G. Wilson Swartz: A Lawyer’s Life

You’ve recently sold a horse because you no longer want to pay for its upkeep. But a few days later, you find it back in your barn, eating your hay. Can you force the buyer to honor the sale and take the horse away?

We find this scenario in a letter written in the early twentieth century by the unhappy farmer to his attorney G. Wilson Swartz in Carlisle. The letter is one of many thousands of letters, postcards, telegrams, bills, receipts and other documents found in Swartz’s files, now housed at the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle.¹

Swartz had a busy practice in downtown Carlisle, and, elected to its faculty in 1901, also taught at the Dickinson School of Law. He seemed to follow the lawyer’s adage: never throw a document out. The documents he carefully filed now are a window into the lives of people in Cumberland County during the first quarter of the twentieth century, revealing how they saw their own lives and world, even as their world was rapidly changing. The pages preserve stories about families, financial straits, marriage, divorce, death, hopes realized and dashed. How they are written tells us about the tools and technologies in their lives. And even though very little writing from Swartz is found in these files, they tell his story as well, one worth telling. There is now little or no trace of G.Wilson Swartz in Carlisle despite his long connection to the community.² His daughter established her life elsewhere. His house on Walnut Street and office building on South Hanover Street still stands, but his name does not. Yet, there must be people all around the country, perhaps world, whose family stories somehow involve Swartz’s life and work.
Born August 27, 1864, in Shiremanstown, George Wilson Swartz (he dropped the ‘George’ except as an initial and was known as ‘Wilson’) was the eldest of three born to George Swartz and Hester Evaline Fleming; his sister Flora was born in 1866 and brother Robert in 1870. Flora married Austin Rupp in 1888 and they had five children. Robert married Elizabeth (‘Bessie’ in the letters), and Wilson married Margaret Kenyon in1898. Their daughter Helen was born 1902. We will see more about them later.

Wilson, who never attended law school or even college, was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1889, long before the bar exam was required in 1903. Instead, he had read law at the Carlisle law office of Silas and John Stuart. His own offices were always located steps from the courthouse and downtown train station, eventually moving from the Oddfellows Building on West High St. into a building he had renovated and co-owned with Harry Peffer. When he died on November 24, 1927, his obituary called it the Swartz- Peffer building. There is a coffee shop there today in 2024.

The Letters

Typed or handwritten, on business letterhead or lined tablet paper, dates written and received (some letters are inside of their original envelopes with postmarks): the letters make vivid what we know in general about early twentieth century life in Cumberland County.³ They convey to the contemporary reader the texture and feel of daily life, bringing voices of the past to the present. A writer looking to set a story in small-town Pennsylvania in 1910 could profit from diving into these letters.

Letters were the primary mode of communication then, and transmission was swift. A letter sent locally in the morning would be received with a response sent that afternoon, thanks to two or more mail deliveries each day. Letters from other lawyers and businesses were typically typewritten, and offices that started the century with handwritten correspondence switched to typewriters within a few years. Sometimes penny postcards (and they really cost a penny) were used to send a brief note, often about a meeting, either setting one up or apologizing for having to reschedule. Other times meetings were arranged or delayed via telegram, which in the early days were handwritten by the operator, only later typed. To contemporary eyes, the writers often seem oddly vague about meeting times (“sometime this afternoon). At other times, frequently linked to train schedules, they can be precise (“my train leaves at 2, arriving at 2:45, and will be at your office at 2:50.”) The form of letters from other offices is in business style, with phrasing that is familiar to us (including closing with “thanking you in advance for…”). Interestingly, we see versions of that same style in letters from nonprofessional correspondents, writing about estate issues, real estate transactions, late rent or mortgage payments; even writers with only modest education painstakingly crafted notes written in pencil on lined notebook paper.⁴ They did their best to use a business style format. There are some grammatical and spelling errors, but nothing contemporary readers aren’t used to from posts on social media. Their handwriting is usually quite readable; in fact, when handwriting is a barely intelligible scrawl, it tends to be from a professional. While most business seems to have been transacted by letters, telephone contact was a growing alternative. In the early days of the century, business letterheads might list several phone companies they subscribed to, but as time goes by, just one, showing the consolidation of multiple phone companies. Wilson’s accumulated phone bills and receipts reflect this. In the early part of the century, he was billed by multiple telephone companies, often in handwritten bills, but these shrink to one or two by 1927.

Some correspondents wrote a lot. I am not here speaking of voluminous correspondence from other professionals, particularly other lawyers. There is a steady flow of correspondence from other lawyers, some local, others in Harrisburg, Chambersburg, Gettysburg. As a reliable attorney in the county seat working a block from the courthouse, Swartz was constantly asked to do business for these other lawyers there---research, court filings, real estate paperwork. One very frequent correspondent was a lawyer named T.Z, Minehart, in Chambersburg, and it was not uncommon for there to be multiple letters (sometimes typed on a frugal half sheet of paper) a day. For people of this era, letters served the function that email does now: rapid fire, sometimes terse, exchanges, posing and answering questions, requesting clarification, sometimes making legal points. Some of these lawyers worked for larger law firms in Harrisburg or Philadelphia and other cities around the country, and their correspondence usually involved bankruptcies, debt collection, but sometimes wills, estates and disposition of assets. Many of the lawyers were sole practitioners. One was Ida Kast, who practiced in Mechanicsburg. Possibly the first woman admitted to the Cumberland County Bar, she, like Swartz, dealt with the legal issues involving real estate transactions as well as wills and estates.⁵

But then there were non-professional correspondents who might also write multiple times a day, often at great length, sometimes clarifying in the afternoon what they had written in the morning. Hypergraphia comes to mind in characterizing some of these writers. These letters, sometimes four or six pages or more, are usually handwritten, sometimes in a barely intelligible scrawl; you can imagine Wilson the reader at most skimming the contents. Perhaps writing to your lawyer was a substitute for therapy in the early 20th century.

Many of Wilson’s clients were in Carlisle, and so could easily walk to his offices on Main Street⁶ in the Oddfellows building, and later on South Hanover St. right by the courthouse. Occasionally a writer (elderly or infirm) would ask Swartz to come to their home for a meeting. Other clients were from the western part of the county, around Shippensburg, or from the West Shore or Harrisburg. While Wilson was an early and enthusiastic motorist, most of his family and clients did not seem to have automobiles and relied on what was then a robust network of local rail to travel from Newville, Harrisburg, or Mechanicsburg to Carlisle, and the train station was just a block or less from Wilson’s office. Travel to and from more distant destinations in the state and US was by rail, and correspondence would detail travel arrangements to meetings.⁷

The Lawyer’s Work

It is fair to say that Swartz was a small town legal general practitioner, whose business included debt collection, mortgages, wills and estates, real estate transactions and management, divorce, and sometimes business bankruptcy. Swartz was one of many lawyers around the country who paid to list their names in registries of lawyers doing debt collections. For example, Attorney’s National Clearing House charged $10 for Swartz’s listing in 1896, which gave him exclusive representation in Cumberland County. The listing cost $12.50 in 1903, and by 1914, $15. This was one of several such listing services, leading to work acting for collection agencies, for example, National Claim Adjusters, National Clearing House, National Collection Agency, National Credit Adjustment Bureau, (and that’s just taking a few names from the N’s) to do what debt collectors have always done and still do: get debtors to pay creditors. Sometimes the collection agencies complained about how long it took to get results. Sums out for collection were frequently less than ten dollars, even five; if successful, the attorney would receive a percentage. For example, in 1916, Swartz collected $200 from a debtor for which he received $15.15 from the Credit Clearing House collection agency: about 7.6%. Sometimes debt collection crossed county lines, in which case an attorney from that county would be involved, and the lawyers would split the fees.

Swartz made loans, including mortgages and unsecured small loans, sometimes from his own money and other times on behalf of clients seeking safe investments; some investors would write to roll over their money into a new mortgage after the old one had been paid off. He and his family as well as some clients had rental properties that he managed, and there were frequent letters from tenants apologizing for past due payments or requesting repairs.

Wills and estates were a cornerstone of Swartz’s legal practice. Since they usually involve deaths and burials, it is unsurprising that one of the fattest collection of letters is from a business selling headstones: Messinger Bros.. The cost of the headstone or monument may come out of the estate, and so it is understandable that there is a lot of communication about the timing of estate settlements. Other large collections of letters involve years of correspondence between Swartz and testators (people drawing up wills) and their eventual heirs. Swartz handled the legal work of unwinding these estates, which sometimes went smoothly but other times, not. In these cases, Tolstoy’s dictum about unhappy families is tested, because at least when it comes to money and property, accusations among family members, if not all the same, at least rhyme: somebody is getting more than their fair share. Nowhere in these files is this more evident than in Swartz’s own family. After the death of his father around the turn of the century, Swartz managed the disposition of the family farm and other property for his mother Hester, the widow, his brother Robert and sister Flora. In thick files of letters we read that Flora, run ragged by her work on her own farm and raising five children, complains that Hester is getting more than she is entitled to.⁸ Robert wants to hold on to the farm for a few years and sell in a better market (something apparently that Wilson also wants). Flora wants her money from the farm as soon as possible, and Robert wants Wilson to team up with him to buy her out. Flora also complains that Robert helped himself to a can of lard and some hay without permission. Hester complains about the unfairness of the will and her failing health. Robert wistfully writes in 1899 that but for his marriage, he wishes he could come to Carlisle and read law with Wilson (the path Wilson had taken to enter the legal profession) and become his legal partner; he also complains that Flora is maneuvering to get more than she is entitled to.

Estate business led Wilson to decades long work with some clients. The letters from two clients in particular tell stories about women whose need to make a living takes them away from Cumberland County. Consider a woman named Helen Dykeman. Born 1880 in Shippensburg (she died in 1962 of breast cancer in a convalescent home in Philadelphia), her correspondence with Swartz, from the early teens until his death, is a mixture of legal, business and personal matters that sheds light on what life held in store for an ambitious single woman in those days. Swartz handled the estate of her father and other relatives, and Helen inherited a family home among other property. Helen had graduated from Cumberland Valley State Normal School (the original name of the institution which evolved into Shippensburg University) in 1898. In 1900, the census lists her as a dressmaker, residing in Shippensburg with her father; by 1910, still in Shippensburg, she is now listed as a teacher, possibly at the Normal School. During the mid-1910’s, she writes to Swartz multiple times about a friend of hers who is being targeted by nasty local gossips. Somehow, she extricates herself from her hometown and moves to Ann Arbor where she is awarded a Bachelor’s (A.B.) in 1920, and then a MA in 1921 from the University of Michigan. She seems to have mortgaged her house to pay for her education (her brother in New York also seems to have helped her out) and Swartz either holds the mortgage or administers it, since there are many letters involving interest payments (at 6%. By the time of Swartz’s death, the principal is 1000; she may have just been paying the interest throughout the years). She also writes for loans from time to time---in 1918, she sought to borrow $300 for a struggling friend.⁹ But finding secure employment was challenging for Helen. You would think that years of classroom experience and degrees from the University of Michigan would make her eminently employable, but these were the 1920s. Also, she seemed to enjoy travel. She headed west and was employed as a teacher in Catalina Island, California in 1923. By that summer, she writes Swartz from Oregon, describing climbing mountains and taking in the sights. She mentions that she had been unable to receive teaching certification, and that it was difficult getting hired as a teacher at her age (she would have been in her 40’s by then) and was heading back East that summer. Subsequent years finds her teaching at a public school in Bryn Mawr, then in business in Boston, then teaching in St. Louis.¹⁰

Margaret Craighead travelled further than Dykeman in pursuit of work. Craighead was widowed early in the century, with no children and apparently only a modest inheritance which Swartz managed, so she put herself to work. We find her working in a hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico from 1909-1914 in a non-medical role, after that in North Carolina in a boys’ school, during war and influenza years. In the 1920’s, she writes from Princeton, New Jersey, working as a nanny, and in several letters over a period of a year, discusses the purchase of a fur coat. Apparently, Swartz had discouraged the purchase, but she pushes back, noting that it gets cold in Princeton. Further, she says, “I am sure you think me foolish and extravagant” but “the years are piling up and I am beginning to feel very much alone and am losing the desire to save all I can for those I leave behind me.” She ended up buying the coat. In these letters, ties to local families and customs remain strong. Craighead was one of several writers who dated their letters “sabbath” if written on a Sunday. His wife Margaret was another.

Swartz handled divorce cases in Cumberland County and his files are full of letters from men and women urgently seeking an end to their marriages. In some cases, women sought divorces from husbands who deserted them, often with children; less often, it was the husband claiming desertion. In other cases, cruel (and ‘barbarous’) treatment was cited, and we can only imagine what that might entail. In one case, a Harrisburg based lawyer, with whom Swartz had had professional correspondence, sought a divorce for “cruel and barbarous” mistreatment by a wife who, along with her mother, hectored and bullied him, according to his deposition. His urgency and desperation, possibly fueled by alcohol, bleed through to the reader even after all these years. Sadly, this person was still married to the same wife when he died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1911.

Sometimes people stayed married even after desertion. In 1923, Nettie Ensminger wrote Swartz after she learned that her husband, Calvin Ensminger, had died in a small town in North Carolina almost a decade after he had deserted her and their ten children, the youngest still a baby at that time. Now, as his widow, she sought whatever money or assets he had at the time of his death, particularly since she had already paid the expenses for his burial. Nettie’s sister wrote too, detailing Nettie’s struggles after Calvin absconded; somehow, she had supported her large family by working as a caretaker and housekeeper. Subsequent correspondence from North Carolina officials to Swartz responding to his inquiries revealed that Calvin had been a traveling huckster. He had been living under an assumed name (one of many, it was noted), making his pitches under a tent where he would operate “some kind of device”. In his rented room, town officials discovered two or three trunks with cheap jewelry and trinkets. More promisingly, there was a small amount of money as well, though not much: a few hundred dollars in a bank account and in his wallet, to which Nettie was entitled.

Then, as now, child support was a critical issue in divorce. One man, writing on behalf of his daughter seeking a divorce in 1921-2 secured $7.00 a week in child support for the child. Sometimes child support can become an issue even without marriage and divorce. In 1917-18, a frantic mother wrote a series of letters on behalf of her 18- or 19-year-old son who was being sued or perhaps criminally charged for child support for an out-of-wedlock baby. After her son joined the military (these are the war years) she claimed she had heard that the young woman, who has now married someone else, was receiving her son’s military allotment as well as her soldier husband’s, even while she, the grandmother, was continuing to pay the child support her son owed.

World and National Events

World and national events leak into the correspondence, as in the child support case but never take center stage. Dykeman sails back East via the recently opened Panama Canal.¹¹ Craighead works in the Presbyterian hospital in Puerto Rico a few years after the Spanish-American War. Another correspondent runs a tourist retail business in Cuba. Through the tumult of the First World War, the influenza pandemic, prohibition, women’s suffrage, there are only bare hints of it: debtors now in the military writing to apologize for overdue payments or requesting loan extensions; writers apologizing for missed meetings or delayed replies to Swartz’s letters because of influenza. Craighead more explicitly addresses events. After the US entered the war, she notes that some of the boys weren’t returning for the new school year but joining the army instead. As the influenza epidemic is subsiding, she boasts how careful management kept the flu from their facility, with no cases on campus. She writes on Nov. 10, 1918, that she thinks the war will soon be over, mentions her interest in a dietetics course at Drexel University. and inquires about work at a hospital she had heard would replace the recently shuttered Indian School.

Several correspondents, including Merril Hummel, write from their war time posts in the military. Occasionally there are letters from former students, now practicing lawyers, usually living far from Carlisle, addressed, with apparent affection, “Dear Professor.” One writes several times in 1916-17, apologizing for not writing sooner, and recounting struggles with a sense of failure after and depression after failing to pass the bar exam. Happily, in 1917 he reports that he passed the exam and has a job in a law firm, though now he faces the draft.

Political matters very seldom emerge: there’s a 1906 solicitation from the Philadelphia Campaign Committee of the Lincoln Party and one in 1910 from the local branch of the Pennsylvania Independent party movement. His frequent legal correspondent, T. Z. (Thomas Zeno, though he always used his initials in correspondence) Minehart in Chambersburg, sometimes wrote from the General Assembly in Harrisburg, after his election to the legislature in 1906. There are several letters from Gifford Pinchot, best known as a conservationist and forester who also served two terms as governor of Pennsylvania. In 1914, Pinchot ran unsuccessfully for Senate from Pennsylvania as the candidate from the Washington party (the name chosen in the election for candidates running as Progressives, part of Theodore Roosevelt’s camp) and after the election, wrote a letter of appreciation to Swartz for his support. Pinchot was elected governor of Pennsylvania in 1922 as a Republican, and he again wrote a letter of thanks to Swartz in 1922. Barred from succeeding himself in that office by Pennsylvania law at that time, he tried once again for the Senate but failed. Swartz must have supported that Senate attempt because in June 1926 Pinchot once again writes Swartz thanking him for his support in that contest. (Pinchot never became a senator, but he did win a second term as Governor in 1930; the files contain a letter of appreciation to Merril Hummel for his support, as well as carbons of letters apparently from Hummel to local chapters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union organizing events in support of Pinchot.)

Personal and Family Matters

Besides professional correspondence, the files are full of personal documents, including receipts, no matter how small the transaction, and correspondence with manufacturers and distributors around the country to purchase (and sometimes complain about) products. He was an early adopter of the automobile, buying an Oldsmobile Light Tonneau in 1905, an open car which came with a 10 HP motor (garden tractors in 2024 have twice that) which he then upgraded, ordering a motor with horsepower in the upper teens (which retailed at $400 but he received a significant discount). His daughter would have been a toddler by then so with children’s car seats an invention far in the future, she would have been held in her mother’s arms as the family took a spin, but Swartz would need to watch his speed, which was limited at 8 mph in the borough of Carlisle at that time.¹² He was probably a stockholder of Carlisle Body and Gear since he received notice of a stockholders’ meeting in 1906.¹³ His files contain numerous receipts for service and parts for his automobiles over the years, both from local businesses (he frequented Seven Star Garage in Carlisle for gas, routine maintenance, and some repairs) and those around the country. He never seemed to be without a car after 1905; at the time of his death in 1927 he owned a Buick.

Judging from the receipts and correspondence, he was an avid woodworker, with steady relationships and correspondence with suppliers. He also bought cigars, and at least once, pre-prohibition, a case of wine following a family sight-seeing trip out west. In 1925 he spent a fair amount of money for an elaborate radio system ($91.50 for accessories and installation, equivalent to about $1795 in 2024, according to online calculators). A subscriber to the Literary Digest, the National Geographic and the Sentinel, he also was a book buyer, purchasing a number of books from book sellers in larger cities and series of encyclopedias and reference works from publishers. Unlike his wife, he doesn’t seem to have been much of a church goer. It seems he turned to his hobbies and reading to unwind, and judging from the bulging files from members of his own family, he had excellent reason to do so. The family drama: conflict over the care of the widowed mother Hester, health crises, money woes, never seems to subside for long. We’ve already seen the family fracas over the estate of Swartz’s father. But there is more.

After the family farm finally sold, the now widowed Hester lived variously at the homes of her three children and in a house in Mechanicsburg, with caretakers at least part time. In her letters, money and property issues mingle with complaints about her frailty and poor health. Oddly, she frequently signs them with her full name, and sometimes addresses letters to her oldest son “Dear Sir.” At various times she is bedridden and cared for by either daughter Flora or daughter-in-law Bessie in their homes. Though Wilson and Margaret have also had their turn with her, in 1907, Robert wants Wilson and Margaret to take her in again. “Bessie must have a rest and it won’t hurt your wife any more than it does mine to stay at home and care for Ma.” In one of the only letters from Wilson in the files, presumably a copy, very possibly unsent, Wilson, in a controlled fury, writes his brother back in September 1907. “I do not propose to have even my mother dictate to me how I shall run my own home”. He vehemently denies Robert’s claim that he expensed his care of Hester from the estate. Finally, he arranges to move Hester into one of the houses Hester owns with a well recommend ‘girl’ to care for her through the winter.

Money is a constant theme in family letters. In 1906, Robert is miffed that Wilson wants him to sign a document for a loan he has asked for. Flora’s letters, usually more affectionate than Robert’s, seldom fail to note how poor she is, at one point writing, “I am the poorest of the lot and have very few comforts” in contrast with her brothers, men with salaries. At one time, she asks for a loan of $10, so she can get some new clothes to attend a church conference in Carlisle. Another time, she confesses how weepy and blue she feels, apologizing for being in existence, saying she would kill herself if not for the children. Her health, particularly her mental health, wanes more than it waxes. She has a baby (her last) in 1903 and at her age (37) it nearly killed her, she says. In the following years, she seems to be very ill. In 1905 she writes from Grand-View Sanitarium in Wernersville, Pennsylvania. Wilson had fronted her the money for eight weeks of treatment and she says she will sign a note for the loan on discharge. Another time, she asks Wilson to take her to a Dr. Stevens in Harrisburg. She seeks more care at a sanitarium in 1909 and writes her brother that if he were the who was sick and suffering, she would pay for his treatment, so why won’t he do the same for her.

Flora’s story just gets sadder. In several letters, she claims her husband choked and beat her. Things come to a head in 1912. In May, she writes Wilson, accusing him of telling her husband she has a ‘dirty disease,” that Austin rubbed ‘stinken acid’ on her privates, hit her with his fist 3 times, knocked her down, and said he’d kill her. She says he had wanted to put her away at the lunatic asylum (this was the name for psychiatric hospitals in those days) that he had done the paperwork but held off once he had learned that her estate income would go to the asylum, not to him. She writes that she wants a divorce, that her privates burn, wonders what that stuff is, and where does he get it? During this period, her handwriting is markedly deteriorated. Austin, Flora’s husband, also writes, explaining to Wilson that the prior week, Flora had gone to Harrisburg to stay with their grown son Robert and his wife, but she ”talked trouble” to Robert’s wife, so they told her to leave but she refused, then went to see other relatives, went home briefly, and now he doesn’t know where she is. Austin is concerned that she will say the most slanderous things and that will harm the reputations of their two grown daughters. Something, he concludes, needs to be done. It's no surprise that by August 1912 she is in the Pennsylvania Lunatic Hospital. She writes several times, frantic, with disorganized handwriting, complaining about the drugs they are using on her.¹⁴ The Superintendent, Dr. Orth replies to a letter from Wilson and tells him he will oversee visitors and letters from those who would report conditions different than what they are. Other documents show that Flora was now adjudicated legally insane, and her affairs were now managed by a S.S. Rupp for a ”committee for Flora Rupp”.¹⁵ Rob writes his brother that he is “very sorry to hear Flora has to be put away” but she was in very bad shape.¹⁶

Letters from Robert echo the money concerns also found in the letters from his mother and sister. Many times, he explains details of his business and financial plans to his brother, and more than a few times, he asks for a loan. But as in Flora’s letters, there is real affection, and perhaps just a tinge of jealousy.

Margaret also writes about money in the few letters from her in the file. As might be expected, there are not many letters from Margaret to Wilson since they were seldom apart. The few times she was away were mostly for medical reasons: her own surgeries and once for that of Jane, a young relative who seems to have lived with the Swartz family during periods of her childhood. In her letters during her stay in Philadelphia while Jane was having surgery for an unspecified gynecological problem, Margaret shamefacedly confesses that she had somehow lost $15 (worth about $475 in 2024 dollars) She writes she started the trip with $20, kept out $5 for expenses and secured the remaining $15 in the bottom of her satchel but somehow it had gone missing. She writes,“there is nothing so precious that I own, except my baby, that I would not give to know just what you are thinking of my carelessness.” The mystery remains: what happened to that money? Had it been stolen out of her satchel? Had the bills somehow worked their way underneath the lining of the bag? Had she (gasp) spent it?

Was carelessness about money an ongoing issue between husband and wife? In 1901 Margaret received a polite letter from a dry goods store in Shippensburg about an unpaid bill of $10.50, incurred before her marriage in 1898. In 1903, a lawyer for this merchant writes Wilson about this unpaid debt, now $13.72 with interest, in the hopes of having it quietly paid before legal action was taken. Did Wilson pay it? Had Margaret never told him about it? Had she no access to $10.50 in 1901 to privately pay it herself?

Daughter Helen (nicknamed Hennie in younger days) emerges in her own voice starting in 1913 in a letter. She is visiting relatives while Margaret is in Philadelphia with Jane and recounts her activities with her cousins but also the need for new socks. In 1915, she paid a county dog tax (26 cents), according to a receipt in her name in the files. The same meticulousness about money and spending later shows up in a letter from Helen, now a college student at Syracuse University, to her father. She provides her father with a detailed “terrible expense account”, listing all of her expenditures that fall, including $.27 for movies,.$.24 for laundry, $.07 for a Hershey bar (about $1.30 in 2024). This sets up her ask: she needs money for Christmas shopping: $8.00($149 in 2024) and asks for it out of her money (perhaps her share of an estate.) “I know you don’t think much of it but you have to do a certain amount of it” [gift exchanges], listing friends she owes for their hospitality.

Margaret seems to have suffered from poor health and endured a number of surgeries. The files contain some medical bills, including a number from Dr. Allen in Carlisle, who provided routine care for the family, at $.75 a visit. Some of these visits would have related to Helen’s birth in 1902. But later we see a charge of $125 from a surgeon in Philadelphia in 1913 (about $3870 in 2024) and a 1913 bill from Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia for $29.00 (including $.55 for telephone) for ten days board in a private room. In a letter in 1913, she explains that she had wanted “what was removed from her” but balks at the charge of $2.25 or $2.50 for the specimen container, expressing frustration that she couldn’t just use a regular jar.¹⁸ In Philadelphia during Margaret’s surgery in 1913, Wilson seems shaken by it, writing in a letter to Merril Hummel “The time seems long, but, as I watch the long procession ceaselessly passing to and fro, each with his burdens of sorrow, I am trying to be brave.”

In 1914, there is a bill from Todd Hospital in Carlisle for Margaret’s board and treatment. It is not clear what her ailment was that time, but seven years later she undergoes another surgery, a hysterectomy in March 1921. This time she is a patient at the Keystone private hospital in Harrisburg, which bills $506.25. Helen, now a college student, remains in worried touch during Margaret’s illnesses, writing her father after Margaret’s hysterectomy that her mother must have a caretaker and housekeeper when she returns home and urges him to let Jane make the arrangements.

Whatever the problems the hysterectomy was meant to solve, the surgery seems to have led to further problems. In Sept. 1921, Margaret is hospitalized again, now in Carlisle and operated on for intestinal obstruction. There is an urgent telegram from Helen in Syracuse, asking whether she should come home. Scrawled on the reverse side of the telegram are notes in Wilson’s hand: he is scribbling down what a doctor is telling him, in person or on the phone, on the paper close at hand. The notes record that the surgery revealed adhesions from the prior surgery which completely obstructed the lumen on the ilium, that these adhesions were released, but additional adhesions were found and released. But after the surgery was completed, Margaret experienced shock and vomited dark brown liquid. She died later that same day.

Letters of condolence in the files frequently mention Helen, and the comfort she must be for the now widowed Wilson. It seems that Helen returned home after she sent that telegram, and probably stayed for a while, but it seems that she did not miss a semester of school. In 1921, she writes her father: “I didn’t drop psychology because it was hard. I dropped it because the professor said I could not pass the course after missing so much work” (presumably due to Margaret’s illness). Helen’s grade report from Syracuse in 1922 shows she is on course to graduate on time, with very respectable grades through five semesters (except for typing, which Helen seems to have flunked): Latin, French, English, Math, Zoology, Elocution, History, Philosophy, and multiple courses in Sociology, which must have been her major.

The files indicate Wilson carried on with his usual work after Margaret’s death. But according to his close friend and legal associate Merril Hummel, the death hit him hard. Writing in April 1928 to a mutual friend, Charles Dakin, about Wilson’s death the prior November, “To me, Mr. Swartz was a close friend in many respects the same as a father.” But, he explains, after Margaret’s death, Hummel noticed he was ‘slipping’ and he never fully recovered.

The years passed nonetheless; Helen graduated from Syracuse and returned to Carlisle. At some point she must have met William Arthur Bissell, a New York City native and Lehigh University graduate who attended Dickinson School of Law, graduating in 1927. But, as Hummel notes in his letter to Dakin, in September 1927, Wilson suffered another blow when brother Robert committed suicide (the death certificate noting two gunshot wounds in his head).¹⁹ This led him to neglect his health, according to Hummel who writes that Wilson had been suffering from attacks of unconsciousness lasting five to ten minutes, and that doctors said that this was due to “concentration of poison” affecting nerves to the brain. Dental x-rays revealed seven abscessed teeth which were pinpointed as the source of the poisoning. However, Wilson refused to have the teeth pulled. Thus it was that Wilson died at his home on Thanksgiving Day 1927, having returned from the office and napping before dinner with Helen. The death certificate cites acute dilation of the heart caused by myocarditis.

Helen married Bissell in February 1928, and they moved to Scranton where Bissell established his law practice. Helen was her father’s sole heir and executor, with Hummel managing the estate, so there are quite a few letters between the two.²⁰ She inherited a fair amount. Hummel referred to a house Helen owns at 231 South West St., as well as the family home at 219 Walnut St., and half-share in the Hanover St building. Harry Peffer (probably the co-owner of the Hanover St. Building) bought the Walnut St. house. Hummel’s correspondence shows she also inherited a Buick and a polar bear rug. Just as many of Wilson’s clients had done, she expressed impatience to Hummel over the amount of time unwinding the estate was taking, and he defended himself, protesting that these processes are slow, and that rather than overcharging her, he is providing his services at a reduced rate.

In 1934, Helen and William Bissell had their first and only child, Anne. William died of heart disease in 1950; Helen lived until 1970.