by Paul R. Spitzzeri
In “Loose Leaves From the Family Tree,” a binder made for various members of the “Los Angeles branch” of the Workman family, a section includes transcriptions of letters (made by the late David Workman in 1973 from the originals owned by a cousin, Conrad Krebs) from England to the brothers David and William, who, with their sister Agnes, left the home country in the late 1810s and early 1820s for new lives in the United States and, in William’s case, México. The fact that the trio made this migration from the remote northern reaches of England in the span of about five years is noteworthy on multiple levels.
David, who left around 1817 and ended up at the western edge of America by settling in central Missouri, was actually the eldest son in the family and, by the laws of primogeniture, stood to inherit what was a not insubstantial estate. He did, however, have a bequest granted him by his parents, Thomas and Lucy (Cook), they perhaps knowing that some of their children would not to remain in the modest village of Clifton. What impelled him to leave is an interesting, and open, question, but we know he traveled widely in the U.S. and México during much of his life, so it may be that a powerful inner push to seek a larger fortune and to do so by extensive movement in North America was at least a significant part of his motivation.
Agnes, the eldest of the children, seems to have headed west in 1820 with a new husband, John Vickers, and ended up in Baltimore, where the couple had a son, John James. John, Sr. worked on the docks in the harbor of the Maryland metropolis and was killed in a steamer explosion in 1842. Around this time, Agnes’ nephew, Joseph, son of Homestead owners William Workman and Nicolasa Urioste, was living with the Vickers, though the information is sketchy, including after Agnes died in 1848. We’ll soon share a letter from Joseph to his English aunt Mary Workman, though, and provide what we know of the story from the Baltimore side.
David, established as a saddler in Franklin, Missouri, then returned home to England in 1822 to cash out the rest of his 800 pound bequest and then sailed back to the U.S. with his younger brother William in tow. It seems likely the siblings visited their sister in Baltimore and then made their way overland to the western frontier. From there, much of that story has been told here and elsewhere, including William’s migration in 1825 to Taos, New Mexico, where he remained for over 15 years before resettling on the Rancho La Puente here in greater Los Angeles.
For the Workmans who remained in Clifton, occasional letters kept the lines of communication open and news (and emotions) exchanged in those few missives that have survived the ravages, and circumstances, of time. We’ll highlight a few of these in this post and return tomorrow to share others and start here with a New Year’s Day 1829 piece of correspondence to David from Mary (1808-1868), who, in many ways, seems to have been the glue that held much of the distant family relations together. We’ve featured her, through some remarkable artwork she created and which was donated by descendants from another branch of the Workman tree.
The envelope was addressed to David at Franklin and traveled through New York City and Mary began by addressing the health of their mother, Lucy Cook, acknowledging a prior letter (likely lost) and relating that the missive “found my Mother in a less infirm state than when I last wrote, but her disease is of a very critical nature.” Her condition, however, fluctuated, so hope was followed by despair, but Mary let David know that she and sister Lucy, the second oldest of the clan, were working “to promote her perfect recovery.”
For Mrs. Workman, David’s letter “was both a consolation and a trouble to her” because “she can read in it al the breathings of an affectionate son whilst at the same time your prolonging your departure,” this makes it sound as if David talked of returning home at some point, “almost deprives her of the hope of seeing you.” Mary then addressed a possible point of tension in their communication, telling David, “you are labouring under a great mistake if there was any thin unkind” in her last letter, but which “I promise you was not designedly done, having [been] written at the impulse of the moment,” while she added she was its author, not the sole remaining son in England, Thomas.
She then wrote,
My Mother earnestly entreats that you will send this letter to William that he may know by a English pen the state of his Mother’s health, and her great wish to see him, but not only him, but you all [the three Workmans in America] once more. The pleasure and the satisfaction it would give her, my beloved brothers, is more than my feeble pen is able of describing. My Father even, who is now a shrivelled old man, looks forward to the time with the most anxious solicitude.
Agnes was also corresponding with David as Mary knew of complaints about too few letters and the latter appealed, “what would she have us do?” as Mrs. Workman “has hitherto punctually answered her letters,” though since her illness, Mary took on that task.” Lucy Cook Workman died within a year at the end of October 1830 at age 59.
Tellingly, it was added that “you also seem to hint that we have in mind her faults” and it was insisted that this true “by no means if Mr. Vickers has proved to her the husband she says he has,” so that “we would be proud of her choice, excepting my Father who is bitter as ever, forgetting that he himself is far from perfect.” There’ll be more on that in an upcoming post, but Mary added “Agness [sic] assures is that Vickers, since his abode in America, has borne the unimpeachable character, holds a respectable and lucrative situation” and treated her well.
That said, Lucy was apparently waiting to deliver the letter, so it ended with the remark that their mother sent her blessings and asked that her children “no longer defer” a return visit home which “would be the greatest satisfaction this world can afford us.” With this, the letter concluded and the next surviving one is from nearly a half-dozen years later, written by Mary to David on 21 September 1834.
This missive began with welcome acknowledgment of a portrait, meaning a drawing or painting, of David, his second wife Nancy Hook and their eldest child, Thomas, named for his grandfather Workman, “but not a word of inteligence [sic] [of] how they came to England; not a word of line concerning either yourself, brother or sister.” It was added that the English Workmans rummaged through the tin container and newspapers used as protective padding, so that, all the image conveyed was that “some time in the year 1834 you were in being, more, in glowing health and good circumstance” as the portrait conveyed this.
Daughter Lucy immediately recognized David, noting the likeness with their mother in the forehead, eyes, mouth and chin, aspects none of the other children possessed, though “the rest of us had to recal[l] our wandering sences [sic] of what you were.” Lucy’s promptings, including the remarks “Oh, do you not then remember his little noze [sic]? Why Moll it is the very twin snout to your own,” stirred the memories of the others. David was cited as “a right hand handsome fellow,” his wife like a woman in the Clifton area “much admired for her beauty and affectionated motherly aspect,” and the young Thomas “a little cherub” who “we all longed to caress . . . for your sakes,” while Mr. Workman “said he could do with that little fellow.”
When word of the image got out to nearby Penrith, “your old Master and Mistress,” whose names were not mentioned and who had David as an apprentice in a saddlery business, “came to see you and [were] highly gratified, drank your health and rejoiced over you as if you had been their own child.” The master even recorded the date in his pocketbook (one wonders if that has survived) noting when he saw his “favourite apprentice . . . observing you did not drive many nails now,” as it may be that David closed his saddlery and was in the mercantile trade.
Mary added that she was motivated by the image to “return your favour and drawn his picture with that of my father and send them the first opportunity,” though whether this was done and transmitted is not known. In any case, the missive ended with the admonishment,
Brother, it is now 4 years since either we have ever heard from you, William, or Agnes. It is extremely strange. If you do not write you will see some of us soon. We are all in the enjoyment of good health.
Just before Christmas 1835, Mary wrote to both David and William, addressed to Franklin, and this is suggestive that William was visiting his brother at the time. While she wrote of her happiness to have heard from them and their good health, she immediately took the latter to task by chiding, “your reproaches, William, upon the supposition of our not writing grates not a little upon our ears.” She added that “we have been so excessively dutiful in writing every year,” though getting no response until the 1834 portrait was received “without either letter or messenger.”
Mary remarked “for the future let me entreat of you not to write such a distance to friends without tenderness” and then lectured her sibling,
Come William my bonny boy you have lived a little longer [about nine years] in this great world than I have (though you may not perhaps explore the minds of men so much as the outside of the globe), yet you cannot be without the experience that tenderness begets tenderness; if our natures from long absence had grown cold towards you, yours continuing warm seeking for corresponding feelling [sic] from us, we are not worth a fig straw if you sought in vain, but give us the trial another time and you will find the difference.
As for William offering an excuse for a lack of letters from the other side of the Atlantic that David was a poor writer, Mary retorted that his wife was a good one “and I am not going to let my sister slip” when it came to why more correspondence was not forthcoming. Moreover, she let her brother know that “those of your own house are living, breathing men and women . . . their souls in good health, breathing nothing but love towards you and all.”
She continued by commenting “I cannot see why you could not have to come to England and stayed your holidays from business, instead of Fr[anklin,” but scolded William by insisting,
Business, not brotherly love, leads you undoubtedly to David. If brotherly love alone will not bring you to En[gland], let business attend [and a visit to England would prove profitable on other levels]. But is it dangerous to ask Mr., what motive carries you to the Sandwich Isles in Anarctic [sic] Seas[?] Is it love, riches, or curiosity? Oh! give us the preference.
The idea that William looks to have contemplated a trip to Hawaii and had some knowledge in his remote Mexican pueblo of Taos of that far-flung island kingdom, where the brother of his future son-in-law F.P.F. Temple lived and worked for much of the 1820s, is a remarkable one. The letter concluded and included a postscript by father Thomas concerning David’s inherited silver tankard, which ended up being taken to Los Angeles by the latter’s son in 1884 when closing up the Workman estate in England—the tankard survives today.
Thomas, however, also wrote a short missive to his sons and included with Mary’s correspondence and he began with telling them “it gives us joy to hear of your good health after so many years & trouble to us in not hearing of you altho Letters have been yearly.” The patriarch continued “that you need not think you are forgotten for you are daily prayed for” and he echoed his daughter in affirming that Nancy Hook Workman could well be the means for communication from America and called her “an acute shrewd Lady and one for this world & a happy one thereafter.”
Thomas, Sr. also remarked on the “very strange” circumstance of receiving “two Likenesses in a tidy fine” container, but “without Letter or [knowledge of] who brought them.” After referring to hearing from a cousin, John Chester, who in a postscript was thought to be “a man that will get on I guess”, said that he’d written twice to Agnes without reply, Mr. Workman growled, “I have quite a different opinion of [John] Vickers. I take him to be a gloomy, sulky hound.”
As to William’s pondering a trip to the Pacific, his father rejoined,
I have no notion of your going to the Falkland Isles [this was a British possession, but he meant the Sandwich chain] where there is nothing but a few [illegible] and Sandle wood [this is why Hawaii was meant] to trade with. Its like going round the world to come Home & by Cape Horn to[o]. You would have been a welcome guest this Winter without staying at Franklin & I would have returned with you not doubting I would have made it pay.
The idea that the man his daughter earlier described as “a shirvelled old man” would make the long, tiring trip to America and turned into a success in terms of some form of business and enterprise is interesting, as it might be a window into the motivations of his sons to leave England and seek their way in their adopted lands. Thomas, Sr. added that there were others in his neighborhood who’d left to go to the Ohio region of the U.S.. He then closed with “hoping that you write at all opportunities & give us some News of the Country & how far the Settlements up the Missoury [River] extend.”
These remarkable documents, hopefully the originals still exist with the Krebs family, are intriguing as surviving remnants of correspondence between family members separated by an ocean and thousands of miles. That distance would only be increased as move to the next set of missives from the late 1840s and into the 1850s, so we’ll return tomorrow with that. Join us then!