Dear father and mother I will try and answer your most kind and welcome letter that came to hand a few days ago. Sure was glad to hear from you all once more. But was sorrowful to hear papa had a sprained knee. I hope it is better by now. Well this leaves us all well but the baby and she has got a sore arm, it has a rise in the wrist joint and is pretty bad but it is getting better now.

This letter was written by my g-grandmother Mary Etter Grimmitt-Quarles. This is the only part of the letter I have, if she wrote more, the other page(s) are missing. The baby she refers to is Clara Etter Quarles. At the top of the letter is an outline of a small hand ( I am assumming she traced Clara's hand) and inside the hand it reads "Three weeks and 3 days old. Clara Quarles". Clara Etter was the second child born to Mary Etter and William Allen Quarles. At the age of 6 weeks, she died. It was assumed that she was bit by a spider.

Scanned Copy of the Letter (It was written in pencil and did not scan well, but you can see the hand she traced) The dark black mark that you see in the left hand corner of the scanned letter, is a tiny lock of little Clara's hair that is pinned to the letter. It looks almost exactly the same color (A light golden brown) as my own hair when I was a little girl. My mother used to say it looked like honey and butter mixed together.