SYLVIA DRAKE HAD her place at the back of the one-room schoolhouse in Weybridge, farthest from the coal-burning stove. At sixteen, she was one of the oldest students, more capable of enduring the Vermont winter cold than the little ones. Most young women her age found better ways to occupy their time than attending school, such as preparing the linens they would need to begin their own households, working for wages to buy other necessities, or even marrying and caring for their own children. Sylvia chose to spend her second winter in Vermont focused on improving her mind. She had arrived in Weybridge already well educated for the daughter of a landless laborer, able to both read and write well. Plenty men of her station could do neither. Nonetheless, when the winter school session began in 1800, Sylvia insisted on returning for yet another season of instruction.1
Weybridge offered only a basic village school for Sylvia to attend. Winter sessions at village schools tended to deliver more advanced instruction in writing than the reading and math basics taught during the summer, but even the winter schools offered little beyond the elementary level.2 As limited as Sylvia’s educational opportunities were in Weybridge, Easton had not been much better. Sylvia’s birthplace had repeatedly flouted the Massachusetts law that directed towns to operate common schools for local children. Local leaders preferred to pay fines rather than undertake the expense of hiring a schoolmaster. Although it had been settled in the 1660s, Easton had no school until the 1740s, and the town’s girls were probably not admitted until the 1760s.3
The year that Sylvia left Easton a new private academy opened in nearby Bridgewater that admitted young women and offered instruction in history, geography, and belles lettres.4 The Bridgewater Academy was part of a movement, sweeping Massachusetts at the end of the century, to offer a more advanced education to female students. The level of instruction did not match the schooling offered to young men preparing for college work, but it marked a radical divergence from a time when, in the words of a snippet of doggerel that appeared in a Vermont newspaper in 1805:
… a good old grannam
at fifty pounds, old ten per annum
Was hir’d to keep a village school;
To learn the girls to knit—the boys to read
And teach the little children, all the creed.5
By 1798, the early feminist writer Judith Sargent Murray, who resented being deprived of an education in her youth, noted ecstatically that “female academies are every where establishing.” Sylvia, only seven years younger than Charity, belonged to a post-Revolutionary generation of women raised with newly broadened horizons. But the timing of her move to Weybridge excluded her from sharing the benefits.6
Unfortunately, Judith Sargent Murray’s “every where” did not yet extend to new villages like Weybridge, where townspeople were more concerned with clearing land than with filling minds. Weybridge, resettled following the Revolution, established its first school in a log cabin at the top of Weybridge Hill in 1791. The structure doubled as a meeting house for the tiny town. After lightning burned the cabin down, the town rebuilt a new one-room schoolhouse on the village green in 1801.7 Sylvia had to make good on the new educational possibilities open to young women of her generation within the frontier conditions of Weybridge. She might stay in school longer than her sisters, but she could not attend an academy.
Sylvia’s situation hardly improved when she and her mother moved from her brother Asaph’s home in Weybridge to live with her brother Oliver in neighboring Bristol. The town sat at the base of Hogback Mountain, and the entire terrain was hilly and forbidding. Settled at the same time as Weybridge, Bristol still did not have a single framed house by the turn of the century. The town was made up of log homes and tree stumps where forest had recently stood. There was not even a grist mill.8 To an enterprising poor young man, Bristol’s lack of development represented opportunity. Oliver not only followed Asaph to Vermont; he followed Asaph’s example, taking advantage of the town’s nascent condition to establish himself within the local hierarchy. He soon became an important man about town, acquiring the economic wherewithal to support his aging mother and baby sister as well as a growing family. But Sylvia found as limited educational prospects in Bristol as in Weybridge.
Middlebury, the nearby market town, would in short time become associated with precisely the model of female education that Sylvia craved. In 1800, the town fathers wrote to Sarah Pierce, founder of the Litchfield Female Academy, seeking assistance in establishing their own academy. Pierce sent them her twenty-five-year-old niece, Idea Strong, who had taught at Litchfield. Soon Strong was instructing girls in the Middlebury courthouse.9 In 1802 she opened the “Young Ladies’ Academy,” bringing female education to Middlebury on the Litchfield model, offering instruction in subjects ranging from classical literature to the decorative arts.10 Strong’s premature death from consumption in 1804 opened the door to an even more challenging vision of women’s education, when a young woman named Emma Hart arrived in town to take charge.11 Hart moved away from the ornamental arts education offered to genteel girls, substituting rigorous training in fields like algebra, Latin, and philosophy. Under Hart’s direction, the Middlebury school became a great success, and she continued to direct its operations after her marriage to Dr. John Willard. At the renamed Middlebury Female Seminary, Emma Hart Willard stood at the forefront of the women’s education movement. The seminary’s success transformed Willard into a celebrity, leading the governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, to invite her to open a new female seminary in the city of Troy in 1819. Later Willard traveled through Europe and was feted by fellow female educators.12 Today, Middlebury celebrates its connection to Willard; a marble memorial commemorating her educational vision stands at the entrance to town.
Sylvia followed Willard’s career with interest, reading her books and commenting enthusiastically in her diary.13 But Willard arrived too late to be of any use to Sylvia. Even had Sylvia been a few years younger, her background would likely have prevented her from attending either Strong’s or Willard’s school. The academies recruited girls from privileged families that had the capital both to pay the fees and to forgo the value of their daughters’ labor.14 Although the Drakes’ fortunes took an upward turn with the move to Vermont, the family was too newly settled to send Sylvia to school in Middlebury. The possibility of an academy education shimmered like a mirage on Sylvia’s horizon, alluring to behold but impossible to grasp.
The impossibility represented by the new academies only reinforced the bleakness of Sylvia’s actual schooling opportunities when she arrived in Weybridge. Sylvia conveyed her deep unhappiness over her circumstances in a letter that she wrote during her second winter in Vermont to her sister Polly, who had married a North Bridgewater man, Asaph Hayward, and was still living in Massachusetts. Her sympathetic brother-in-law wrote back affectionately, “I conclude you are very discontented in Vermont.” Asaph sympathized with Sylvia, but he could hardly understand the depth of her discontent. Barely educated himself, Asaph felt puzzled by Sylvia’s fierce desire to continue her schooling so long past the point at which most girls stopped. “I hear that you go to scool this winter which I am glad of althou you had good larning befour yet it is a difficult thing to get too much larning if you make a good improvment of it which I hope you will.” He did not disapprove of Sylvia’s strange decision, but he struggled to understand her rationale. What use, he wondered, could she make of extended learning?15
Asaph Hayward’s gentle bemusement at Sylvia’s peculiar desire for advanced learning was kinder than the reaction of many observers to the growing intellectual ambitions of American women. Many believed that the shift threatened women’s place in the family and left them ill-equipped to perform the work required by a farmwife in the early nineteenth century. The Middlebury Mercury published a satiric notice in 1806, shortly before Emma Hart’s arrival in town, advertising the opening of “an Academy for the education of YOUNG LADIES in the useful, though unfashionable art of HOUSEWIFERY.” Ridiculing the academy-style education that taught girls “embroidery, fillagree, rhetoric, and dancing” but left them unable to “milk a coo,” the new academy promised instruction in
Spinning, Weaving, Knitting, Darning, Sewing, Bleaching, Washing, Starching and Folding; Cutting and making up shirts for both sexes. Milking, making Butter and Cheese; White and Brown Bread; most kinds of Pies, Tarts, Custards, and Jellies, Pancakes and Slapjacks. Boiling, Codling, Roasting, Broiling, Frying, Fricasseeing, Alamoaning and Smothering all kinds of Flesh and Fish with the construction of other necessary Sauces and Gravies. Ragauts, from the luscious haggis down to the simple shin of beef, turtle and rat soups inclusive. Salting beef and pork, making Sausages, Pickling and Preserving in general, Drying apples, Curing Tobacco and Dying Blue with an introduction to the nature of roots and herbs.16
The satire, intended to amuse, brought to light the disruptive nature of the move toward female education. Sylvia’s insistence on remaining longer in school than usual challenged her family’s expectations for her future. But affection for the baby in the family persuaded her older siblings to make allowance for her oddities.
The Drakes found some logic for her unusual path in the observation that Sylvia was a Sabbath child.17 In the eyes of eighteenth-century New Englanders, being born on a Sunday conferred evidence of God’s favor. Samuel Hopkins, a preeminent eighteenth-century minister, placed a special stake in his identity as a Sabbath child. His parents, he recalled in his memoir, always “considered it as a favour that I was born on the Sabbath,” and from early childhood he knew that he was chosen to become a “minister or a sabbath-day-man.”18 Sylvia could not become a minister. During her childhood, women were discouraged from speaking in the Congregationalist church, let alone preaching. Men and women did not even sit together during meeting.19 Nonetheless women were encouraged to read their Bibles, and from childhood onward Sylvia expressed a singular devotion to religious study that helped her family to rationalize her choice to go to school when other girls were marrying.
There may have been a cause besides intellectual curiosity and religious fervor that led Sylvia to cling to the schoolroom past her time. Polly’s husband noted in his letter to Sylvia in February 1801 that her older siblings in Vermont reported there were many worthy young gentlemen who were “paying their respect to you,” but Sylvia was “very indifferent” to all of them. Expressing a desire to remain in school longer gave Sylvia an acceptable explanation for her aversion to courtship. A sheer lack of romantic interest in her suitors could not provide the same justification. Courtship and marriage were matters that transcended romantic feeling. Families encouraged young women to judge their suitors on practical grounds such as their frugality, industry, piety, kinsmen, and property. Unions should be bound by affection, but passion need not play a role. The young men who courted Sylvia were “worthily deserving of your regard,” Asaph Hayward advised Sylvia, and she should listen to their suits.20 Their qualities, however, made little difference to Sylvia. Farmer or smith, resident of Bristol or Weybridge, tall or short, it is unlikely that any young man was pleasing to Sylvia.
Instead of expressing an interest in the villages’ young men, Sylvia sought connections with other young women, relationships that marriage would impede with its heavy demands on a wife’s time. There were fewer young women to befriend in frontier Vermont than in long-settled Massachusetts. According to the federal census, only thirty-six women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six lived in Weybridge in 1800, and forty-three in Bristol.21 The towns’ widely spread residences, minimal educational opportunities, and early age of marriage for girls sharply reduced the number within this greater set who were suitable to become Sylvia’s intimates. But Sylvia was not dissuaded.
The closest friend Sylvia made in Vermont, Lovina Wheeler, was four years younger than herself, which meant she remained unmarried later than many of Sylvia’s nearer contemporaries. In other ways, Lovina represented a good candidate for Sylvia’s affections. She came from a privileged family that valued education. With a girl like Lovina, Sylvia might be able to share the elevated style of romantic friendship just becoming popular among more genteel young women. Most farm girls in a town like Weybridge had too many daily concerns to waste their time in composing poems and letters to their female friends. Fit candidates for such intimacies were rare on the early national frontier.
Lovina’s rare qualities also made her desirable as a wife, and sooner than Sylvia would have liked, Lovina accepted an offer of marriage from Jonathan Wainwright, the owner of an iron business in Middlebury.22 The marriage created a distance between the two young women that could not be bridged. Like other wives of the era, Lovina’s identity became subsumed by her husband’s, and she was compelled to put away girlish things. When Lovina died in 1821, the Middlebury newspaper paid respect to the Wainwright family by printing a notice of her passing, with the succinct description: “Mrs. Lovina Wainwright, wife of Mr. Jonathan Wainwright, aged 33 years.”23 But in her diary, Sylvia would choose to remember Lovina as an unmarried girl in addition to a wife. “Hear of the death of Mrs. Wainwright nee Lovina Wheeler,” Sylvia noted. By recording her friend’s maiden name, Sylvia ascribed an unconventional significance to her friend’s premarital identity, one not reflected in the newspaper obituary. “Companion of my youth, thou are no more,” Sylvia continued, using the archaic familiar form of the second person. Thou denoted the closeness that had once existed between Sylvia and her cherished friend. Lovina’s marriage had separated the women, but Sylvia’s affections endured:
I mourn thy early exit tho’ thou hast long ceased to be my intimate. Early a wife + mother, thy residence at a distance I seldom saw thee: but never forgot thou existed. Thy image was imprinted so deeply on my memory that whenever recollection presented thee I beheld thee with pleasure + fondly hop’d some future period would favor us with a long interview. That hope which ever reviv’d at the recollection of that lov’d form, is now utterly extinguished.24
Sylvia’s memorial to her friend suggested the physical dimension to her love for the “companion of my youth.” Lovina’s “image,” not as a wife and mother but as a girl, remained permanently “imprinted” in Sylvia’s mind. The contours of her “lov’d form” were etched so clearly in Sylvia’s memory that any recollection of Lovina resurrected the old feelings and led Sylvia to long for her friend’s presence beside her. Sylvia’s diary entry captures the evidence of youthful romantic feelings that were lacking in her relations with male suitors.
Those feelings alarmed her siblings. Her sister Polly, who had received reports from the family in Vermont that Sylvia was refusing to entertain male suitors, wrote to Sylvia in June 1801 advising her to avoid excessive intimacies with other young women. Polly framed her letter “in answer” to a letter from Sylvia that had worried her, and that likely discussed Lovina. “I would give you a word of caution and my best advice, and hope your good sense will lead you to profit by it,” Polly embarked on this sensitive subject, in notably more refined writing than her husband’s. “You are now in the bloom of youth. Now indeed is the most dangerous time of your life—you are expos’d to a thousand unseen snares,” Polly warned. Some snares were well understood by young women, such as the risk of forming a connection to a man who promised marriage, made you pregnant, and then breached his promise. “You are expos’d to the deception and the flattery of the other sex,” Polly conceded, but she had another stronger concern for her little sister. She worried about
the impositions of the false friendships of your own [sex]—you may believe me when I tell you that there are but few real friends—many proffes, but few know the meaning of friendship.—They know nothing of it but the name, and are entire strangers to that heartfelt bliss which takes place in the union of virtuous souls’—and you may often find, my dear, under the mask of friendship the most completed treachery.
Polly’s own growing friendship with Charity Bryant, back in Massachusetts, may have influenced this warning to her little sister. Hearing of Charity’s tribulations could have inspired Polly to try to save Sylvia from suffering the same sorrows.25
A few months later, in a letter to mark Sylvia’s seventeenth birthday, Polly reiterated her concerns that her little sister was entering a “dangerous period” in which her hopes for redemption might be destroyed by the “snares temptations and enemies” that the devil enlisted to deceive humanity. This time, Polly called on a terrible example to drive home her point: the story of Sodom. “Lot chose to reside in Sodom because it was a pleasant country and well watered,” Polly began, suggesting an analogy to the Drake family’s removal to the green hills of western Vermont. But the “sins of the inhabitants soon made him forget the advantages of the place.” The “ungodly deeds” of the men of Sodom caused a “righteous soul” to tremble. Polly exhorted her younger sister to avoid ungodly deeds and begin her new year in the awareness that it might be her last. Using Lot’s story emphasized the critical importance of her message at the same time that it discreetly raised the dangers of the specifically sexual sins that might tempt a young woman entering the most “dangerous period” of adolescence. The sin of sodomy, as defined by traditional New England Protestants, encompassed a variety of non-procreative sexual acts, ranging from bestiality and masturbation to same-sex encounters.26 Polly suggested a range of possible sexual sins tempting Sylvia when she called on Lot’s example, but she may have had the danger of excessive physical intimacy between friends particularly in mind. Again, one wonders whether Polly’s friendship with Charity brought this danger to mind.27
Sylvia shared Polly’s religious sensibilities, which bound the sisters in affection despite their twelve-year difference in age. But if Polly hoped that an early marriage would rescue Sylvia from the perils of Sodom, she was bound to be disappointed. Polly married immediately after her twentieth birthday. Her sisters Rhoda and Desire had been unable to find husbands in Massachusetts, as their father’s bankruptcy gave them little to offer suitors. But Rhoda married the owner of a grist mill in Bristol, Enos Soper, immediately upon removing to Vermont. Desire married a landowner from the same town.28 Sylvia had the luck to come of age in a frontier community where men outnumbered women, and girls with domestic skills, like those Sylvia possessed, were in high demand. But despite Asaph’s and Polly’s urgings, she remained single.
Sylvia’s aversion to courtship appeared evident even to Asaph and Polly’s young daughter, Achsah, who began exchanging letters with her aunt in 1803, when she was ten. Achsah looked up to her clever aunt, whom she remembered from before the move. No doubt at her mother’s urging, Achsah began to send letters to Sylvia with news from Easton and Bridgewater, copies of her school lessons, and snippets of poetry.29 Achsah took after her aunt Sylvia. A precocious poet and a sly observer of the adult world, she was a very clever girl. Sylvia encouraged her niece’s letters and wrote back with words of support for Achsah’s studies. But Sylvia did not offer the same sort of gossip that her niece reported. In particular, Sylvia neglected the subject of marriage. Achsah’s letters kept Sylvia apprised of the constant whirl of courtships and weddings in Massachusetts. “Miss Mehitebel Dalie is married to Mr Daniel Manley,” she informed Sylvia in her first letter; in a later letter, “Uncle Manly Hayward is a courting Aunt Mary Monk and Clement Bryant is a courting Miss Phebe Perkins.”30 Exasperated with Sylvia’s silence on these matters, Achsah pestered her “there don’t any of the girls get married”?31
By 1804, Polly may have begun to suspect that Sylvia was not the marrying type. When their last single sibling, middle sister Desire, became engaged, Sylvia wrote to Polly that she expected soon to be “left alone.” Polly understood that Sylvia’s solitary station might be long-lasting. “If so,” Polly wrote, “I hope you will be a comfort to our Mother in her declining age, as she has been the faithfull guide and protectress of your infant days.”32 Seemingly unwilling to begin her own family, Sylvia’s siblings assumed that she would remain living among them, helping the family. No one could foresee a future in which their unmarried sister lived outside the family circle.
When Polly and Asaph moved with their children to Weybridge in 1805, all the surviving Drakes were finally reunited. Oliver, Isaac, Solomon, Rhoda, and Desire lived in Bristol; Asaph and Polly lived in Weybridge. Sylvia and her mother split their time living with different siblings. By then Sylvia had ended her attempts at further schooling. She took a great deal of responsibility for her mother. True to her sister’s wishes, Sylvia treated Mary Drake as her “dear maternal friend,” giving the aging matriarch the emotional (and later material) support that her married sisters found harder to spare.33 The two women often spent time in Polly’s household. Sylvia shared a religious vocabulary with her pious sister, and an interest in poetry with her clever niece, which made living among them comfortable. In Mary, Polly, and Achsah’s company, she passed her early twenties without feeling the need to take on a new name.
Sylvia’s closeness to the women in her family shaped her character. Her years among them trained her to be as proficient at the “unfashionable art of housewifery” as any curmudgeon could desire. She learned how to bake pies and cookies, to sew shirts, to make sausages, and to dry apples. Her upbringing instilled Sylvia with a sense of family loyalty and devotion to the well-being of the next generation. She was very much like the other women in her family, except for her lack of desire to get married and begin her own household. The significance of that peculiarity appeared great at some moments, and unimportant at others.
An aphorism of Alexander Pope’s, often repeated in early New England, sagely declared “’tis education forms the common mind; just as the Twig is bent, the Tree’s inclined.” Thousands of school children, including Sylvia’s own nieces and nephews, transcribed Pope’s words into their copybooks as a reminder about the importance of learning.34 The Drakes’ history of hardships and migration to western Vermont denied Sylvia the formal education that she wished to “form” her mind, but her family’s experience “bent” her growth in lasting ways. The depression of 1784, the division of her family, and the hardships of frontier life taught her thrift, industry, and endurance. Born a decade or two later, Sylvia may have had an easier childhood. Her intellectual inclinations would have found more avenues for development; her early years may have been less marked by desperation. But Americans of the next generation often felt impoverished for having missed the experience of the Revolution. Their experiences seemed trivial in comparison.35 Sylvia’s birth at the end of the Revolutionary era subjected her to deprivations but also inclined her to become a self-determined young woman. To extend Pope’s metaphor, Sylvia was like a bonsai; raised under harsh conditions, pruned close as a twig, she adapted and became a hardy tree, crabbed in some respects, but beautiful to those who appreciated such qualities.