"I cannot get him to stick at school": Stephen's Roving Youth
After the White Cottage, the Foster family lived an itinerant life. Between 1832 and 1846 William Sr. and Eliza moved at least ten times, and most likely many more, with various combinations of their children included in their many households. These residences ranged from rented rooms and houses to hotels and the homes of relatives. The locations were generally in and around Pittsburgh (Allegheny Town, now the city’s North Side neighborhood) and Youngstown, Ohio (where the Fosters' daughter Henrietta and William Barclay Foster Jr. lived for a period). One was due to a cholera outbreak in Pittsburgh in 1833, others were due to changes in employment and income for William Sr. Between relocating with his family and attending several schools, Stephen himself moved at least eighteen times during these years. [i]
Perhaps as a result, Stephen Foster’s career as a student was inconsistent and erratic, and his concept of “home” uncertain. According to his brother Morrison, “Stephen was not a very methodical student. He early developed . . . symptoms which ill accorded with discipline of the school-room.” Stephen began his studies at the age of five at an “infant school” taught by an elderly woman and her daughter. Morrison relates an anecdote in which, when called for a lesson to recite the alphabet, Stephen let out “a yell like that of a Comanche Indian” and “bounded . . . into the road, and never stopped running and yelling until he reached home.” Stephen was also home schooled by his sister Ann Eliza and later studied at the Allegheny Academy, where a reverend named Joseph Stockton and an Irishman named John Kelly instructed him in arithmetic, English, and the classics. Stephen’s school-books included a grammar manual, English Reader by Lindley Murray, Walker’s Dictionary (see Fig. 1), and Hutton’s Mathematics and the Western Calculator for arithmetic. The frontispiece of an 1829 edition of Murray’s reader reveals that the aim of the volume was to instruct students on more than the English language—it hopes to “inculcate some of the most important principles of piety and virtue” alongside its grammatical lessons. Among its contents are sections entitled “Virtue and piety man’s highest interest,” “The Injustice of an Uncharitable Spirit,” and “On the Slavery of Vice”. [ii]
Morrison also remarks that Stephen “preferred to ramble among the woods and upon the hills by the three beautiful rivers of his home with his books and pencil, alone, and thoughtful.” Stephen stayed for a time in 1837 with an uncle on his mother’s side, John Struthers of Poland, Ohio, just south of Youngstown. The following summer the Fosters relocated to Struthers’s farmstead, which the old man expanded to make more comfortable for the family. In Biography, Songs and Musical Compositions of Stephen C. Foster Morrison mentions that Stephen, from the ages of ten to thirteen, visited the elderly Struthers “who had been a surveyor, hunter, and Indian fighter” and who “was very fond of Stephen." It seems that Stephen and his uncle went on many nocturnal hunts and that Struthers regaled him with tales of adventures from his pioneer days. Stephen apparently had time to day dream on the farm, without the pressures of school and farm work. In a letter from Henrietta to William Jr., Stephen’s sister wrote that he “enjoys himself finely” at the farm, and that “Uncle just lets him do as he pleases." Uncle Struthers, according to Morrison, “prophesied that Stephen, who even then displayed great originality and musical talent, would be something famous if he lived to be a man.” [iii]
In January of 1840 Stephen moved with his brother William Jr. to Towanda, Pennsylvania (Fig. 2), a small town on the Susquehanna River, where he attended the Towanda Academy. William’s canal office and headquarters were located in the town, which was home to less than 500 people, yet contained a downtown and several houses built primarily in the fashionable Greek Revival style. Stephen and his brother traveled the 300 miles between Pittsburgh and Towanda by sleigh, with Stephen wrapped in blankets and with a heated brick which helped to keep the boy’s feet and legs warm during the journey. His general attitude toward formal schooling, however, seems not to have changed. William Wallace Kingsbury, a friend of Stephen’s during their Towanda days, recalled that Stephen and he “often played truant together, rambling by shady streams or gathering wild strawberries in the meadows or pastures, removed from the sound of the old academy bell.” Stephen attended Towanda Academy for only a short time before being transferred in August of 1840 by his brother William to Athens Academy in nearby Tioga Point (Fig. 3). [iv]
Stephen spent almost a year at Tioga—a span during which he did not see his parents. He boarded there with a family by the name of Herrick. In letters to his brother William he complained that his room was very cold and that he had “no place to study in the evenings,” because the noisy children who lived in the house with him were “crying and talking [so] that it’s imposible to read.” He seems to have been homesick while living in Athens. His mother refers to him in a letter from March of 1841 as “poor little Stephen” when asking William Jr. how the boy was doing, and Foster himself called Athens “that lonesome place” (Fig. 4). [v]
Stephen left Tioga Point in the summer of 1841, returning to Pittsburgh with his parents for a short while before leaving for Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania (Fig. 5), about twenty miles south of the city. He wrote to William Jr. on July 24, mentioning that their father had paid his tuition ($12.50) and boarding ($2.00 per week), but requesting that his brother send him money for several necessities, including funds for joining a literary society, a “summer coat”, and “$1.25 per week for washing as I have to keep myself very clean here”. This trend of asking for money from his brothers would continue later in his life as seen through his correspondence with Morrison. Stephen’s time at Canonsburg was decidedly short lived. After only seven days away, he moved into the boarding house in Allegheny City where his parents were renting rooms. Canonsburg was the last attempt at formal schooling that Stephen would undertake. After his return to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1841, he would remain with his parents until 1846, when he moved to Cincinnati to work as a bookkeeper for his brother Dunning. Eliza and William Sr. were living in a house owned by William Jr. on the East Common in Allegheny, where they made use of Irish immigrants as paid servants. Eliza wrote to “Brother William,” as the family often referred to the eldest son, that they had:[vi]
—settled down into the house keeping having a
good girl which enables me to keep clean and
comfortable as I study nothing but our comfort . . .
everything around our neighborhood looks natural
and perfectly harmonizes with the very pleasant
association of home.
For his part, Stephen studied music and mathematics with a “Mr. Moody” at a day school and seemed to enjoy being back at home with his mother. Eliza wrote to her son William that Stephen played with a new tortoise-shell cat that had appeared at the house, and that Stephen also read “a great deal, and fools about not attall.” William Sr. in two letters to William Jr. expressed frustration and bewilderment on the part of Stephen, writing that “I cannot get him to stick at school” and that “he is uncommonly studious at home but dislikes going to school . . . I dislike to urge him so long as he discovers no evil or idle propensities.” [vii]
Stephen Foster’s musical education was equally as fractured and random as his physical relocations in the years after the White Cottage, but it seems to have progressed well despite this. There is an early episode of Stephen at the age of seven visiting a music store, Smith & Mellor in Pittsburgh, where he “took up a flageolet” and “in a few minutes had . . . so mastered its stops and sounds that he played Hail Columbia in perfect time and accent.” At nine he was part of a thespian company made up of the boys of neighborhood families who performed minstrel songs in a carriage house theatre. Stephen was allegedly the “star performer” and was even paid a weekly sum. Evelyn Foster Morneweck writes that when he was a teenager in Ohio, Stephen played the flute, accompanied by his sister Henrietta, who perhaps also taught him rudiments of the keyboard and chords on the guitar. A couple years later he was at Tioga Point, creating his first known composition the “Tioga Waltz” in April of 1841. According to Morrison, when he returned home to Pittsburgh later that year he began studying music theory with Henry Kleber (Fig. 6). When he moved into the Union Avenue house he began to “compose in earnest,” as biographer JoAnne O’Connell writes, and produced his first published composition “Open Thy Lattice, Love” (1844) (Figs. 7, 8).[viii]
Some reminisces of Stephen written by contemporaries and biographers have claimed that the songwriter was influenced by the rivers, forests, birds, and animals that he encountered roving through the many countrysides of his youth, and that he even modeled some of his pieces after birdsong in particular. There may be similarities, and perhaps some of Stephen’s early pieces were inspired by these childhood experiences, but it is impossible to verify this with the existing evidence. For example, Stephen’s “Tioga Waltz” no longer exists as Stephen wrote it. The piece in its current manuscript form is based on a version that Morrison Foster transcribed from memory and included in his 1896 biography of Stephen (Fig. 9). “Open Thy Lattice Love" (Fig. 10), a serenade and Foster’s first published song, with lyrics by George Pope Morris; the marching “There’s a Good Time Coming” (1846) with lyrics by Charles Mackay; and even “Where is Thy Spirit, Mary?” (1847) (Fig. 11) were all perhaps influenced by the opera singer Henry Russell, whom Stephen heard perform in Pittsburgh in 1843. As with the songs that seem to hearken back to the White Cottage, such possible connections are tantalizing, but ultimately impossible to confirm. [ix]
How much did Stephen’s experiences in his early life influence his later music? As will be seen in subsequent sections of this site, Stephen never settled into a permanent home, and like in his youth, lived in several boarding houses, stand-alone houses, and hotels—many of which he shared with family. A pattern during his adulthood in this regard is discernable, but it is difficult to determine with certainty why Stephen never settled down in Pittsburgh, Ohio, New York, or otherwise.