Half a life: the case of Jessie Wilson Manning

Forty years after Jessie E. Wilson Manning earned her B.S. degree from Iowa Wesleyan College, Mt. Pleasant, during the spring of 1877, her alma mater published a 75-year retrospective that included a list of alumni, 1842-1917.

Among other talents, Jessie was a poet. Her small book, "A Passion of Life" --- a five-part poem occupying 75 pages and published in 1887 --- still can be located.

Of Jessie, it was written in that directory: "Entered Iowa Wesleyan 1871. B.S. 1877. Lecturer, authoress and musician. A very brilliant woman. Deceased."

But Jessie, by now 62, wasn't dead at all. Instead, she had been confined to southwest Iowa's Clarinda State Asylum for the Insane for roughly 20 years. She would live 30 more, until her death at Chariton during 1947.

We don't know when the darkness overcame her, the nature of her illness or if appropriate treatment now, a century later, might have alleviated it. Only that to the casual observer she seems to have lived barely half a life during her 92 years.

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Jessie was sufficiently well known when at her creative peak to be nominated for a couple of published "vanity" compendia of prominent women and people engaged in the arts. At the top here is her page from the 1890 volume, "Local and National Poets of America." The following is her entry in the 1893 "A Women of the Century, 1,470 Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life," edited by Frances E. Willard and Mary E. Livermore.

"MANNING, Mrs. Jessie Wilson, author and lecturer, born in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, 26th October, 1855. Her maiden name was Wilson. She spent her childhood and received her education in Mount Pleasant. Immediately after graduation in the Iowa Wesleyan University, in 1874, Miss Wilson entered the field of platform work, and was for five years an able and eloquent speaker on literary subjects and for the cause of temperance. In the fall of 1879 all her private ambitions and public work were changed by her marriage to Eli Manning, of Chariton, Iowa, prominent in business and political circles in that state. Since her marriage Mrs. Manning has devoted herself to her home and family of three sons. Her first book, published in 1887, called "The Passion of Life," is her most ambitious work and has achieved a moderate success. She has written a large number of articles for the Iowa press, among them a series of literary criticism, and poems, and essays for magazines besides stories under a pen-name. Her Chariton home is a social and literary center."

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Eli Manning

Jessie's husband, Eli Manning, was a prominent Chariton grocer, among the founders and long-term officers of the Chariton Volunteer Fire Department, city council and school board member, sheriff of Lucas County from 1896-1901 and a one-term state legislator. They were married in Chariton on Nov. 18, 1879.

There's a discrepancy in the published dates of Jessie's degree from Iowa Wesleyan, but circumstances suggest that she earned a lesser degree in 1874, then set out on the lecture circuit, returning to Mount Pleasant (where her family lived) during the off-season to complete her B.S. degree in 1877.

References to Jessie are frequent in Chariton newspaper archives from the 1880s and early 1890s --- as an author, a musician and member of the city's most elevated women's organizations, including the Zetamatheans and the Clio Club. The Mannings had three children, all sons: Robert, Charles and Mill Alexander --- Mill died during 1901 of typhoid fever and was the first to be interred in the family lot in the Chariton Cemetery.

And then she simply disappears, so we don't know precisely when she was institutionalized or what the circumstances were.

When Eli died on June 23, 1919, at the age of 73, Jessie was referred to in his obituary as follows:  "His wife survives him, but for almost twenty years has been so afflicted that she had never mingled with society or enjoyed the companionship of her family."

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Jessie still was a patient at the Iowa Hospital for the Insane in Clarinda during 1920, but by 1930 had been transferred to the Lucas County Home, then located in northwest Chariton on the current site of Hy-Vee's giant frozen foods facility. She still was resident there when the 1940 census was taken and died there on Aug. 30, 1947, age 92.

It seems likely that Jessie's nephew, Frank Manning, watched out for her interests as best he could during the years after Eli's death. Her sons had lived elsewhere since early in the 20th century.

Jessie's obituary was published in The Leader of Sept. 2, 1947, under the headline, "Mrs. Jessie Manning Taken by Death." There is no indication in it that in some sense, her life had ended nearly 50 years earlier:

Doris Christensen/Find a Grave

"Jessie E. Wilson Manning, 92, died Saturday, August 30, at her home.

"Mrs. Manning, lifelong resident of Lucas county, widow of Eli Manning, who preceded her in death about 25 years ago, was an accomplished musician and was prominent in theater activities of the earlier day, and was also author of the published book, "The Passion of Life."

"Survivors include two sons, Robert E. Manning of Pocatello, Idaho, and Charles Thayer Manning, also one nephew, Frank Manning, of Chariton.

"Funeral services, in charge of the Rev. J. T. Bloom, of the Christian church, were held at 10:00 a.m. today at the Beardsley funeral home. Burial was at the Chariton cemetery."

A date of death never was inscribed on her tombstone.