Ruth Cutler Proctor

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

Ruth Cutler Proctor was born in 1772 in the cane-and-cedar country that would later be the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and she spent her working life as a shopkeeper on the Tennessee frontier. She married a blacksmith and vampire slayer, Jacob Stone, raised two sons who became hunters of the White Ledger and died in 1832 at the age of sixty, having seen her counter become one of the busiest places in the district. She was a Proctor by family custom, the younger daughter of a Virginia printer and a milliner, and her shop, which sold everything from salt to sealing wax, was the nearest thing the Proctors had to a headquarters in the western country. The family records place her birth in 1772, which is earlier than any town stood on the Stones River. The most likely explanation, and the one the Proctors have always told, is that her parents were travelling the long hunters' trace west when she was born and that the family later remembered the place by the name it came to bear. Her father, Asa Cutler, was a printer who lived from 1741 until 1816. Her mother, Phebe Wilder Proctor, a milliner, lived from 1741 until 1803. Her elder sister, Hannah Cutler Proctor, born in 1769, stayed in the Shenandoah Valley and became a laundress. Ruth was the one who went west, and she went because the White Ledger needed somebody on the far side of the mountains. The Tennessee frontier of her girlhood was a string of stockaded stations along the Watauga and the Cumberland, each one a cluster of cabins, a blockhouse and a spring. The settlers were Scots-Irish and English, and they lived on corn, venison, hog meat and whatever they could trade. They were hunters and farmers and, in time, the core of the new state of Tennessee, admitted to the Union in 1796. Ruth grew up in a world where everything was made by hand and nothing was wasted. She learned to card wool, spin flax, dip candles, make soap, run a loom and keep accounts on a slate. She also learned, from her father's printing trade, to read and write a clear hand, which set her apart in a district where a good many settlers signed with a mark. She saw the country change. In the 1780s there were few stores, and settlers bought their needs from pack peddlers and river traders at extortionate prices. By the 1790s, as the population grew and roads improved, permanent shops began to appear, and Ruth saw her chance. With a small loan from her father and a stock bought at Knoxville, she opened a shop at a crossroads near the Stones River, a single room with a plank counter, three shelves and a scale. She sold powder, lead, salt, cloth, needles, nails, coffee, sugar, whiskey and ribbon, and she took payment in coin, furs, corn or promises. The shop grew by the year, and within a decade she had built a second room, a storehouse, a small tavern sign over the door and the best reputation for honest weights in the county. In 1795, at the age of twenty-three, she married Jacob Stone, a young blacksmith of nineteen. Jacob, born in 1776, would be called to the work three years later, and his forge at the crossroads served as both a workshop and a meeting place for the hunters of the district. The marriage was a practical alliance and, to the surprise of the neighbours, a happy one. He shod horses, sharpened axes and forged the silver-tipped bolts and the iron stakes that the region's hunters ordered, and she kept the accounts. She was a vampire slayer's wife who could face down a fur trapper over the price of lead, and she was also the keeper of the shop's back room, where hunters left messages, bought ammunition and stayed the night without signing a register. Their sons carried the Proctor name according to the family custom. Jacob Proctor, born in 1798 and dead in 1873, was a vampire slayer of the White Ledger, a thoughtful man who is remembered for his long feud in tallies with the Faulkner hunters of Kentucky. Asa Stone Proctor, born in 1800 and dead in 1870, was also a slayer, named for his grandfather the printer, and he kept his brother's accounts as well as his own. Ruth taught both boys to read a ledger before they could ride, and the account books they kept are among the best preserved in the family archive. She lived through the years of the western settlement, the admission of Tennessee as a state and the War of 1812, in which her husband, then in his late thirties, served with the Tennessee riflemen, and her elder son, only fourteen, minded the forge. She held the family and the shop together, buying beef for the soldiers, sewing shirts and selling lead at cost. By 1820 the crossroads had become a village, and her shop sat at the centre of it. She was a woman of decided views, a Presbyterian of the old sort who disapproved of dancing and approved of arithmetic, and she was said to have a way of looking at a debtor that made him find the money. Ruth died in 1832 at the age of sixty, of old age, in the room above her shop. The village closed for a day. Jacob Stone outlived her by eleven years and died in 1843, and the shop passed to their sons, who kept it until the railroad came. The back room deserves a description of its own, because it was the part of the shop that the White Ledger valued most. It was a narrow space behind the counter, lined with barrels of nails and sacks of salt, with a trestle table, two stools and a shuttered window that looked out on the yard. A hunter passing through the country could leave a note there under a particular sack, collect a parcel of ammunition, sleep on a pallet beside the flour and leave before daylight, and Ruth would enter the lot under the innocent heading of dry goods. She kept a second account book, in a cipher of her own devising based on the prices of common goods, which recorded who had come, who had gone and what they had said of the road ahead. Nobody in the district ever asked to see it, and no one but her sons could have read it if they had. It outlived her by more than a century in a trunk in Tennessee, and several of its pages have been reproduced in the family archive, where they are admired for their clarity and their dry, economical humour. Ruth Cutler Proctor is remembered as the shopkeeper of the Tennessee frontier, the woman whose counter gave the White Ledger a home in the west. In the Slayerverse she stands for the trader's kind of courage, which is to keep the lamp lit and the accounts true while the hunters come and go.