Diary of Emma Cummins Snively Crosier Pauling

Emma Cummins was born in 1848 in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the first daughter of Civil War Union General Robert P. Cummins, who died in the Battle of Gettysburg and was regarded as a hero of the war. At age fourteen, Emma Cummins was married for the first time, to a French-Canadian man named Blacklock, and moved to Canada. The marriage ended quickly, after Cummins sustained abuse from her husband, to the extent that Blacklock’s family paid for Cummins’s return home to Pennsylvania. She was then married to Dr. George Snively, with whom she had one daughter named Hattie and a second daughter who died in early childhood. By 1870, Cummins Snively and her daughter relocated to Utah to join Dr. Snively who had earlier moved west in search of work mining precious metals, land, and fortune. In December 1872 while in Utah, Cummins Snively was hired as a telegrapher by the Western Union Company, a role in which she found success due to the speed and fluidity of her writing and signaling. In the second half of the 19th century, telegraphy in the United States was at its height, following the completion of the first transcontinental telegraph line in 1861. Cummins Snively worked as one of a growing network of women telegraphers stationed in depots along railroad lines, sometimes in quite isolated outposts in unpopulated areas. By 1880, Dr. Snively had passed away and Cummins Snively had married and divorced her third husband, George Crosier, and had again returned to Somerset, Pennsylvania. By 1884, she had returned to Utah, where she first worked as a postmaster and later as a cashier. It is in this period in Utah that Cummins Snively Crosier began to add entries to her diary. In 1893, Cummins Snively Crosier was married for the fourth and final time, to George M. Pauling (1840-1898), a Civil War Veteran. By 1899, poverty-stricken, Cummins Snively Crosier Pauling returned to reside with family in Pennsylvania. She was granted a pension of $12 per month which depended, in large part, on her father’s admiral service during the war. Cummins Snively Crosier Pauling lived the rest of her life in Somerset, Pennsylvania until her death at home with her family at the age of seventy-five in 1923.