were sent to college, studied foreign languages and music, and were taught the business and professional skills to carry the Salter legacy into the future.
Elizabeth, or Lizzie, the eldest Salter girl, was extremely bright and well read. She married Sam Evans, the owner of the Hopkinsville coal yard and eventually had three children: Hugh, Lynn, and Gertrude, the youngest. The children were still infants when their father died suddenly from a burst appendix, and Lizzie had used the income from selling the coal yard to build a cottage immediately adjacent to The Hill. Though they lived next door, everyone dined together in the larger house and pitched in with chores.
Kate Salter Smith, the next in line, was a gifted musician and could be counted on to entertain at the piano or read poetry. She was also quite the reader, kept up the family library, and was active in theatrical performances at her church. Also thanks to her, the family moonlights included such guests as visiting pastors and distinguished lecturers and musicians who came to speak or perform at the Union Tabernacle or Holland’s Opera House.
Caroline, known as Carrie, was the youngest and most beautiful. A buyer for Anderson’s Department Store, who volunteered part-time as an art teacher at the Hopkinsville asylum, she was not as outspoken as Lizzie and could not write poetry or play music as well as Kate, but she had inherited the full range of Sam Salter’s talents and his fierce sense of independence. Edgar knew Carrie and some of her young cousins because they frequently stopped at the bookstore for college supplies.
The more Edgar learned about the family, the more he regretted not taking Ethel Duke up on her invitation. Thus, when she stepped into the store the following month and issued a second invitation to attend a party at The Hill, Edgar immediately agreed. On this occasion he also caught a glimpse of Ethel’s best friend and second cousin, Gertrude, who sat in a carriage outside. Few words were exchanged that day, but Edgar had the distinct impression that Gertrude, the petite brunette in the back of the buggy, and not Ethel, was issuing the second invitation and was perhaps responsible for the first. His suspicions were confirmed when, disregarding his father’s edict, Edgar polished his shoes, oiled his hair, and attended the party the following Friday at The Hill.
While making bookstore deliveries, Edgar had been inside several of Hopkinsville’s finest homes. They had been built by the wealthy tobacco planters and traders. These homes were more grand and imposing, had more land, and were more conveniently located near the city center. The Hill, however, built by Sam Salter himself, impressed him more than any other. Inside, Edgar was confronted by a rainbow of colors. There were deep purples and blues in the oriental carpets and Chinese porcelains, gold leaf on the picture frames, flaming red window sashes, and velvety greens and browns in the brocade upholstery. But what most captured his attention was the scent of perfume: lavender, primrose, chamomile, and honeysuckle. For a country farm boy, who had grown up in a cabin with a dirt floor, stepping into The Hill was like entering a new, exciting, and distinctly female environment.
Ethel Duke took him by the hand and introduced him to the grey-haired Sam and his wife Sarah, and then to the ladies who ruled The Hill.
Thirty-five-year-old Lizzie, Gertrude’s mother, was as petite and dark-haired as her daughter. She supervised the planting and harvesting of the vegetable gardens and the orchard in addition to seeing that the home was always full of flowers and color. She was also chiefly responsible for The Hill being a forum for political discussion. Elected or aspiring policy makers were always welcome at her frequent salons and dinner parties.
Edgar Cayce, c. 1890s.
Then there was Kate, a fat-cheeked woman with fine hands. He recognized her from Hopper Brothers, and her contribution to the house was everywhere evident in the library, where could also be found the piano which she played so well.
Twenty-year-old Carrie was surrounded by adoring young male suitors. That she hadn’t yet married, Edgar quickly realized, wasn’t for lack of proposals. She simply had hadn’t found the right man and wasn’t willing to settle for second best because she was no longer a teenager. She, too, was a striking contrast to Edgar’s own familiar experience where a woman wasn’t welcome to express an opinion of her own, freely mingle with unmarried men, or use perfume.
Mingling, as Edgar soon realized, was what the moonlight was about. In a matter of minutes he was introduced to clergymen from the Methodist church, railroad engineers, and practically the entire junior class from South Kentucky College. He couldn’t easily enter into the conversation, but he was a good listener, and Ethel Duke filled in gaps in their conversation. All too soon, though, she disappeared, leaving him on the lawn in front of a table with small sandwiches, cookies, and a punchbowl of lemonade. Young people sat on benches and chairs or lay on the ground looking up at the moon. Almost miraculously, Edgar found himself face to face with Gertrude, who took his hand and led him down the carriage path to see her rose garden.
Edgar couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Fifteen-years-old, standing just five-feet tall and weighing eighty pounds, she had silky brunette hair, large brown eyes, an oval face, porcelain white skin with fine, delicate features. This evening she wore an embroidered ankle-length gingham dress that her aunt Carrie had purchased in Springfield for her. “A mere slip of girl” was the way Edgar described her. “Petite, win-some, and graceful” another would say.
How much time Edgar spent inspecting Gertrude’s rose garden, or the full moon overhead, is anyone’s guess. However, in the years to come, he always associated her beauty with roses. He brought her a rose when they later went out on dates and would never plant a garden in any of the homes they lived that didn’t feature at least one rose bush which was produced from stock originating from Gertrude’s plot at The Hill. Today at the A.R.E.’s Virginia Beach headquarters roses from this same stock still grow.
To Edgar’s relief, Gertrude did the lion’s share of talking that night. A romantic, she encouraged him to listen to the sound of tree limbs swaying in the wind. “The souls of lovers, who were cruelly parted,” she is reported to have told him. Eventually she got him to talk about himself and flattered him by suggesting that he was probably so good as a clerk that he would someday own a bookstore himself. A great reader herself, she knew the Hopper Brothers’ inventory nearly as well as he. Clergyman and fiction writer E.P. Roe was her particularly favorite author, something Edgar would note on her next birthday.
Edgar left The Hill that night convinced of two things: that she was most certainly behind Ethel Duke’s invitation and that she knew considerably more about him than he did her. This, too, would soon be confirmed. Thanks to Ethel Duke, who had been a substitute teacher at the Beverly School, and Gertrude’s aunt Carrie, who knew Edgar’s sister Anne from Anderson’s Department Store, Gertrude had been told all about the stories of his ghostly encounters and strange abilities. That Gertrude knew this in advance and was still interested in pursuing a relationship made him all the more enamored of her.
With a chaperone on a date to Pilot Rock, Gertrude is at far right, c. 1902.
No sooner had Edgar attended the party at The Hill than he received numerous other invitations to parties and social gatherings which, by no coincidence, Gertrude was also invited. Still, he remained painfully shy around her, mostly because he couldn’t fathom why a beautiful young woman like Gertrude, from a well-off and well-educated family such as hers, could be interested in a mere bookstore clerk with an eighth-grade education. He wasn’t certain she actually liked him until he accompanied her and Ethel Duke on a picnic to Pilot Rock, a massive limestone outcropping nestled into the Christian County foothills.
They
