From Little Rock to the streets of Laredo

Ifound Lou Krause.

A more efficient researcher would have thought to glance at the index to “A Fierce Solitude,” Ben Johnson’s biography of John Gould Fletcher, where Lou appears on page 8.

But why drive when you can walk? I spent a few hours reading Krause family letters instead and got to know Lou first from letters addressed to her from her sisters Addie Parker and Adolphine Krause Fletcher, and then from her own letters—early ones signed with her name and later ones signed with an alias.

Freiderika Habermann Krause died May 23, 1877. According to Johnson, the three surviving Krause sisters inherited $600 in personal property; most of their inheritance was tied up in the Krause building at Second and Main Streets in Little Rock.

Johanna Krause’s husband, Peter Hotze, recommended that the sisters allow John Gould Fletcher to help with property management and on Sept. 4, 1877, Fletcher, 46, married Adolphine Krause, 23.

The Hotzes moved to New York to allow Peter Hotze to manage the New York end of the cotton brokerage that he and John Gould Fletcher ran together. The Fletchers moved to August Hill Garland’s house on the 14th block of Scott Street. It seems that Lou Krause was sometimes in New York with the Hotzes and at other times at home in Little Rock with the Fletchers.

In the fall of 1879, Lou Krause and Adolphine Krause Fletcher sent their adopted sister, Addie Parker, to the Sisterhood of the Good Shepherd in St. Louis; she boarded and attended school there for at least three years. In her earliest letters home (to Lou), Addie is 19, but sounds much younger.

The quality that her letters share with letters from her older sisters is a frankness that challenges every cliche about the prudishness of Victorians. Prudes these women were not.

Here is Addie writing to Lou from school just before Christmas 1879: “I am not surprised to hear of Emma Trundle’s condition; it is only what every sensible person might have expected that comes from girls getting married before they are women … And I think that old Trundle ought to be cow-hided to have so many children and teach them nothing but that they must get married and kill themselves as quick as possible.”

While far more measured and mature than Addie’s, Adolphine Krause Fletcher’s letters to Lou Krause suggest that Adolphine too deemed Lou worthy of confidence. John Gould Fletcher Sr. was “almost suffocated with congestion of the lungs” after the death of the Fletchers’ 17-month-old daughter Frederika in October 1880.

Complaining that her husband’s family had offered no assistance during the five weeks when he was being treated with mustard plasters and poultices and unable to leave the house, she added, “… another thing that fretted me a great deal was that it was intimated that I was in the family way and that was what was the matter with ‘baby’ …”

It’s hard to imagine where such a notion would have come from in an age when pregnancies in rapid succession were not only common but often necessary to sustain the population; I don’t think I’ve heard of a folk belief that attributed the poor health of a toddler to her mother’s new pregnancy, nor have I read such in the expert opinions of Victorian physicians, though questionable expert opinion proliferated then as now.

“[The] worst of it,” Adolphine continued, “was the day after baby was buried, someone came to me and wanted to give me the good advice not to have any more children and also a preventative that they knew of.” Our age has no monopoly on bad taste, either.

Adolphine was undaunted: “Lou, I took it as being in very bad grace coming from the source that it did, and I intend to have another one just as soon as possible.”

The earliest letter from Lou is from April 1, 1884. Now around age 36, she appears to be striving to become both a writer and a musician in St. Louis: “I am still in the land of the living, and almost worked to death. I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to try two professions at the same time. Day before yesterday I practiced [piano or singing] for seven hours, and then after supper I wrote until 12½ o’clock, so yesterday I was so nervous that I could hardly accomplish anything.”

Lou complains further: “Well, my article was not published, was it? Of course old maids will not be upheld by any woman’s paper; you will have to take some batchelors [sic] for that.”

Two more letters from St. Louis continue in the same vein. Lou soon returned to Little Rock to teach at Arkansas Female College, and in 1886 bought the Pike mansion, where it was held, and took over its operation.

Ben Johnson draws from an unpublished essay on the history of the Pike mansion for his brief account of what went wrong: Lou spent a lot of money remodeling the mansion, converting much of its space to practice rooms for music.

While the catalog for 1887-88 boasts that the Music Department enrolls 67 students (“the largest class ever enrolled in any city in the State”), the improvements and emphasis upon music failed to increase enrollment overall, and in 1889, John Gould Fletcher assumed the obligations of the college.

In other words, Lou Krause spent too much money on behalf of Arkansas Female College, and her brother-in-law bailed her out. Day-to-day control of the college reverted to founder Myra McAlmont Warner and her daughter Julia who moved it to a new building on Rock Street while the young Fletcher family moved into the Pike mansion.

I’m not sure if Lou Krause paid any debts directly from the $18,000 that John Gould Fletcher paid her for the Pike mansion. If she was able to keep the whole sum, then she still had a substantial net worth for a woman of 1889.

Whatever she retained in dollars, she clearly felt her reputation dashed, or her honor so insulted that she fled to the border and changed her name.

“God has quieted me, but never can it be obliterated, the sufferings and hardships which I have endured, but thanks be to his goodness and kindness, I have never done anything which could mantle my cheek with a blush of shame,” wrote “Emma Cummings” to John Gould Fletcher Sr. on Aug. 9, 1896.

Lou, assuring John that she had assumed the new name legally, wrote that she had traveled from her home in Laredo to Saltillo, Mexico (where his two letters finally reached her) because of poor health, including frequent fainting spells. She is still hurt: “I have always lived decent and respectable. I have never heard one word from there [Little Rock] since I left and will say this that I never intend to return unless I can take my old position.”

Proving the endurance of exchange networks between Arkansas and Texas, Lou wrote that she had “met several LR people face to face on the streets [of Laredo] but owing to the fact that the sorrow … had made such inroads on me, they failed to recognize me. The Rev. Mr. Carnahan for one.”

Only three letters from “Emma Cummings” survive. The second, addressed again to John Gould Fletcher, is dated Oct. 25, 1896. She is back in Laredo and writes: “[This] fall I found myself compelled to open my school here and have enrolled 58 pupils. I have worked hard as you may know and have gained the good will and affection of the people here and would not like to lose it as my living depends upon that now.”

She admonishes him not to try and visit, as “I live alone, and a man seen about my place could only hurt my character.”

Lou’s final surviving letter, to Adolphine, describes her school (she took, in her words, both “native” and “American” students), and apologizes for her “stout” appearance in a photograph she plans to send, but gives little indication of anything else to come.