Jennie Casseday's Rest Cottage for Working Women, Pewee Valley, KY

Jennie Casseday's Rest Cottage for Working Women

Marietta Waring
(Jennie Casseday)
(1840-1893)

Jennie Casseday

A brief version of Marietta Waring's life story is recounted in a conversation between the Little Colonel and Mrs. Bisbee in Chapter XIII, "In the Footsteps of Amanthis"," of "The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation", published in 1905:

... "I nevah knew till the othah day that Miss Marietta has been an invalid so long. Miss Allison told me she had been in bed for fifteen yeahs! It's awful! Why, that is as long as my whole lifetime has been."

"She was to have been married," began Mrs. Bisbee, pouring out the romance at which Miss Allison had only hinted. "She was engaged to Murray Cathright, one of the finest young lawyers I ever knew, steady as a meeting-house. He had the respect and confidence of everybody. Well, Marietta had her trousseau all ready, and a beautiful one it was. Her father had sent to Paris for the wedding-gown, and all her linen was hand-embroidered by the nuns in some French convent.

"They certainly had all that heart could wish in those days. It is a pity that Agnes was too young to enjoy her share of luxuries. Well, just a week before the time set for the wedding, Murray Cathright mysteriously disappeared. He had gone away on a short business trip. His family traced him to a hotel in Pittsburg, and then lost all clue, except that just before leaving the hotel he had asked the clerk for the time-tables of an Eastern railroad. There was a terrible wreck on that road that same night. The entire train went through a bridge into the river, and they thought he must have been swept away with the unidentified dead. But it was months before Marietta would believe it.

"She acted as if her mind were a little touched all that summer. Used to dress up every evening in the clothes he had liked best, with a flower in her hair, and go down to the honeysuckle arbour to wait for him. She'd sit there and wait and wait all alone, until her father'd go down and lead her in. The next day she'd go through the same performance. It ended in a spell of brain fever. She came out of that with her mind all right, but she never was strong again. After all the rest of their troubles came, she had a stroke of paralysis. It's left her so she can't walk. But she can lie there and make buttonholes and pull basting threads. She's a perfect marvel, she's so patient and cheerful. People like to go there just on that account. You'd never know she had a trouble to hear her talk. But I know what she's suffered, and I know that she still keeps the wedding-gown. It's laid away in rose leaves for her to be buried in."

(Note: The Waring story is slowly developed fromh Chapter 12 through 15 of Christmas Vacation, and mentioned again in "The Little Colonel's Knight Comes Riding, Chapter 13")

We believe that Jennie Casseday may have been Annie Fellows Johnston's inspiration for Marietta Waring. According to the "Encyclopedia of Louisville," Jennie Casseday was a philanthropist and civic leader:

"...When a carriage accident in 1861 left her an invalid, she devoted the rest of her life to helping others, conducting her affairs in bed. Casseday was instrumental in the 1878 creation of the Jennie Casseday Flower Mission, which distributed flowers and texts of scripture to the destitute and sick. Mission work also included distribution of clothing, fruits, fuel, and attending the sick, among other acts of charity....Four years after its inception, the mission became a department of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, and Casseday became its national superintendent....Casseday also helped organize the Louisville Order of the King's Daughters, which served the sick and the poor, and the Lying-In Hospital for Women of Small Means, which opened on Sixth Street in 1882...In 1890, she started the Jennie Casseday Rest Cottage for Working Women in Pewee Valley...."

Although she was never a resident of Pewee Valley and died a few years before Annie Fellows Johnston made her first visit to Pewee Valley, Jennie Casseday's charitable works were certainly well known to Pewee Valley society through the Rest Cottage for Working Women, which operated from 1891 into the 1940s on 63 acres at the end of what is now called Rest Cottage Lane. Jennie was also a member of the Warren Memorial Presbyterian Church in Louisville. According to "Jennie Casseday of Louisville : her intimate life as told by her sister, Mrs. Fannie Casseday Duncan," although Jennie was unable to leave her bed to attend services, Mr. James Clark, president of Louisville's first telephone company, has a phone installed at the church so Jennie could listen to the Rev. A.A. Willet's sermons. We know that Samuel and Louise Culbertson were members of Warren Memorial and assume that many of the Little Colonel folks would have attended services there if they happened to be in Louisville on a Sunday Morning. Finally, we also know that the women of the Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church established their own chapter of the King's Daughters from 1894 to 1909 for the purpose of doing charitable works.

In addition to the fact that both Jennie and Marietta were long-term invalids, paralyzed and bedridden, there are several other parallels between them (quotes taken from "Jennie Casseday of Louisville : her intimate life as told by her sister, Mrs. Fannie Casseday Duncan"):

1. Before the carriage accident that injured her spinal cord and left her partially paralyzed, Jennie, like Marietta Waring, suffered a bout of brain fever.

"Just before Jennie graduated, her years of too-intensive study told upon her brain, and fever carried her out on its drifting tides, bewildering her for months; but after that came a period of happy young womanhood of beaux and travel and dress and the usual whirl of social life."

2. Marietta Waring is described as a seamstress. Jennie Casseday formed a Mending Bureau to repair clothing for those who lacked the time and skills.

"At one time ...we lived in a large boarding house whose Christian owner rented the top story to young men whose purses were usually very flat. They were small clerks, errand boys, jobless youths who were to read Micawbers, always hoping for "something to turn up," but who were themselves usually turned down. to the boarding house also came many bill collectors in the hopeless task of collecting bad debts. From her window, Jennie often saw these down-and-outers. Sometimes they had their shabby jackets buttoned over obviously unshirted bosoms. Sometimes a celluloid collar, held in place by a soiled necktie, towered bravely above a rim of skin that had failed to make connection with the frayed collar. Mostly their conditions gave them that hang dog look of failure which bodes ill success for the business of collecting bad debts from unwilling debtors. These people got on Jennie's heart and she wondered how she could help them, even a little bit -- help them and hundreds like them...she opened a "Mending Bureau" for such persons as had garments needing stitches but had not skill or time to put the stitches in. In those days rooms were plentiful and cheap and sewing women who were glad to get work by the week were easily reached. So a room was rented and the Bureau was publicly announced."

As to Marietta Waring's evening wanderings through the honeysuckle arbor waiting for her dead fiance to return, perhaps Annie Fellows Johnston was inspired by the tale of Mary Belle Wilson, the Ghost of Floydsburg Cemetery. According to this enduring Oldham County ghost story, Mary Belle had two suitors prior to the Civil War. Both came back alive and she was forced to choose one. She was to be married on December 28, 1874, but on the eve of her wedding, the rejected suitor stabbed her to death in her second floor bedroom in her father's (Colonel James F. Wilson) home that still stands across from Floydsburg Cemetery. People claim to see her apparition, dressed in her wedding finery, wandering the cemetery at night.

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