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4
And was as wild as he. I could not keep my bonnet on,
The briars tore the frill,
The wind untied the knotted strings And tossed it at their will. My dress and apron bore the sign Of frolic wild and free,
The brambles caught my yellow hair,
And braided it for me.
Leonard, Eliza?s uncle was depicted as a frugal but generous man. He probably joyed in his niece?s free spirit, mitigating his wife?s sternness.
Why and when Eliza was sent to the female Seminary in Liberty Mississippi is not known. I expect it was because of aunt Jane?s prompting to assure her niece would get the proper education. Eliza graduated in 1858. There is an album in the Nicholson Collection at the Williams Research Center in New Orleans that has many poems and well wishes to Eliza at graduation. I expect that there were other albums where Eliza wrote poems to her classmates but only one has been mentioned. She was depicted in a publication of women writers in the south as the ?Wildest girl in school,? apparently her own designation.
What she did after she graduated is not known, nor her activities during the Civil War. There is a group of poems written for the N. O. Times in 1866 that reflect a romance with a Civil War soldier. And there?s a story by Elise Farr, secretary for Lamont Rowland, a one time owner of the Hermitage. She wrote extensively about the place and Eliza. She gives an account of a girl living at the Hermitage who fell in love with a civil war soldier (reported in one manuscript as Union) and mourned his death by sitting on the porch playing sad music on her violin. When the slaves heard the music they would stop their work to listen. With the error in her age, (she would have been only twelve), the account was not attributed to her, but since she was actually in her late teens, the lore was probably about her.
There are poems about lost love and rejection and about ?My soldier boy? written for the New Orleans Times in early 1866. If her poems are in any way biographical, and I believe many were, she intimately knew a woman?s heart in love, lost love and in rejection.
The earliest poem I?ve found in the Daily Picayune, is ?A Little Bunch of Roses,? published October 17th, 1866, but there was a delightful poem published a day earlier called ?Wouldn?t you like to know.? If she didn?t write it, then her poetic twin did. On January 28, 1866 she wrote, I Miss Thee for the New Orleans Times, followed by five other poems. These were sad poems about her dead soldier fiance?.
Eliza Jane?s first know trip to New Orleans was in the latter months of 1868 when she visited her Grandfather Russ. There were trips back and forth to New Orleans until she met Alva M. Holbrook, Co-owner of the Daily Picayune who asked her to become literary editor of that paper. She accepted and later married him, a man 29 years her senior. She began writing for the New Orleans Times in January 1866, but by 1867, she