Sincerely, Joel C. Swisher

Biographical Background

Joel C. Swisher, graduation from George School, 1916

Joel Carter Swisher, son of Charles Ross Swisher and Edith Stubbs Swisher, was born November 19, 1895 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Edith died in childbirth.

Charles Swisher had been in the dairy business with a maternal uncle of Edith’s, Joel Carter. Edith had been the bookkeeper for the business. A year or so after Edith’s death, Charles left for Kansas to seek another business opportunity. It was agreed that the Stubbs grandparents would care for baby Joel until Charles was established. A few years later, after Charles had remarried, he returned to the Stubbs family home in Peach Bottom, Lancaster County, for his son. The grandmother and the aunts, who doted on Joel, raised such a commotion, weeping and wailing, that the grandfather, Cooper Stubbs, persuaded Charles that he would be doing a terrible thing to take Joel away from them, and so Charles reluctantly returned to Kansas without him. Joel, too young to understand, grew up believing his father had not wanted him and had a strained relationship with him into adulthood.

Correspondents

These letters and postcards were sent to the following people. A few letters are from some of these people.

• Cooper Stubbs and Anna Maria Stubbs, Joel’s maternal grandparents, who raised him after his mother’s death. They raised him within the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), to which their families had belonged for many generations.
• Aunt Hattie Stubbs, a semi-invalid, having had an illness during her childhood which left her deformed with a hunchback, and something less than bright, although she could read and write. She lived with Joel and his grandparents.
• Aunt Mary Stubbs, also a spinster, was an RN who lived with wealthy families as their family nurse. She was the financial mainstay of the Stubbs family. When Joel graduated from Fulton Township High School as valedictorian of his class, Aunt Mary paid for the extension of his education at George School, a Quaker boarding school in Bucks County. Later, she loaned Joel the money to go to Penn State, which he did for one year.
• Aunt Lizzie Gatchell, the eldest of the Stubbs sisters, lived on a farm with Joel’s first cousins, Mary Gatchell (referred to as Miss Gatchell in some letters), Harlan Gatchell and his wife, Margaret Gatchell, and their young family.
• Aunt Kate Bradley was married to Martin Bradley, who operated a mill and feed store in Peach Bottom. They had five children living when Joel left for the army in 1917. Edith Bradley, their eldest, was just a few years younger than Joel, his closest cousin, and the “sister” of his childhood.
• Great-aunt A. Catherine (“Kate”) Carter, his grandmother’s sister.
• Helen Clement, a classmate of Joel’s from George School.

License and Credits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The original transcription of these letters into typewritten form was done by Helen Swisher Davenport; the content is used with her generous permission.

Most images were scanned by Joel Davenport. Claire Wilson conducted additional research.

“Personal” theme, Copyright 2017 by Obox Themes.