Red Geranium

For over a century, a Memorial Day tradition in the Mitchell-Young family included the placement of a red geranium at the graves of ancestors and sharing of heroic, if somewhat sanitized, family stories. Generations of treasured Mitchell-Young family letters were bundled in attics and basements, untouched for decades, and recently brought together in a collection of over 5,000 items. While letter-writing was an essential feature of commerce and family life on the American frontier, the craft largely disappeared by the end of the twentieth century, rendered obsolete by more ephemeral communication. In Red Geranium, a sampling of the letters offers a compelling multi-generation story that illuminates family mysteries and tragedies and provides deeper insight into the subsequent trajectory of the lives of family members and that of their descendants.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, three pioneer families with deep American roots migrated west from Kentucky, Illinois, and Arkansas, and intersected in rural Sumner County, Kansas. By 1880, the region was blessed with a rich network of railroads, and there was heavy promotion of homesteading and speculation in the rich prairie farmland. The voluminous Mitchell-Young family letters lovingly describe the difficult journey to achievement of their dreams of educational opportunity, economic security, and respectability. Their letters, supplemented by family stories and memories, describe their immigration to Kansas in the first generation of statehood, college life at the University of Kansas after the turn of the century, the routines of middle class rural family life, and the triumphs and disappointments of Sumner county commercial and farm life. The correspondence touches upon a bank crisis, offers a first-hand account of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, and describes the devastation the Great Flood of 1927 on the Arkansas River. The letters recount the immediate threat to health and longevity of epidemic infectious disease, the stain of heavy alcohol consumption during Prohibition, and the xenophobia, racism, and cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

With the collapse of the Kansas farm economy, followed by a family tragedy on Christmas Day of 1932—at the dawn of the Depression—the Mitchell-Young family of four teenage children was forced to face long odds with their creativity, work ethic, the leadership of a strong matriarch—and the timely assistance of neighbors, family, and government. The letters describe their slow recovery from bereavement, isolationism, and poverty and their later interaction with the most important historical events of the twentieth century, including the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II. With the diaspora resulting from the war years, the family broadened its horizons and interacted with national and international events and leaders. As the sibship matured, individual personalities, streng...