Julia Stockton Dinsmore’s life spanned ninety-three years of almost constant change. She lived through the Civil War and World War I; she experienced the world of a slaveholding white family and, later, she learned firsthand the troubles and rewards of managing a farm with white and African American wage or tenant labor; she never married but she experienced the joys of raising children; and she progressed, sometimes very slowly, from a world that relied on horses and ferries to one that boasted cars, airplanes, and trains everywhere. Through it all, she valued her family above all else and she strove to create a ‘little bit of heaven’ in Kentucky where they could retreat from an often cruel world – where pretensions and ‘masks’ were not allowed. Ultimately, though she was successful in creating a refuge for some, later generations moved far away and were not able to visit enough to appreciate the beauty of the farm, seeing instead a business concern – and a failing one at that (at times it was referred to as the “Boone Situation”)¹. Nevertheless, it is a tribute to Julia that hers was not the last generation to be buried in the old family graveyard on the hill beyond the house her father had built.

On March 6, 1833 Julia Stockton Dinsmore was born on a sugar cane and cotton plantation in southern Louisiana. Her parents were James and Martha Macomb Dinsmore and she had an older sister, Isabella, and a younger sister, Susan. The atmosphere of the Bayou Black plantation made a deep impression on the young Julia, who grew up with a great appreciation for all things in nature – except snakes and groundhogs. Spending her mornings and afternoons walking along the dark bayou and underneath the live oaks, she acquired the knowledge of a wide variety of birdcalls and wildflowers and retained this interest throughout her life. To Julia, the plantation was a wild, romantic place to explore and she completely overlooked the forced labor of the African Americans that was required to keep her family living in style.

When Julia was six years old her mother took her, Isabella, and Susan to Lexington while her father kept an eye on their property in Louisiana. For the next three years the girls split their time between going to school in Kentucky and living with their father in the Deep South. Their friends, the Gibson family, had homes in both places also, so there were other children to keep them company. It was not until 1842 that Julia and her family moved into the home her father had built for them in Boone County, only one mile away from the Ohio River. The new home was surrounded by woods, hills, creeks, and ponds, providing Julia with plenty of room to roam with her sisters, picking wildflowers and traipsing up and down the hills and over the fields.

The Dinsmore girls were tutored at home by Eugenia Wadsworth until they were sixteen years old and ready to enter the Young Ladies’ Seminary in Cincinnati. Although Susan did not go there as a result of her untimely death, Isabella and Julia both attended the boarding school. While there Julia met and befriended Julia Resor, a daughter of a wealthy Cincinnati stove maker, Jacob Resor. Julia Resor was to remain Julia’s closest friend until death broke their bond. Julia did well in school and especially enjoyed reading and composition. She delighted in writing poetry as a young girl, though it was Isabella that relatives considered to be the likely poet in the family. Foreign languages seemed to come easy to Julia and as an adult she could read books in French, German, and Italian, and had studied Greek and Latin as well. Like most young ladies of her social status and generation, she was also an accomplished piano player and singer.

Following the completion of her studies in Cincinnati, Julia returned to live with her parents, her sister, Isabella, her cousin, Susan Goodrich, and a close friend of the family, Isabella Hill, who was nicknamed Hilda. At home, she probably helped her mother manage the household and embroidered, quilted, and read in her free time. In Kentucky, the Dinsmore family did not live on a large plantation, but James did have anywhere from seven to fifteen enslaved African Americans providing the labor for him from 1842 through 1865. He also had several tenant families living in cabins on the property who either made indenture agreements with him or who worked on shares or for wages. Growing into adulthood in a large house in a neighborhood of cabins, poor white families, and enslaved people, instilled in Julia the belief that certain people were meant to be at the top of society. She did not like to see people who were of lower class origins trying to act, or dress, as though they were middle class. On the other hand, her outlook was paternalistic, so she often offered a helping hand to those less fortunate than herself—if she thought they deserved it. Some of the African Americans who were enslaved by James Dinsmore later exhibited an ability to read and write. It is quite possible that Julia and Isabella taught them. Much later, the parents of a tenant family (the Kelly’s) died, and Julia agreed to allow the daughter, Beulah to stay with her and go to school. Little acts of kindness were quite common, but underneath it was a commitment to a social hierarchy that was shared by many elite Americans of that time period.

One of the mysteries of Julia Dinsmore’s life is why she never married. A poem she later wrote, “Louisiana Buttons,” is about the death of a Confederate soldier from Louisiana. While this has led to speculation about a young lover who died and was mourned by Julia for the rest of her life, there is little factual evidence to support the theory. The Dinsmore family remained very close to the Tobias Gibson family they had met in Louisiana and Julia visited Sarah Gibson Humphreys at the family’s Lexington and Woodford County, Kentucky homes often before and during the Civil War, but none of Sarah’s brothers fit the “dead Confederate beau” model. Letters written during the war indicate that two different men were interested in Julia and that all she needed to do was to encourage them. Apparently she did not. This was generally how Julia’s experience with men went. The one direct proposal to Julia that survives is interesting for what it says that Julia did not want out of a marriage. C.F. Bennetts, a man from Louisville who occasionally visited the Grant family nearby, wrote to Julia explaining why she should marry him: “I believe that I can relieve you from many of the unpleasant cares and annoyances of outdoor life to which you are now subjected if you will let me....”² Although it is quite possible that Julia did not care for the man at all, perhaps she also did not think of her “outdoor life” as unpleasant and annoying enough to exchange her position for that of a dependent wife. So, even though Nancy Mcgruder wanted Julia to “find a nice beau” so she would “have some one to take care of you in your young days as well as when you get old,” Julia remained what she called an O.M., or old maid.³

Living for ninety-three years, Julia became well-acquainted with death and grieving. She was eighteen when her younger sister, Susan, drowned in Lake Erie. The two girls had been very close when young and this death came as a great shock to Julia. Eight years later, Julia’s mother, Martha, died just seven days after Isabella was married. In 1867, Isabella died in Minnesota and her husband, Charles E. Flandrau, sent his children, Patty and Sally, to Kentucky to live with their Aunt Julia and she raised the girls as if they were her own. Although Charles often talked about reuniting his family, by the time he remarried the girls were more comfortable with Julia as their “owny mommy.” James Dinsmore died in December of 1872, leaving Julia the sole heir and the last member of her family at the age of thirty-nine. She inherited 371acres and all the contents of the house and the outbuildings. Although she occasionally thought about selling the farm, and was encouraged to do so by Charles, her heart was never in it. Farming was not the profitable business it had been when her father was alive, but Julia survived with the help of deceased relatives—her mother’s family left her bank stock and when Cousin Willie Dinsmore died in 1888, he left Julia another $10,000. Flandrau helped her to invest the money in St. Paul real estate but that never quite realized much in profits.

Taking over the farm was a huge chore for Julia, who had learned something about dealing with people from her father. As a woman in 1872, though, running a farm was a tricky business. Suspecting that the male tenants were trying to cheat her because she was an inexperienced woman, she began keeping a journal where she recorded the men’s daily activities. Unfortunately for us today, the journal never became a place for her to record her innermost thoughts, but sometimes the level of her frustration could not be hidden. On January 21, 1875, after two full years of managing the farm, she protested,

I drudge and worry to no avail – love, money, and temper and hope. I feel so unlike a lady in my externals that I have no doubt I shall be soon less of a lady in reality – associating only with coarse people all against me in their own interest – and never having one day of leisure or pleasure in which I can be my own old self again. Lord send me a fool who wants to pay a good price for this place.⁴

Over the years her attachment to the farm became obvious by her reluctance to leave it. She could become very angry with herself for letting others take advantage of her but the next day, with the sun high in the sky, the world looked beautiful again, and she quickly put aside her worries. Even as an industrious adult she took pleasure in looking for the first wildflowers of the spring and in watching the birds make their summer nests.

Julia traveled as she grew older, even going to Europe with Sally. She also went, several times, to Louisiana with Sarah Gibson Humphreys, and to West Palm Beach with Julia Resor Foster. As Patty and Sally grew older and married, Julia also traveled to the Dakota Territory, Long Island, and Santa Barbara, California. Interested in poetry from her childhood, Julia began to write poems in a serious way in the 1880s. Encouraged by Patty and Sally who each insisted that she send them copies of every poem she wrote, she submitted her poems to the New Orleans Times-Democrat where they were printed under the pseudonym, F.V. Although Julia was proud enough of her published poems to send copies to family members, she wrote Patty that “no one wants my things except that N[ew] O[rleans] man who has a great big paper like the leech’s daughter, always calling for more....”⁵ It was Sally who pushed Julia to gather her poems together and publish them as a book for all of their friends and relatives. She did this in 1910 and received many letters of thanks and appreciation, including one from Theodore Roosevelt.

As Julia grew older and became—as she put it—“gnawed by the tooth of time,” she began to rely more on the help of her tenants. Most of these men are known to us only by their given names—Charley, Dick, Jess, Joe—but some have two names and actual faces. Harry Roseberry is one of these. Harry came to work for Julia with his father, George, in 1895. His father soon moved over to Rising Sun, Indiana, but Harry stayed. He was only about fourteen at the time so he was still in school, but African Americans had only a limited opportunity to attain a decent education in Kentucky. Julia wrote about his school being burned down and about his class being kicked out of the home they used as a temporary school, and also about herself as she taught him to read. Apparently he did pretty well and Julia wrote Patty, “I am coaching Harry in the second reader and must say he behaves better than you did in it.”⁶ Harry eventually married Susan Riley and had four daughters.

In early April of 1926, while Julia was visiting Sally in Santa Barbara, she fell and broke her hip. On the 19th of that month she died. According to her wishes, her body was cremated and returned to Boone County where she was buried on the hill with the rest of her family. Julia may have regretted living for ninety-three years and having to mourn so many loved ones, but throughout it all she kept her sense of humor, laughing at the world around her – and even at herself. A year and a half before she died Julia had written, “If this wasn’t a funny world I couldn’t have lived in it so long.”⁷ It was her wit, her insight, and her sense of humor which she passed on to her nieces and through the succeeding Dinsmore generations. Never tied to one particular religious sect, she followed her own sense of moral duty; never allowing herself to be brought low by the drudgery of farm life, she celebrated the splendor of nature. While her descendants did not always share her love for the farm and the family ties it represented to her, they continue to be buried in the Dinsmore graveyard, and other people now enjoy what the farm has to offer—hiking trails and a unique view of history.

¹ Isabella F. Greenway to Frank Cutcheon, 5 August 1924.
² C. F. Bennetts to Julia Dinsmore, 20 August 1877.
³ Nancy Mcgruder to Julia Dinsmore, 24 September 1883.
⁴ Julia Dinsmore Journal, 21 January 1875.
⁵ Julia Dinsmore to Patty F. Selmes (reference to Proverbs 30:15), 31 October 1888.
⁶ Julia Dinsmore to Patty F. Selmes, 4 October 1896.
⁷ Julia Dinsmore to Sally F. Cutcheon, 10 October 1924.