Sourcing that historical fiction
When you prefer your facts spiral-bound
Earlier this month, I was on a historical fiction panel at Left Coast Crime in Washington state to talk about my new novel, The County Line. The site was billed as Seattle, but was actually in Bellevue, just east of Seattle. As it turns out, my aunt — my mother’s sister — left Columbia County, Arkansas and lived in Bellevue, Washington many years ago. But today we’re looking at Columbia County, Arkansas, the site of my fiction.
One of the questions required of any historical fiction panel is “How do you do your research?”
From newspapers to diaries, the sources are often exactly what you’d think. One of the most helpful sources, though, has been a spiral-bound, cheap reprint, bought from some dude off eBay a few years back.
I bought a copy of the Columbia County section of Goodspeed’s Biographical and Historical Memoirs of Southern Arkansas. Back in the late 19th-century, The Goodspeed Publishing Company out of Chicago, Nashville, and St. Louis published histories of “prominent” citizens that were mostly sent in by these prominent citizens.
In the early 1880s Westin A. Goodspeed, a successful Nashville-based publisher, discovered that volumes combining local history, biography, and state historical records had sold well in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northern states. In the South, except for Kentucky, Virginia, and Georgia, little compilation of resources had occurred since the Civil War; Goodspeed acted to fill that gap in Tennessee. — Tennessee Encyclopedia
So you have these regional collections, and you can go to AbeBooks or Amazon or eBay or elsewhere and snag one for the county you’re interested in.
Of course, Goodspeed aren’t the only folks who have done this. In fact, eBay has a storefront of sorts devoted to these county histories: American History County by County.
Heck, you don’t even need to hand over ten bucks to some eBay seller in Bucksnort, Tennessee or Chadron, Nebraska to read these books. The Internet Archive has you covered, and you can download and print your own.
The reprinted, sprial-bound version I bought contains the 65 pages that make up the Columbia County section of the bigger southern Arkansas book from Goodspeed, as well as a section of Columbia County information from a Work Projects Administration American Guide book.
You can learn about the people from the area, as well as the area itself. I find the financial information really useful, as you get a good idea of how far your dollar would go in, say, 1873.
Even this little section pictured above is so full of wonderful information, both good and, well wrong.
(The book mentions here that the “present townships” included “Lambertine,” though the town was Lamartine, named for a French poet, naturally.)
The old military roads mentioned here fascinate me. As does the poor farm. Reading through this book, you get great flavor and facts, though I’d suggest double-checking both.
And, if you’re from that area, you’ll likely as not run across your kin. Here’s one of my own uncles (great-great-etc), Monroe Jefferson Talley.
You also get so many great names: Littleton, Salida, for example. Heck, my great-great(and so on) grandfather Elisha (son of Micajah) Talley even gets mentioned.
If you’re interested in researching history, either for creating fiction or enjoying non-fiction, I’d suggest looking around for the Goodspeed book on your area, if there is one. And if there isn’t, I’m sure someone on eBay will trade you another publisher’s spiral-bound county history for fifteen dollars or so.
Next time: more historical fiction sources.
Salida—guessing I wouldn’t want to live there. 😆