Ten years ago, local historian Brad Asher was poking around the archives at the Filson Historical Society. As he flipped through the special collections catalog, he found references to letters between an escaped slave and her former mistress.
Intrigued, Asher wanted to know the backstory behind the letters. His curiosity led him to write a book, “Cecelia and Fanny: The Remarkable Friendship between an Escaped Slave and her Former Mistress.”
Cecelia Larrison, a former slave, and Louisvillian Fanny Ballard, her former mistress, sustained a relationship for 50 years. In 1846, Cecelia, then 15 years old, escaped from Fanny during a family trip to Niagara Falls. In Canada, Cecelia married, worked and raised a family, but she desperately wanted to know what happened to her mother, who was still a slave with Fanny’s family in Louisville. Cecelia started corresponding with Fanny to maintain a connection with her mother. Although she and her mother were never able to reunite, Cecelia did reconnect with Fanny when she moved back to Louisville after the Civil War. Their relationship – like the correspondence that preceded it – was mostly civil and affectionate. 
While the five letters Asher found at the Filson form the core of the book, they cannot tell the whole story. “All historians face gaps in the documentary record, but the gaps are often worse when writing about women and minorities,” Asher says. To fill in the gaps, he first tapped public records, such as census records, city directories and land records, as well as records left by the men in the women’s lives.
“I read a lot of secondary literature on people in similar situations and applied the insights of other writers to the situations of Cecelia and Fanny,” Asher says. “Finally, sometimes I just had to acknowledge the gaps and present the reader with a set of plausible, if uncertain, conclusions about what I thought likely.”
Asher, who has a bachelor’s degree in International Studies from Johns Hopkins University and a master’s and Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, says he’s been pleased by the positive reaction to “Cecelia and Fanny,” and credits the community with a strong interest in history and family history. “At talks I have given on the book, people have told me their own family stories having to do with slavery and the Civil War,” he says.
Asher moved to Louisville about 14 years ago and says that he and his family liked the city and decided to stay. But there may have been other forces at work: “Shortly after I moved here, I learned that my great-grandfather had been raised in London, Ky., before moving out to Oregon in the mid-1800s. So in a roundabout way, I guess I was coming home,” he says.
“Cecelia and Fanny” is available at Carmichael’s bookstores or online at Amazon.com. It is also available as an e-book.
Susan E. Lindsey can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .