No Strangers Here Today - Excerpts
Janauary 1, 1864
I arose this morning twelve minutes after 5 - found it middling cold.
Thermometer ten degrees below zero, blowing strong.
No strangers here, but Adeline, the girls sewing at Maria's dress.
Men sitting around, too cold to work.
- from the diary of Elizabeth Conard Edwards
The Edwards were members of the Society of Friends, Quakers, and part of a vast network known as the Underground Railroad. From the beginning of this movement in the 1700s until the end of the Civil War, conductors along the railroad harbored and assisted fugitives of slavery on their journeys north to freedom.
Quakers called the fugitives, "travelers" and "strangers," a form of code.
- from the Society of Friends
March 29
Rained a little, snowed some, clear and windy in the afternoon.
Abbie is at Susan's boiling sugar water.
Swain is ploughing,
John chopping, Jesse doing sundrys.
No Strangers here.
- from the diary of Elizabeth Conard Edwards
The Rankins kept a lantern burning in the window of their small home. The light could be seen for miles up and down the Kentucky shore, a beacon of hope for those on the other side of the Mason Dixon Line and a guide for those who made it across the river, hiding in the dense brush behind the town, heading up the hill toward the lantern, pursued by slave catchers on horseback, bloodhounds leading the chase.
- from The Lantern's Story
May 15
Cloudy sprinkling rain. I planted cucumbers.
Abbie dropped corn until noon.
The men washed sheep.
John went home.
Strangers here today.
- from the diary of Elizabeth Conard Edwards
He remembers as a child in the 1930s shimmying half-way down a cistern, where there was a small door, large enough to crawl into. Inside was a nine-foot square room, with a low arched ceiling and two large stones that may have been benches. When he found the secret room, he said, it was painted bright white and perfectly clean.
- from The Secret Room
Three days later, on April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, were watching Our American Cousin, a comedy, at the Ford Theatre. The actor John Wilkes Booth, who had performed at the theatre and was known for his good looks, entered Lincoln's box during the laughter from a particularly witty line in the play and shot Abraham Lincoln in the back of the head.
Lincoln's successor was Andrew Johnson, a southern racist who broke the promise of allotting 20 acres and a mule to the freedmen as reparations for generations of slave labor. Instead, he returned property seized by union forces back to the master class.
- from The Broken Bell
July 31
Clear and hot as I ever felt it.
I baked some pies and done 50 other things.
I sowed some turnips.
Robert took the wool to Samantha.
Strangers are here today.
- from the diary of Elizabeth Conard Edwards