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March 6, 2010

Historical Perspective: Theodore Dreiser returns to his roots (Part III)

By Mike McCormick Special to the Tribune-Star

TERRE HAUTE — Though Terre Haute native Theodore Dreiser spent several hours trying to find the places he lived as a child, he also sought other landmarks from his childhood.

Dreiser recalled the Catholic school, “where at five years old I was taken to learn my ABC’s and where a nun in a great flaring white bonnet and a black habit, with a rattling string of great beads, pointed at a blackboard with a stick and asked us what certain symbols stood for.”

Understandably, Dreiser’s memory of 40 years was erratic, a characteristic that manifested itself during the search for his former residences.

Besides 203 S. 12th St., the only decisive address of a Terre Haute home where Dreiser resided between 1871 and 1878 was 533 N. Seventh St.

On their second day in the city of his birth, Dreiser asked artist Franklin Booth, his traveling companion, to take him to “my first school, to see if I could recognize it.”

Archives confirm that Dreiser attended St. Benedict’s School at the northeast corner of Ninth and Walnut streets in 1877. Nevertheless, he wrote that, “along with Trina (the fictitious name he gave older sister Tillie in his autobiography, “Dawn”) and later my brother Ed, (I) … was installed in St. Joseph’s German Catholic school, an adjunct of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, on Ninth Street in Terre Haute … ”

The first St. Benedict’s Church, which the Dreiser family attended after Theodore was born, faced Ohio St. It was built in 1864 and replaced by a grand new house of worship in 1899. The original St. Benedict’s School was supplanted in 1887 by the structure there today.

“A picture postcard which I found, “ Theodore wrote, “showed a quite imposing church on the site my father had given, but no school.

“Imagine my surprise on reaching it to be able to recognize in a rear building to which a new front had, in years gone by, been added, the exact small, square red brick building in which I had first been drilled in my ABC’s.

“Owing to a high brick wall and the presence of an encroaching building it was barely visible any longer from the street, but stripped of these later accretions I could see exactly how it looked — and remember it!

“As I gazed, the yard, the pond, the old church, the surrounding neighborhood, all came back to me. I saw it quite clearly.”

By peering through a window, Dreiser viewed a room he remembered from his youth. Later, he walked into the magnificent new church nearby while preparations were being made for a funeral.

Before departing Terre Haute, Theodore wanted to find the son of the mill owner who inherited the woolen mill and had John Paul Dreiser run it. He was hopeful he could examine the site of the old mill where his father had worked. Chauffeur Booth obliged.

He found Edwin Ellis, son of Wabash Woolen Mill owner George F. Ellis, operating a feed store at 315 Walnut St. In “A Hoosier Holiday,” Theodore gave Edwin a fictional name: Adam B. Shattuck.

It was apparent from the recorded dialogue that Ellis was glad to meet Theodore as an adult. The men talked at length. Oldest brother Paul Dresser had told Ellis about Theodore’s success as a journalist. Edwin told Dreiser that the woolen mill, now “a wagon company,” was situated on the northwest corner of First and Walnut streets.

Theodore asked Ellis if, “by any chance,” he could tell him “where the first house my father ever occupied in Terre Haute stands?”

Without hesitancy, Ellis affirmed that the first Dreiser home was in the 300 block on S. Second St., “next to a grocery store.”

“It’s a two-story brick now,” Edwin explained, “but they added a story a long time ago. It was a one-story house at the time but then it had a big yard and lots of trees.”

The response surprised Dreiser. “I was not expecting to find it,” he confided in his diary. Booth drove two blocks to the “old mill, now whirring with new sounds and looking fairly brisk and prosperous” and to the brick residence on South Second Street.

Whenever Theodore saw a familiar site, “a kind of nostalgia set in” and he felt “a slight upheaval in my vitals … The very earth seemed slipping out from under my feet.”

The next stop was Sullivan. The trip took the men through land with “charm — not the charm of predisposition … but real charm. The soil was rich — a sandy loam. The trees were shapely and healthy … The fields were lush with grass or grain …”

The Sullivan Woolen Mill where John Paul Dreiser worked before Theodore was born still stood in 1915 but it operated only intermittently. Booth’s pen sketch of the mill appeared in Theodore’s book.

From late 1878 until 1882, Theodore resided in Sullivan with his mother, sister Tillie and brother Ed. The older Dreiser girls lived with their father at 205 N. Thirteenth St. in Terre Haute. For awhile, the Sullivan Dreisers were taken in by the James Bulger family. Theodore had been notified that Jimmy Bulger, Jr. — “Red Brogan” in “A Hoosier Holiday” — was electrocuted March 24, 1903 at Sing Sing, N.Y., prison for murder.

After exploring portions of Sullivan, Dreiser set out to find “our house.” When he found it, he was disillusioned that the “field of clover” of his childhood dreams now was an “unkempt weed patch.”

Though “drab and dirty,” the house was “physically unchanged” and still on the wrong side of the Evansville & Terre Haute Railroad track. Fruit trees planted by Sarah Dreiser and a back fence on which Theodore sat in the morning were gone.

Theodore knocked on the door and was permitted to tour his former home which, 35 years earlier, his mother planned to rent to boarders. The family financial situation was desperate. Neither Theodore nor Ed went to school because they did not own shoes.

The house, like the weed patch, was unkempt but it was about the only Sullivan landmark with which Theodore identified. He also remembered mill pond where he and Ed fished, courthouse square, the post office and Busseron Creek.

The two travelers continued on their journey, trekking to Vincennes in time for the Knox County Fair and making brief stops in Carlisle, Decker, Paxton, French Lick, Jasper, Huntingburg, Bloomington, Evansville and several other Hoosier communities.

It was a true “Hoosier Holiday.”

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