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Elizabeth Margaret StroupBorn- abt 1781 At- Lincoln County, North Carolina Died- abt 1859 At- Carter County, Tennessee Buried- Unknown
(1) Married- Alexander Spence Head Marriage Date- 15 February 1800 Born- 1777 Virginia Died- 1842 At- Carter County, Tennessee Buried- Unknown
I have copies of the "Head" letters from Ethel Belle Stroupe files, just email if you are interested. The
following letter, although undated, was added onto the last page of the letter
dated Aug 10, 1858, written by Elizabeth (Stroup) Head to her great niece (and
daughter-in-law) Margaret Eliza Head.
Another surprise is that although this brief letter is signed “Leonard
A. Bowers” it is in the same Spenserian handwriting as the one signed
“Elizabeth Head” to which is added. What
is surprising, in these early to mid Victorian days in the American South, men
were usually so much better educated than their women that they were the ones
who wrote all the family letters.
However, by 1824, it is Elizabeth (Stroup) Head, born c1782 and educated
at Hoyle’s Creek who was the scribe for her husband and several of the other
Head men, and continues as the scribe used by her sons even after she is
elderly, deaf and living with her daughters Bowers family.
It now appears that Elizabeth (Stroup) Head and her great niece, Eliza
(Stroup) Head, were both unusually well educated (for the time and place) and
that were‚ heavily involved with the family’s business affairs. Elizabeth
Stroup’s education probably began about 1790 at upper Hoyle’s Creek, but the
real surprise is that she, a girl, was so well trained in writing script when
her brothers Jacob Jr., Joseph were not, her eldest brother Jacob Jr.being
described in a letter by one of his sons as “Having no schooling and being
self taught”. This disparity
seems caused by Jacob’s is born in 1771 and of school age when the Revolution
began, and a local history records show that the local schoolmaster enlisted in
the Army. He apparently did not
return, because c1783 when Joseph Stroup reached school age, he also was not
taught to write fine script.
There is still some mystery as to who taught Elizabeth Stroup to write
well enough to become the scribe for the men of her family, both early and late
in life, a talent she apparently acquired from a local teacher in the
neighborhood a few miles SE of Lincolnton in the 1780’s. Elizabeth’s
son, Alfred B. Head, used a Spenserian script so similar to his mother’s
handwriting that’s a near certainty she was his teacher.
He left pages showing how he practiced the precise slant, fancy
capitalization and down stroke shading that was so admired at this time, along
with the set phrases that were expected to be used in all polite, private
letters of the day.
Although her grammar is awkward and her spelling leaves much to be
desired, she wrote in the vernacular of the rural South at a time when almost
everybody spelled phonetically, and punctuation was so unknown that all the
sentences in one letter might be separated either by blank spaces or by
“and”, a word commonly used in place of “periods”.
She was elderly when spelling began to be taught in school, and Spelling
Bees were fashionable. From the files of Ethel Belle Stroupe
Surprisingly,
handwriting comparison between letters written in 1824 from Indiana and in 1858
from E. Tennessee reveal that the person who wrote the carefully slanted
Spenserian script was not Alexander Spence “A.S.” Head, but his wife,
Margaret Elizabeth “Betsy” Stroup.
Elizabeth “Betsy” (Stroup) Head b c1782 was d/o
Adam & Catherine Stroup of Hoyle’s Creek, Lincoln Co., central N.C., and
in 1800 married Alexander Spence “A.S.” Head. Before 1810, they moved to
Louisville, Jefferson Co., Ky., taking her teenaged sister, Nancy, with them.
By 1824, they were living in Bedford, Clark Co., Indiana, when Elizabeth
wrote to her father-in-law, A. B. Head, in Carter Co., E. Tennessee.
The fact that this 1824 letter in elegant Spenserian handwriting Elizabeth
was also the mother of Alfred B. Head, a prosperous business man in Asheville
and Swannanoa, Buncombe County, western N.C. who had fallen in love with
Margaret “Eliza” Stroup, d/o Henry Stroup and granddaughter of Joseph Stroup
(1776-1851), the latter being his mother’s older brother.
About Jan. 1850, Alfred Head married Eliza in spite of their close, blood
relationship, with the full approval of both families, a happy marriage that
produced two sons, Millard Fillmore Head and Marion Head.
Eliza apparently attracted him because she was, like his mother, a rarity
of the times, a spirited and educated woman with whom he could discuss business,
and both wrote letters in the elegant Spenserian handwriting of the day.
By 1855, Alfred B. Head owned a General Store in Swannanoa that also
housed the post office, was appointed the Swannanoa Postmaster, owned a saloon
in downtown Asheville for which he purchased wholesale lots of brandy and
whiskey and paid another man to operate it. He practiced the elegant Spenserian
handwriting of the day, and though his spelling, punctuation and grammar were
sometimes less elegant, he acted as a paid scribe and paralegal, drawing up
documents such as wills and bills of sale. The
reason for Alfred’s death at about age 36 has been forgotten, but his death on
Saturday, Oct 18, 1856 in Asheville apparently created a financial problem for
many of his brothers and his Bowers and Head nephews who lived in a depressed,
rural area of East Tennessee so that their primary source of cash seems to have
been from buying on his behalf tons of iron bars and many barrels whiskey which
he then retailed in western N.C., business transactions with a steady flow of
bills and payments which he carefully recorded into account books.
After Alfred’s death, his widow, Eliza (Stroup) Head was left with two
small sons, but she managed well, moved next door to her father on Bull Creek
where she was surrounded by relatives, and continued to collect payments from
Alfred’s debtors. Since her mother-in-law, Margaret Elizabeth “Betsy”
(Stroup) Head, was also her great-aunt, the two women shared an affectionate
relationship, but letters to her from East Tennessee also reflect the family’s
great financial concerns, both for her as a widow and for the men of that family
who were her late husband’s suppliers. The
beautiful Spenserian handwriting in the following letter dated 1858 matches one
from 1824 (signed “Betsy Head”
and Alex “A.S.” Head) from their earlier home in Bedford, Indiana, However,
the 1858 letter signed “Margaret E. Head” was written after she was a widow
at Stony Creek, Tennessee, where they had moved to be near sons David, Marshall
and Solomon Head, and a daughter married to (David or William?) Bowers.
Margaret Elizabeth “Betsy” (Stroup) Head was at the age of about
seventy-six, was completely deaf and for the past five years had lived with her
Bowers daughter and grandchildren. Surprisingly, instead of deterioration, her
letter dated 1858 shows she has improved her already excellent Spenserian
handwriting, learned to indent paragraphs, and her spelling and grammar have
improved. Still uses the same
“form letter” phrasing without which no Victorian era letter was considered
“polite”, the set phases about health, money and crops, but has learned to
abbreviate them into less flowery speech and get to the purpose of her
communication. Her
letter reveals that as previously suspected, that Adam Stroup (b 1746) of
Hoyle’s Creek had not been able to educate part of his older children,
including sons Jacob, Joseph and David, because their area’s schoolmaster had
gone into the American Army during the Revolution, From the files of Ethel Belle Stroupe
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