The ever recurring thought comes, to me to ask you for your Autograph, and now I do. This is the first time in a life of sixty years, that I have ever made such a request of anyone.
I have two of your books, Leaves of Grass, and Two Rivulets1; they have been a light to my steps, these many years.
Yours most truly, Julia A. J. Perkins. Baldwinsville Onondaga Co. N.Y. loc_jm.00255.jpgCorrespondent:
Julia A. Jennings Perkins
(1830–1916) was born in New York and, in 1851, married dentist and Civil
War veteran William Wirt Perkins (1827–1907). According to federal and
state census records from 1860 to 1910, the couple lived around the Syracuse
area—in Lysander and Baldwinsville—and had two children: Harvey
James (1853–1876) and Harriet "Hattie" J. (1856–1940). According to
an entry in the December 21, 1882, issue of The Index,
Julia A. J. Perkins of Baldwinsville was a member of the Free Religious
Association (298). Her name also appears in a letter from her sister, Adele J.
Grow, published in the Report of the Convention for
Organization from the Woman's National Liberal Union (edited by Matilda
Joslyn Gage [Syracuse: Masters and Stone, 1890], 14), requesting that copies of
the Union's journal, The Liberal Thinker, be sent to
Perkins in Baldwinsville. Perkins is buried with her family in Baldwinsville's
Riverview Cemetery.