Lilacs Going West
“Go West, young man.”
John Soule, a reporter in Indiana, wrote that in 1851; Horace Greeley popularized it. When I read that as a teenager, I thought he was talking about the “west” I was familiar with. I thought of the great plains, and the land rush, and of efforts to break the Prairie that too often broke the humans instead. But as I read further, I realized that wasn’t what he’d been talking about at all. He meant the Old Northwest; places like Indiana and Illinois and Wisconsin, already admitted to statehood but still a frontier in the process of settlement. I never saw it mentioned when we studied Lincoln’s life in school, but Indiana was still a territory when the Lincoln family moved there in 1816; statehood arrived in December of that year. The opportunity that Soule and Greeley saw was that of country that was not yet settled, and had room to grow.
I was thinking about all of that because the lilacs are in full and showy bloom now. They were clearly visible from the road as we went out to dinner the other evening. Some of them were in predictable places: along the west side of houses in a solid hedge as a windbreak, or simply near to a farmhouse, visible through the kitchen window. Even those near to the road were in proximity to something, be it church or property line or cemetery. But some weren’t. I saw huge bushes, nearly trees, standing mostly isolated fairly deep into wooded areas. The thing about lilacs is that other than sending up shoots off the roots of the parent shrub, they don’t self-propagate much at all. The seeds are theoretically fertile, but they don’t sprout easily or often even under ideal conditions, and forest is hardly that. On the other hand, once established a lilac can live for a hundred years or more. There are lilacs in New England planted before the Constitution was ratified, still spreading a bit at a time, grown into great bushes, almost small trees. That means that once upon a time, someone planted those bushes I saw.
In my fascination for history, I’ve read as many of the journals kept by women settling on the frontier as I have been able to find. Often those began with the process of deciding what to take from their homes in the East, giving away the things that could not be easily transported to family and friends, saying goodbye to all that was familiar. And over and over, I would read that a woman had taken a day and dug up daffodils, or June lilies (now we call them day lilies). They collected seeds from their gardens, listing them out. And they potted up things that they treasured, things that symbolized “home” to them, like herbs from their gardens – and lilacs for the dooryard.
So those lilacs that are far from any human structure (other than the road itself) now weren’t always so. Now, for the weeks that they bloom and are clearly visible, they mark the places where those immigrants from more settled regions built their homes or their churches, or perhaps where they buried their dead. I don’t know that I’d see anything if I walked back there; just as fallen trees eventually rot back into the ground they grew from, so do cabins built from them, if not maintained. I’m no archaeologist; I don’t know what to look for, and so would likely not know the signs if I saw them. But whether I could find them or not, the stories are there, as the people were there. And even if all other signs of their presence are gone, the lilacs remain, their blooms an annual reminder of the women who planted them as a tie between the homes they had left and those they hoped to make in this new place.