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About the Author
Like most others growing up in the West Virginia town of Elkins, I was well-versed in the later career of the town’s founder, Stephen B. Elkins, a Congressman from the New Mexico Territory following the Civil War, West Virginia’s U. S. Senator, and President Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of War.
Elkins’s early political career, his rebellion against his own family, his allegiance to the Union Army, his activities in New Mexico, and his contribution to the development of the West were only matters of hearsay, speculation, mystery, and intrigue. Such intrigue led my father and me into a competition to uncover Elkins’s secret life. We questioned members of the town’s oldest families, railroad men, professors at Davis & Elkins College, the owner and manager of the town’s only hotel, a banker, newspapermen – all with the same result: no one knew even a grain of the man’s early history. The competition became a life-long pursuit.
Between 1992 and 1994 I wrote a monograph published by the New Mexico Historical Review (S. B. Elkins: Business in New Mexico’s Early Banking Era, 1873-1875) and more recently began the writing of the present narrative.
After selling investment properties for five years, from 1985-1991, I realized the story’s relevance today, its association with financial markets, is as strong as it was following the Civil War. As a graduate of the Real Estate Institute and in the sale of rental properties, I recognized how far most of my buyers were stretched. I feared for the stability of lending companies and banks. I left the real estate market for a steadier income as a clerk in the federal court system in Richmond, Virginia. My first career had been as a middle school teacher in Richmond and Charleston, West Virginia. I stayed at home with my family of four for over a decade before taking up real estate in Durham and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I served as a clerk at the U. S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit in my final career.
I belong to and actively participate in the following writing groups: WriterL, WriterHouse, James River Writers, Virginia Writers Club, Inc.
Beth Rogers currently lives in the greater Richmond, Virginia area.
Elkins’s early political career, his rebellion against his own family, his allegiance to the Union Army, his activities in New Mexico, and his contribution to the development of the West were only matters of hearsay, speculation, mystery, and intrigue. Such intrigue led my father and me into a competition to uncover Elkins’s secret life. We questioned members of the town’s oldest families, railroad men, professors at Davis & Elkins College, the owner and manager of the town’s only hotel, a banker, newspapermen – all with the same result: no one knew even a grain of the man’s early history. The competition became a life-long pursuit.
Between 1992 and 1994 I wrote a monograph published by the New Mexico Historical Review (S. B. Elkins: Business in New Mexico’s Early Banking Era, 1873-1875) and more recently began the writing of the present narrative.
After selling investment properties for five years, from 1985-1991, I realized the story’s relevance today, its association with financial markets, is as strong as it was following the Civil War. As a graduate of the Real Estate Institute and in the sale of rental properties, I recognized how far most of my buyers were stretched. I feared for the stability of lending companies and banks. I left the real estate market for a steadier income as a clerk in the federal court system in Richmond, Virginia. My first career had been as a middle school teacher in Richmond and Charleston, West Virginia. I stayed at home with my family of four for over a decade before taking up real estate in Durham and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I served as a clerk at the U. S. Court of Appeals, 4th Circuit in my final career.
I belong to and actively participate in the following writing groups: WriterL, WriterHouse, James River Writers, Virginia Writers Club, Inc.
Beth Rogers currently lives in the greater Richmond, Virginia area.
