Before technology brought us electronic mail and before there was a greeting card for every occasion and event, people wrote letters letters filled with heartache, pain, love and romance. But perhaps of all the letters written, the most poignant remain those that are sent home by loved ones in faraway places.
More than 50 examples of such letters are included in a Cornell exhibition, "I Take This Pen in Hand: Letters Home From Everyday People," on display at the Carl A. Kroch Library through Sept. 30. The letters are drawn primarily from Cornell Library's regional history collection.
The exhibition documents letters across 160 years of American history. These are not historically important letters in the traditional sense, but rather they are letters written by loved ones who separated from family members either by war, occupation, school or other circumstance longed to be back home.
Some items in the exhibition are illustrated with photographs and other materials to help viewers place the letters in context. For example, photos of a U.S. camp in Vietnam accompany the letter of an army medic.
"Reading letters intended for others is an exciting privilege," said Lorna Knight, Cornell's curator of manuscripts. "Each letter reveals some of the secrets, joys and imperfections of the writer. These letters resonate with human life, human experience and human relationships and appeal to us, in part, because we can relate them to ourselves or to people we know.
"While these letters permit us to glimpse the past and gain historical insight, we are most fascinated by our ability to overhear snatches of conversations not unlike our own. In these conversations as in ours, the said and the unsaid are equally relevant," Knight added.
Letters in the exhibition to parents often express thanks and a longing to be back home.
Margaret Coulter, a student at Cornell in 1907, writes of homesickness: "I am wild to get away from here and wilder to see you."
A letter by Virginia Helen Lyons, Cornell Class of 1924, to her mother alludes to a smallpox epidemic. "The truth is I am not feeling very well. I was vaccinated a week ago last Monday and the darn thing waited until this Monday to work besides I am menstruating and am completely done in. Please do not be worried because I am not really ill just suffering from the combined affects of two necessary evils vaccination and the curse of Eve."
John Breedlove, a Vietnam War helicopter pilot, writes to his parents from the front lines: "I received another letter and a package. All the food is appreciated. I really like Beefaroni."
The fear of war and the pain of being away from loved ones is expressed in Civil War soldier Simeon Stoddard's letter of May 17, 1864, to his wife and family: "As we are now under marching orders to the front perhaps never to return again, I thought that perhaps you would like to receive a letter from me. . . . Many of us are going on our last march & perhaps myself among the number but if such should be the case you can rest assured that my last thoughts are of you and the children."
Pvt. William B. Osborne, stationed in France in World War I, writes to his wife in Tioga County, N.Y.: "I am going unafraid trusting in the good Lord for my safe return and you must do the same....You will always be with me in soul. I am never alone. Perhaps you may have thought I was different than I use to be. I am. There is a lot more to life now. It is much dearer than ever. I have the thought of a home and best wife in the whole world."
The exhibition also contains 10 books of etiquette written in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries that outline the rules for proper letter writing. Highlighted passages feature words of wisdom from such arbiters of manners as Emily Post, Amy Vanderbilt and former U.S. Rep. Millicent Fenwick.
Gallery hours at the library are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday; Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m., beginning Sept. 6.