Josiah Royce's mother walks west from Iowa

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Just published in The Iowa Source. Sarah Royce, the mother of American philosopher Josiah Royce (a colleague of William James at Harvard), was a "forty-niner," one of those hell-bent American souls, who walked with their families from the Midwest to the West Coast in 1849. Read the entire article here.

peach brandy / couldn't get drunk until sundown

Above Historic clay jug, as rendered in a painting by American illustrator Bisby Finley, for the Index of American Design (1939).

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Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 77—

Micajah McGhee had many acres in peaches for making brandy. His constitution was such, the history says solemnly, that drink as he might he was unable to be drunk till sundown, once a day; but as the infirmities of age crept on him he was able to be drunk twice a day. The Methodist exhortations converted him to some of sort of reform by which he agreed to limit himself to a daily quart of brandy. In a fortnight he returned to say that he could not endure it, and his advisors said, very well, they would pray for him and he should what he could; the matter was between him and God.

the family chair in which one customarily dies

Above Armchair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow (1898).

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Stark Young, The Pavilion: Of People and Times Remembered, of Stories and Places. NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, p. 78—

…in another branch of [his father's] family, nine Douglass men had gone from a single household to [serve in] the [American] Revolution. It was in this Douglass family that they had what was known as the Douglass chair. The custom was for every man in the house, when the moment came for him to die, to rise from his bed and go, or else be carried, to meet his death sitting in this chair.