Statesmen, Scoundrels, and Eccentrics: A Gallery of Amazing Arkansans

Lessie Stringfellow

Lessie Stringfellow When Stephen Chism published his book The Afterlife of Leslie Stringfellow: A Nineteenth-Century Southern Family’s Experiences with Spiritualism, he shed light on a subject that has received little attention in Arkansas history. Spiritualism is usually traced back to the Swedish mining engineer and physician Emanuel Swedenborg, who at the age of fifty-six in  began writing about his ability to communicate with spirits.During the remaining twenty-eight years of his life,Swedenborg wrote thirty books in which he portrayed a spiritual world that parallels our physical one. The movement grew in the United States with the publication in  of The Great Harmonia, by theAmerican mysticAndrew Jackson Davis. Although Davis’s book was published in , it apparently had nothing to do with developments of that same year when a “haunted house” in Hydesville, New York, captured the popular imagination. John and Margaret Fox, along with their two young daughters, started noticing strange sounds after moving into the simple two-story house. The parents became exasperated with all the banging and knocking, but fifteen-year-old Margaret Fox and her twelve-year-old sister, Kate, came to believe the sounds were made by a spirit—and they worked out a means of communicating with it.The news media learned of the Fox sisters, and soon their stories were publicized around the world. Spiritualism grew rapidly in both the United States and Britain.No less than the president of the Royal Society of Science in England, Sir William Crookes,was a believer,as was the writer Lewis Carroll.Perhaps the best known spiritualist in England was the creator of the Sherlock Holmes series,SirArthur Conan Doyle.InAmerica,leading proponents of spiritualism were writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and James Fenimore Cooper. Most spiritualists considered themselves Christians. The arrival of spiritualism in Arkansas is not documented, but we do know that psychics were advertising their services in the Arkansas Gazette by . Five years later the Gazette reported that  members  of a “Spiritualist sect” were living in Little Rock. Among the wellknown spiritualists in Arkansas was Julia Burnelle “Bernie” Babcock, a novelist and founder of the Arkansas Museum of Science and Natural History in Little Rock. On the surface, the Stringfellow family might not seem destined to become spiritualists. Alice Johnston was only sixteen when she fell in love with a young Confederate officer named Henry Martyn Stringfellow. In December , they were married in Houston, Texas. The young couple settled on Galveston Island, where Henry made a fortune establishing the citrus industry along the Texas coast. In March ,the Stringfellows had their only natural child,a son named Leslie.A precocious child, Leslie was talented in music and the darling of both parents. In September , Leslie died unexpectedly after an illness of only three days. While dying, the twenty-one-yearold Leslie vowed to his mother that he would contact her after death. The bereaved parents traveled to Boston, then a spiritualism center , where they sought a medium who could connect them to their son’s spirit. After participating in several séances, the Stringfellows returned home dissatisfied. Despite early disappointment, the persistent pair located a medium in Galveston who directed Mrs.Stringfellow to purchase a planchette. This instrument, which later played a role in creating the Ouija board, held a pencil above a piece of paper. At first Mrs. Stringfellow could coax nothing from the planchette, but when she asked her husband to place his hands on hers, the instrument began writing. Beginning in , the Stringfellows held séances nightly at  P.M. For the remainder of the century, the family received more than four thousand messages from their dear Leslie. At first the family talked publicly of their successes, but they stopped after friends and neighbors reacted badly. In , the aging Stringfellows moved to Fayetteville, apparently because of Henry’s failing health.They brought along a daughter,Lessie, whom they adopted after the death of their son, and Lessie’s husband, pharmacist James Read.Henry Stringfellow spent his time in Fayetteville experimenting with grafting English walnuts onto native black walnut rootstocks. The great horticulturist Luther Burbank lived with the Stringfellows for a short time while he collaborated with Henry in his  SEERS, SPIRITUALISTS, AND SKEPTICS experiments. Henry Stringfellow died after living in Fayetteville only a short time. When Lessie’s husband abandoned her, she went to work as a reporter for the Fayetteville Democrat newspaper,which was...