Asa Cutler

Spouse of Phebe Wilder Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Asa Cutler was born in 1741 in the limestone country of the Shenandoah Valley, at a place that would later be called Lexington, Virginia, though in his boyhood it was only a scatter of cabins, a mill race and a wagon road that ran south toward the Carolinas. He was a printer by trade and lived to be seventy-five, long enough to see the colony of his birth become a state, a republic and a settled, quarrelsome part of a larger nation. He entered the records of the Proctor family only by marriage, as the husband of Phebe Wilder Proctor, but the White Ledger's marginal notes remember him kindly, as the man who kept the house's paper in order for nearly half a century. The Valley of Asa's childhood was a place of Scots-Irish and German farmers who had come down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania, and it was a country where a man who could read and reckon was valued out of all proportion to his rank. His people were not gentry. His father kept a few cattle and a share in a gristmill, and his mother taught him his letters from a psalter with a cracked cover. When Asa was fourteen, the news of Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela reached the valley, and the frontier settlements filled with refugees and rumours. He remembered all his life the sound of the alarm guns from the neighbouring farms and the way his family sat up through the night with the doors barred. The French and Indian War was the first great fright of his life, and it taught him that news, accurate or otherwise, was a kind of weather that people lived under. That lesson decided his trade. A cousin on his mother's side carried him east, and he was bound as an apprentice in a Williamsburg print shop, where he learned to set type upside down and backward, to beat ink onto the forme with leather balls, and to pull a sheet on a wooden hand press without smearing it. The work was hard on the back and the eyes, and it stained the hands so deeply that his palms stayed grey for the rest of his life. He also learned the habits of a proper printer: to proofread twice, to trust nobody's handwriting, and to keep an exact account of every ream of paper that came through the door. Paper was dear in the colonies, most of it shipped from England or made by the small mills in Pennsylvania, and a printer who wasted it went out of business. When he came back west in the mid 1760s, he set up a small shop on the road, printing broadsides, blank bonds, almanacs, land deeds and the occasional sermon. He was not a fiery man. Those who knew him described a careful, dry, patient person, thin and a little stooped, who spoke slowly and listened more than he talked. He wore spectacles that he had bought in Philadelphia and mended twice with wire. He liked accuracy above almost everything, which suited the Proctor family well, because the Proctors were a house that lived by a ledger. He met Phebe Wilder Proctor through that ledger, in a roundabout way. The Valley Proctors of that generation kept the White Ledger in the old manner, a bound book in which every vampire taken by the Yorkist line was tallied and witnessed. Their copies were wearing out, and a page had been spoiled by damp. Someone recommended the printer on the road, who could rule a page and copy a hand exactly. Asa was let into the secret of what the book recorded with the caution the family always showed, and he took it in without alarm. He was not a slayer and never claimed to be one. What he understood was that somebody had to be the person who kept the paper straight, and he was glad to be useful. Phebe, a milliner who had a shop of ribbons, caps and straw bonnets a few doors along, had carried the damaged pages over herself. They were married in 1768, when both were twenty-seven. The household they made was one of the more orderly in the Valley. Phebe's millinery brought in coin at a time when coin was scarce, and the two trades fed each other, for she ordered her handbills and trade cards from her husband and he hired her to trim the covers of his almanacs with printed borders. Their daughters Hannah Cutler Proctor and Ruth Cutler Proctor were born in 1769 and 1772. In the family custom the daughters carried the Proctor surname forward with their father's name in the middle, a pattern that the wider family had followed for generations. Asa taught both girls to read before they were five and let them sit at the type case, where they learned to pick sorts from the compartments faster than his own journeyman could. Hannah had her father's exactness, and Ruth had her mother's eye for colour and finish. The Revolution came to his print shop as it came to every printer in the colonies. A press was a weapon of a sort, and every side wanted it. Asa printed the militia rolls, the county's paper money, and, when the summons came, the local committee's notices and appeals for recruits. He was too old for the line and had no taste for the camp, but he served in the way he was best fitted for, keeping the county's records and running its handbills. He worried constantly about a supply of paper and lead type, and at one dark point he melted a pair of pewter tankards to make sorts. Slayers of the Proctor house passed through his shop in those years, among them men who scouted for the army, and he learned to say nothing about the packets they left with him to be copied into the ledger. The rivalry with the Faulkners, meanwhile, ran on in the quiet way it always had, by comparison of tallies, and he was one of the few people who could say without exaggeration exactly how many entries each side held, because he had copied them. Phebe died in 1803, at sixty-two, and Asa never entirely recovered from the loss. He kept her shop sign in his own workroom and let the millinery go to a niece. His daughters looked after him, and in his last years he printed little beyond the occasional notice, though he still went down to the shop each morning to wipe the type. He liked to say that a printer's greatest secret was that nothing he set ever belonged to him. The saying became a small proverb in the family. He died in 1816 of a fever, at the age of seventy-five, and was buried near his wife. His daughters carried on, Hannah until 1823 and Ruth until 1832, and the White Ledger's fair copies from the years around the Revolution are in his hand or in the hands he trained. His name is entered in the family's records as a friend of the house rather than a hunter, which is how he would have preferred it. In the Slayerverse he is remembered as the printer of the Valley, the quiet man whose clean pages let the Proctor line prove what it had done.