It’s New Year’s Day. Most everyone’s looking forward, but I’m going to double-jump into the past, first to exactly 99 years ago, and then to more than 160 years ago.
I do a lot of stuff from the Modernist era of the first part of the 20th century here at the Parlando Project, but of course not every poet was going all Imagist or Surrealist or whatever new ist was their jam. And one can well note that written poetry in this era still retained a bit of the mass-media or populist strains that are harder to find in our 21st century.* Non-literary-circle people then still might read poetry or write it without taking a stand between Amy Lowell or Ezra Pound.
An example: on New Year’s Day in 1927 an 80-year-old woman wrote an anniversary poem to her husband of 61 years. Susan Emeline (Partain) Hudson was my great-great-grandmother, the mother of my great-grandfather for whom I am named. Her New Year’s poem isn’t looking forward much, but then her husband would die later that year, and she would die within two more years. Instead, her poem recounts how the couple met and gives some hints about how they came to settle in Iowa.
Susan Emeline Partain was born in 1847, the daughter of a carpenter who lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Tennessee’s stance during the American Civil War over slavery was somewhat unique. It was a slave state, but it joined the Confederacy only after the war broke out – though eventually supplying the second highest number of troops to the retain slavery side.** Yet the state government also officially withdrew from the Confederacy shortly before the end of the war, and this move meant that Tennessee didn’t come under the short-lived era of Reconstruction when the federal government sought to remediate the former slave-holding and secessionist leadership. Tennessee was also the place where the very first WASP-supremacy KKK terrorist group was founded, right at the end of the Civil War.
That’s a hell of a paragraph to put in a love story isn’t it! In calmer national times than ours of New Year’s 2026, throwing this in would be as inappropriate as my choosing a poem-made-into-song of religious persecution for this past Christmas.
But I go forth, and here’s the background of the tale Susan Partain Hudson put down. That husband was David Hope Hudson, a young corporal from Ohio who enlisted in the Union Army. His unit was fighting in Tennessee, and involved in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. On and around New Year’s Day 1863 they are engaged in the Battle of Stone’s River. Union forces suffered 32% casualties over 4 days of fighting. For those that aren’t military history nerds, that approaches Charge of the Light Brigade levels of carnage. That summer these Union forces take control of a critical railroad/riverboat center, the town of Chattanooga. Later that year, in the autumn, they are in the battle of Chickamauga as the Northern forces seek to expand their control in that region. Once again, casualties on both sides are terrifying, 28%, and given that 150,000 troops were engaged (counting both sides) it was the second bloodiest battle of the American Civil War to Gettysburg.
Chickamauga was a Union defeat. The forces that included David Hudson had to fall back to Chattanooga. The Confederates, bloodied by the equivalent casualties to the Union at Chickamauga, didn’t press on against the retreating Union army, choosing instead to surround and cutoff the town of Chattanooga. For about a month, the Union army is besieged with no supplies able to get through. Hardtack and salt pork run low, are rationed. And here I need to leave off details, as I haven’t found a detailed account of that month for the Union army troops, or for remaining civilians.***
Susan Partain was a teenager living with her family there, and it’s possible they remained in the town, or at least in the area. Without details, one can only speculate on what things were like for Susan and David during this siege. I’d hold that it’s possible that the cup of water that her poem speaks of was symbolic of more than that, though the poems says the exchange happened in summer and the siege-stage of these battles was in the fall – but clearly this matter is much more risky than a simple flirtation between two young people. Susan’s poem doesn’t give us those details, but her audience – chiefly her husband now near the end of their long-life together – wouldn’t need for that to be said.
We also don’t know everything Susan’s family felt. Hudson family lore says they might have had Union sympathies, but also that they weren’t supportive of Susan’s romance with the soldier. In the summer of 1865, Susan’s mother died, and that may have broken some constraints for her. David, still stationed in the south, was mustered out in October 1865, and he and Susan eloped off back to Ohio for that New Year’s wedding.
Two things I notice in this marriage certificate: that it may have been necessary to be in another state for Susan to marry without her father’s permission, and that David, or whoever filled out the Jan. 1st date, may have suffered from the still common error of writing 5 first before revising the year with the current 6.
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Susan never saw nor stayed in contact with any of her family back in Tennessee until 1905, by when many of her elders were likely dead and she wanted to find out what had happened to her siblings. The newly-married Hudsons also didn’t stay in Ohio – Susan was viewed with suspicion there too. The place they chose to raise a family (eventually, 11 kids!) was Iowa, where David got work in a coal mine.
“From Kisses we make mankind:” Dave and Susan Hudson with 10 of their (take that Nigel Tufnel) 11 kids. The tallest boy on the front left is Frank Hudson, my great-grandfather (who looks a lot in this picture like my dad in his younger years).
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But it’s still a love song – these are my kin, and as Paul Éluard would have it, their kisses helped make me. They married, looking forward on New Years Day 1866. And Susan made this poem that says they celebrated a long life together in 1927 when looking backwards on another New Year’s. Some other little things before I hand you over to the song made with Susan Partain Hudson’s words. Susan mentions being struck by David’s dark moustache and goatee. A few decades ago, I took to that facial landscaping, proximally because I don’t like the irritation of shaving those areas – but who knows, maybe something whispered the idea from some DNA, and my wife only knows me, from the day we met, with that face. And writing poetry? At least one of Susan’s grandsons did too, as I have seen a poem written by my grandfather to my father on his birthday. And the other half of this Project, music? Susan’s family name, Partain, is common in Tennessee. In days when literacy was far from universal, the exact written spelling of a name was not strictly enforced, and a leading spelling variant of Partain is Parton, also commonly found in Tennessee – in particular, with one Dolly Parton. Family genealogies have found no link whatsoever, but that hasn’t stopped me from stretching beyond fact to joke about “Cousin Dolly.” I should also mention that much of what I know about this story comes from work of a later David Hudson, my uncle, who put together information remembered or gathered by other older relatives.
Susan’s poem in chords-sheet form for those who’d like to sing it themselves.
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I’ll leave it to you how much Tennessee heritage can be found in the song I made from my great-great-grandmother’s poem, but like Dolly I compose a lot on guitar, and I also plucked a little mandolin to frame today’s musical piece. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below. Has any such player eloped from your view? Well then, I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Today is also Public Domain Day in the US, works first published in 1930 are now freely available for reuse. Each year a couple of places celebrate with a list of the works now freed-up. In previous years I’d gratefully see a handful of poetry collections or poems in those lists. This year? Nothing highlighted in the summaries. I think this is a double reflection. By 1930 both poetry as a mainstream publishing genre and the Modernist revolution have entered a downward slope, and landmark collections of verse are rarer; and for putative readers in 2026, it’s likely understood that only a handful of readers will be looking for poems to gather.
Populist poetry, everything then from newspaper and radio poets, to greeting cards with short verse, to scrapbook keepers, to folks who simply wrote their own verse for themselves/friends/family without any aim of publication – all these are hard to locate in our current year. “Instagram poets” and others who use social media are perhaps something like this past group. Early in this project I suggested that this kind of poetry, even “bad poetry,” wasn’t harmful to literary poetry, that it wasn’t any different than other “high arts” that tolerated examples that were simply vin ordinaire.
**Wikipedia says Tennessee also supplied a relative high number of Union soldiers for a Confederate state.
***The siege was lifted when a couple of Union Generals named Grant and Sherman sent troops to break the Confederate encirclement, but of course there was more fierce fighting around Chattanooga related to that effort.
Frank Hudson 