William Thomas Campbell.
Blaffer-Owen family photograph.
Sarah Jane Turnbull.
Blaffer-Owen family photograph.
Grandfather Campbell emigrated from his native England as a young man, worked as a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and married Sarah Turnbull of Middleport, Ohio. But he remained a true son of empire and envisioned the oil fields around Beaumont, Texas, as a new country to explore, colonize, and conquer. He left his news desk, sold his printing press, brought his young family to Waxahachie and set off for Spindletop in 1901.
My father belonged to a third generation of public-spirited New Orleanians. He cared for his city and its traditions, but the Queen City of the South had lost her crown in the Civil War and, apart from the entertainment of Mardi Gras, had not regained her kingdom or replaced cotton and sugar cane as her source of wealth and revitalization. When news of the bountiful gusher in Beaumont reached Lee Blaffer in the teller’s cage of his uncle’s Hibernia Bank, he lost no time in exchanging a safe monotony for the unpredictable life of a wildcatter in East Texas. He brought more than an adventurous spirit with him to Beaumont; he brought a small library of history books. During the dreary months of waiting for a well to “blow in,” Daddy spent his evenings reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Had he been a senator in pre-Augustan Rome, he would have distrusted the imperial ambitions of any Roman citizen and opposed his election. Despite Daddy’s distaste for empires, he and William Campbell became friends. My father fell in love with the Englishman’s beautiful daughter. I became the second child of the bipartisan and felicitous marriage of Lee Blaffer to Sarah Campbell.
Robert Lee Blaffer, his father, John August(e) Blaffer, and my elder brother, John, as a baby, 1913.
Blaffer-Owen family photograph.
Sarah Campbell Blaffer with John, 1914.
Blaffer-Owen family photograph.
Kenneth’s voice interrupted my reverie: “Why are you so quiet? Aren’t you excited about being back in Houston as a bride of almost a month?”
I reached for the fingers of the strong hand on the steering wheel.
“Of course I’m glad we’ll soon be living in our own home. But I can’t help imagining the day in 1909 when my newly married parents arrived here, after their two-month honeymoon in the capitals of Europe. They intuited Houston’s great future. Surely their spines tingled with anticipation before an evolving city where they would invest their energies to improve it economically and culturally. I am also grateful to their contemporaries, men and women who also believed in the future Houston. Nothing was impossible or unbearable for them.”
Kenneth eyed me quizzically. “I’m not hearing your spine tingle.”
“Not above this traffic noise while stopped at the one-hundredth red light that seems to have been added since we left three months ago. But you’d hear it on the Indiana farms you plan to buy. Remember, there’s only one overhead traffic light in New Harmony, and its skyline is formed by the trunks of the tallest and most leafy-headed maples I’ve ever seen. Let’s hope that the gnarled roots of the sturdy trees can keep the poor, malnourished houses from falling until you can take me back!”
Kenneth squeezed my hand. “Thank you for your loyalty to a town most people consider a lost cause, especially your mother. I’d like to spend more time there, too, but I have to make a living in Houston; you don’t. You’ll find plenty to do here and perhaps think more kindly about cities, which are as necessary as farms and country towns.” His words echoed those my father had once spoken to me: “You make money in the city so you can spend it in the country.”
Kenneth drove beyond downtown, toward my parents’ home in Shadyside, where we would stay until our rented house was ready. I couldn’t help but notice the ostentatious automobiles—Cadillacs, Lincolns, even a Rolls-Royce—encircling the Museum of Fine Arts as we passed. With triumph, I pointed. “Look! Houston is teeming with generous benefactors; I won’t be missed here. But in New Harmony . . .” My voice became inaudible as my thoughts turned inward.
Cities are good for commerce, the presentation of fine art, education, advancement, and the intermingling of peoples and races. Yes, they can even be explored, but not as we explore oceans. Persistent daydreams of New Harmony intruded upon my civic efforts. I imagined myself as if on the bank of a great but as yet unexplored river, exhilarated as surely as Magellan had been when he first beheld the unlimited body of water that he named Pacific.
An ocean prompts us to dive below the surface, not to look above unless to navigate by the stars in the night sky. It invites us to sail beyond the horizon of our perceptions. The very uncertainty of what I would find scanning the horizon or discover beneath the surface, treasure or terror, was part of the spell New Harmony had cast over me. Cockeyed or sacrosanct as my daydreams might appear to my family and friends, I felt with all my heart that New Harmony would be my gateway to ocean depth.
Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot . . .
—Thomas Moore, The Loves of the Angels
CHAPTER 2
Indian Mound
My fears about a racing-stable absentee husband began to dissipate. In the first year of our marriage, Kenneth began necessary improvements to the Laboratory residence and purchased a large portion of Robert Owen’s original holdings, rolling farmlands that culminated in the highest point on the Wabash River for many miles, a rise known as Indian Mound (see area map). Archaeologists called it a midden, a deposit containing refuse indicative of an early human settlement; this one was created with mussel shells discarded by prehistoric Native Americans. But generations of townspeople had other names and softer feelings for this ageless place. Indian Mound became for Kenneth and me (and later our three daughters) a refuge from the rattle of trucks along Church Street, heat, and concerns. The greatest reward for climbing that far, however, was the expansive view of Cut-Off Island, belonging half to Indiana and half to the nearby fertile, flat plains of Illinois, still innocent of factories and housing developments on the other bank of the Wabash (see area map).1
Kenneth planned to grow corn and soybeans on his newly acquired Indian Mound Farm and sought expertise from members of Purdue’s agricultural department concerning how best to reinvigorate the land that had lain fallow for many years (see area map). As a young boy, he had picked corn on the gentry farm on the Old Plank Road for a dollar a day. His agricultural instincts were sound, but he needed professional advice. Fences would be built and hay sown before purebred Herefords could graze on well-seeded fields.
Heeding Louis Bromfield’s advice that the best manure is the owner’s foot tracks, we headed for the farm soon after our return to New Harmony from Houston in the late spring of 1942.2 I was several months pregnant with our first child