It's a small world department...
A letter (not online) in the current New Yorker comments on one of the obscure books mentioned in the article I blogged on June 27. It was a book by Edmund Ruffin about manure. The letter writer informs us that this book was a hit in the antebellum south and went through five editions. One of the reasons people became pioneers and went west was because the soil in Virginia was depleted. Ruffin's book showed them how to restore the soil on their farms. Edmund Ruffin used the profits from the book to devote himself to the cause of seccession and wound up firing the first shot at Fort Sumter. He later killed himself after the defeat of the South. Here is a nice short bio, which incidentally has the clearest summary of the causes of the Civil War that I have ever read.

Now further online research reveals that Ruffin had a friend and distant cousin, Col. George Blow. Blow was a fellow Virginia planter and a follower of Ruffin's methods for renewing the soil. Blow was also a seccesionist, though not such a fire-eater as Ruffin. During the Civil War, he was appointed a Lt. Colonel in the 14th Virginia Regiment of Infantry, got captured and exchanged and apparently sat out the rest of the war.

George Blow had a son, Judge George Blow, Jr and he in turn had a son, George Preston Blow. George P. Blow graduated from Annapolis and joined the Navy. In 1893 he married Adele Matthiessen of LaSalle, Illinois (Adele was the daughter of F.W. Matthiessen and Fannie Clara Möehler.) He was aboard the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor when it blew up in 1898, starting the Spanish American War. George P. Blow's Naval career included the invention of the depth charge. Later, he became president of the Western Clock Company, makers of Westclox (his wife's father owned the company).

Now, you're with me so far, right? Right. Well, it turns out his wife Adele was my first cousin, twice removed. What, you're not impressed? It's a long way to go for nothing? Oh well.