Nettie Eaton

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

Nettie Eaton was born in 1807 in Nashville, Tennessee, and ran a dry-goods shop in Franklin for more than forty years. She married the blacksmith and vampire slayer Albert Nichols Proctor in 1828, raised two children with him, buried him in 1848 and kept the shop and the family going for another thirty-five years. She died in 1883 of old age, at seventy-six. She was not a hunter and was not born to the White Ledger, but she married into it at twenty-one, learned its secrets in a winter, and spent the rest of her life as the keeper of the Proctor household in the Harpeth country, through widowhood, war and the slow rebuilding of a ruined town. Nashville, in the year of her birth, was a river town of about four hundred houses, built on a limestone bluff above the Cumberland. It was the capital of the Tennessee country in all but name, a place of log taverns, brick stores, a new courthouse and a market square, where the planters of the middle basin came to sell cotton and buy cloth. Andrew Jackson, who lived at the Hermitage a few miles out, was its leading citizen and its principal source of gossip. Nettie's father kept a saddler's shop on the public square, and her mother, a capable, sharp-voiced woman, took in sewing. The family papers give no more detail about them, except that Nettie was the eldest of five, and that she was set behind the counter at the age of nine, on a box, because her father had found that customers would pay a pretty price for a saddle if a child asked them to. She learned the trade early. By twelve she could measure a bolt of calico by eye, add a column without a pencil and spot a counterfeit note at arm's length. The shop that she eventually set up for herself, at nineteen, with a loan from an uncle, sold dry goods in the old sense of the term: cloth, thread, buttons, ribbons, needles, hosiery, gloves, hats, shawls, handkerchiefs and whatever else a woman of the district might want and could not make. It stood on the square, between a tavern and a bookseller, and within a year it was doing better than either. She had a shrewd eye for fashion, a good head for prices and a manner, at once brisk and kind, that made a customer feel she had been waited on by a friend. She was a small, round-faced woman, with bright brown eyes and a quick laugh, and she looked, she said, like a person who was about to sell you something. She nearly always was. She met Albert Nichols Proctor in 1827, through a cousin of hers who was married to a Franklin farmer. He had come up to Nashville on an errand for his father, to buy a set of tyres, and had stopped at the square to ask for directions. He was twenty-two, six feet tall, black-bearded and so slow of speech that she took him at first for a drover. He bought a pair of gloves, which he had no use for, and a card of buttons, which he did not need, and asked her, rather gravely, whether the shop was open in the evenings. She said that it was. He came back four evenings running. On the fifth, she closed the shop at seven, and they went for a walk along the river. They were married in 1828, in the spring, at the Presbyterian church, and she moved to Franklin. The little town, twenty miles to the south, was in the middle of its first prosperity, with new brick stores on the square and a good road to Nashville, and she saw at once that it lacked a decent draper. She opened her shop in the front room of the frame house that Albert had built beside his smithy, with a bolt of calico, a case of ribbons and a tin of pins. By the end of the year the front room had been enlarged. By the end of the second she had two girls to help, and the Franklin ladies who had formerly sent to Nashville were buying everything at home. It was Albert who told her the truth. He did it in the fall, after a night in which he had come in at three in the morning, pale, dirty and unwilling to explain. He said that there was something she should know. She said, without looking up from the stockings she was counting, that she had known there was. He told her everything, sitting at the kitchen table, in the order in which it had happened, the calling at the funeral in 1826, the talk with his father, the White Ledger and its cousins, and the vampires. She listened to the end. Then she asked a number of practical questions. How often did he go out? What did he carry? Who else knew? What would she do if he did not come home? He answered them all, and she wrote the answers, in her neat shopkeeper's hand, on the back of a bill, and filed it in the drawer under the till. She became, in the Proctor family's phrase, the quartermaster. The White Ledger's hunters of the middle South needed many things, and they could not buy them openly. A silver-lined pocket, a length of dark cloth, a coat with a hidden seam, a stout pair of boots in a particular size: these were ordered through her, in the ordinary way, as part of the shop's business, and delivered in a paper parcel. Nobody in Franklin thought it odd that a draper should stock so much dark stuff. She also, without being asked, took to noticing who came into the shop. A draper sees a great many people, and she saw, over the years, the stranger who bought a yard of black crape on the day before a funeral that nobody had heard of, the young wife who came in at closing time to buy a scarf to cover her throat, and the traveller who paid for a waistcoat in gold coin that looked a hundred years old. She passed it all to her husband. Her children were born in the early years of the marriage. Edwin Eaton Proctor was born in 1830 and lived until 1908, and Naomi Eaton Proctor was born in 1833 and lived until 1912. Neither of them hunted. Edwin went into the forge, and in time took over both forge and shop, and Naomi became a seamstress in Nashville who also taught needlework. They were brought up in the middle of a busy household, with a forge in the yard and a counter in the front room, and they learned to tell the time, the day and the weather by the noise from the street. Her husband's death in 1848, after a blow in a churchyard, was the great grief of her life, and she took it in her own way. She had nursed him for three days. On the fourth, when he died, she washed him, dressed him and sat by him till morning. Then she opened the shop. The neighbours, who came in to offer their condolence, found her behind the counter, cutting a length of black ribbon. She said that it would be wanted. She carried on alone. She had a forge, a shop and two children, and she intended to keep all three. She hired a smith to run the forge, a sober, skilful young man named Hale, who stayed for twenty years, and she kept the shop herself. The Proctor cousins, who regarded the house as a fixed point in the country, continued to use it. She sent their messages, stocked their gear and, on the rare occasions when a hunter arrived in a bad way, put him in the back bedroom and sent for the doctor. The Ledger's western tally book records fourteen hunts in which her information was used after her husband's death. The Civil War came to her door. In the autumn of 1864 the battle of Franklin was fought a mile south of the square, in a few desperate hours on a November afternoon, and by nightfall the town was a hospital. She was fifty-seven. She opened the shop and the house to the wounded, gave up every bolt of cloth she had for bandages, and worked for four days and nights, with her daughter, beside the surgeons. She did not ask the colour of a man's coat. When it was over, she counted the stock, and found that there was not a yard of calico left in the place. In the years after the war she rebuilt. She took out a loan, restocked the shop and opened a second counter for ready-made clothing, and by the end of the 1870s she was the most respected tradeswoman in the county. She grew stout, and gave up the heavy lifting. She died in the autumn of 1883, at seventy-six, of old age, in a chair by the window, looking out at the square. Nettie Eaton is remembered in the Proctor family as the draper of Franklin, the wife who kept the shop open. In the Slayerverse she stands for the shopkeepers of the White Ledger, the women at the counter who saw everything and sold what a hunter needed, and who were still there when the smoke cleared.