Deborah Norris Logan
Deborah Norris Logan (October 19, 1761-February 2, 1839), a writer and historian, contributed to the documentation of early American history by preserving, transcribing, and publishing a large cache of family papers. Her seventeen-volume diary (1815-1839) is itself an invaluable source of information concerning the social, political, and cultural life of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia.
History
The granddaughter of Isaac Norris, one of Philadelphia’s original Quaker settlers, Deborah Norris grew up in the heart of the city, where she witnessed pivotal events in the founding of the United States and proved a keen observer of daily life in Philadelphia. At the age of fourteen she overheard the first reading of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia's State House Yard, which shared a wall with the garden of her childhood home. [1] It was there that she encountered many of the Declaration's signers, along with other prominent Philadelphia residents and visitors. She published a detailed description of the "beautifully improved" garden and grounds of her family home years later, noting with pride that "a walk in the garden was considered by the more respectable citizens [of Philadelphia] as a treat to their friends from a distance, and as one of the means to impress them with a favourable opinion of the beauties of the city.” [2]
Apart from attending Anthony Benezet’s Friends Girls School (the first public school for girls in America), Norris essentially educated herself through reading. [3] In 1781 she married George Logan (1753-1821), a Philadelphia native and Quaker recently returned from studying medicine in Edinburgh and London. In 1783 they assumed responsibility for renovating and maintaining Stenton, the Logan family’s war-damaged farm north of Philadelphia. George Logan abandoned medicine and devoted himself to scientific farming and agronomics, becoming one of the principal theorists of American agrarian democracy and a United States Senator. [4] Deborah Norris Logan became the centerpiece of a group of politicians, historians, and artists who congregated at her home. [5] Among her guests were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Charles Willson Peale. In 1814 Logan discovered a trove of decaying letters between William Penn and his secretary, James Logan, her husband’s grandfather. [6] The letters she transcribed were published after her death in two volumes by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1870-72), which elected her its first honorary woman member in 1827. [7]
The following year, at the age of fifty-four, Logan began keeping a diary in which she resolved to record “whatever I shall hear of fact or anecdote that shall appear worthy of preservation. And many things for my own satisfaction likewise that may be irrelevant to others.” She also revealed her personal predilections: “My favourite amusements are gardening, writing,and reading.” [8] She wrote in her diary nearly every day for almost forty years, collecting historical anecdotes and transcribing details from her own daily life. Her entries abound with detailed descriptions of houses and gardens in and around Philadelphia. Gazing out a window one rainy summer day in 1824, she wrote: “The window is nearly covered with a network of wild Ivy and the Glycine, the latter of which greatly predominates, and lays forth its purple clusters of flowers and gently Green luxuriant! Between its lattice I see the Garden: the Broom with its strings of golden blooms, and the beautiful Horse-Chestnut with its thick covering of leaves – but I stop my writing pen, tho’ I am never weary of such scenes myself.” [9]
an developed a fascination with the history of her native city and its rapidly evolving circumstances. [10] She was April 9, 1821 her husband died; she began a memoir of his life, published in 1899 as Memoir of Dr. George Logan of Stenton .. in 1830 John F. Watson’s Annals of Philadelphia included her memoirs and some of the manuscripts she rescued. Deborah Logan died on February 2, 1839. The Historical Society of Philadelphia issued a tribute to her as a Pennsylvania historian.
References
Deborah Logan’s diaries: http://stenton.org/index.php/history-collections-and-interpretation/deborah-logans-diaries/
Logan, Deborah Norris (1761–1839) - Local History - Philadelphia, Historical, Society, and Letters - JRank Articles
http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/4711/Logan-Deborah-Norris-1761-1839.html#ixzz2yIuD1rTP
Logan Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania: http://www2.hsp.org/collections/manuscripts/l/Logan2023.html
Logan Family Papers, University of Pennsylvania: http://dla.library.upenn.edu/dla/pacscl/ead.html?id=PACSCL_LCP_LCPLogan http://freedomsbackyard.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/deborah-norris-logan-historian-transcriber-memoirist/
- ↑ Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,” Biography, 8 (1985): 14, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Logan, Deborah Norris, The Norris House (Philadelphia: Fair-Hill Press, 1867), 1, https://www.zotero.org/groups/54737/items/itemKey/KGVT4B54 view on Zotero].
- ↑ Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,” Biography, 8 (1985): 14, view on Zotero; Terri L. Premo, ‘“Like a Being Who Does Not Belong”: The Old Age of Deborah Norris Logan’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 107 (1983),.87, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Manuela Albertone, National Identity and the Agrarian Republic: The Transatlantic Commerce of Ideas between America and France (1750–1830) (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2014), passim , view on Zotero.
- ↑ Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,” Biography, 8 (1985): 14, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,” Biography, 8 (1985): 14, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Terri L. Premo, ‘“Like a Being Who Does Not Belong”: The Old Age of Deborah Norris Logan’, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 107 (1983),.87, view on Zotero. See also Logan, Deborah, Correspondence between William Penn and James Logan, Secretary of the Province of Pennsylvania, and Others, 1700-1750. From the Original Letters in the Possession of the Logan Family, ed. by Edward Armstrong, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1872), vol. 1, view on Zotero; vol. 2, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Deborah Norris Logan, introduction and diary entry for October 16, 1815, quoted in Marleen Barr, “Deborah Norris Logan, Feminist Criticism, and Identity Theory: Interpreting A Woman’s Diary Without The Danger of Separatism,” Biography, 8 (1985): 15 and 18, view on Zotero.
- ↑ Deborah Logan, unpublished diary entry, 1824, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, quoted on Stenton House website, http://stenton.org/index.php/history-collections-and-interpretation/deborah-logans-diaries/; accessed 3/24/15.
- ↑ Karin Wulf, “’Of the Old Stock’: Quakerism and Transatlantic Genealogies in Colonial British America,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 304–20, view on Zotero.
