Z 1801.000 Larrabee (Elizabeth Hatheway) Letter

Z 1801.000
LARRABEE (ELIZABETH HATHEWAY) LETTER

In the summer of 1842, Elizabeth Larrabee also moved to Pontotoc, where Charles Larrabee was planning a new business venture with his college friend, Lyman Draper. Draper had come to Mississippi in 1841, not only to work as an editor for The Spirit of the Times, a weekly Democratic newspaper in Pontotoc, but also to pursue his avocation: collecting oral histories of frontiersmen and Revolutionary War veterans. After less than a year, the newspaper failed. The subsequent business and farming ventures Draper and Larrabee began in 1842 also failed. Draper left Mississippi late in the summer of 1842 to rejoin his relatives in Buffalo, New York. He returned briefly in the summer of 1843, but Draper left that fall for Baltimore, Maryland, where he pursued his collecting full-time.

Elizabeth Larrabee bought a homestead and remained in Pontotoc until she contracted "the ague" in 1844 and went to live with her brothers in Wisconsin. Charles Larrabee also left Pontotoc in 1844 and moved to Chicago, Illinois, to continue his law practice. He later moved to Wisconsin in 1847, where he eventually became a circuit judge, a United States congressman, and a Union colonel. Lyman Draper moved permanently to Wisconsin in 1854 at the insistence of Charles Larrabee who had found him a job as executive officer of the newly created State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison. Draper held this position until his death on August 26, 1891. In 1864, Larrabee moved to the West Coast, practicing law in California, Oregon, and Washington. Charles Larrabee was seriously injured in a California railroad accident, and he died on January 20, 1883.

1. Letter. 1842. 1 item.