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, page: 183[View Page 183] 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 page: 184[View Page 184] (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.
- On the We-a Trail; a Story of the Great Wilderness.
New York, 1903.
- Bold Robin and His Forest Rangers. New
York, 1905.
- Dionis of the White Veil.
Boston, 1911.
