The telephone caller was a trust officer in an Atlanta bank. She was administering an estate and was attempting to find the proper home for a physical object, an old portrait which had special meaning to its deceased owner. After trying other offices on the University of Richmond campus, the woman was directed to call me.
“I am thrilled that you really exist,” she said. “Does the name of Betty S____ mean anything to you?”
Fred Anderson
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I did not have to think very long. My mind raced back some 25 years to the summer of 1986. I had assembled a large traveling exhibit to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Lewis and Henrietta Hall Shuck of Virginia going to China as pioneer missionaries. The exhibit was shown at the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s meeting in Salem, at First Baptist Church in Richmond where Henrietta had taught Sunday school, and at Kilmarnock Baptist Church in the county of Henrietta’s birth.
We received an invitation from Catherine Allen herself, the missions historian and then a top WMU executive, to take the exhibit to Atlanta for the annual meeting of Woman’s Missionary Union, SBC. It was a capital opportunity. But how could I get the rare and valuable portraits and artifacts to Atlanta? An appeal to Louise and Harwood Cochrane of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Richmond provided the answer and the trucking magnate provided delivery. I traveled by auto and met the Overnight truck driver and arranged the exhibit in a large lobby just off the auditorium where the WMU would meet.
On the morning of the opening meeting, Catherine Allen asked that I come onto the platform and give a short presentation about the exhibit. Although unknown to Catherine or me, there was seated on the back row of the auditorium an older WMU member from a church in an Atlanta suburb. When I began to talk about J. Lewis Shuck, the pioneer missionary, the other women from her WMU group looked at their fellow member. They had heard their friend talk about Lewis Shuck, about his missions work in China and California and about her kinship with the missionary; but they likely had never heard anyone else talk about him. After all, they were Georgians and Shuck’s story has been championed and perpetuated by Virginians.
Fred Anderson examines the portrait of Eliza Shuck with her husband Lewis Shuck’s portrait in the background.
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After the morning meeting, the woman came to see the exhibit and introduced herself. “I am Betty,” she said. “Lewis Shuck was my great-great grandfather.” I took her through the exhibit but her fellow members were in a hurry to beat the Atlanta traffic and get back to the suburbs.
Later that night, I received a telephone call at my hotel room. It was Betty. She told me that she had been thinking all day about something. She said that she was the last member of her family and that she had some things related to the Shucks. She said: “You all in Virginia seem to appreciate history.” The next day she came to the hotel and placed into my hands a double daguerreotype of Lewis Shuck and his second wife, Eliza Sexton Shuck who was the donor’s great-great grandmother. Betty took a providential attitude about the whole encounter. “The Lord made it happen,” she told me, considering the almost impossible odds that the two of us might have ever met.
When told about the daguerreotype, Catherine Allen felt that it was the first time that Eliza’s likeness had been seen. Little is known about Eliza. When Henrietta died giving birth to the couple’s fifth child, Lewis visited America to tell about his missions work, to raise funds for a chapel and, most importantly, to find a new wife to mother those children. He found Eliza at the Judson Female Institute in Alabama, married her in an elaborate ceremony, and took her with him back to China. Like Henrietta, she also died in China. Lewis returned to America and eventually married a third time.
After my Atlanta experience, the years passed and one day I received a visit from Betty. She was on a Virginia road trip specifically because Betty wanted to visit the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and see where the old daguerreotypes now resided.
Eliza Shuck
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More years passed and I had not heard anything further from Betty. The recent call from the bank official brought all of this back to the surface of my mind. The caller told me that in the past three years Betty had suffered from memory loss. Her caretakers watched as she carried the small portrait of Eliza, her great-great grandmother, around the house and heard her repeat my name even in her dementia — “Fred Anderson” — in connection with the portrait. They understood that she wanted the portrait to find its way to someone named Fred Anderson. Betty died last year and the bank’s trust department was in charge of disbursing her possessions.
The bank official did her homework. She read a book found among Betty’s things. It was a copy of I Give Myself, the biography of Lewis Shuck by Thelma Hall Miller of Bridgewater, Va. The caretakers also remembered their Virginia visit; but after all these years, they thought that they had gone to the College of William and Mary. From the biography, the trust officer figured that the school must have been the University of Richmond, knowing that it had Baptist roots. “When searching, start with a library first,” she explained. Just by chance, her call was taken by a UR librarian who knows me. And that is why she said: “There really is a Fred Anderson! Miss Betty was right!” She became elated that she was fulfilling the deceased’s wishes and that her detective work had brought results. “Miss Betty wanted the legacy of her family to be in the right place. You have just made my day!”
In time the parcel arrived. I carefully opened it, knowing that I was holding not just the old portrait of Eliza Shuck. I was holding the legacy so carefully guarded by this woman whom I had met so long ago. I already had a space waiting on the wall just next to Lewis Shuck and just over from his first wife, Henrietta. Now I have Lewis with two of his wives. Does anyone have a likeness of the third, Annie Trotti Shuck? There’s room for one more!
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.