Childhood
Zoe's family, from left:
Henry Tompkins Anderson. The New Testament. Cincinnati: self-published, 1864 (two versions); Codex Sinaiticus. Cincinnati: Standard Publishing Co., 1918, and modern reprints.
Zoe’s father Henry Tompkins Anderson retranslated the New Testament from ancient texts through the lens of the Disciples of Christ, an evangelical sect he had joined in his youth. Few copies sold (various bindings were offered). Zoe’s sister Pickett Anderson Timmins published another version in 1918, and it remains in print. Henry considered scholarly labors a “divine call,” while Zoe’s mother Henrietta tended their large brood. Zoe similarly sloughed off material cares while fighting for the poor with words.
Sarah Ann Tompkins Garnett. Cursory Family Sketches. Albany: Joel Munsell, 1870.
Zoe’s cousin Sarah Garnett wrote about their ancestors in colonial Virginia and Kentucky—George Washington was another cousin—who assembled large libraries, read voraciously, and were brilliant conversationalists and musicians. For male and female relatives, Sarah Garnett wrote, the pursuit of knowledge “sometimes destroyed the influence and powers of ambition.” That unworldliness—which Zoe inherited—was only made possible before the Civil War by the labors of enslaved Black people.
Archibald Beatricia Rue. “Photos,” in The Professional and Amateur Photographer. Buffalo, NY: Professional Photographer Publishing Co., July 1902.
Zoe’s family was bent on documenting the world, although only she took up her father’s mantle as a writer. Some relatives became photographers, including her sister Jessie’s husband A. B. Rue, based in Harrodsburg, Zoe’s hometown. His sitters included students at Daughters College, Zoe’s alma mater, in a Neoclassical mansion (shown above right in an 1884 engraving from The Disciple of Christ magazine), run by John Augustus Williams (shown above left in an 1870s photo by Zoe’s half-brother Clarence Anderson). Also in this section are A. B. Rue’s landscape photos. Jessie, a portrait painter, sometimes based artworks on his photos.
Three landscape stereographs of riverfronts near Zoe’s hometown, Harrodsburg, by Archibald B. Rue, a photographer married to Zoe’s artist sister Jessie.
John Wilson Townsend. Kentucky in American Letters, 1784-1912, Volume II. Cedar Rapids, IA: The Torch Press, 1913.
In this collection of about 200 profiles, Townsend quoted a brief memoir typescript that Zoe provided and ran East Side excerpts, including a poem about longing to escape “turmoil and trouble” and “be rocked in a cradle again.” He made errors, for instance giving Zoe’s birth year as 1861 instead of 1860. But by 1913 she pretended to be around age 40; The East Side called him a “chronological fiend,” stealing her youth.
A bottle of Old Jordan whiskey made in Zoe’s hometown, Harrodsburg, and a label depicting the distillery, run by Zoe’s sister Mattie’s husband John B. Thompson, a teetotaler and womanizer.
The Thompsons lived in a column-fronted Harrodsburg mansion with their alcoholic son Philip, a Harvard dropout. Zoe fictionalized a haughty, cruel woman, who had grown up impoverished, living in a column-fronted Kentucky mansion with her wealthy, unfaithful distiller husband, a teetotaler, as their Harvard-educated son becomes a ne’er-do-well alcoholic.
Postcards
Clockwise from top left: Postcard depicting downtown Harrodsburg; postcard of Lewis Academy in Wichita, where Zoe taught art in the late 1880s, when her husband Spencer brought the family westward; the Wichita courthouse where Zoe’s divorce was finalized in 1898 on grounds of Spencer’s admitted adultery.