A Woman of the Limberlost: Gene Stratton-Porter

Wandering through the fields on her father’s farm one morning, a young Wabash County girl heard a rifle shot, looked up, and spied a large bird plummeting to earth. Running to the spot where the bird fell, she discovered a chicken hawk with a badly broken wing and her father who was preparing to club the injured animal to death with his rifle. Distraught, the girl, already known by her neighbors as a nature lover, pleaded with her father to give her the hawk to nurse back to health. Her father angrily gave in to her wishes, responding: “God knows I do not understand you. Keep the bird if you think you can!”

Over the next few weeks the girl’s father, a minister, watched in amazement as the bird recovered and devotedly began to follow the child around the farm. Impressed, the preacher gave all of the birds on the family’s property to his daughter as a gift. “Even while he was talking to me,” the girl recalled, “I was making a flashing mental inventory of my property, for now I owned the hummingbirds, dressed in green satin with ruby jewels on their throats; the plucky little brown wren that sang by the hour to his mate from the top of the pump, even in a hard rain; the green warbler nesting in . . . wild sweetbriar beside the back porch; and the song sparrow in the ground cedar beside the fence.”

The affinity for nature shown by the Hoosier child expressed itself in other ways as the girl matured to womanhood. Through such books as Freckles, A Girl of the Limberlost, Laddie, and Michael O’Halloran, Gene Stratton-Porter won popular acclaim and, in time, came to believe that she was a latter-day Moses, leading the women of her day back to nature and away from the strictures imposed on them by society. She had some success; an estimated fifty million people have read her work, and her books have been translated into several foreign languages. By the time she died in a Los Angeles, California, traffic accident on December 6, 1924, she had become, as Yale pundit William Lyon Phelps termed her, “a public institution, like Yellowstone Park.”

Born on Hopewell farm in Wabash County, Indiana, on August 17, 1863, Geneva (later shortened to Gene) Grace Stratton was the youngest of twelve children. Her father, Mark Stratton, was a licensed Methodist minister and prosperous farmer. Her mother, Mary, became ill when Gene was five years old and died in 1875. While Gene had little formal schooling in her early years, she developed a lively interest in nature and wildlife. “By the day I trotted from one object which attracted me to another,” she noted, “singing a little song of made-up phrases about everything I saw while I waded catching fish, chasing butterflies over clover fields, or following a bird with a hair in its beak.” When her family moved to the city of Wabash in 1874, she began to attend school on a regular basis and completed all but the last term of high school.

On April 21, 1886, Gene married Charles D. Porter, a druggist and banker, who was thirteen years her senior. Living for a short time in Decatur, the couple moved to Geneva after the birth of their daughter, Jeannette, in 1887. “I did not write,” Gene Stratton-Porter said of her early days of marriage, “but I continued violin, painting and embroidery lessons, and did all the cooking and housework with the exception of the washing and ironing. I had agreed to love a man, and to keep his house neat and clean.” She did maintain her connection with nature by keeping several different kinds of birds in her household. After oil was discovered on some farmland owned by Porter, Gene Stratton-Porter used the new family wealth to construct in 1895 a fourteen-room, Queen Anne rustic-style home on the outskirts of town near the vast Limberlost swamp.

As Stratton-Porter herself described it, the Limberlost swamp had its head “in what is now Noble and DeKalb Counties, its body in Allen and Wells [Counties] and its feet in southern Adams and northern Jay [Counties]; its extent about one hundred miles in length and its width averaging twenty-five.” The Limberlost had a reputation as a “treacherous swamp and quagmire, filled with every plant, animal and human danger known—in the worst of such locations in the central states.” The swamp received its name from the fate of Limber Jim Corbus, who went hunting in the swamp and became lost for some time. When local residents asked where Jim Corbus had gone, the familiar answer was “Limber’s lost!” The swamp was where Stratton-Porter began to photograph birds and animals in their natural habitat. She sent her photographs, with no explanation, to Recreation magazine. Impressed by her efforts, the periodical asked her to write a camera department and paid her with new photographic equipment. A year later, Outing magazine hired her to do similar work.

Encouraged by these accomplishments, Stratton-Porter turned to writing fiction. Her first novel, The Song of the Cardinal, illustrated with photographs by the author, met with modest success, but her next book, Freckles, established her tremendous popularity with the reading public selling more than 670,000 copies in ten years. Although her sentimental style won favor with the reading public, Stratton-Porter’s work never received much critical acclaim, a fact that puzzled her. Why, she asked, the “life history of the sins and shortcomings of a man should constitute a book of realism, and the life history of a just and incorruptible man should constitute a book of idealism. Is not a moral man as real as an immoral one?”

In 1913, with the Limberlost swamp drained and cleared for farming and commercial ventures, Stratton-Porter and her family moved to northern Indiana, where she built a new home—The Cabin in Wildflower Woods—on the shores of Sylvan Lake at Rome City. She was attracted to the lakefront site by a wood duck she spied near the shore and an acre of blue-eyed grass on the property. “I bought the wood duck and the blue-eyed grass, with a wealth of tall hardwood trees for good measure,” she said. Stratton-Porter took a personal interest in the construction of her new home, noting that she was on the job “from the drawing of the line for the back steps between the twin oaks to the last stroke of polish that finished the floors.” The Hoosier author also worked with Frank Wallace, a tree surgeon and later Indiana State Entomologist, to improve the 150-acre property.

Just seven years after her move to Rome City, Stratton-Porter relocated to California where she took on writing a monthly column for McCall’s magazine, which first appeared in January 1922. In addition to her writing, she also organized her own movie company and based a number of her films on her best-selling books. “As a motion picture producer,” Stratton-Porter told her McCall’s readers, “I shall continue to present idealized pictures of life, pictures of men and women who inspire charity, honor, devotion to God and to family.”

At the age of sixty-one, Stratton-Porter was killed in an automobile accident just a few blocks from her Los Angeles home. She was buried in Hollywood Cemetery in California. For many years, her last wish went unfulfilled. It was: “When I am gone, I hope my family will bury me out in the open, and plant a tree on my grave; I do not want a monument. A refuge for a bird nest is all the marker I want.” In May 1999 Stratton-Porter’s last wish came true as her remains, and those of her daughter Jeannette, were interred at her home on Sylvan Lake near Rome City.