Paul Minor

Delving Into Yester~Year

Local historian and writer Paul Miner takes items from The Republican’s Yester-Year column to develop an interesting, informative and often humorous article.

To the Editor:

I possess a fondness for highfalutin language. Some might call it rhetoric. People describe a politician’s rant as “rhetoric” when it’s often nothing more than lowbrow diatribe. Or windbaggery.

Before Central Normal College packed up and hightailed it from Ladoga here to the county seat where there was room to grow, a verbose Danville academician submitted in 1876 what I call a scathingly sublime superlunary rebuke:

“The Ladoga Normal College and Business Institute has promulgated a paranomastical, propaedeutical, prolegomanary, pronunciamento, which you will find in a late number of the Indiana School Journal.”

The writer, “Etty Logos,” is layering rhetoric on so thick you have no choice but to believe she knows what is going on.

Etty had issues with Ladoga’s opening year curriculum approach, calling it “so stilted and flatulent that less euphusiastic language would utterly fail to convey any idea of its extreme bombastry.”

The prospectus read “more like a patent medicine humbug, than it does like a simple invitation to the young men and maidens of Indiana to assemble at Ladoga, for purposes educational.”

Ladoga proposed: “To young men and women preparing for Teaching, Law, Medicine, Theology, Farming and Business, the Normal College offers unusual advantages and opportunities.”

She argued, “In my humble estimation, this is all wrong.” Then Etty revealed what I believe was the focus of her opposition: “And in behalf of my sex, I raise my feeble protest against this indiscriminate turning of females into lawyers, preachers, doctors and grangers.” In Etty’s opinion, Ladoga’s aim was dead wrong. I had thought women of the era wanted precisely such places in society. “One Mrs. Mary Walker is all the world can put up with, with her semi-male attire and her clamor for the privileges of the Ballot-box.” Mary Walker, I gather, was the Civil War-era Medal of honor winner, surgeon, abolitionist, spy and women’s rights advocate, and she did dress like a man.

I would like to have known Etty – outspoken and violently opposed to breaching the era’s gender job barrier. Her distaff polemic spanned two issues of The Republican’s competition, the Gazette, but that second installment apparently is lost to time.

Before Central Normal the Danville Academy debuted in the Danville Seminary in September 1854, offering eager scholars algebra, geometry, plain and solid trigonometry, mensuration, surveying, history, philosophy, rhetoric, Latin and Greek, all for five dollars, apparently. School term ended in December. That was crammed into four months? The announcement reads that way. Central Normal opened its first four-week Danville term July 9, 1878. Miss Dora Lieuellen taught rhetoric, history and geography. I wonder what Etty thought of that.

Two Union correspondents boasted of their respective cadre’s rhetorical skills in 1881. Of Plainfield’s 37-strong fanfaronade, one swore, “The most accomplished of our clan is Tom. He throws ink in a hundred directions in one stroke. He is no amateur in prose, poetry, wit, humor, or on obituaries. When he draws a bead on you, you had better step aside.”

Pecksburg correspondent Hop Wo claimed his fellows were so abundant that “all you have to do at any time when you want one is to shake a bush.”

Fortified with a book on composition and rhetoric, another Pecksburg correspondent “of the Eli Perkins species” would “just make the immortal gods lie down on the grass and hold their ambrosial scented breath to see him waltz in and stir up the menagerie.” Eli Perkins was the pseudonym of humorist Melville D. Landon. Monday, July 13, 1885, was “according to the family Bible,” C.W. Davis’ 26th birthday. Friends and relatives of the North Salem man threw a surprise party and, according to correspondent U.L.C., when asked what he thought of the birthday dinner, “his eyes began to beam with more than usual lustre. His muscles became rigid and his whole body was electrified as it were.”

Davis spoke “for a score of minutes, perhaps two, possibly three. I only know that I was listening to words before unknown to my vocabulary.

“Adjectives defined adverbs emphasized and all combined presented to my mind one sublime panorama rhetorical sublimity.”

U.L.C., comparing the young man to Demosthenes and Cicero, avowed Davis “was watering us, the sickly plant of ignorance, with his eloquence.”

I believe U.L.C. fainted; and, rousing, “returned to my own vine and fig tree.” Paul Miner Lizton