TOWNSEND, George Alfred ("Gath").
The Entailed Hat; or, Patty Cannon's Times. A Romance.
TEACKLE MANSION EDITION — ONE OF 500 COPIES, THIS NO. 475. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1912.
Octavo. Dark blue cloth, gilt lettering and rules to the spine ("THE ENTAILED HAT," with "GATH" at the foot and "HARPERS" at the base). First published by Harper & Brothers in 1884; this is the privately financed 1912 limited reissue, the "Teackle Mansion Edition," produced to preserve the novel to the Del-Mar-Va Peninsula per the limitation statement. Copyright 1884 by Harper & Brothers and 1912 by George Alfred Townsend. Inscribed in ink to the front free endpaper, "To Ethel Nicholson, an / Angel if ever there was / one. With Love. / Georgie" — a period gift inscription, not in the author's hand (Townsend signed as "Geo. Alfred Townsend" or "Gath"). Good to very good: the dark blue cloth complete, the spine gilt legible; pages clean and unmarked apart from the inscription; no dust jacket.
George Alfred Townsend (1841–1914) reported the Civil War and the aftermath of the Lincoln assassination under the byline "Gath" — his initials G.A.T. plus an H, after II Samuel 1:20 — and drew this novel from the country of his Delaware boyhood. Its Patty Cannon was the historical leader, with her son-in-law Joseph Johnson, of an early-nineteenth-century gang operating along the Maryland–Delaware line from Johnson's Cross Roads (now Reliance). The gang abducted free Black people and fugitives and trafficked them south into slavery — what historians call the Reverse Underground Railroad. Cannon was indicted for murder in 1829 and died in jail awaiting trial.
Rooted in the Eastern Shore landscape Townsend knew firsthand, and peopled with characters drawn from local memory, The Entailed Hat is the major nineteenth-century literary treatment of this difficult and still-understudied chapter of American history. Its setting includes the real Teackle Mansion in Princess Anne, Maryland, for which this 1912 limited edition is named. A solid, attractive copy of an uncommon limited issue.
SKU TO-2026-015
