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More than a century after Dixon Lanier Merritt wrote his enduring pelican limerick, a letter from his great-grandson has shed new light on the journalist’s long career, family life and unexpected place in literary history.

Robert Watkin said Merritt—known within the family as “Granddaddy Merritt”—was his maternal grandmother’s father. Watkin remembers visiting him at Cabincroft, a home that burned down in the early 1980s, and still treasures typed letters Merritt sent him during his childhood.

Family stories connect Merritt to national history as well. While living near Dupont Circle in Washington during the late 1910s and much of the 1920s, he reportedly played dominoes with Woodrow Wilson at the National Press Club. Watkin believes those games likely occurred after Wilson left the presidency and near the end of his life.

Watkin also shared remarks delivered by Merritt’s son Stanley at the April 28, 2012, dedication of a pelican statue at Cedars of Lebanon State Park. Stanley, who died in 2019, reflected on why his father’s five-line poem remained popular more than 100 years after it appeared. Merritt’s youngest child, Bob Merritt, was 93 and living in Chanute, Kansas, when Watkin wrote.

Merritt’s famous 1910 verse playfully describes a pelican whose beak can carry more than its belly, using invented words to complete its rhymes. Stanley explained that the poem emerged when newspapers were a central source of news, entertainment and intellectual stimulation for Americans, roughly half of whom lived on farms or in very small towns.

Its timing also followed the “Great Limerick Craze” of 1907 and 1908, when newspapers and magazines held contests asking readers to supply missing final lines. One London newspaper reportedly offered $1,000 for the best entry and drew about 10 million submissions, creating such a burden for the British postal system that Parliament debated whether the contest violated the Lottery Act.

“The Pelican” arrived around the time of British monarch Edward VII’s 1910 funeral and only a few years before World War I. Stanley suggested that the poem benefited from a final period of widespread enthusiasm for such lighthearted verse.

A Life Far Larger Than One Limerick

Merritt, born July 9, 1879, began pursuing journalism in 1901. According to family history, he approached Nashville Banner Managing Editor Marmaduke Morton and asked for work. When told there was no money for another reporter, Merritt replied that he had asked to work, not to be paid.

The Banner hired him as a cub reporter before loaning him to the Owensboro Messenger, where he rose to city editor during a seven-year stay. He returned to the Banner in 1907 as associate editor and began writing “Along the Bypaths,” a daily column exploring the many moods then encompassed by the word “humor”—from sadness and nostalgia to happiness and comedy.

Merritt wrote “The Pelican” in that setting, largely as an experiment in creating words that rhymed with “pelican.” The verse became the best-known piece of his career, but Stanley believed his father would have preferred to be remembered for the human-interest columns devoted to the everyday experiences of his readers.

One example, published in “Along the Bypaths” on Jan. 26, 1912, transformed the sight of an aging “loose arm fiddler” playing “Turkey in the Straw” into a sweeping reflection on American memory. Merritt traced the tune through imagined scenes of rural dances, the Battle of New Orleans, Southern mansions and cotton fields before concluding that the old music had fulfilled its purpose remarkably well.

Merritt became managing editor of the Nashville Tennessean in 1914 and remained there until 1917. He then served as director of information for the U.S. Department of Agriculture during World War I.

From 1919 to 1929, he worked as the Washington correspondent for the weekly Outlook magazine. His assignments included the 1925 Scopes Trial, the Mississippi flood of 1927 and the 1928 presidential contest between Republican Herbert Hoover and Democrat Alfred E. Smith.

He returned to Tennessee in 1929 as an editor and reporter for the Lebanon Democrat. There, his earlier human-interest column was revived under the name “Our Folks.” He continued contributing versions of the column into old age.

From 1939 to 1946, Merritt again worked for the Agriculture Department, editing “Rural Electrification News.” He later farmed, contributed to “Our Folks” and helped edit the 1959-60 “History of Wilson County.” He continued farming and writing until his death on Jan. 9, 1972, at age 92.

His other work included a 1913 history of Tennessee written with Will T. Hale and a 1924 history of Mason & Hanger Co., which helped build the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and DuPont’s Old Hickory powder plant. Merritt also completed an unpublished 1925 biography of World War I Pacific Fleet commander Adm. William Banks Caperton, which the Navy Department declined to authorize for publication because of security concerns, and an unpublished 1939 biography of Andrew Jackson.

The family record makes clear that Merritt’s celebrated pelican was only a small part of a career spanning newspapers, magazines, government service, history and decades of writing about ordinary life.