Famous Skaggs: Katherine Anne Porter

Though she was not a Skaggs herself, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer Katherine Anne Porter was a Skaggs descendant.  Her paternal grandmother was Catherine Ann Skaggs, daughter of Abraham Moredock Skaggs and granddaughter of the James Scaggs who married Susanna.

Katherine Anne Porter was born in 1890 in Brown County, Texas, the daughter of Harrison Boone Porter and Mary Alice Jones.  Her birth name was Callie Russel Porter and after her mother's death in 1892, her father took the family to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas.  Her grandmother was born Skaggs and had a great influence on her as reflected in the adoption of her name later in life.  Katherine Anne Porter later described her grandmother's wedding as told by a flower girl who was there (from Katherine Anne Porter: A Life by Joan Givner):

Only a few years ago a cousin of mine showed me a letter from a lady then rising ninety-five who remembered that wedding as if it had been only yesterday.  She was one of the flower girls, carrying a gilded basket of white roses and ferns, tied with a white watered-silk ribbon.  She couldn't remember whether the bride's skirt had been twenty-five feet or twenty-five yards around, but she inclined to the latter figure; it was of white satin brocade with slippers to match.

The flower girl was allowed a glimpse of the table set for the bridal banquet.  There were silver branched candle-sticks everywhere, each holding seven white candles, and a crystal chandelier holding fifty white candles, all lighted.  There was a white lace tablecloth reaching to the floor all around, over white satin.  The wedding cake was as tall as the flower girl and of astonishing circumference, festooned all over with white sugar roses and green leaves, actual live rose leaves. The room, she wrote, was a perfect bower of southern smilax and white dogwood.  And there was butter.  This is a bizarre note, but there was an enormous silver butter dish, with feet, containing at least ten pounds of butter.  The dish had cupids and some sort of fruit around the rim, and the butter was molded or carved to resemble a set-piece of roses and lilies, every petal and leaf standing out sharply, natural as life.  The flower girl, after a lapse of nearly a century, remembered no more than this, but I think it does well for a glimpse.

That butter.  She couldn't get over it and neither can I.  It seems as late-Roman and decadent as anything ever thought up in Hollywood.  Her memory came back with a rush when she thought of the food.  All the children had their own table in a small parlour, and ate just what the grownups had: Kentucky ham, roast turkey, partridges in wine jelly, fried chicken, dove pie, half a dozen sweet and hot sauces, peach pickle, watermelon pickle and spiced mangoes.  A dozen different fruits, four kinds of cake and at last a chilled custard in tall glasses with whipped cream capped by a brandied cherry.

That's crazy by today's standards, never mind Warren County, Kentucky in 1849.  That would have been Abraham Moredock Skaggs who put on this big wedding.  Remember, his sons were E.M. and E.H. Skaggs who made fortunes in Sacramento and New Orleans so this family must have been quite wealthy.