This post was contributed by Hannah Gaydeski, a student worker in the Center's Public Services unit.

The Center for Southeast North Carolina Archives and History holds a mysterious manuscript item entitled “Diary (author unknown)” written from 1859 to 1864. I first consulted this diary during the Fall 2025 semester, when I researched Victorian hair jewelry for my final project for the English department’s Victorian Literature class. Given that this diary was labeled as having a significant overlap with the Civil War, I was hopeful that there might be some mention of hair jewelry or hair wreaths, which were connected to the era's mourning practices. I did come across a mention of “wreaths” on January 28, 1859. This was obviously not a focus of the diary, but it did contain some valuable insights. 

The author of the diary was a schoolteacher at the Glen Anna Seminary, and had just arrived for her first semester. The author documents her daily activities. She focuses on irregular but necessary activities, such as laundry or food preservation. My interest quickly expanded to other mentioned instances of material culture, such as wax replicas, painting, and letter-writing. As to the physical properties of the diary, it is bound in a cloth hardcover. The pages have browned and the ruling has faded. Towards the end of the diary there is a small envelope and a poem, with an accompanying dried flower wrapped between the slit envelope. At the very back there is a blotting paper. Some pages at the end of the diary have been cut out, but the final known entry is contained in its entirety on the last page. 

I was curious about the author’s identity and conducted a quick internet search for the school, as the author had not signed her name to the  book. This turned up two digitized Glen Anna Seminary catalogs, one of which dates from 1858-1859, which overlaps with the diary’s creation. The school, a girl’s seminary, was described as “not sectarian. There are nine branches of the christian [sic] church represented, and we have teachers of different denominations." I expanded my research to include instances of the author’s interpersonal relationships at this point, hoping to uncover her identity. The documentation of her friendships and the information in the catalog led me to believe that the author was one “Miss Maggie Clewell.” The diary author could not be P.L. Lathrop, Jennie Jenks, S.T. Ray, nor S.A. Burch, as the author had written about all of these women. This left the two assistant pupils, or Maggie Clewell, the “Teacher of Mathematics and English Branches” as potential authors. Clewell seemed the most likely choice as she had made mention of teaching algebra before. Furthermore, a second search turned up a related collection in our archives! The Clewell Family Collection (MS 365) contains manuscripts relating to Margaret (Maggie) Clewell Jenkins and her brother, Francis Christian Clewell. The diary’s author had mentioned writing to “Frank,” a common nickname for Francis. 

After cross-referencing with the Clewell Family collection, I determined that the diary was definitely connected to this collection. This collection contains a family history entitled Endurin’ The War and a series of letters from Francis (Frank) Christian Clewell written to his family during his service in the Civil War and up until his death in 1867. Frank’s letters are not originals, unlike the diary, but were instead transcribed on a typewriter some time afterwards. Whoever transcribed the letters included notes describing family relations, errors in the accounts, and even physical descriptions of the paper that the letters were written on! This editor confirmed that Maggie taught at the Glen Anna Seminary and was Frank’s sister. The editor also mentioned that she married a Robert Alexander Jenkins, Jr. From this, I was able to successfully cross-reference events between the letters and the diary. It would appear that the diary and letters were separated from each other at some point after being donated to UNCW Library and were never reunited, since connecting the diary to the family collection would require a familiarity with the family. Both collections state the “method and date of acquisition unknown,” but the digitization of other records has happily provided enough evidence to connect the collections back to each other. 

[Update: Thanks to Hannah's research, Special Collections staff were able to reunite this orphaned diary with its parent collection in April 2026. It can now be found as part of MS 365 Clewell Family Collection (finding aid linked below)]

Sources

• MS 365 Clewell Family Collection
• Catalogue of the officers and students of Glen Anna Seminary, at Thomasville, North Carolina 1858/1859

Further Reading

• The Church and Private Schools of North Carolina: A Historical Study, by Charles Lee Raper (1898)
• Transcripts of Clewell family letters posted to the blog Spared and Shared 7
• "Women's Colleges in North Carolina, a Postal History," by Tony L. Crumbley, from the North Carolina Postal Historian vol. 36, no. 3 (Summer 2017)