The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

Martha E. McMillan and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s House and Home Papers 1867 Michelle Gaffner Wood The day after their marriage James McMillan took his bride to her new home-the McMillan farmhouse—located four miles east of Cedarville on “the pike,” now State Route 42. Because James’ mother Nancy and his unmarried sisters – Jane, Jennette, and Martha – lived with James at the farm, Martha did not immediately commence housekeeping. In fact, between January and October 1867, Martha travelled back and forth between her parents’ home and “Mother McMillan’s.” James would drop her off at her parents’ home, and he would pick her up the next day or a few days later. On June 5, Martha’s friend Mary Park gave Martha the domestic guidebook entitled House and Home Papers by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Stowe had published a series of domestic advice essays in the Atlantic Monthly between January and December in 1864 (Hedrick 312). In her 1863 letter to James Fields in which she pitches the series of home papers, Stowe indicates that her reason for wanting to write “a series of household papers” is to divert readers’ attentions from the horrors of the war (Hedrick 312). Stowe proposes: a sort of spicy sprightly writing that I feel I need to write in these days to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy and blind and fill my eyes with tears so that I can’t see the paper [.] I mean such things as are being done where our heroes are dying as Shaw died—It is not wise that all our literature should run in a rut cut thro [sic] our hearts and red with our blood—I feel the need of a little gentle household merriment and talk of common thing—to indulge which I have devised this. (qtd. in Hedrick 312) 28