Ranald Thorne

Member of House of Thorne, parent of a spouse who married into the Proctor line.

Ranald Thorne was born in 1765, according to the family's account, in a long hunters' camp on the Ohio bank at the place that would later be called Maysville, Kentucky, a spot then known only as a good landing under the Limestone Creek where buffalo came to the salt. There was no town, no station and no road. There were a few skin tents, a fire pit and a Thorne mother who had followed her menfolk over the Alleghenies. Kentucky had scarcely been touched by settlers, and the Thornes who went there in the middle of the 1760s were of the old kind, mountain hunters of the Appalachian ridges, descended from the border reivers of the Northumbrian marches who had ridden the debatable land between England and Scotland for centuries. They had brought the habits of that country with them: a fondness for fast horses, an indifference to other people's boundaries, a clannish loyalty and a code about the dead that had lasted longer than the code of the reivers. The Thornes were slayers of a rough and independent type, and the House of Thorne in the Appalachians had adapted its old borderland skills to a new wilderness. They tracked by sign, ran silent through the woods, and used the long rifle and the tomahawk as their grandfathers had used the lance and the jack. They were not, however, the whole of Ranald's family. He was a printer, and his life in the end had little to do with the woods. The Thorne clan liked to say that every generation produced one member who preferred the written word, and it was Ranald's fate to be that member. The settlement of Kentucky reached the Limestone landing during his boyhood and youth. In the 1770s Boone's trace opened, in the 1780s the stations rose one after another along the rivers, Bryan's Station, Harrodsburg, Boonesborough, and Ranald grew up among forted cabins with palisades and blockhouses, surrounded by cornfields that had to be worked with a rifle at the plough handle. The Revolution reached the frontier as a bloody, undeclared war of raids and counter-raids with the tribes of the Ohio and their British allies, and the Thornes were in the thick of it. Ranald lost a good many kinsmen in those years. His own part was the classic one of the boy at the loophole, loading rifles for the men, carrying water and standing sentry on the cabin roof until he was old enough to be trusted with a gun. He never became a slayer. The family accounts say the calling passed him by, and that he bore it with a grumbling philosophy. What he found instead was type. Somewhere in his early twenties, probably at Lexington, the frontier's first real town, where John Bradford started the Kentucky Gazette in 1787, Ranald got a job as a boy at the press. He learned to set type from the case, to lock up a forme, to ink with leather balls, to pull a page on the wooden hand press with a good, hard, even impression, and to distribute the type afterwards, letter by letter, into its compartments. It was heavy, dirty, exacting work, and it suited a man who liked things done right. A frontier printer was a considerable person. He printed the newspaper, the almanac, land office notices, sheriffs' sales, legal forms, hymn sheets, broadsides for elections and religious revivals, and the notes of small banks and salt works. In a country of illiterate settlers and a great deal of litigation over land titles, the man who could set a deed in clean type was worth his weight in Spanish silver dollars. His son Hob Thorne was born in 1787, and Ranald's household followed the rhythm of the press. The mother of the boy is not named in the House of Thorne's records that survive, and it would be wrong to guess at her. What the papers show is a single father, or at least a father who took the greater share in the boy's upbringing, and a printing shop in a rented log building where the child grew up among stacks of damp paper, cans of lampblack and linseed ink, and the sharp clean smell of lye used to wash the type. Hob learned his letters early, and much of what the family later knew about the hunters of the Thorne line was written down because Ranald had taught his son to write clearly and to keep a record. He was a strict and affectionate parent, with a dry way of saying things, and he was proud of a son who could read the small print of a land patent. He ran his own shop at Limestone in the 1790s, when the landing had grown into a busy river port that took in flatboats and immigrant families and sent out hemp, tobacco, whiskey and salt. The salt roads that ran to the licks and the pack trains that used them made the town a commercial junction, and a printer there did a good trade. His type, his press and his stock of paper came down the Ohio by keelboat from Pittsburgh, and the loss of a shipment in a snag or a flood could ruin a season. He was known as an honest and slightly irascible man who corrected other people's spelling and printed the truth in a country that was fond of exaggeration. He also printed, by a private arrangement that he did not discuss, the small handbills and notices with which the Thornes sent messages to one another across the mountains, and he kept, in a locked drawer of his type cabinet, a manuscript book of the family's hunts. His relationship with the Proctors and Faulkners came only through his son. In 1813 Hob Thorne married Rebecca Bowen Proctor, of the Yorkist line, and Ranald, who was then forty-eight, was an old-fashioned and slightly suspicious father-in-law who spent the wedding day in a corner counting the printing errors on the invitation. But he came to respect the bride, who was steady and clear-headed, and to like the news that came with her, of a family whose records went back to the Wars of the Roses, and whose contest with the Red Ledger of the Faulkners had lasted longer than the border feuds of Northumberland. He found it a highly satisfactory arrangement, to see the Thorne blood joined to the White Ledger, and told a friend that it was the only time he had known a wedding to improve a filing system. The War of 1812 was the last of the great frontier upheavals that he saw, and the least welcome. Kentucky sent thousands of men north, to the River Raisin and to the Thames, and the losses fell heavily on families he knew. He set the casualty lists himself. His eyes were failing by the time the war ended, and his hands were rheumatic, and he sold the shop in the twenties and lived quietly on the profits, sitting in a chair by the window and reading everything the river brought him. His son Hob died in 1839, four years before him, and this was the only blow that he was said to have felt bodily. Ranald Thorne died in 1843, aged seventy-eight, of a winter cough that settled on his chest in January and did not lift. He was buried on the hill above the landing, near the graves of the first settlers. The family remembers him as the printer of the House of Thorne, a rare literate in a house of hunters, and the reason why so much of their story exists on paper. In the Slayerverse he is a small but useful figure, a man without the calling who kept the reivers' descendants supplied with the written word, and who gave the joined houses of Thorne and Proctor a son and a record to be proud of.