Park letters offer a window on the past
Bobby Kilgo looking over some of the E.C. Park letters his family entrusted to the Darlington County Historical Commission.
Photo by Samantha Lyles
By Samantha Lyles, Staff Writer, slyles@newsandpress.net
The Darlington County Historical Commission received a very special gift this year: a collection of letters spanning nearly forty years detailing the trials and triumphs of the Park family, which has roots in Darlington County dating back to 1790 when Thomas Park came to Society Hill to teach at St. David’s Academy.
The letters were donated by local attorney Robert “Bobby” Kilgo, Sr. and his family, who saw the need to preserve these documents properly in order to ensure their survival. The letters passed down to Bobby from his mother and grandmother, fortuitously kept in a ventilated wooden box that protected them from light and spared them from dry rot.
“They’re in amazingly great condition considering the age,” says Kilgo, noting that the only thing more amazing that the letters’ condition is their content.
“The early set of letters from 1849 deals with the story of E.C. Park, Sr as he travels to California; he didn’t make it… and E.C. Park, Jr, at age 12, went on to California,” Kilgo says.
The bulk of the correspondence deals with that remarkable young man: Edmund Calvin Botsfield Park, Jr.. He spent the early years of his life in Darlington, moving with his family to Greenville, Illinois in 1939 when he was a small boy. His father practiced medicine there for a decade, until the lure of potential riches made him light out for California in search of gold. He took young Edmund with him, thinking the trip might aid the boy’s poor health. Ironically, it was his own health that failed – he soon took ill with cholera, as did other members of the wagon train expedition, and he died in Independence, Missouri in 1849.
Undeterred, the rest of the party continued westward for eleven long months, taking the fatherless boy along with them – a bereaved youth with little say in his own fate. Young Edmund focused on learning to keep him occupied. Already fluent in Latin, he learned to speak and read Spanish during the trip. When the wagons finally reached California, Edmund headed to the post office with a group of friends to see if any letters awaited them. There they encountered a crush of immigrants all seeking news from home, and the post office was a bit of a madhouse.
“(Edmund) gets separated from his friends and never sees them again,” Kilgo says, noting that as frightening as that might have been, the boy’s troubles were about to get worse. “Hours later, he finally gets to pick up a letter from home and it says that his mother, a week after learning that his father had died, died herself. His siblings were spread out with friends back in Illinois, and now he has to raise money to get home.”
A sketch of Edmund’s life published some years later related this daunting situation: “Small in stature, delicate in appearance, the only answer to his question for work was, “What can you do – a little fellow like you?”
Displaying admirable aplomb, Edmund used his language skills to support himself, earning money for the return trip by translating Spanish. After surviving a year in rough-and-tumble Gold Rush California, he had enough saved to buy himself a circuitous passage home to Illinois – sailing from San Francisco to Panama, walking across the isthmus, taking a ship to Cuba (where he witnessed a public execution of a political radical) and likely sailing up the Mississippi. Finding his Illinois home gone and his family scattered, Edmund continued to fend for himself. He financed his own education and took up the medical profession. In 1857, he married Emma M. Dowler, the woman who would finally return to him a sense of home and family. Their peace, however, was not to last.
Civil War ripped the nation in two, and Dr. Park was called to serve as a Union army surgeon in Arkansas. During his absence, he and Emily exchanged letters regularly, and the text shows this correspondence meant a great deal to them both.
Dr. and Mrs. EC Parks, Jr.
Edmund shared harrowing tales of war, of his own brushes with mortality, and of his yearning for home. Emma wrote to her husband of the weather, of church goings-on, of family and friends, always offering heartening passages about God’s love or sweet anecdotes about their family. She wrote once of their son’s excitement over going to school and learning to write. And sometimes, Mrs. Park wrote to Dr. Park of matters more…personal.
“The letters are very real, and some are truly love letters,” says Brian Gandy, director of the Darlington County Historical Commission. “In one letter, she tells him, ‘If you were here and we were getting up from bed this morning together, you would not leave with just one embrace; you would leave with several.’”
Gandy and the DCHC staff first carefully settled the Park documents (including receipts, invitations, and a few photos) in protective clear sleeves. They then worked to transcribe the letters, an arduous process requiring them to learn the Park’s penmanship and syntax, and used the Commission’s newly acquired overhead scanner to produce digital copies so the public can read the letters without actually handling them. It was a labor of love, which Gandy likens to marathoning an engrossing TV series.
“You develop an affinity for these people…You get so involved in their story that when you finish the last letter and it’s over, you just want more,” says Gandy.
Following the close of the Civil War, the Parks moved to Flora, Illinois and lived there quite happily until Emma’s death in 1896. Dr. Park eventually moved back to South Carolina to live with a daughter in Manning, and he passed away after a lingering illness in 1920.
On his passing, he was fondly remembered in the Flora newspaper: “The night was never too dark nor too cold for Dr. Park to go when called, not stopping to inquire who it was, but feeling he was needed, he went, therefore he gained a place in the hearts of the people in and around Flora.”
To learn more about the remarkable E.C. Park letters, visit the Darlington County Historical Commission, located at 204 Hewitt Street in Darlington.