So this is what her parents looked like...

In a moment in between thoughts, I googled "dr. james green carson" and look what I found.

These are Katherine's parents. Well I know that is her mother but I'm not convinced that that is her father. The portraits are in the collection of Tennessee State Archives and are attributed to the same artist and the same pre-1861 period. The artist is listed as Frazier with a question mark. But the portrait of her father looks very young. So if people were smaller back then, were they also younger????*

*For my non-historian followers, I hate to be the one to tell you but people were not smaller back then. This is a joke.

And now I'm going to bore you with history!

Back in September I promised a series of posts on Katherine Carson Breckinridge. I know it has been almost 9 months but I'm going to make good on that promise. I'm beginning to start up the additional research I've been meaning to do for over 5 years. So I'll revise the past and share my new discoveries as I find them.


Katherine Breckinridge at age 22.

 Katherine Carson Breckinridge was born Katherine Breckinridge Carson on February 20, 1853 on her father's plantation in northeastern Louisiana. She was the daughter of Southern planter privilege and this would be her legacy to her children. My research on Breckinridge was varied and wide reaching because she didn't exist in a vacuum. Her world, her experiences, her family all influenced the woman she became. The part of the process that I dreaded the most but found the most satisfying was doing her genealogy. Unlike the Ancestry.com commercials lead you to believe, genealogy is hard work and very time consuming. And genealogy is not just tracing someone family tree. You have to figure who these people in the family tree are and what they were like. For instance, I knew that Katherine Breckinridge Carson was the daughter of Dr. James Green(e) Carson and Catherine Waller Carson but I didn't know anything about them. What were their politics, their religious views, their thoughts on slavery, and their constitutions? All these questions are important for historians to ask.

As an aside - historians are supposed to be as unbias and objective about their subjects as possible. It is also important to be an observer of your subject and not interact with your subject. Historians are not novelist and I will admit that at times it was very difficult not to give Katherine Breckinridge traits and characteristics that I wanted her to have or needed her to have in order to make the "story" better. Yes, I know she is dead but when you are spending the majority of your time consumed by the life of another person, it is hard not to "talk" to them.

After some looking in online resources and library databases, I was able to locate some information about Katherine's parents. The information below came from the following primary source materials.

• Handwritten note, Carson Family Genealogy, Container 843, Family Papers; “The Family of Thomas Carson, Sr.,” edited by Alan Carson, http://alcarson.home.texas.net/Tom_Sr_Family.htm.
• John Q. Anderson, “Dr. James Green Carson, Ante-Bellum Planter of Mississippi and Louisiana,” Journal of Mississippi History 18 (October 1956). 
• Breckinridge Family Papers, Manuscript Reading Room, Library of Congress.

Katherine's grandfather, Joseph Carson, immigrated to Washington County, Alabama in 1801, and established himself as an attorney and landowner. He married Caroline C. Green of Natchez, Mississippi in 1814 and they had one son, James Green Carson (Katherine's father), on March 8, 1815. Joseph Carson died in 1818 and Caroline Green Carson died when James Green Carson was about seven or eight years old.

After his mother’s death, James Green Carson, moved to Natchez, Mississippi to live with his maternal uncle, Judge James Green. Before James Carson reached adulthood, Judge Green died and left his nephew in the care of a family friend, James Railey, a wealthy Mississippi planter. With his inheritance from his father and his maternal uncle, Carson availed himself of the opportunities wealth provided him and went to boarding school in Connecticut. He attended the University of Virginia before transferring to Centre College in Kentucky to be closer to his fiance, Catherine Breckinridge Waller.

James Green Carson married Catherine Waller of Fox Gap, Franklin County, Kentucky, on July 28, 1835. Shortly after the wedding, the couple moved to Canebrake Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi (near Natchez). The Carsons owned sixty slaves who worked as house servants and field hands on the large plantation. James Green and Catherine Waller Carson had five children (who lived to adulthood) between 1843 and 1853: Joseph (born October 19, 1843), William Waller (born June 2, 1845), James Green (born March 25, 1847), Edward Lees (born August 12, 1848), and Katherine Breckinridge (born February 20, 1853).

By 1850, Carson owned extensive amounts of cotton plantation land in southwestern Mississippi and northeastern Louisiana. Plantation records list James Green Carson as the owner of three large plantations: Airlie Plantation in Carroll Parish, Louisiana; Canebrake Plantation in Adams County, Mississippi and Concordia Parish, Louisiana; and Oasis Plantation in southwestern Mississippi.

I would say that the four paragraphs above took me months to compile. In writing history, research takes you down a lot of different plans. Some are dead ends and some are just wrong for that topics but all are interesting and educational.

And not only did I have to do genealogy for Katherine's family but I needed to do genealogy for her husband, Clifton. You never know where a little primary source gem might be hiding. Luckily most of Katherine and Clifton's papers are part of the Breckinridge Family Papers at the Library of Congress. I had the amazing pleasure of doing the majority of my thesis research in the Manuscript Reading Room. It was an ideal research experience. Despite popular belief, I was about to photocopy a good number of Katherine's letters and study them every carefully once I returned to Arkansas.

Then there are the papers of her eldest children, James Carson Breckinridge and Mary Carson Breckinridge. Her son, Carson, was a General in the Marine Corps and his personal papers including letters to this mother toward the end of her life are at the Marine Corps University Archives in Quantico, Virginia. Her daughter, Mary, founded the Frontier Nursing Service in Kentucky and her papers including personal letters to her mother are at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I hope to be able to look at those in the near future so that I can get a better idea of the type of mother she was.

Despite the years of research and volumes of information I have collected, I still have more to do. I don't really know who Katherine Carson Breckinridge was but I'm determined to find out.

Chasing The Dress: Katherine Carson Breckinridge



The Dress

 When I entered graduate school, the thesis process intimidated me. I think it intimidates most people. I had never written any thing that long and although I'm a good writer and a good researcher, the end result was going to be manuscript bigger than any thing I ever imagined producing. So I knew I had to find a topic that I was passionate about because if I wasn't passionate it about the topic, I might never finish.

As I began to explore the landscape of history and possible topics, professors encourage us to look at Arkansas History for 2 main reasons -- 1) we were in Arkansas and the primary research materials would be accessible, and 2) strong, scholarly history needs to written about the state. This was my problem - I was passionate about late Imperial Russian history. Nicholas and Alexandra, court society, and pretty clothing. Arkansas was about a far as you can get from the Imperial Court of the Autocrats of All the Russias! Or so I thought.

In 1999, I began working at the Old State House Museum. In their collection was the court gown of Katherine Carson Breckinridge. Her husband, Congressman Clifton Rodes Breckinridge of Arkansas, was appointed Minister to Russia in 1894 by President Grover Cleveland. The Breckinridges traveled to Saint Petersburg in late 1894 and arrived 3 days before Tsar Alexander III died. In this twist of fate, Katherine Breckinridge witnessed the funeral of a Tsar, the wedding of the new Tsar to Princess Alix of Hesse-Darnstadt, the coronation of the Tsar and Tsarina and the birth of one of the Grand Duchess. In fact, Arkansas and Russia are not that far apart.

Once I discovered the dress and Katherine Breckinridge, I was on a mission. This WOULD be my thesis topic. The new question became what direction will the paper take - will I focus solely on the dress or will I do a biography of the woman and include the dress as a part? Although I believed I had enough to write just about the dress, the designer John Redfern and the events Breckinridge attended in Russia, I didn't have her whole traveling wardrobe and it would be difficult to produce roughly 150 pages on one garment. So a biographer I would become.



KCB Letter

I soon found out that Katherine Breckinridge wrote letters. Yes, I know that everyone wrote letters in the 1890s but she wrote hundreds of letters from Russia to her friends and family in the United States. She wrote about life in Russia, about the Imperial Court and the wedding and coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra. All her papers are in the Breckinridge Family Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress. And in many cases, both sides of the correspondence existing the Breckinridge Papers because she was writing to other family members. It was a gold mine. The details that she was able to convey. I have only found one other American woman (from Minnesota) who was present at the coronation and she published her collection in a volume that is only available at a few repositories in the US.
But even with the letters, there were lots of questions left unanswered. What about her childhood and her family in Louisiana? Why did she go to New York to live with her mother's sister? What kind of mother was she? What was her relationship like with her husband - traditional or non-traditional? Who is John Redfern (fashion designer) and why can't I find any information on him in traditional fashion and costume histories? All questions needing answers. And I found the answers to most of them. I will do a series of posts on KCB and more to come...