Fent Noland: The Early Years

Abstract

ON THE FIRST DAY OF 1858, sitting in a silent, empty house on Main Street in Batesville, Arkansas, a slender man, between coughing spells, penned a letter to his nephew in far-off Virginia: I am the sole tenant of the old mansion, sleep in it and write from a room filled with a thousand memories of the past. Were I a believer in spiritualism and a medium, I could conjure up many beloved forms, who have passed from this to a better world. I do not ever feel lonely-a pleasant and sad feeling comes over me-soothing in its influence than otherwise. . . . What will the year 1858 do? How many who enter it full of life and hope are destined ere its race is over to sleep in the cold and silent grave. . . . I have scarcely the shadow of a hope that I shall be able to visit Virginia. I am beginning to feel old and somehow or other have not managed to have me a home. I shall build this summer and then I expect to pass quietly away the life it may please a kind providence to grant me.1 In another man, such musings might have seemed morbid affectation. From Charles Fenton Mercer Noland, they were an honest assessment of his circumstances. He was back in Batesville to handle the depressing business of disposing of his father-in-law's estate. John Ringgold had recently vanished from the dark deck of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. Despite Ringgold's financial success-he was known as one of the most important businessmen in north Arkansas-the Panic of 1857 and his unexpected death had conspired to eat up much of his wealth. Ringgold's wife, Elizabeth, had died two years earlier, and the couple's daughters had married, leaving the brick house empty. Noland's own circumstances were happier, with a beautiful wife and a thirteen-year-old son. Thanks to two decades of publishing letters that had been embraced by a national audience, he was famous. As a legislator, public official, and newspaperman, he had also become a luminary among Arkansas's Whig minority. He was about to build in Little Rock the first home he had ever owned. Yet there were aspects of his life that dimmed the brightness of the future he hoped for. At forty-seven, he had enjoyed little financial success of his own, despite years of seeking the right endeavor, one that would be worthy of his enthusiasm and abilities and bring material rewards. He had lived in Little Rock for two years, and he had worked in three jobs, none of which proved satisfying to him. In addition, there was his persistent bad health. For more than two decades, he had been weakened by "consumption" and had several times been ill to the point of expecting to die. By 1858, his health was worse than ever, and he knew it. His words to his nephew were prophetic-before six months had passed, he would "sleep in the cold and silent grave," in a donated plot in Little Rock's Mount Holly cemetery. His son, Lewis Berkeley Noland, would marry and manage to live through the Civil War, only to die childless in 1870 after a fall from his horse. With no estate and, ultimately, no posterity, Noland's only legacy seemed to be a mass of short publications, spinning tales of bear hunts, horse races, tavern brawls, and down-home politics in Arkansas. He had created a literary character, Pete Whetstone, whose letters to the New York Spirit of the Times delighted the nation. As perhaps the most popular and prolific contributor to one of the most influential outlets for humorous writing of his day, Noland would later be recognized by scholars as a major figure in the literary school of "Southwestern Humor."2 In his own time, Noland would be confused with his creation (he received notes and gifts addressed to Pete) and imitated by other writers. Noland's fame grew so great that he became a celebrity, perhaps the best-known antebellum Arkansan. But unlike many of his colleagues in America's literary world, Noland did not collect his writings in a published volume, so he never made any money from the book sales that would almost certainly have followed. …