Lewis Thayer Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Lewis Thayer Faulkner was born in 1800 at the Ohio River landing in the country where the town of Paducah would later stand, and lived eighty-one years as a printer of Kentucky and Louisiana. He was the son of the boatman and slayer Silas Faulkner, known in the Red Ledger as The Flatboat Falcon, and of Patience Thayer, who died when he was sixteen. He was not a hunter. He was called to no work, carried no gun and took no tally, and he spent his long life among type cases and ink balls while two of his brothers carried on the family's work. He married the seamstress Naomi Kincaid in 1820, raised a son and a daughter, and died in 1881 after a fall, aged eighty-one, having lived, as his mother's papers predicted, long enough to see the railroad come to Louisiana. The place of his birth was hardly a place at all. The mouth of the Tennessee River, where it came into the Ohio across from the bluffs of Illinois, was in 1800 a wooded point with a trading cabin, a scatter of boatmen's shelters and a landing that the flatboats used when the current served. Silas Faulkner, who was at that time working the river from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi, had brought his wife Patience down with him when she was heavy with her third child, and she was delivered in a log cabin that belonged to a trader, with the help of a boatman's wife and a bottle of whiskey. The boy, whom they named Lewis, was carried to the river's edge within a week to see the water. His father said afterward that he had never seen a child so little interested in a river. His mother, Patience Thayer, was a farmer's daughter from the Kentucky River country who had married the young boatman against her family's advice and never regretted it. She was a dry, exact, unsentimental woman, who believed in the virtues of a clean shirt, a clear conscience and a book in the house, and it was she who taught the boy his letters. She had a few volumes, a Bible, an arithmetic, a volume of Watts's hymns and a copy of Franklin's autobiography that she had carried down the Kentucky River in a flour barrel, and Lewis read them all. By seven he could read anything put in front of him, and his father, who could hardly sign his name, regarded the gift with a mixture of pride and alarm. In 1804 Silas Faulkner took the family down the Mississippi on a flatboat, a long, slow, drifting journey that lasted most of a season and took them past Natchez to the country of the lower river. The boy remembered it, in a general way, for the rest of his life: the long brown water, the sandbars, the flocks of ducks, the fires of the camps and the heat, which struck him, at four, as a personal affront. They settled on the edge of New Orleans, where his mother kept a cow and sold milk and butter in the Vieux Carre. His father worked the river. His mother kept house, raised the children and kept her eye on the stores. Lewis, the oldest of the boys, looked after his sister Eliza, born in 1805, and then his brothers Caleb, born in 1807, and Silas, born in 1811, and learned early the skills of a household in which the head was often away. What he wanted was not the river. He wanted to read. He had found, in a trader's cabin, a bundle of old newspapers, and he spent a summer reading them, advertisements and all, and it was in those papers, with their thin columns and their strange woodcuts of runaway slaves, steamboats and patent medicines, that he found his calling. He learned that somebody had set those words, letter by letter, in a little iron frame. He wanted to know how. His mother died in 1816, in an accident, and he was sixteen. The house broke up. His father took the younger boys and went back to the water, and Lewis, who would not go, was sent north up the river to an uncle in Frankfort, who found him a place in the office of the town's newspaper. He swept the floor, carried the forms and learned to set type. He was a slow, careful, fastidious compositor, who read every line back to himself under his breath, and within two years he was setting the front page. His master said that he had never seen a boy so determined to get it right. In 1819, at nineteen, he was sent on an errand to a dressmaker's shop with a friend's torn coat, and there met Naomi Kincaid, the young seamstress who had set up on Main Street with a bow window and a sign. The story of their meeting is told in her own account, and he told it in his own way, with less about the coat and more about the thimble. He said that he had fallen in love with her hands. They were married in the spring of 1820, at the Presbyterian church, and he took a room above the shop. It was Lewis who told his wife the truth about the family. A year into the marriage, conscious that it was a wrong to keep it from her, he sat her down and explained that his father was a slayer of the Red Ledger, known as The Flatboat Falcon, and that his brothers Caleb and Silas had been called into the same work. He himself, he said, had not. He was a printer, and he was slightly ashamed of it. Naomi's answer, that she had been mending the coats for a year, relieved him of the shame for good. From then on he thought of his trade as a form of service. He printed, at his own cost, the hunters' notices, the routes, the list of safe houses and the small handbills by which the cousins of the Red Ledger kept in touch across a thousand miles of river. They were printed in an ordinary typeface, on ordinary paper, and they read like the notices of a lodge. They were, in effect, the first regular circular of the Red Ledger in the West. The shop grew. By 1826 he had bought out his master's interest, and in the 1830s he moved to Louisville, where the printing trade was larger and the work more varied. He printed a weekly paper, a good many pamphlets, a steamboat directory, a volume of hymns and a number of legal forms, and he took on two apprentices and a journeyman. He was an exacting employer and a fair one. He had no patience for a crooked line. The shop was clean, the type was sorted, and the proofs were read twice. His son Milton Kincaid Faulkner, born in 1823 and dead in 1899, grew up in the shop and followed him into the trade. His daughter Naomi Faulkner, born in 1827 and dead in 1903, took up her mother's needle. He was a tall, stooping, ink-stained man with a long nose and a dry manner, and he did not look like a member of a family of hunters. He looked like a printer. He had the printer's squint, the printer's stained fingers and the printer's habit of quoting a line of type from memory. He was, in his way, a reformer, a believer in public schools, temperance and cheap postage, and he used his paper to argue for all three. He disliked slavery, which was not a popular view in a border state, and he said so in print, at some cost to his subscription list. His brothers came and went. Caleb, who had been called in 1828, and Silas, who followed him, passed through Louisville on their way up and down the river, and they stayed at the printer's house and slept on the floor of the composing room. They told him, when they had had a glass of wine, about the things they had seen. He listened, and set them in type in his head, and never printed a word of them. It was, he said, the one thing he had learned as a printer that had been worth knowing: that some pages were not for the press. The Civil War was hard on the shop. His Kentucky was divided, his customers were divided, and the paper lost half its advertisers in a season. He kept it going, in a smaller way, by printing for the army, and in 1864, when a Union provost marshal closed three other papers in the state, his escaped because it had said nothing at all. Naomi died in 1873. He lived on, in the house on the hill, for eight more years, with his daughter looking after him, and he spent his last summers reading the old papers again, the bundle of newspapers from the trader's cabin, which he had kept. He saw the railroad come to Louisiana, as his mother's friends had said he would, in the sense that he lived to read of the lines that ran to New Orleans, and he sent a letter of congratulation to the cousins at the southern end of the family's country, who had waited sixty years for it. He died in 1881, at eighty-one, after a fall on the stairs of his shop. He was found at the foot of them, with a proof in his hand, which he had corrected. Lewis Thayer Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner family as the printer of the western branch, the man who set the hunters' notices without ever taking up a gun. In the Slayerverse he stands for the ordinary trades that carried the work: the printers, the seamstresses and the clerks whose quiet labour held a scattered family together.