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Mary Strang’s Diary

Mary Strang was born into a Quaker family in Collins, New York, and grew up in a household full of aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors who moved constantly between each other’s homes. At fifteen, in the dead of winter in 1853, she carved out the time to begin keeping a diary. She spelled by ear and punctuated by instinct, and she wrote with real relish about the ordinary: a January breakfast was “the table smoking and steaming and loaded with victuals I found very entiseing,” the household “devouring like hungry wolves.”

On January 5th, Mary wrote that a neighbor girl named Evaline Rice fell into a trance, engaging in the popular spiritualism of the day, and “entertained us with menny quite mirthful remarks.” Two days later, her uncle Ebenezer read Uncle Tom’s Cabin aloud by the fire. Mary’s verdict: “which is very interesting.”

A young man named Erastus Harris appears again and again in these pages, walking with her to the Ross farm, calling to invite her along on errands, staying overnight at the house more than once, one name among many in a crowded social world. Decades later, his own son would claim his father went with Mary before she married someone else.

Illness runs quietly under everything, too. Mary’s cousin Rhoda Melissa Boyce is sick for months, visited constantly, “failing very fast” by the diary’s last entries. We never learn what happened to her.

Sarah Ann, six years older and Mary’s closest companion, married Morris Kellogg on March 29th before a squire at the Eagle Tavern in Gowanda. Mary wrote her farewell with real ceremony: “so goodby sister and brother, Moras kellogg and Sarah Ann kellogg.” Six weeks later, on May 15th, Sarah Ann left for Iowa. “It was a partin strain,” Mary wrote, “so alas my sister has gone to the far distant west.” The next entry moves on as if nothing had happened: an evening walk with Erastus, “very pleasant.” Grief and ordinary life sat side by side on the same page.

That June, Mary’s grandparents, Barak and Mary Smith, left Collins for Springdale, Iowa too. Mary’s own family followed the next year.

The diary’s last entries run through July, and then it breaks off. The rest, if it ever existed, is lost. In 1856, at not yet eighteen, Mary married John Russell, an Oberlin-educated schoolteacher seventeen years her senior, and left for Kansas, where she spent nearly all the rest of her life. Erastus went on to marry Mary’s own cousin Emily, and the two of them eventually settled back in Collins, raising their family there. The two women, once girls together in this same crowded household, wrote to each other for the rest of their lives.

Sources

This entry draws on Mary Palmer Strang’s 1853 diary, transcribed by family genealogist Clarance Maris Smith in 1992, with special thanks to Pat (Mackey) McCarroll, Mary’s great-granddaughter, for making the original available; Howard L. Harris’s manuscript, prepared in the 1940s, recalling his father Erastus’s relationship with Mary; and family research compiled by Laura Atkins, Clarance Smith, and Vic Lewis.