It is hoped that this publication will stimulate reminiscences among Mrs. Porter’s friends and acquaintances and reacquaint her large retinue of readers, both young and old, with their beloved author. Geneva Stratton, later better known as Gene Stratton Porter, the youngest of twelve children, was born on Hopewell Farm about ten miles from Wabash, Indiana, August 17, 1863. Her father, Mark Stratton, was a farmer and ordained minister and had lived in Wabash County since about 1834. Mr. Stratton was a high-principled man with unusual mental powers and some education. Mrs. Stratton also possessed abilities of high quality. To the end of her life, Mrs. Porter gave her father credit for her literary success. He devoted much time to instructing her by precept and by example. He found the time to give her and his other children that which they lacked in formal education. One of his contributions was the oft-enforced admonition to finish a task once it was started. He taught her economies which she practiced all of her life; many years later she remarked that her instruction in thrift at home as a child prevented her use of the telegraph later when she could well have afforded it. Geneva Stratton had little schooling in any formal sense of the word. Her father’s knowledge of history, literature, and the Scriptures was monumental. He had read the great English and American historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; he knew much of their writings by rote. He could recite from memory most of the Bible with references as to the source of his quotations. He transmitted not only this knowledge and the wisdom based upon it to the child but imbued her with a zeal to teach herself; this she did. Always a woman of firm convictions, she usually had sound information to support her views. Mark Stratton was a fervent abolitionist and assisted in the escape of fugitive slaves for several years before Geneva’s birth; a secret tunnel on his Wabash farm served as one of the stations of the famed underground railroad. The family was a strong supporter of the Union cause and stoutly adhered to the newly-organized and dominant Republican party. This partisan influence infiltrated the life of Geneva so strongly that when Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected president in 1884, the young non-voting Geneva (for women did not then vote) felt that disaster indeed had come to her country. After the death of his wife, Mark Stratton, too old for farm work, moved with his family to Wabash, where he believed his children would have better educational facilities. Geneva was eleven years old at the time.