Isabella Ramsay Dinsmore, born on April 11, 1830, was the oldest child of James and Martha Macomb Dinsmore. Although she considered Louisiana to be the home of her childhood, she was actually born in Cincinnati, Ohio in the lower Mill Creek Valley area. This is where James and Martha had stopped after their wedding trip to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and a little over nine months later Isabella was born. Her father had already returned to Terrebonne Parish to oversee the construction of a house and the tending of his sugar cane crop, so it is likely that Martha spent much of her time in Cincinnati with James’ uncle, Silas Dinsmoor, and his wife, Mary. In 1831, James came back for his wife and infant daughter and the little family made their way to their new home in Louisiana.

Isabella’s childhood may have been a rather isolated one, since she had no close neighbors, but two younger sisters eventually joined her and there were numerous young enslaved African Americans nearby, if she was permitted to play with them. Her own recollections of her home near Houma included idyllic memories of Bayou Black, which ran very close to her house and provided the name for her father’s plantation. She captured the romantic beauty of this home of her childhood in a short essay she wrote a number of years after leaving Louisiana:

The stream before our door moved noiselessly along, its dark surface unbroken by a single ripple. From the branches on its smooth green banks the long grey moss hung gracefully and stooped to kiss the placid bosom of the Bayou that glided like a black and shining serpent among tall groves of cypress.¹

The only description of the house Isabella grew up in comes from her daughter, Patty, who included it in an essay she wrote for school in the 1870s. According to her description (which came from stories told to her by her grandfather, James Dinsmore, while sitting in front of the parlor fireplace), it was a “pretty, low house with a great hall through it and climbing all over it roses.... Crepe Myrtle & Oliander trees gave shade in the yard, and in front of the house between it and the bayou was a beautiful drive lined on either side by stately live oaks.”² Whether or not this description was colored with a dreamy nostalgia is unclear, but it sounds very much like some of the plantation museums that still survive in the South. When Isabella, at the age of nine, left Louisiana to go to Lexington, Kentucky, with her mother and sisters, she missed her old home and wrote her father, “The longer I stay up here the more I want to go home for I can feel at home nowhere but at Bayou Black with the frogs and alligators though when I say so every body thinks I have strange taste[s]....”³

Like her younger sisters, Isabella did not go to a regular school until she went to stay in Lexington. In addition to her regular classes (arithmetic, reading, penmanship, and French), she also began taking piano lessons. At the age of fifteen, after the family had moved to Boone County, Kentucky, Isabella was sent to Cincinnati to the Cincinnati Female Seminary which was run by a friend of Martha Dinsmore’s, Miss Margaret Coxe. This was a boarding school for Isabella, as it took about three hours to go upriver from her home. From the schoolbooks that survive, it is clear that Miss Coxe’s school did not provide the ordinary education that young ladies might have expected. Instead, Isabella studied Algebra, Rhetoric, Geometry, Latin, French, and Composition. The Dinsmore library also contains books she owned on moral, mental, and natural philosophy. Although this may not have been the most practical education for Isabella, it did ensure that she would be better educated than most women of her generation. Among the expectations her parents held for her was for her to marry someone of an equal or higher social/economic standing, and such an expectation was furthered by an education which allowed her to converse intelligently on many subjects.

Because slavery was such an ingrained aspect of life for the Dinsmore family, Isabella did not address the subject much in her letters. Although she believed that in Louisiana, “Cruelty and Injustice walk amid thy cool groves unpunished and the wings of thy gentle zephyrs come laden with the signs of multitudes of oppressed human beings;” in Kentucky she saw no injustice and there is little doubt that she saw nothing wrong with enslaved African Americans doing all the domestic and farming duties on the farm. ⁴ Growing up, she had her washing, cooking, and house-cleaning done for her, which posed a bit of a problem when she married and moved with her husband to Minnesota. Although servants could be hired in the northern states, Isabella dreaded the though of having to do any of her own housework. In a letter to her sister, Julia, Isabella expressed surprise at how other women managed without enslaved people. Referring to a neighbor in Minnesota, she wrote, “She had us at her house to dinner on Christmas day & we had a right pleasant time. I don’t see how she can manage as she does without a girl. She was with us all the time, & yet we had a first rate dinner.”⁵ For Isabella, who apparently had little contact with kitchen work, cooking a dinner was a chore that took all of a woman’s attention. To do the cooking and be able to entertain guests required real skill.

Prior to her marriage to her cousin Charles Flandrau, the two had visited back and forth for years. Although Charles later wrote that he had another love interest before Isabella, this was the first marriage for both and their relationship was close. On August 10, 1859, Isabella was married in the parlor at “Summerset Place” to Charles, who was two years older than she. At twenty-nine, she was following in her mother’s footsteps by marrying late and she may have been following her mother’s advice – a late marriage was one way to ensure that a woman had to go through the experience of childbirth fewer times. Martha Macomb Dinsmore died seven days after Isabella’s wedding.

Once in Minnesota where her husband was a lawyer and a judge, Isabella became homesick. Finding herself pregnant in the spring of 1861, she returned to her father’s house for her convalescence and later that summer, on August 14th, her daughter, Martha Macomb Flandrau, was born. Like her namesake, this little girl would be known by her nickname, Patty. Recovering quickly, Isabella was back in Minnesota by December and had Susan Goodrich there to help her with the baby. But she was still not happy with the distance that separated her from her family and tried to convince Charles to find a job closer to Boone County. Instead, he and a friend went to Nevada and she traveled to California to meet him in 1865. His partnership did not work out, though, and the couple returned to Minnesota after the war was over.

Again, Isabella found that she was pregnant in 1866, and again she traveled to Summerset to be with her family. On December 4th she gave birth to another girl whom she named for her close friend, Sarah Gibson. Like her sister, Sarah would be known to her family and friends by a nickname, Sally. After Sally’s birth, Isabella was not feeling well. She returned with Charles to Minnesota, but became so ill that she wrote for Julia to come up and help her with the children. Although we know nothing of Isabella’s death-bed scene, these were important events in Victorian America and Isabella would have put on a brave face for her husband and children. It was decided that Patty and Sally would return to Kentucky with Julia until Charles had a stable home in which to raise them. Isabella died on June 30, 1867, and her body was taken back to Kentucky where it was buried next to her mother in the family graveyard.