It’s A Wagner Week: Teenage Tales From 1887
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Hill Country Living
By Coulter Fussell
It’s a Wagner Week! I know that upon reading that intro phrase a whole group of readers just turned the page of the paper. But there’s also a whole group of you that just buckled in! I’m always appreciative of my Wagner Week readers. Occasionally, I’ll run into someone around town who will bring up something I wrote about in my column.
I always have total recall when it’s something from the Wagner letters but zero recall when it’s a happening from one of the columns about my own life. So I guess we know which column material I personally prefer.
This week we have a letter from a teenage Andrew Gallatin Wagner who is off at Southeastern Presbyterian University. He is writing to his cousin, John Henry Wagner, who is also a teenager but off at Bingham Military Academy in North Carolina. Andrew is king of the run-on sentence, especially when he gets going on about girls. This letter isn’t dated, but I estimate it around 1887. In 34 years from the writing of this letter, Andrew’s little brother, Will (who is mentioned in this letter), will meet his fate on Wagner Street — at the wrong end of an ax.
Clarksville, Tenn.
September 13
Dear John,
It is Sunday and as I had nothing to do so I thought I’d write to you, and I want you to answer it right away. We arrived here two weeks ago and I’ve gotten fixed and at work. I’m going to study really hard this session, for I might come back next year.
Well, you just left Water Valley two weeks too soon, for those four girls that Will Howd was expecting all summer came about two weeks before I left and stayed a week, and as I had a cousin in the crowd I had a right to go down oftener than the other boys, and so I went down every day almost while they were there and had them up at my house twice and you may know that I made a “mash” on them and they made one on me. I will tell you what’s a fact, I was “struck.” I wish you had been there; you would’ve liked the girls a great deal. Ol’ Ed Hoke and Madden Smith were the worst “struck” boys you ever saw. They wanted to go every night but did not want to go so often just after you left.
Your father and a whole lot of other fellows and Will and myself went down in Yocona Bottom and stayed one night and two days, and then just before we left for Clarksville, Uncle Dan and some men went down in the Mississippi Bottom. I was going with them but could not go because I had to come up here. I saw your father the other day down at the train, and he and Charles McCarty and four other fellows were going east after goods. He seemed to be looking well.
Our school has 100 scholars now and more expected. How many has yours? Write as soon as you get this and tell everything you know.
We are all well and getting along fine. Hope that you are doing as well. I’m in haste.
Your cousin,
A.G. Wagner
