Of all the correspondence Hiram Atkins ever received while serving as editor of Montpelier’s Argus and Patriot newspaper, these three envelopes must rank among the strangest. Between August 1879 and July 1880, Atkins received a series of letters from Sylvester Rockwell of Middlebury, a minister-turned-businessman with a message to share.
Rockwell had suffered some sort of debilitating, possibly life-threatening, ailment at about the age of 50. But after switching to a vegetarian diet, he recovered and began telling all who would listen that eating meat was a ticket to a premature death. In addition to his careful diet, Rockwell was a devotee of the water cure, a medical fad of the day, which proclaimed the healing power of water when used to cleanse the body inside or out.
It’s not so much Rockwell’s beliefs that would have caught Atkins’ attention — they were not that far from the mainstream; indeed, many are still popular today — it is the way he professed them.
The envelopes were the first clue that these were not your average letters. Perhaps to catch Atkins’ eye, Rockwell had decorated the envelopes by piecing together words and images from newspapers, ransom-note style. The effect is certainly eye catching, but the style combined with the content was more than a bit unnerving.
“There is 1,435 letters on this pretty, interesting envelop (sic),” he informs Atkins in one note. “Nearly double the number of letters I ever thus used, before. It took me over 2 days & a half to make it.”
On one of the envelopes, which are preserved in the collection of the Vermont Historical Society, Rockwell suggests that he knows something of the editor and his family. Beside a line drawing of bespectacled man representing Atkins, Rockwell pieced together a brief poem:
“Mr. H. ATKINS,
HE IS a WIsE MAN,
& HaS A NICE PLAN.
WRONG WORK, He DOTH Fight
& LIVES WiSE and RIGHT,
WhiCh Doth PleasE God’s Sight,
MORN, NOON, and NiGHT.”
This bit of doggerel was perhaps meant to flatter Atkins, but when Rockwell went on to add lines about Atkins wife, son and daughter, his tone turned preachy.
“Mrs. Atkins.
O LORD, i PRAY,
That She Hence MAY,
A VEGETARIAN BE,
IN A WiSE DEGREE,
O MAY SHE HATE,
WHAT DOTH CrEATE,
DEATHS – A BAD FATE,
As HYGIENISTS STATE.”
Of the Atkins’ daughter, Rockwell wrote:
“Their NICE DAUGHTER,
WHO DOTH SLAUGHTER,
FALSE HABITS AS SHE OUGHT TO.”
And of their son, he added:
“THEIR NICE Dear BOY,
NO DOUBT HE’LL DESTROY,
EACH FALSE APPETITE,
& HENCE Live Right.”
The lines about Atkins’ children would have made Rockwell seem rather like a stalker, if he hadn’t gotten his facts wrong. The Atkins had not one daughter, but three, and no sons.
Whatever Rockwell’s shortcomings as a poet, he kept his envelope poems mercifully short. Cutting and pasting words together had a way of encouraging brevity.
He felt no such need for concision with the sheaves of poems he tucked inside the envelopes. Those bits of verse he wrote out in longhand.
“A meal composed of Graham-bread,
potatoes, fruit and one boiled egg,
or instead of eggs, some boiled beans,
which are nutritious, & have means,
to make folks stout, so it seems,
like horse-teams.
Instead of grease, eat applesauce, do thus, & then you sure will pass,
Premature death, yea it is so,
As chemists do know,
and God also.”
In one letters, Rockwell provided a brief biography, which, not surprisingly, focused heavily on his health. For this section at least, he was willing to drop the rhyming. He explained that while attending college he had been “a slave to false table habits” and his diet had made him dyspeptic. A doctor suggested he smoke after meals, but the prescription “did not cure or help my dyspepsia an atom,” he wrote.
After college, Rockwell had become a preacher in East Middlebury. In his first and only week in the pulpit, he claimed that he won several converts, but poor health made him resign his post. His health problems, however, didn’t stop him from going into business as a store clerk and later as a merchant.
In 1860, at the age of 47, Rockwell headed west with a few Merino sheep to California and Oregon, where he sold them for a neat profit. Sensing a business opportunity, he arranged for his brother to ship him more sheep. Rockwell planned to continue the business, but by 1863 he was “so injured in health, by smoking, and using flesh & butter & pastry & tea & coffee, that instead of selling sheep one year more, as I intended, I had to take a doctor’s advice & quit work & go home.”
Returning to Vermont, Rockwell consulted a former neighbor, a Dr. Allen of Rutland, who told him his stomach and liver were in bad condition and that he was near death. Allen told him he had a choice: change his diet or die. Allen’s prescription became Rockwell’s battle cry.
“Sir, quit & drink nothing with your meals—the saliva of the mouth is an important agent of digestion,” Rockwell quoted Allen as saying. “Drinks thin, weaken & dilute it.” They also cause people to swallow their food too quickly, before it is properly chewed. Skip tea and coffee, they have no nutrition, he said. Allen advised taking milk with meals, apparently considering it more a food rather than a drink.
“Quit all flesh-meat,” Allen continued, “it is hard to digest, it is a stimulant & soon takes away strength. It is a carbonate & produces fevers, and it causes people to act unkind.”
At the time that Rockwell wrote, vegetarianism was uncommon, but not unheard of. Benjamin Franklin had been a vegetarian for much of his life. The Vegetarian Society had been founded in England in 1847 and was winning converts on this side of the Atlantic.
In Battle Creek, Michigan, John Harvey Kellogg was promoting vegetarianism as the pathway to health at his famed sanitarium. He was also advocating hydrotherapy, the “water cure,” which involved drinking plenty of water, taking cold baths and using water enemas.
Rockwell shared Kellogg’s faith in water. “When I rise up in the morning,” he wrote Atkins, the newspaper editor, “I drink a pint of soft pure water. Then in 2 minutes, I wash my system in cold water & wipe dry with a course towel…”
Perhaps Rockwell provided too much information, or Atkins didn’t share his beliefs or didn’t care for his poetry. Whatever the reason, the editor apparently declined to print Rockwell’s poems and spread his message. An online search of editions of the Argus and Patriot turned up no mentions of the Middlebury poet or discussions of vegetarianism.
But today, with almost a century and a half having passed and vegetarianism having entered the mainstream, Sylvester Rockwell is finally getting his message to the public.
