In his book, A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken writes of how he and his beloved Jean Palmer Davis (Davy) came to be married...
In September as the new term began, we were secretly married — secretly because of my father’s forbidding views on early marriage, especially of people still in statu pupillari. Why, then, marry? Not, certainly, as a sanction for sex: we had known each other in the spring without guilt. There was no great reason: there might be in some emergency a legal value in our being wed. And I thought Davy would be pleased—which she was. It was not, assuredly, a desire to feel ‘married’, for we thought of marital attitudes and jokes as destructive of love; and we never did overcome our distaste for the words ‘husband’ and ‘wife’: we said we were ‘comrade-lovers’. Perhaps we had a sense that there ought to be a confirmation by ritual of our deep vows. At all events, one Saturday morning, license in hand, we set forth to find a clergyman in some village far from our usual haunts. We drove into a village and found the Rectory. Despite ourselves we felt a small wave of excitement. But we had reckoned without football: the Rector was on his way to watch and cheer. Village after village, hundreds of villages: not one gentle old man writing his sermon and meditating. Amazed at the faithlessness of the cloth, we became hot and tired and discouraged. On the point of giving up, we tried a last Rectory; and there we found a white-haired old gentleman who had doubtless been meditating. Perhaps a saint. Thunder rumbled as we went in. He talked to us kindly for a few minutes. Then, as thunder crashed and rain poured down, we were wed. A bed-ridden sister upstairs signed as witness, which she wasn’t; so perhaps it wasn’t legal. As we left, the sun was striking through. The air was rain-washed and cool, and there were bright puddles by the walk. As we drove away, a rainbow appeared. Heaven approved. When we got to the wooded park where we would have a two-day honeymoon—the only guests in the small hotel—we discovered that each of us had a different idea of which village we had finally married in. In later years, whenever there was some unresolvable difference about a fact, we would chant the names of the two villages at each other.When I was working on my biography of Vanauken, I searched and searched for a copy of Van and Davy's marriage license, all to no avail. I have continued the search off and on over the past five years. Then, just a couple of weeks ago, a correspondent sent me a digital image of the marriage record which she had found.
The record indicates that Van and Davy obtained their marriage license at the courthouse in Greenfield, Hancock County, Indiana on Wednesday the 22nd of September in 1937. Indeed, Van and Davy travelled far from their usual haunts, all the way to the east side of Indianapolis, to obtain their marriage license in a county where none of Van's family had any connection. Then on the following Saturday, the 25th, they were wed by Robert Beck, a Minister of the Christian Church (The Disciples of Christ denomination in which Van had been raised.)
However, the license does not indicate where the wedding took place, so I had to do a little more digging.
I was able to find, through a search on newspapers.com, that Robert Beck was serving the First Christian Church of Greencastle, Indiana in September of 1937.
So this is where Van and Davy were wed, twenty-eight and a half miles due south of Wabash College where Van was a student in his senior year. I do not know for certain the location of the small hotel in the wooded park where Van and Davy spent their brief honeymoon. However, my guess is that they stayed at the Turkey Run Inn located in one of Indiana's state parks nearby...
What were the names of the two villages where they thought they were wed? I have a sneaking suspicion that the debate over the name of the village arose because Van and Davy obtained their marriage license in Greenfield and they were wed in Greencastle, but I suppose we will never know for sure...
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