Rebecca Bowen Proctor

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

Rebecca Bowen Proctor was born in 1792 at the Ohio River landing of Limestone, Kentucky, later called Maysville, and lived sixty-five years as a midwife in the river settlements of Virginia and Kentucky. She married the circuit preacher Hob Thorne in 1813, raised two daughters, Hannah and Minnie, and died in 1857 of old age, having delivered, by the family's count, some two thousand children. She was not a hunter. She was, however, the White Ledger's midwife in the west, a woman whose night calls took her into every kind of house and whose notes on what she found there were passed, year after year, to the cousins who hunted. Her father was Samuel Bowen, born in 1764 and dead in 1825, a boatman of the Shenandoah who, in the early 1790s, had taken work on the Ohio and carried his family with him. Her mother, Hannah Cutler Proctor, born in 1769 and dead in 1823, was a laundress who took in washing wherever the family happened to be. Her elder sister, Deborah Proctor Bowen, born in 1789, would become the landlady of Harpers Ferry. The Bowens stayed at Limestone for about four years, in a rented cabin near the landing, while Samuel worked the flatboats down to Natchez and back, and Rebecca was born there in the last of those winters. The family returned to the Shenandoah Valley when she was three, and she had no memory of Kentucky, only the tale that she had been born at a place where the boats from Pittsburgh tied up and the emigrants climbed a steep road through the mud. She grew up in the valley, in a small house near the river, in a household that smelled of lye soap and wet rope. Her mother, who had a good head and strong arms, taught her to cook, sew, scrub and keep accounts, but Rebecca's interest lay elsewhere. She was fascinated by childbirth. At nine she had been sent to fetch a neighbour's midwife in the middle of the night, and she had stayed in the doorway, unnoticed, to watch. The sight of a woman, a bowl of hot water, a pair of capable hands and a baby's first cry stayed with her, and from that night she knew what she wanted to do. She was apprenticed at fifteen to a midwife in Charles Town, an old Scots-Irish woman who had delivered half the valley and who regarded most physicians as dangerous amateurs. The apprenticeship lasted three years. Rebecca learned to judge a pregnancy by touch, to recognise a breech, to turn a child, to cut a cord, to stop a haemorrhage, to handle a fever and to lay out the dead. She learned, too, the etiquette of the work: to keep her counsel, to ask no questions, to arrive when called and to stay as long as she was needed. By eighteen she had her own practice, and she covered a circuit of farms and river landings from Harpers Ferry to Winchester. In the spring of 1812, at twenty, she attended a Methodist meeting in a barn near Winchester, with her midwife's bag at her feet, in case she was called. She was called out during the sermon, for the birth of twins, and she found, on returning at dawn, a tall, dark, rough-handed man sitting on the barn step who asked her whether the babies were well. He was Hob Thorne, the circuit preacher, and he had been born, he told her, at Limestone, Kentucky, in the same landing town as she. They compared notes. They had been born five years apart in the same raw river settlement, had left it for different reasons and had met again, eight hundred miles away, in a barn. He said afterwards that it was the only coincidence he had ever been able to believe in. They were married in 1813. She moved to Kentucky with him, and there she built the practice that would make her name. The river settlements and horse farms of the Bluegrass country were hungry for a good midwife, and within a year she was delivering babies from Maysville to Frankfort, riding a bay mare with her bag strapped behind her saddle. Their daughter Hannah Proctor was born in 1815 and lived until 1873. Their daughter Minnie Proctor Thorne was born in 1816 and lived until 1887. Neither became a hunter, though Minnie was to marry a Thorne who did. What made Rebecca valuable to the White Ledger was the same thing that made her valuable to her patients, the fact that she went everywhere and saw everything. A midwife's call came at any hour and led to any house, and she was trusted with a family's deepest secrets. She saw the birth of a child with marks on its neck, the young mother who had not been seen in daylight for a year and the household in which the cellar door was always locked. She entered such things in a small notebook, not by name but by place and date, and sent a copy each season to the Proctor cousins in the valley. The Ledger records some twenty-five tallies taken on her information. Her husband's death in 1839, after a fall from a horse, left her at forty-seven with two grown daughters, and she took the loss without complaint. She kept working, moving to Lexington to be near her younger daughter, and she continued to practise until the age of sixty. By then she had trained four apprentices, three of whom became midwives in their own right, and she had seen her trade change from a village craft to a matter of licences and medical degrees. She regarded the change with a dry, forbearing contempt. She died in 1857, at sixty-five, in her own bed, with a neighbour's newborn grandchild in the next room. The Kentucky Proctor cousins buried her beside her husband, and on her stone was carved a line she had chosen herself: She came when she was called. Rebecca Bowen Proctor is remembered as the midwife of the Bluegrass, a woman whose practice was a network. In the Slayerverse she stands for the trusted women of the White Ledger, who heard the secrets of a district in the small hours and, in the morning, passed on what mattered.