The Roaming Invalid

Thomas Jeffries’ books show the life of a disabled man in the 1800s.

Last year, Bridgewater resident Betty Blough Martin brought an old family photograph album to the Alexander Mack Memorial Library at Bridgewater College. As I leafed through a list of people pictured inside the album, my eyes stopped abruptly at the name “Mr. Jeffers.” (Actually his name was Mr. Jeffries, and the name in the book was incorrect.)

“I saw him at the home of my Grand Father Levi Shaver in 1873,” read an accompanying note from one of Mrs. Martin’s ancestors. “He was a cripple and men carried him into the house. He was an interesting man and much beloved and respected by his friends.”

My curiosity piqued, I turned quickly to his photograph and saw a man in a wooden wheelchair, baggy trousers draped over withered legs. The image confirmed what I suspected: The man in the photograph was none other than the “Crippled Fayette,” which is the title of a book he later penned.

Known also as “Roaming Invalid,” Thomas Fayette Jeffries left a sad but unique mark on the literary landscape of the 19th-century Shenandoah Valley. Although he long ago faded from historical memory, a few of Jeffries’ writings remain to provide a glimpse of Valley life in the mid 1800s, an unexpected accomplishment for someone with a major physical disability.

Jeffries was born Sept. 15, 1829, in Rockingham County, in the shadow of Massanutten Peak near Cub Run. He was the son of a school teacher, Harrison Rector Jeffries, and his wife, Margaret Darnell Jeffries. His mother died when he was 8, the first of two tragic events that shaped a tragic life.

Unable to care for his children alone, Harrison Jeffries sent Thomas and his five siblings to live with relatives and friends. A Miller family who lived alongside “Cheese Creek” took in Thomas. While working on the Miller’s farm one summer day, Jeffries experienced the first pains of an illness that altered the rest of his life.

Taking a break from making hay, Jeffries remembered feeling “a sharp pain in my left knee-joint.” The pains increased in severity and frequency and, he wrote, “gradually extended themselves to different joints of my lower limbs and to the spinal column, and tortured me more or less until they finally disabled me altogether in my 18th year.”

From 1847 to 1854, Jeffries remained almost constantly bedridden. All efforts to alleviate his pain or his disease, which he called “my great enemy, the Rheumatism,” failed. He tried a slew of remedies, including “Cod-liver” oil mixed with turpentine, arsenic, opium, laudanum, morphine and a contraption made by a Harrisonburg doctor to move his frozen limbs “by force.” His malady occasionally affected his eyes, sending “ten thousand pangs through those tender orbs.”

To pass the time, Jeffries wrote, first as a hobby and eventually to make a living. The Rockingham Register, the long-running Harrisonburg weekly newspaper, printed several of his first writings, not for their literary merit, but “more through sympathy,” Jeffries wrote. He called them “simple little pieces,” but the newspaper’s publishers liked them enough to reward him with an honorary subscription.

Once he was able to endure his pain enough to ride in a carriage, in 1854 Jeffries traveled up the Valley to Staunton and boarded a train for Georgia. He visited relatives in Atlanta, then traveled to northern Georgia where his father had moved a few years earlier. Jeffries continued on to Tennessee, then returned home to Rockingham.

Encouraged by friends, Jeffries compiled his poetry, his life story and an account of his trip to Georgia into a book called “Nine Years in Bed, Or Affliction’s Own,” published in 1856 by Joseph Funk of Mountain Valley (now Singers Glen). He then traveled throughout Virginia, hawking the book and generating enough interest to produce a second edition in 1857 entitled, “Crippled Fayette of Rockingham, Detailing His Times and Giving His Rhymes.” He published at least three more small books: “Invalid’s Offering, or, A Helpless Man on Wings,” 1858; “The Book of Sunshine, or The Bright Side of Everything,” 1861; and “The Secret Out, or The Curses of the ‘Credit System,’” undated.

Although Jeffries’ books reveal he lived in Dayton and Bridgewater for a time, he continued to travel outside Virginia and wrote about his excursions in the Register and another Harrisonburg newspaper, Old Commonwealth. In 1860, he traveled between New Orleans, La., and Hot Springs, Ark., seeking medical relief while also peddling his books, papers and pens. According to a recent article on peddlers in Arkansas Online, Jeffries stayed long enough in Hot Springs to publish a newspaper and sell photographs of the springs.

As much as he lauded his native land in his writings, Jeffries apparently spent most of his remaining years traveling in other parts of the South. An 1871 letter published in the Old Commonwealth reveals he was in Georgia. In a short biographical sketch in “Men of Mark and Representative Citizens of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County,” published in 1943, historian John Wayland noted that Jeffries died in Georgia about 1890.

Dale Harter is the curator of the Pritchet Museum at Bridgewater College and archavist for the Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society.