As a young wife, Mary Virginia Gibson (nee Rice) was forced to leave her beloved Virginia after her husband deserted the Confederate Army and fled to Illinois, leaving his pregnant wife and young daughter. After giving birth to their second child, Mary Virginia followed him to Illinois in 1864, and then on to rural Moniteau County, Missouri. Refined and well-educated, Mary Virginia had few practical skills and found little companionship among her neighbors. She found solace in her 42-year correspondence with Annie Rector, her first cousin and lifelong confidant, who kept her letters and her secrets. After the death of Annie, the correspondence continued with letters to her children and after Mary Virginia’s death, with the letters of her children to each other.

Mary Virginia read extensively and throughout the letters, she referenced many local and national current events, shared her views on raising children, freely expressed her political opinions, conveyed her passion for equal rights for women, and generously dispensed advice to her adult children. Her letters were forthright, irreverent, witty, sometimes heart-wrenching, and always interesting. They reflect Missouri life, set against the backdrop of some of the greatest events of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Having been privately tutored as a girl in Virginia, the education of Mary Virginia’s eight children was an enormous priority for her. She made significant sacrifices so that all eight of her children were able to attain post-high school graduate educations, an exceptional achievement in the late 19th century. Her children chose widely varying career paths, many of which led to extensive travels and far-flung adventures. Around the turn of the century, one of her sons started a coffee plantation on the big island of Hawaii, while another one spent three years traveling by ship through the South Pacific. Mary Virginia had a son and a daughter that both panned for gold in the Nome Gold Rush of Alaska in 1901, and they were both later shipwrecked in Alaska, in separate incidents, ten years apart. All the while, Mary Virginia tried unsuccessfully to convince her children to move back to Missouri and settle down. The letters of this remarkable family finally end in 1958 when the last two remaining siblings became too feeble to correspond.