A lost art

As fewer people take time to write letters, preservationists lament decline of rich historical resource

By The Columbus Dispatch  • 
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COURTNEY HERGESHEIMER | DISPATCH photos
Letters from Godfrey Weitzel, a general in the Union Army, recently acquired by the Ohio Historical Society

 In 1764, future President John Adams wrote to his fiancee, Abigail, as he prepared to travel to Boston from his hometown of Braintree, Mass.:

'Now Letter-Writing is, to me, the most agreeable Amusement: and Writing to you the most entertaining and Agreeable of all Letter-Writing.'

So went one of more than 1,100 letters that the two exchanged — a remarkable documentation of thoughts and feelings that helped David McCullough write his Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams, adapted in 2008 as an HBO miniseries. Almost 250 years later, though, Americans don’t share that passion for writing letters: In     its 2011 annual report, the U.S. Postal Service noted a 29 percent drop in first-class mail during the past decade.

Such a sea change might threaten the ability of future historians and biographers to chronicle modern life.

“Letters are wonderful to research the personality of people,” said Stuart Hobbs, director of the History Teaching Institute at Ohio State University.

“Letters give you that firsthand account of what they were feeling at the time. If people aren’t writing as many letters, we’re not going to have that kind of record.”

The Ohio Historical Society archives contain thousands of letter collections. Some illuminate the lives of important public figures, as with the acquisition last month of correspondence from Civil War Gen. Godfrey Weitzel, a Cincinnati native.  

The more than 300 letters and official military reports help historians better understand events such as Weitzel commanding the first Union Army units to enter the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va.

The Weitzel collection “is spectacular,” said Sharon Dean, the society’s director of museum and library services.

Although the society has no immediate plans to include the letters in an exhibit, Dean said, researchers are clamoring to go through them.

Beyond enhancing historical records, letters convey a depth of thought and emotion. McCullough, the Adams biographer, said he thinks writing offered Adams an almost-therapeutic   way to sort through his thoughts.

Consider this excerpt from the society archives, from a letter written in February 1862 by Lil Rathbun of Marysville to her husband, Capt. John Rathbun, who was off fighting the Civil War with the 66th Ohio regiment.

“I have again seated myself on this beautiful Sabbath to address you through the medium of my pen. This is a beautiful day, all nature seems gay, and as I am seated alone in our little home, my thoughts are wandering after you. . . . My heart is sad and lonely and why is it? You can easily tell; it is because that all that is dear to me on Earth is far away.”

Such flowery intimacy isn’t generally replicated in modern forms of communication. Twitter, for example, limits senders to 140 characters in a tweet.

“Letter writing assumes a kind of quiet attention you have to give,” said David Staley, an adjunct associate history professor   at OSU and a futurist.

“Today’s communication environment is enforcing a kind of ‘sped-up mind.’ It’s more like a rolling collection of statements.”

An even bigger problem for future historians might be the move to a paperless society.

What happens to our recorded history if the billions of emails, texts and tweets aren’t archived?

The Library of Congress recognized the potential problem and, in 2000, formed a Web Archiving Team. Since then, the push has been to identify what type of online information should be saved and how to do it.

Official government business is archived, team leader Abbie Grotke said, but private correspondence is another matter.

“There’s a real push toward   personal archiving, to get the average person to think about digital preservation,” Grotke said. “There are a lot of local news and local stories, not to mention citizen journalism and blogs, that are at risk” of not being saved.

The National Digital Stewardship Group, founded in 2010, consists of more than 200 organizations working together to help preserve electronic communication, including that on social-media sites. Someday, Grotke said, people might opt into a personal online-archiving system.

Staley and Hobbs caution that preservation efforts don’t guarantee a complete record.  

George Washington, for example, directed his wife, Martha, to destroy their personal correspondence; just three letters survived. That prevented historians from probing the private thoughts beyond Washington’s reserved public persona, Hobbs said.

Of electronic records perhaps being lost, Staley said, “I may be in the minority among historians, but, if that happens, so be it. We work with incomplete and imperfect information all the time.

“It’s not simply electronic stuff. All sorts of things aren’t preserved. Maybe there’s a fire or a flood that washes out old records.”

Historians have always been creative in finding ways to fill in the gaps, as when they use court records as clues to daily life, Hobbs said, and they’ll find ways to cope in the future.  

“It’s like in the 19th century,” Hobbs said. “They saw the trains coming, but they could not know how it would shake out.”

To donate letters of historical significance to the Ohio Historical Society, reach curator John Haas at jhaas@ohiohistory.org

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