Lincoln in Indiana

[Rob Wick]

Just to add to Gene's review. This is from my article in the Indiana Magazine of History on Tarbell's study of Lincoln's views on democracy.

J. Edward Murr was a Methodist minister born December 20, 1868, in Corydon, Indiana, Murr entered Depauw University in Greencastle in 1897 to study theology and was graduated in 1901. He served various churches throughout southern Indiana and later became superintendent of the Methodist Church district in that region. Murr’s interest in Lincoln was due, partially, to the accident of birth. “I chanced to have been born and reared in the general community where Josiah Lincoln, a brother of the President’s father lived and died. I thus personally knew the older Lincoln’s [sic] who were cousins to the President,” Murr wrote. Beginning in December of 1917 and running through June of 1918, Murr contributed a three-part series on Lincoln’s Indiana years to the Indiana Magazine of History, which was generally well received. It's that series that Gene was talking about. Here is a photo of Murr.



Murr had a strong dislike for Tarbell. Again, from my article:

In January of 1920, Tarbell spoke in Evansville on “The Making of the World.” The Evansville Courier reported, citing Murr as its source, that during a visit to the region at the turn of the century, Tarbell was “worsted” in an encounter with the Lincoln family’s Gentryville neighbor, James Gentry, who lived in Rockport at the time of the newspaper report. As Murr told the story, he asked Gentry if he had ever met Tarbell. When Gentry curtly replied that he had, Murr asked, “And you didn’t think much of her?”
Gentry reportedly said he did not, adding, in the reporter’s imagined vernacular, “That woman came here with her preconceived ideas of Lincoln as a boy and attempted to tell me things I ought ter know about Abe.” Murr then told the reporter that Gentry grew so angry with Tarbell that “he sent Ida Tarbell off the premises with a curse.” Gentry’s descendants refuted Murr’s claim in a follow-up article discussing Tarbell’s visit, claiming Gentry would never curse at a woman. Another family member claimed to have witnessed the encounter between Tarbell and Gentry, noting that when Tarbell left, the two shook hands and Gentry invited her to come back. When she left, Gentry reportedly said, “There’s a mighty smart woman.”
That any of this ever happened is questionable, given the fact that Tarbell never stopped in southwestern Indiana while researching her McClure’s articles. In the article detailing her 1920 visit to Evansville, Tarbell told the Courier reporter that, while she didn’t visit Lincoln City, she did stay for “several days” in Rockport and interviewed a number of people, and that she sent her Illinois researcher J. McCan Davis into the region to do research. Tarbell never mentioned her Indiana researcher, a Vincennes schoolteacher named Anna C. O’Flynn. Whether Tarbell felt it necessary to embellish her early travels due to Murr’s allegations, or she was misquoted by the reporter, neither corresponds with what Tarbell recorded in her papers several months later.
In August of 1920, in the Footsteps memorandum, Tarbell wrote that she never spent a day in Spencer County. “I never stopped in Spencer County myself. A. Hoosier [O’Flynn’s nom de plume] had sent us her manuscript. She was there one day, and she made notes that seemed to me desirable.” Tarbell noted that because of Herndon’s previous work, a trip by her would have been unnecessary. One is left to wonder, as Tarbell later did, if it was O’Flynn who visited Gentry and who was sent “off the premises with a curse,” if, indeed, it ever happened


I would second Gene's view on the Dirck book as well as the entire series. Forum member Ed Steers wrote the book on Lincoln's assassination.

Best
Rob