Why the PCAS?

Good morning from Porte Crayon’s hometown of Martinsburg, West Virginia where it’s warmer than I like it to be — the high around 80 degrees today. Pretty sure you’re not supposed to sweat for no reason in October, but here we are. Thankfully, things are supposed to cool back down tomorrow.

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Because a few new subscribers have joined us here at the PCAS, I feel like I should roll things back and explain how this fake society got started.

The short version goes like this — I cooked it up during the pandemic. I suddenly had time on my hands because I wasn’t commuting three hours a day to Washington, D.C. Thought it would be fun to see how many people I could dupe into joining a sham sodality.

The long version is not quite as jokey.

It goes like this.

When I took my job in the nation’s capital during the summer of 2004, I couldn’t bring myself to become a member of the West Virginia diaspora. Too many of us leave the state for one reason or another, usually for better job prospects, but I found a better paying job that allowed to me stick within the confines of home. My kids were young then and it was important to me that they know where they’re from, so shading my eyes with a hand and peering east from Charleston, the state capital, Martinsburg looked like viable option.

Ever since we moved here, it’s bugged me that Martinsburg doesn’t give Porte Crayon his due. There’s no road here named for him. No plaque that says, “Porte was born here.” No historical marker at all. It’s as if he never existed as far as Martinsburg is concerned even though he was arguably the most famous writer and illustrator of his day. It’s been said his fame rivaled Herman Melville’s, the author of the American masterpiece, Moby Dick.

Porte was born David Hunter Strother on September 26, 1816, to Colonel John Strother and his wife Elizabeth Pendleton Hunter. As a young man he studied art under Samuel F.B. Morse, the inventor of the telegraph and furthered his studies by knocking around Europe for a few years. Notably, he witnessed Napoleon’s funeral in Paris and traveled to Italy before running out of money and returning home in the spring of 1843.

Ten years later, Porte was famous.

In 1853, Porte made a splash with the American reading public with his account of a fishing trip he and his Martinsburg cronies took to what amounts to their own backyard — the high mountain playground of Canaan Valley. The trip he wrote about was actually the second to the region, the first described by his friend and cousin Philip Pendleton Kennedy in the book, The Blackwater Chronicle. Porte contributed illustrations to his cousin’s book and then cut a deal with Harper’s New Monthly Magazine for an illustrated article based on a follow-up trip.

Porte’s article, The Virginian Canaan, put Harper’s on the map. It was so popular that his editors gave him carte blanche and he made the most of it - following up on his initial success with Virginia Illustrated (1854–1855), North Carolina Illustrated (1857), A Winter in the South (1857–1858) and A Summer in New England (1860–1861). He was the original multi-media journalist, able to illustrate his own stories at a time when illustrated magazines and newspapers were just getting started.

In 1859, Porte covered the aftermath of John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and Brown’s subsequent trial for Harper’s sister publication, Harper’s Weekly — sketching a death image of Brown after his hanging for treason. When the Civil War finally broke out in 1861, Porte defied many of the people he grew up with and many members of his extended family when he took the Union side, rising to the brevet rank of brigadier general before returning to the pages of Harper’s with his Civil War memoirs. His last major work for the magazine was The Mountains, a ten-part series that introduced the new state of West Virginia to the nation. He then became the top U.S. diplomat to Mexico before returning to what is now West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, where he died in Charles Town on March 8, 1888.

He’s buried here in Martinsburg, at the historic Greenhill Cemetery, a burying ground that he himself designed. Porte’s plot is no more than a 15-minute drive from my house.

Quite an eventful life, right?

I’m still trying to figure out why Porte isn’t better remembered, even in his hometown.

And that brings me back to the point of today’s newsletter.

Thank you for subscribing to the PCAS. It may be a fake society dedicated to an obscure writer and illustrator, but with each new member, Porte gets that much closer to a revival.

Stay hydrated.

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