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As you may have already noticed, I've added to the right of the screen (and down a little) a listing of the recent comments posted onto this blog. I'd like to take a moment and explain the two reasons why I've decided to do this now. The first has to do with me, and the second with you. Learning about history, like learning about anything, is a constantly growing and evolving thing. One of the things I struggle with most in writing these posts is when to draw the line, stop researching, and just write the stinkin' post. Very often I come into a topic thinking I'll just look into quickly, find a few things, then write up a short post. What ends up happening, though, is that I keep finding interesting little tidbits related to the subject and I end up with one (or both) of two problems. Either I've found a number of ( I think) interesting facts that I struggle to horn into the post and still keep a modicum of flow, or I keep digging for facts, putting off writing ...

No history today, just a little bit of whoo-hooing over my new cover. This showed up on Valentine's Day in my email. Best V-Day presie ever. Makes me want to say inappropriately lewd things about about how hard my publisher rocks my world. Love the pose, and adore that garter . . . The rough draft had a higher neckline on the gown (and no cleavage) and her hair was a bit on the skimpy, Regency side. How they fixed those issues, I have no idea, but I clearly need to sacrifice a goat to the Photoshop gods they've got working in the art department (or maybe take them a nice bottle of Napa Zin this summer when we're all in NY). Given how high they've set the bar, I can't wait to see what they come up with for book three, LOL! Maybe I'll finally convince them to give me a long-haired hero. *grin* I may need to have this one made into a necklace or a pin. It deserves some serious flaunting.

This photo was taken on the east side of 14th Street between Marantette and Baker, facing south. The caption reads: "Apr. 20th 1903. M. Hayes. In front of 224 14th Ave. There had been a new walk put down." Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library ( Source ) The sign in front of the house a few doors down reads "Furniture and Piano Moving." That would be the home of furniture mover James Reardon at 218 14th Street. This is the area today: The charming building in the photo was built in 1940 as a repair center for vehicles owned by the United States Postal Service, and it retains that function today. The Burton Historical Collection also contains a photo from the same spot but facing north: Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library ( Source ) The same view today: This is a detail from an 1885 atlas of Detroit showing the houses that stood at the time. (The Bechstein House is highlighted in red.) Below that...

After many long months of angst and annoyance, I’m happy to report that my new book, Lady Lavender , is at last on the shelves! Angst and Annoyance because it’s been three years since my previous book ( Templar Knight, Forbidden Bride ) was published, and I have the sweat and frown-lines to document each and every month of the interim period. But no matter, the novel is here and I am celebrating. Lady Lavender is a western historical romance about an immigrant French woman on the frontier trying to grow lavender (yes, they grew it in Oregon) to support herself and her 4-year-old daughter. The problem is the Oregon Central Railroad and the dishy exec it sends to gobble up her land, and her lavender field, by laying shiny steel rails right down the middle of it. Hence, a romance blooms. For me, the “romance” derives not only from Jeanne and Colonel Halliday and their struggles, but from the early 1900's, when my mother was a young woman raised on a ranch in Douglas County, Oreg...

Coming Soon: Historical Romance March Madness Some people might think of March as the month for basketball tournaments and St. Patrick’s Day, but starting this year March will be known for a celebration of historical romance readers and writers. From Tuesday, March 1st through Thursday, March 31st, come interact with some of your favorite authors, meet new ones, and enter to win 40+ prizes as Ashley March hosts the 1st Annual March Madness Blog Party at www.ashleymarch.com/blog. A fantastic line-up of historical romance authors will be guest blogging with giveaways every single day, and a special daily feature will highlight romance community sites, reviewers, and bloggers who support historical romance. In addition to the recent releases, upcoming books, and ARCs given away by historical romance authors each day, historical romance readers will also have a chance at winning: 1. A bundle of 5 historical romances every Sunday. 2. 8 Victorian lady postcards 3. 8  “Do you know the way to ...

Miss Lora Little, 1924  There are a few major categories of what I like to call "Names we know but don't usually think about". One of those is road names, and a few such names have come up in previous posts. These are names like (Benjamin) Duncan Road , (Rev. William) McKennan's Church Road , and the Robert Kirkwood Highway . No doubt, you'll notice that these are all men, which should not be too surprising since, let's face it, men's names were generally the most prominent until relatively recently. However, there was at least one profession open to a woman in the 19th and early 20th Centuries where she could make enough of an impact on the community to have her name remembered by future generations -- teaching. In this post we'll take a look at three such teachers who lived and/or worked in Mill Creek Hundred and, in honor of the contributions they made, had schools named for them -- Lora Little, E. Frances Medill, and Anna P. Mote. (h/t to Donna Pe...

The Hostess’s Dilemma, or When to Throw the Party Whenever I start plotting a historical novel, I always ask myself whether I want to include genuine historical events. If answer is yes, then I figure out when they occurred because I’ll have to schedule everything in my book around them. Sometimes this is so easy that it feels like inviting your best friends over for an al fresco dinner. Sometimes it’s so hard that it’s worse than including the in-laws from hell in your holiday at the beach – and you’ll rethink the entire party! THE SHADOW GUARD , my April release, is set in a thinly-disguised version of Alexandria, Virginia – a town with a very rich history. George Washington is Alexandria’s most famous son. Every year, the city graciously accepts the United States’ announcement of a three-day holiday in his honor and throws him the country’s biggest birthday party . There’s a parade with fife and drums – whose grand marshal this year was a naval commander – various races, cooki...

 Hadley-Dennison House  One of the things I enjoy most when researching our local history is reading about a significant person or place from long ago, then realizing that there is still something standing today that ties directly in to someone or something from several hundred years ago. I had one of these exciting revelations recently after reading a little about one of the pioneering settlers in what would become Mill Creek Hundred, long before Delaware was its own entity. I'm sure not many people realize that slightly northwest of Valley Road and Limestone stands a direct link to one of the original settlers of Mill Creek Hundred. Although at first glance it looks too new (if you can call nearly 120 years old, new), the Hadley-Dennison House likely contains at its core one of the first permanent houses erected in this part of Delaware. And for good measure, it also has a barn that is at least 200 years old, if not older. This story, like that of many of MCH's early immigr...

In a previous post , I stated that a bricklayer named Joseph S. Greer rented the Bechstein house, where I live, in 1893. That is not correct. The city directory for that year states that "Geer, Joseph W., bricklayer" lived at 195 Wabash. Based on the first name and occupation, I assumed this was a Joseph Greer who appeared in a later census record. However, it was the first name that was incorrect--that right man is John W. Geer. I found this out from an old Detroit Free Press article about a sensational murder trial that occurred at the time Geer lived in my house. * * * * * On the evening of November 18, 1892, a twenty-year-old pharmacist named Fred H. Kelly went to work at J. W. Caldwell's drug store at the corner of Grand River Avenue and High Street (now the I-75 service drive). He would sleep in the store and be on call to fill prescriptions throughout the night. Early the next morning the door was found unlocked and Kelly was discovered in the basement, de...

I'm indebted to Tracy for her Valentine's Day post about romance in historical movies, which afforded me a week of delicious meditation on some of my own most romantic movie moments -- historical or not. Or should I say historical AND not? Because when considered over my own lifetime of film-going, even a movie as utterly, aggressively of its own historical moment, like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , becomes a document of that moment, an opening to an era as heady as the 1960s when I careened into precarious adulthood. But then, movies are always this combination of historical and not, because they're always simultaneously documentary and imaginative. Reality, as Godard has famously said, twenty-four frames a second. When we're watching a movie (though NOT a DVD), for most of the experience we're sitting in the dark: the time slices between the frames are longer than the time it takes for the frames to flash by us. What's happening at the movies is that for...

Here is an (almost) instant update on the story just posted about the 1866 death of Mrs. Mary Moore Whiteman. In that post, I noted that I had not found any other references to the horrific events of  November 25, 1866, other than the one paragraph linked to in the post. Well, someone else did find another reference to it, and it helps to fill in some of the blanks left from the first story. A reader of this blog, Donna Peters, forwarded to me a story that appeared in the December 4, 1866 issue of the Village Record , which I believe was out of West Chester, PA. Here is how they told the story: ACCIDENT DISTRESSING ACCIDENT - TWO PERSONS BURNED TO DEATH. - On last Sabbath evening, about half past seven o'clock, while Mr. JACKSON WHITEMAN , of Mill Creek Hundred, Delaware, was at meeting in Ebenezer Church, his wife attempted to fill a coal oil lamp which was lighted from a vessel containing nearly two gallons of oil, when the blaze from the lamp flashed into the can causing it to...

I juggle historical fiction and nonfiction, and lately I've found myself feeling a lot like the circus performers or vaudevillians who keep a row of plates spinning atop individual stalks, running back and forth up and down the line, giving each plate just the right push to keep it in motion so that all of the plates are spinning at the same velocity and none of them crash to the floor. An agile performer can also stop all of the plates from spinning without breaking a dish. I've got five literary plates in the air these days, and it's taking every waking moment, plus every ounce of my concentration to keep them all airborne. I can't schedule vacations. Heck, I hardly take breaks. But when I complete a manuscript and hit "send" to dispatch it through cyberspace to an editor, something happens inside my brain -- the equivalent of "Now comes Miller time!" to quote a famous beer commercial. And after analyzing my behavior over the past several completed...

In the post about the Roseville Cotton Factory , I included a snippet from an old newspaper that I had found online, more specifically, at the site Old Fulton NY Post Cards . I realize that Fulton is nowhere near Delaware (it's between Syracuse and Lake Ontario), but the site has a collection of old newspapers that includes one from Wilmington. In searching the site one day for Mill Creek Hundred-related items (yes, my days are just that exciting), I came across a couple of things of interest. Most of what I found was more along the lines of what we already saw -- real estate ads. However, the piece excerpted here caught my eye. It was not a particularly important event in and of itself (except to the families involved), but I thought it was interesting to be able to flesh out the details of those involved. As a side note, it also is a good example of the interconnectedness of families in MCH in the 19th Century. The paragraph in question was reprinted in a number of papers. This ...

Tappan School, n.w. corner of Vermont and Marantette Streets, c. 1882 ( Source ) Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library By 1867, the worn out school building on 15th Street could no longer contain the growing student population of Detroit's Ninth Ward. In January of that year, the school board purchased four lots on the west side of Lafferty (now Vermont Street), north of Marantette, from Charles Lafferty for $300.00 each. Lafferty was the grandson of the founders of the Lafferty Farm, where the land was located. Although some board members questioned whether the construction of such a "large" schoolhouse was warranted, it was decided that the new Ninth Ward School would be a three-story, twelve-room brick structure with a capacity for 800 students. The contract went to the lowest bidder, a company called Dean Brothers owned by James, Edward P. and Richard W. Dean. The building cost $23,915 to build, or over $360,000 in today's money....

There were, and still are, many old farms in Mill Creek Hundred. There are many old families in the hundred. There are many new businesses, too. But rarely will you find one venture that incorporates all three of these traits into one enterprise, the way you see with the Woodside Farm Creamery on North Star and Valley Roads, south of Hockessin (and rarely are they as delicious, either, but I digress). It might sound a bit odd to call a business entering its 14th year of operation "new", but in relative terms, this one is. While Woodside Farm Creamery may be less than a decade and a half old, the Mitchell family has been working this same land for well over two centuries. In fact, the current creators of (in my opinion) Delaware's best ice cream are the sixth and seventh generations of the family to live and work on the farm. Through their hard work and dedication to the land, a little bit of old Mill Creek Hundred has been preserved. The Mitchell family story in America b...

Saturday night I re-watched the 1982 Anthony Andrews/Jane Seymour Scarlet Pimpernel . I was hoping Percy’s league would help me make sure the band of aides-de-camp in my Waterloo book are properly differentiated (which it did). I love the banter among Percy, Tony, Andrew, and Timothy Hastings. It has a tone I’d love to capture in some scenes in my book. Even though I practically know the dialogue to the film by heart (I actually had a tape recording of it before I saw it, because when it first aired I was at a rehearsal, and my family didn’t have a VCR yet, so my mom tape recorded it), the magic still works. I was also reminded what a wonderfully romantic movie it is, with scenes such as the heart-melting scene where Marguerite visits Percy in prison (which is actually based on a scene in Eldorado , one of the Scarlet Pimpernel sequels; the 1982 film is based on both The Scarlet Pimpernel and Eldorado ). One of the scenes in my April release, Vienna Waltz , is an homage to tha...

WINNER: JenJak. I got lots of emails and FB comments telling me that people were having problems commenting on the post here. I'm so sorry. I put everyone from all three sources into the virtual hat when I chose the winner. Thanks again for all the lovely compliments and for the buzz of excitement. I can't WAIT to share RfP with you come April 26th . . . I got my first ever ARCs hot off the press and I want to share one of my two precious copies of my May release Ripe for Pleasure with a reader. So leave a comment (and an email address) and maybe you'll be my very first reader . . . " Ripe for Pleasure is a very naughty pleasure indeed." —Bertrice Small, New York Times bestselling author of The Border Vixen "Sexy, sumptuous, and wicked smart." —Pam Rosenthal, RITA-Award wining author of The Edge of Impropriety "Sensuous and sexy with flirty, witty dialogue. Truly a pleasure.” —New York Times bestselling author Maya Banks Ripe for Pleasure kicks...