KROUT, CAROLINE VIRGINIA: 1852-1931.
Caroline Virginia Krout was one of the daughters of Robert Kennedy and
Caroline Brown Krout.
In order to get a clear picture of her life, and of that of her more famous sister,
Mary Hannah Krout, it is necessary to give considerably
more than the usual attention to the parents–more especially to the
father, Robert Krout, a sort of Hoosier Bronson Alcott, who seems to
have had a rather profound influence upon the careers of his brilliant daughters.
Robert Krout spent his early years in Covington, Ky., where his maternal grandfather held a lucrative
franchise for a ferry running between that place and Cincinnati, O., and where his family owned considerable property.
Young Krout was eleven when an employee of his
grandfather–for reasons now unknown–brought him to a farm in
still wild and hilly southwestern Montgomery
County, Ind., in the section known as "Balhinch."
At the. school in Alamo (capital-by-consent of the vaguely defined Balhinch district)
young Krout was tutored in Greek and Latin by a local schoolmaster, James
Gilkey, who would eventually leave his mark on half a dozen Indiana writers.
After six years of tutoring in the classics–plus less esoteric subjects in
the local schools–the young man was admitted to Wabash
College. He was then seventeen. Robert Krout received
the A.B. degree in 1848 and, while still an undergraduate,
began to read law in the office of Lane and
Wilson.
At the time of his baccalaureate Robert K. Krout was considered
by his professors and by himself to be a young man of extraordinary promise: it was,
however, a promise never to be fulfilled, and as the years passed this unfortunate
circumstance came to have a profound effect both upon his own attitude toward the
world and upon the lives of the members of his family.
As a senior undergraduate he was a youth in rebellion –his last appearance
before his college literary society in March, 1848,
being an oratorical complaint against the manner in which the Mexican War was being
waged and a plea for universal military training (except for young men in their
senior year in college), for justice for all and for attention to the voice of
youth. Young college seniors in rebellion are, of course, no phenomena, but it was
Robert Krout's misfortune to remain quietly in
that state until his last day.
Within a year of his graduation he married Miss Caroline Van Cleve
Brown, daughter of a Crawfordsville physician. The Browns lived across
the street from the cottage in which young Krout roomed as a
student. Caroline's brother was a firm friend of
Robert, and Caroline–as her wedding picture
attests–was a beautiful girl of seventeen at the time of the wedding.
Robert Krout's interest in the law waned (as did many
another interest in his later life) as soon as he had mastered its rudiments. Some
time in 1849 he and his bride went to New Orleans and, later, to Arkansas, where they set up a private school. Two years of school- keeping
sufficed for Robert, and the young couple returned to the Brown
home in Crawfordsville in time for Robert to go through the
rather perfunctory motions of qualifying for an A.M. degree at Wabash and in time
for Caroline to bear the first of her nine babies in her father's home in
the fall of 1851.
The sanctuary of the Brown home for the young mother was convenient, but the
usefulness of an advanced degree for Robert was questionable.
His classical learning was to be employed, as time went on, in assisting him as a
chemist in the drug store which his brother-in-law had opened. There were interludes
of lightning-rod and buggy selling, some ventures into the then questionable realms
of insurance and a constant correspondence with the newspapers. Community service
took the form of long-time and contentious membership on the city school board.
Robert Krout's scrap-book, covering the last thirty
years of his life, is filled with clippings of newspaper yarns of strange
adventures, weird discoveries and exposés of the foibles and frailties of
the great, interleaved with woodcut GODEY'S
LADIES' BOOK plans for Italian villas and
be-jigsawed country houses –all this while the cottage which he had
inherited through his wife from her father progressed from, in 1879, "a queer, dark, dull little house" in which
"the weather boards begin to warp and get frayed and dingy., the fence
needs paint …" to, in 1900,
"a low, long structure … the weatherboarding looks as though it
had never made the acquaintance of paint in all its history., the roof is old and
weatherbeaten. The trees and shrubs are thick around the cottage … But
when you think of the occupants … the mind goes back to the home of the
Brontes … the father, for whose sake the cottage is left unrepaired
… dislikes to have the old cottage changed in the least, it is said, and
with sweet patience the sisters live on in it leaving it undisturbed
…" according to contemporary newspaper accounts.
Perhaps recalling Robert Krout's failure appears
somewhat less than the handsome thing to do: it would certainly be so, except that
this very failure had a most profound bearing upon the ultimate literary successes
of his daughters. His criticism of their early efforts at writing (his own
contribution to letters was almost wholly confined to temperature readings and
weather observations to the local newspaper) and his constitutional inability to be
satisfied with less than perfection on their parts drove them to success. Probably
also (although she never mentioned it and may
never have realized it) Robert Krout must have been the
tyrannical male who first convinced his eldest daughter that a campaign for equal
rights for women was a project well in order. Robert Krout was
demanding, exacting and critical, and by these very qualities he became important to Indiana literature.
Robert and Caroline Krout's first
daughter, Mary Hannah, was born in the grandparents'
home in Crawfordsville on Nov. 3, 1851. The subject
of this sketch, Caroline Virginia, was born a bit more than eleven months later, on
Oct. 13, 1852.
Caroline Krout–Cary to her sisters and her very few friendsnattended a
Crawfordsville subscription, and later a public, school. When she was sixteen her
mother died and, her older sister (an educated woman of seventeen) having already
begun to teach at the Bunker Hill School, it fell upon
Caroline's shoulders to take over the keeping of her father's
house and the care of the four younger children who had survived babyhood, until,
three years later, her next younger sister, Jane, graduated from high school and
took over the housekeeping–an assignment at which she continued for
almost seventy years.
Caroline V. Krout began teaching in Crawfordsville schools in her nineteenth
year–money was, as always in those days, a scarce article in the Krout
household– and she continued for five years, when, as she is quoted in an
interview in the INDIANAPOLIS NEWS for April 19, 1900, "my health gave way and I
became a nervous invalid for several years." During her illness she wrote
her first story and presently became an occasional contributor of short stories and
feature articles to the INTER-OCEAN,
INTERIOR, CHICAGO DAILY NEws, CHICAGO JOURNAL and other papers.
Recovering somewhat, Caroline took employment as assistant court reporter in
Crawfordsville and, after a time and through the offices of her sister,
Mary Hannah, already a newspaper woman of importance in Chicago, she went to that city and secured a place on the staff of the
Dewberry Library.
Poor health made her resignation necessary, and about 1896
she returned to Crawfordsville. Unable to take regular employment and encouraged by
her older sister's long-time patron and advisor, Susan Elston Wallace (wife
of General Lew Wallace, and herself a successful writer), Caroline V.
Krout first tried writing for the periodical market.
Her first sales were to ST. NICHOLAS and the COSMOPOLITAN, and her subject–in her first three
stories–was Robin Hood and his followers, a result
perhaps of Crawfordsville's preoccupation with the archery which Maurice
and Will Thompson had popularized, first in Crawfordsville, then in the nation.
There were twenty or so short stories, and then, in 1900,
her first novel, Knights in Fustian, under the name "Caroline
Brown." It was a story of the Copperhead movement in Indiana–and particularly in the "Balhinch"
district of Montgomery County which she and her family knew so well. The book was an immediate
success. Although many reviewers bruised Caroline's always sensitive
spirit, sales were good, and even such a student of history as Gov. Theodore
Roosevelt of New York wrote to the author to say: "… you have given me
far and away the best and most vivid idea I ever had of the Indiana Copper-heads and also an exceptionally good picture of life in the
western farming communities."
Caroline Krout's shyness kept her from capitalizing upon her first success, and the fact
that another of her novels, On the We-a Trail, employed the same locale and period
as Alice of Old Vincennes by her fellow citizen, Maurice
Thompson, almost caused her to give up writing altogether. Neither she
nor Thompson had the slightest idea of the other's interest and Thompson,
when he learned of her embarrassment, exerted all of his native kindliness to put
her at ease.
There were two more novels, the last in 1911, then
Caroline Krout gave up writing almost altogether. She was
sensitive both to criticism and to the defects in her own writing, and the
combination was an impossible one for a career in writing. She became, in effect, a
happy, home-loving recluse during the last thirty or forty years of her life.
She died, in the home which she and her sisters had modernized and rebuilt after a
decent interval of mourning for their father, on Oct. 9,
1931.
Information from Miss Roberta Krout, Krout family papers, and
contemporary newspaper articles.
- Knights In Fustian, a War-Time Story of
Indiana. Boston, 1900.
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Close X - On the We-a Trail; a Story of the Great Wilderness.
New York, 1903.
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Close X - Bold Robin and His Forest Rangers. New
York, 1905.
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Close X - Dionis of the White Veil.
Boston, 1911.
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