Rose Hartwick Thorpe — the poet, by birth

1850–1939 · BORN IN MISHAWAKA, 18 JULY 1850

The tie, exactly. Rose Alnora Hartwick was born in Mishawaka on 18 July 1850, the daughter of William Hartwick, a tailor and pioneer settler, and Mary Louisa (Wight) Hartwick. The family moved to Litchfield, Michigan, in 1861, when she was ten; Litchfield raised and schooled her, and the standard accounts give her formation to Michigan entire. The city claims the birth of a famous poet, and nothing past it — the same proportion this record prints for every birth-tie on its pages, and the reason her Mishawaka existence had to wait for her own city's historian to write a book about her, as the De Kever entry above records.

The poem. At sixteen, a Litchfield schoolgirl, she wrote "Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night" — the ballad of Bessie, the sexton's daughter, who climbs the belfry and clings to the bell's tongue to keep the curfew from ringing out her lover's death sentence. One modern encyclopedia account gives her age at the writing as fifteen; the standard record, her own and the Library of Michigan's alike, says sixteen, and the two figures are printed here unreconciled. She kept the poem in her desk for more than a year, "never dreaming that it was destined to make her name known throughout the civilized world." It appeared in the Detroit Commercial Advertiser in 1870 — she traded it, the Library of Michigan records, for a subscription to the paper — and it made the circuit of the earth: reprinted everywhere, translated abroad, set for the magic-lantern recitation slides, and carried into schoolrooms for two generations. Illustrated book editions followed (Lee and Shepard, Boston, 1882; C. T. Dillingham, New York, 1883), George Wharton James told "the story of 'Curfew'" from her own account in a souvenir volume of 1916, and Litchfield raised the poem a monument topped by a cast-iron bell at its own centennial in 1934. Hillsdale College conferred an honorary Master of Arts on her in 1883.

The books. The poem was not the shelf. She married Edmund C. Thorpe, a carriage maker who himself wrote German dialect recitations, on 11 September 1871; when his business failed in 1881 she took up editorial work on the religious monthlies Temperance Tales, Well-Spring and Words of Life, and wrote for the Youth's Companion, St. Nicholas, Wide Awake and the Detroit Free Press. The books, from the bibliography printed in A Woman of the Century (1893) and the Library of Michigan's catalog: Fred's Dark Days (Fleming H. Revell, 1881) and The Yule Log (1881); The Fenton Family (1884); Nina Bruce; or, A Girl's Influence (1886); Temperance Poems (1886 in her own century's bibliography; the Michigan catalog dates the L. M. Hartwick printing to 1887 — both stand); The Chester Girls (1887) and Ringing Ballads (1887), the collection that carried "Curfew" between covers; The Year's Best Days (1888), stories in prose and verse for the young; Sweet Song Stories (1898); The White Lady of La Jolla (Grandier & Company, San Diego, 1904), her book-length prose of the sea caves; The Poetical Works of Rose Hartwick Thorpe (Neale Publishing Company, 1912), the author-compiled summation; and a late collection, In Sunset Land (1927). She had removed to San Diego in 1888, to Rosemere in Pacific Beach, and she died there on 19 July 1939, one day after her eighty-ninth birthday; an autograph manuscript of "Curfew" rests at San Diego State University, and a critical collected edition of her poems appeared in 2026 — the Mishawaka-born poet still in recovery, a century and a half after a schoolgirl traded her ballad for a newspaper subscription.

Sources:

1. A Woman of the Century (1893), "Thorpe, Mrs. Rose Hartwick," via Wikisource — the Mishawaka birth, 18 July 1850; the 1861 removal to Litchfield; the 1870 appearance and the desk-drawer year; the Hillsdale honorary degree of 1883; the San Diego removal of 1888; the book list of her century.
2. Library of Michigan, Michigan Authors database, Rose Alnora Hartwick Thorpe — the catalog record: the Commercial Advertiser trade for a subscription, the standalone "Curfew" editions (Lee and Shepard 1882; Dillingham 1883), Fred's Dark Days (Revell, 1881), Temperance Poems (L. M. Hartwick, 1887), The White Lady of La Jolla (Grandier, 1904), the Poetical Works (Neale, 1912), the Litchfield centennial history (1934), and the 1934 bell monument.
3. Encyclopedia.com, "Thorpe, Rose Hartwick (1850–1939)" (Women in World History) — the tailor father, the marriage of 11 September 1871, the five children's novels, the editorial posts, the death at San Diego; its "fifteen" for the poem's writing printed against the standard sixteen.
4. Rose Hartwick Thorpe: Collected Poems, critical edition (Text-Tech Papers, Los Angeles, 2026) — the 1912 Poetical Works as base text, In Sunset Land (1927), the San Diego State manuscript, the death one day after her eighty-ninth birthday.
5. George Wharton James, Rose Hartwick Thorpe and the Story of "Curfew Must Not Ring To-Night" (1916), via the Internet Archive — the poem's story from the author's own telling, Mishawaka birth stated.