Danske Dandridge
First Assignment
Timeline/Bio
BIOGRAPHY: Caroline "Danske" Dandridge
(1854-1914)
She was born the third child of Henry and Caroline Bedinger in November,
1854 in Copenhagen, while her father served as this country's first
ambassador to Denmark. Her father died in November, 1858, just two weeks
after returning to Shepherdstown. VA. (today in easternmost West
Virginia). He had come down with pneumonia while speaking to a cheering
crowd before a bonfire in front of the Entler Hotel.
The family lived a while at "Bedford" with her father's sister,
Henrietta Bedinger Lee, and her husband, Edmund Jennings Lee, the first
cousin of Robert E. Lee. (Bedford was burned by Union troops in July,
1864). Danske's frail mother soon bought Poplar Grove and fifty acres
from the Morgan family.
During the battle of Antietam, Danske, her mother, brother, and sister
cared for wounded men in their house. Her sister, Mary Bedinger
Mitchell, would write a famous essay called "A Women's Recollections of
Antietam" which appears in Vol. II of "Battles and Leaders," a widely
used Civil War reference. Her step-brother, George Bedinger Rust was
killed at Gettysburg. Danske's mother opposed slavery and hired all
help.
When her mother, too, died in 1869. Danske, her writing gifts astir,
went to live with her wealthy and prominent grandparents in Flushing,
NY. She had been attending Mrs. Pelham's Priory in Staunton, Virginia,
where she experienced a religious awakening.
She married Adam Stephen Dandridge in 1877, a handsome son of the
venerable Dandridge family that lived at "The Bower," in Jefferson
County. The Bower was the inspiration for an influential southern novel
called "Swallow Barn" by John Pendleton Kennedy. The Dandridge's Bower
also fed and entertained about 300 of J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry men for
almost a month in September-October, 1862.
After what she called "Ten Perfect Years" in which she gave birth to her
first two children, Serena and Stevie, Danske turned, at a friend's
urging, to write in earnest.
A difference in temperment between the intense, otherworldy Danske and
her genial, uncomplicated husband led them to pursue divergent
interests; she her poems , her garden, and a wide range of "postal
friends"; he, spending time playing Muggins (a game of dominoes) at the
A. S. Dandridge Farm Implements Shop. Danske, a poet of delicate
constitution, wrote of her struggle to make ends meet at their home,
(which she owned and had inherited), while her husband was relatively
unproductive. Danske would go away for stretches to sanitariums, paid
for by her wealthy family. Stephen would serve in the West Virginia
House of Delegates, spending in-session months in far away Charleston.
Danske published two volumes of poetry in the late 19th century: "Rose
Brake," (the new name she gave her home), and "Joy and Other Poems."
They were widely acclaimed. Had she lived in a large city closer to
publishers and reviewers, she would have probably had yet greater
reknown. Poet John Greenleaf Whittier included her poem, "The Struggle,"
in his anthology of great poetry covering a 400-year period.
She also wrote an estimated 200 gardening articles or letters to
magazines, such as "Garden and Forest." She created, with the help of
her African-American gardeners Tom and Charity Devonshire, a fabulous
garden with a hundred varieties of roses along with innumerable other
types of plant life.
She also wrote four books: "Historic Shepherdstown," "George Michael
Bedinger: Kentucky Pioneer", "American Prisoners of the Revolution," and
an unpublished manuscript about General St. Clair.
Her progression away from poems, to garden articles; and finally the
dryer, more dispassionate study of history, mirrors the timing of the
deaths of two of her children, 16-year-old Stevie and 12-year-old
Dorothea, or "Dotise." Their losses seem to chart her gradual withdrawal
from any writing that is emotionally intense and vulnerable.
Danske died June 3, 1914 with no will. Some of the town's waggier
tongues punished Danske for her aloof unconventionality calling her
"crazy", the price for eschewing her quota of church picnics. When a gun
went off in her house the day she died with only Danske and an Irish
nurse in the house, the same tongues called it a suicide. Helen
Goldsborough, a relative who lived across the street at "Leeland," wrote
that this is a claim Danske's family and persons who lived their entire
lives at Rose Brake have always denied. Danske's death, Miss
Goldsborough and other close family friends say, involved the
disgruntled nurse the ailing Danske had fired just days before. The
nurse had refused to leave.
Husband Stephen died about a decade later, leaving their artistic
daughter Serena, also called "Miss Violet," to live out her life at Rose
Brake. Her cousin, Nina Mitchell, daughter of Danske's sister, Mary,
came to live at Rose Brake around the time of World War I. She and Miss
Violet, who later asked to be called "Serena K." in memory of an aunt
she loved, became two of the most beloved and generous residents
Shepherdstown has ever had. Longtime residents have often said "Miss
Violet and Miss Nina" are the very essence, and something of a source,
of what is Shepherdstown, in style and outlook.
A friend said lovingly that almost everyone in this remarkable family
was very religious, goodhearted, and greatly talented in the arts. Yet
most also had a "slightly loose screw" to spice the memory of them. The
friend said that this "crack" in the family's members was like one the
Grecian goddess Diana decreed as "the place were the demons were shown
out".