1858
Mahantango, Pennsylvania
Tuesday, December 28th
Before their nuptials, David Boal’s fiancé Cordelia Thompson was calling their coming affair, The Middle Wedding. They – meaning she – had chosen a date in the middle of the holiday week. They would be married at noon, the middle of the day. They had chosen a location in the middle of the valley where the muddy Juniata flows into the Susquehanna. They had hoped their choices would be convenient for their guests -- Thompsons and Boals from the west, another set of Thompsons from the south, and Boughmans from the north. The truth was, the location was inconvenient for all. Especially with the cold, drenching rain heading east, storm clouds unburdening themselves after passing over the summit of Shade Mountain. They certainly hadn’t planned on that when they sent out their invitations.
The guests, the ones whose wagons and carriages didn’t get mired in the muck, arrived at the stone inn in Mahantango before the appointed hour. The good news: the granite walls and the lumbered roof did not leak. The bad: little more than half the guests – 30 or so – made it.
“We should have known,” Cordelia would say, years later in her repertoire of tried and true stories, “Mahantango is a Lenape word, meaning ‘where we had plenty of meat to eat.’ That was certainly true for our guests.” Thirty people indulging in a feast meant for sixty. When farming is your livelihood, laughter can be in indispensable tonic.
That morning, neither David, nor Cordelia, in their separate rooms at the inn, were laughing much, but the truth was, they both had much to smile about. Theirs had been a fine courtship, one started in a most improbable way.
David had met Cordelia’s older brother William at the gristmill. They had gotten to talking as they sat in adjoining wagons, waiting for the less-than-scrupulous brokers to make offers for their heaping mounds of corn. David sensed that William, just a couple of years older than he, was good stock, doing his best to keep his family together, after the death of his parents, one right after the other. He was a Thompson, but after a few questions, David was able to determine William wasn’t one of those Thompsons. He was from New Buffalo, some 20 miles removed from Thompsontown.
While farming was a solitary undertaking, David found himself wishing he had more occasion to spend time with William, a storyteller with a warm laugh. Instead, his days – sunup to sundown – were spent working alongside another set of Thompsons. Fine people, yes, but not ones he had chosen. Then David came up with his plan.
William’s life was lived in and about New Buffalo, while David’s was centered in Thompsontown. The thing that had brought them together was the gristmill that served all the farmers of the Juniata Valley. There was only one other thing he could think of that served the entire valley of Scots-Irish.
David, not a religious man, had convinced his sister Jane to join him for the Sunday service at the Presbyterian Church in Millerstown. They walked down the broad center aisle and tucked into a wooden pew near the back. And, just as he had hoped, three rows in front of them, was William Thompson, on the aisle, in his Sunday best. He was seated next to a slender woman a bit younger, and next to her, a hulking man a touch older.
The two Boals relied on a shared missal to guide them through the largely unfamiliar proceedings. After the recessional concluded, David waited for William to proceed up the aisle, which he did, following the tiny woman and lumbering man.
“Good morning,” David said, startling William Thompson, who had been looking down.
“Oh hello, David,” William said, with a smile. “I didn’t know …”
“More time in the fall, with the harvest in.”
After David introduced Jane, William presented his sister Cordelia and his older brother, Samuel.
Nods and handshakes were exchanged as they promenaded out to the vestibule. Cordelia was a tender thing. With older brothers working the fields, she likely spent most of her time indoors. Samuel was big as an ox and seemed just about as simple. Even if he was limited, there would still be plenty for him to do around the farm.
And, in that roundabout way, that was that start that led to these two being joined together under the ordinance of God on this sodden December day – Presbyterian liturgies; Sunday afternoon carriage rides; formal visits to meet the extended families. David, not a big man, felt like he was busting out of his new suit of clothes. Not only had he won Cordelia’s hand, he and his new bride would be making their lives together at the Boal Homestead, reclaiming the house that his father had built years before his birth. He felt as if he was taking back a disputed borderland.
As for Cordelia, at 21, this union was something of a reprieve. With her parents gone and her older sisters married off, she had spent the last couple of years looking after her two brothers, preparing meals, keeping the farmhouse tidy. While David Boal wasn’t dashing like Mr. Darcy or any of those other male leads in those Jane Austen novels that Cordelia loved, he was solid, good, and courteous. “Companiable” was her word for him, but that was not a word she would share with another soul. After all, Cordelia Emaline Thompson of New Buffalo, Pennsylvania recognized that she was no Elizabeth Bennet.
Having been pronounced man and wife, David and Cordelia stood side-by-side, greeting their guests in their shorter-than-anticipated receiving line. “You look lovely, dear,” Cordelia was told by a matronly woman she’d never met. “I wish you both the greatest happiness,” said a man David suspected must have been one of Cordelia’s uncles.
The young couple saw separate things as they looked out at their guests. Cordelia spotted her two brothers, standing apart from the other guests. She prayed that they each would find wives since neither was capable of managing a home without a woman’s touch.
David, buoyed as he was by a newfound sense of independence, looked across the room, and saw his mother and her husband standing close to one another, while his sister Jane and his stepfather’s considerably younger brother Thomas Boal Thompson were paired in conversation. There was something slippery about this Thompson. Thomas had just returned to Thompsontown from Georgia, where they said he operated a bank for the planters, having left the children of his deceased spouse with their mother’s people.
Years later, when asked about their courtship, Cordelia would say, “I always felt like God brought us together.” David, not a funny man, thought, but did not say, “Really, it was corn.”
Mostly, when he reflected on that day at the inn above the churning Susquehanna running outside its banks, David would remember that fleeting sense of independence and his premonition that it would not last.
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