Jessie Dewey Cutting (Richardson)

by Madge Richardson Walsh, 2001

Jessie Dewey Cutting was born in San Francisco on November 5, 1895, in the apartment building her grandfather Cutting built next door to his home (both were still standing in the 1980s). Jessie was the third of five children, with two older sisters and two younger brothers. Her parents were not particularly happy at having another girl; when her proud father had rhapsodized in the family Bible over the birth of the first two girls, endowing them with lovely names — Marjorie Adele, Ida Mary — number three was recorded simply as "another girl." No mellifluous name for her, either: she was named Jessie after her mother. 

The Cutting home was in Honolulu, where her father, Eugene Cutting, worked as a sugar broker. When Jessie was about 11, and after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, they moved permanently to the mainland. Her mother had made regular visits to San Francisco to have her children; all these trips except the last were made in sailing ships.

In the Bay Area, they had a house on Nace Avenue in Piedmont, and Jesse went to the Piedmont Avenue School. 

Another disappointment developed: Jessie was born with congenital bilateral hip dysplasia in which the hip fails to make a socket for the thigh bone, and could not walk until a specialist operated on her when she was three. For one hip, the operation was successful; the other was not so, and she always walked with a limp. In her later years, arthritis compounded the pain, and her movements were restricted and she tired easily.  

This was not a period where women were encouraged to go to college, but Jessie persuaded her parents to let her attend what was then the California School of Arts And Crafts. This was during the tenure of Frederick Meyer, of Perham Nahl, and Xavier Martinez. Despite little support for her work, she did finish school, and did her practice teaching in art at University High School in Oakland, and then went into commercial art. She illustrated such new clothing fashions for Capwell’s department store sale brochures. 

Capwell's Advertisement, Oakland Tribune, Oct. 13, 1922

We have two of her oil paintings, one a still life exercise, the other the tawny hills and oak trees in the Piedmont uplands. While her active art career was brief, she remained a wonderful teacher, as her patience was infinite.

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Jessie died in 1984; in a gesture of his deep love for her, Russell established a scholarship at her alma mater, which is now known as the California College of the Arts. The Jessie Cutting Richardson Memorial Scholarship is awarded annually to 1-3 full-time students who are either U.S. citizens or eligible noncitizens and who demonstrate financial need and academic merit at CCA. Her family continue to donate to the fund so that her memory may remain alive in the hearts and hands of its many recipients.

Richardson Family Papers: An Introduction

In the early 1980s, Madge Richardson Walsh, as the self-nominated family historian, started pulling together family stories and letters with an eye to publishing them for family members. Two volumes of the Richardson-Smith-Street Family Papers were self-published by Madge. In the days before computers and internet, Volume I (1983) entailed photocopying photos and typesetting on an electric typewriter; Volume II (1991) was assembled using an early version of Microsoft Works. The first volume was embellished with poor quality photocopies; the second with photographic prints hand-pasted onto the correct pages, and hand bound, much to the chagrin of her family, who lived for months with a dining room transformed into an assembly line of signatures (groups of pages sewn together) and hardboard being covered with matching quaint cotton print (brown on white for Volume I, white on brown for Volume II), each completed book being pressed by bricks on a sheet of plywood as they dried. Each volume was hand-numbered; at least 31 copies of each were made and distributed to family members. 

With these small successes, and empowered with increasingly powerful computers and software, she outlined a total of five volumes: Volume III was to be her father Russell's memoirs and wartime letters, as well as a charming story written by Florence Grinsted Richardson; Volume IV was to be dedicated to George Owen Richardson's Autobiography and a Memoir by David Fay Richardson. The pièce de résistance was to be Volume V: Recollections of My Life Work, a transcription of the Journal George Warren Richardson's (GWR), the Richardson family patriarch, which spanned a key part of this country's history.

By the time of Madge's death in 2015, the various pieces of these and other writings were scattered throughout her disorganized home: the Alzheimer's that ravaged her brain also stole her organizational ability. Some of the pieces were found in their entirety on one floppy diskette (Volume II), others printed out at 50% in several copies (Owen's journal transcription abruptly ends mid-sentence), and even more were just snippets on disk in outdated software formats or individual hard copy pages. Many family artifacts were passed on to her nephew, who has published the story of GWR's Journal as The Abolitionist's Journal; Most of the cartons of letters that she refers to are now lost to time, but the photographs and other items are or will be professionally digitized, and the most historically significant will be housed in a world-class library.

In 2000, she writes about her progress on the project in a letter to her nephew James Richardson:

As you know, I’ve been working up the family tree, aiming toward printing GWR’s autobiography for the family. I practiced by starting with my father’s generation—but after the first two little volumes, I got bogged down, because when I started on Dad’s memoirs, I discovered he had saved every family letter he had ever received, for over 60 years—cartons of them. Mother kept the letters he wrote to her, and in return she had written to him every day when he was on the USS Gridley.

It was so overwhelming, I decided to skip to their parents’ generation, as both David Fay Richardson and George Owen Richardson had written memoirs, and the younger two boys and Emma are mentioned in them. David Fay unfortunately wrote only a few chapters, with tantalizing remarks about what he was going to write about, but never did. Still, with the letters and a bit of research in the county deed records in Roseburg, Ore., there is enough, and Ruth and Florence both already had told quite a bit about him.

Uncle Owen (as he was usually referred to) wrote a whole book. I’ve transcribed it all, and am annotating where it seems to need it. Since he was very close to his father, and was associated with him particularly during their ministry in Texas, there are passages you may find very illuminating. There is much to read between the lines. It is also intriguing to read about the same incidents as told by GWR and then by Owen.

What has held me up on this book has been some of the annotating, as well as the format—this volume will not be hand-bound! that’s for sure, and I’ve been trying to learn to use a scanner so I can incorporate photos with the text...

As a way to preserve these stories, I offer up the pieces of this project that I have or can reconstruct with the aid of fellow family historians, and will add pieces as they come. 

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