeon Creek.

I recently found three books on Indiana history and Abraham Lincoln. I would like to show three illustrations from those books, each by an illustrator previously unknown to me either as an illustrator or by name. Two have birthdays coming up next month.

"A Typical Pioneer Scene" by the Brown County artist Marie Goth. Born in Indianapolis on August 15, 1887, Jessie Marie Goth was educated at Manual Training High School and the Herron School of Art in her home city. Her teachers included fellow Hoosiers William Merle Allison, Harry E. Wood, and William Merritt Chase. Marie also taught art, but she is best known for her portraits. She was in fact the first woman to paint an official portrait of an Indiana governor (Henry F. Schricker). Her younger sister Genevieve, also an artist, married an artist, Carl C. Graf. Marie Goth was otherwise connected by blood or association with artists of the Hoosier Group and among the artists' colony in Brown County, Indiana. Her longtime companion was the artist Veraldo J. Cariani (1891-1969).

The drawing here is from Historic Indiana by Julia Henderson Levering (1916). In his youth, Abraham Lincoln would have lived in a cabin like this one. He also worked on a ferry boat and a flatboat, making a trip to New Orleans in the 1820s. In 1830, he moved with his family to Illinois, leaving his Indiana home behind. By coincidence, Marie Goth lived in a log house in Brown County. She, too, fell victim to poison when she was bitten by a brown recluse spider in the autumn of 1974. In her weakened state, she fell down the steps of her home and died on January 9, 1975.

In 1927, The Indiana Lincoln Union put out a booklet called Lincoln the Hoosier, written by Charles Garrett Vannest and illustrated by a youthful Constance Forsyth. Born in Indianapolis on August 18, 1903, Constance Forsyth was the daughter of artists Alice Atkinson Forsyth and William Forsyth. Like her father, Constance was renowned as a painter and teacher. Her résumé runs to hundreds of items (education, exhibitions, prizes and honors, holdings in museums, teaching career, etc.). One highlight of her career was her assistance to Thomas Hart Benton in his completion of the murals for the Indiana Building at the Century of Progress Exposition, the Chicago World's Fair of 1933. Lincoln the Hoosier was the first of two books she illustrated, the other being The Friends by Esther Buffler (1951). Constance Forsyth died on January 22, 1987, in Austin, Texas.

This map of Lincoln home sites is in a second booklet called Abraham Lincoln: A Concise Biography, published in 1934 by the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company of Fort Wayne. The mapmaker was Noble Brainard, also of Fort Wayne. (The image reproduced in the booklet shows only part of Brainard's original design. The image above is from the Internet.)

Noble Eyck Brainard was born on September 3, 1893, in Buda, Illinois. Like Marie Goth and Constance Forsyth, he was a teacher. For a time he lived in New Mexico, but he also worked as a civil servant in the Philippines and in Fort Wayne, where he resided from the 1920s on. Brainard married Amelia Zichgraf in 1924 in Fort Wayne. The copyright date on the map above is 1933. Brainard died on October 28, 1956, and is buried in his adopted home city. For years, Fort Wayne was home to the Lincoln Museum, one of the largest collections related to Abraham Lincoln in the United States. In 2008, shortly before Abe's bicentennial, the Lincoln Financial Foundation, holder of the collection, donated it to the Indiana State Library and the Allen County Public Library.

Text and captions copyright 2014, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

The Civil War

At 4:30 in the morning, on April 12, 1861--one hundred and fifty years ago today--Confederate artillery commenced its bombardment of Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina. Thirty-three hours later, the Union garrison at the fort surrendered. The next day, April 15, 1861--four years to the day before he died from an assassin's bullet--President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 troops to put down the insurrection. Thus was ushered in our great Civil War, perhaps the most profound event in American history.

In 1861, Indiana was in its forty-fifth year as a state. Its population was 1,350,428, fifth among the states. Initially, Indiana planned on filling the ranks of six regiments, about 4,600 men in all. Lew Wallace, a veteran of the Mexican war, was to serve as adjutant general and was charged with raising the needed number. So many men answered the call that some had to be turned away. By the end of the war, though, 197,141 Hoosiers had served in the Union cause, second among the states. Another 100,000 filled the ranks of the state militia. Over 25,000 of these men lost their lives. Not counted among that number is the nation's commander-in-chief, who--though he was born in Kentucky and elected from Illinois--spent his formative years in what is now Spencer County, Indiana.

The men who went to war came from all walks of life, art included. Some drew and painted scenes in their own diaries, letters, and sketchbooks. Others created works for publication. Lew Wallace (1827-1905) of Brookville and Crawfordsville was--in addition to being a lawyer, military officer, governor of New Mexico, minister to the Ottoman Empire, and author of the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century--an artist and illustrator. James Farrington Gookins (1840-1904) of Terre Haute and Indianapolis, who served with Wallace for a time, drew sketches for woodcuts published in Harper's. And Adolph G. Metzner (1834-1918) of Indianapolis kept a sketchbook of the things he witnessed during his war years. (I have written about him in a previous entry, and his work is subject of a newly published book.) Countless artists who came after them have depicted scenes of the Civil War. In any case, we commemorate the men and women who served and died during those four years that rent a nation and the century and a half since that have mended it.

The weekly newspaper was a fairly new thing in America when the Civil War began. Rapid communication by telegraph and rapid transport by train allowed publishers to stay on top of current events and to get the news out to a nation of readers in pretty short order. Photography could not yet be reproduced in the mass media. Instead, newspapers and magazines relied on line art, cut on blocks of wood and assembled into printing plates. Most woodcuts were the work of two artists, the sketch artist who submitted his work from the field and the engraver who transferred the sketch to wooden blocks, worked in a painstaking way for the production of the final image. 

Above is a woodcut from the June 22, 1861, issue of Harper's Weekly, captioned: "The Eleventh Indiana Volunteers Swearing to Remember Buena Vista, at Indianapolis, May, 1861--Sketched by Mr. James F. Gookins." Gookins was a Hoosier, a mostly self-taught artist, and a student of law at Wabash College when war broke out. He served for a time with Lew Wallace and the Eleventh Indiana Volunteer Regiment, a unit of Zouaves which saw service very early in the war. The story accompanying Gookins' drawing in Harper's:

Remember Buena Vista

On page 388 we publish a picture of a most striking scene, which occurred at Indianapolis, in the inclosure [sic] surrounding the State Capitol, a few days since. The artist from whose sketch our picture was made, Mr. James F. Gookins, of Company I, 11th Regiment Indiana Volunteers (Zouaves), writes us as follows concerning it:

The Regiment was presented by the ladies of Indiana with a splendid stand of colors, after receiving which the whole Regiment, kneeling, with uplifted right hands, took an oath before God that, with His help, they would not only avenge themselves of the insults cast at the flag of the nation, but furthermore of the contumely and wrong received by the Indiana troops at the hands of Jeff Davis during the war with Mexico. To keep this oath more continually before them they have adopted the motto "Remember Buena Vista!" as their warcry.

Another image from Harper's. The caption reads: "At Romney, Va., June 11th, 1861,--The Eleventh Indiana Zouaves, Colonel Lewis Wallace, crossing, on the double quick, the bridge over the Potomac." The artist is unknown.

The story of the Civil War is of course incomplete without Abe Lincoln. His election to the presidency was--in the minds of the secessionists--the event that precipitated the South's withdrawal from the Union. Even then, a legend had begun to build about him and his life. John T. McCutcheon (1870-1949) drew from that legend, just as so many cartoonists  have, before and since. From John McCutcheon's Book.

As a child, Franklin Booth (1874-1948) learned to draw by imitating woodcut illustrations from books and other publications. By the time Booth began working professionally as an artist, Abraham Lincoln had reached the status of an icon in American art, history, and popular imagination. This drawing, though it has the appearance of a woodcut, was actually done with a pen. It's a decoration for an unknown use. Like Lincoln, Booth grew up on an Indiana farm, in the artist's case, in Hamilton County, northeast of Indianapolis. He was perhaps the most accomplished Indiana illustrator of his time. His drawing of Lincoln here only hints at his really astonishing technique and enormous body of work.   

There are of course other illustrations by Indiana artists on the topic of the Civil War. Unfortunately, many of them are protected from usage on the Internet. If anyone has pictures to offer, please send them to me at:

info@hoosiercartoonists.com

Text and captions copyright 2011, 2024 by Terence E. Hanley