Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
Sylvia Drake had been dead a century when her life caught the interest of historians. In the mid-1960s, Donald Murray and Robert Rodney of Northern Illinois University stumbled upon her diary and realized it offered something often overlooked. While most historians were focusing on huge events — world-changing discoveries, clashes of civilizations, wars and pandemics — Murray and Rodney saw Drake’s diary as an uncommon window into the life of a common woman in rural 19th century America.
But the two historians overlooked, or perhaps ignored, an important aspect of Drake’s personal life that has attracted more recent scholars.
The basic facts of Drake’s life are unremarkable. She was born in Bristol, Vermont, in 1784, and lived most of her adult life in Weybridge, where she worked as a seamstress. She died in 1868. When Murray and Rodney wrote about the diary in an article for Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society, they were interested in how it chronicled Drake’s deeply held religious beliefs and the everyday details of life in an early Vermont town.
The interests of scholars change over time, however. Today Drake’s diary, which covers the years 1821 to 1824, can be read with new meaning. In addition to the value Murray and Rodney saw in the diary, scholars now believe it may offer a rare view of an even more deeply hidden world, because Drake’s partner in life was another woman.
Drake and her dear friend, Charity Bryant, ran a tailor shop in town and lived together for more than four decades. As one relative who visited their home commented, the women shared both “pillow” and “purse.” If this was in fact a romantic relationship, then it is an extraordinary glimpse indeed. Such lesbian relationships, as well as those between gay men, are hard to track, except in recent decades. American historians only began studying them in the mid-1970s and have found relatively little documentation.
Homosexuality was so taboo in much of society that gay men and lesbians often hid their personal lives, leading some to claim that such lifestyles are a modern phenomenon. In his 1976 book, “Gay American History,” Jonathan Katz wrote: “My research focused on uncovering and presenting enough significant evidence to demonstrate that the heretofore suppressed, hidden history of homosexual Americans does exist.”
Drake’s diary is interesting both on the level that Murray and Rodney discuss, and in the more modern interpretations that the diary’s descriptions of the women’s lives elicit.
In her writings, Drake reveals the intensity of labor that was required to make a living and keep a household during the 19th century. In an entry from April 27, 1822, Drake comments that she feels “very unwell, but with the assistance of my ever-dear C[harity], wash 5 flannel sheets, 5 flannel shimmies, 1 waist, & 6 pairs of stockings, 13 towels, 3 table cloths, & 3 pair of pillow cases, 3 aprons, 1 night gown, 5 handkerchiefs, clean the buttery, cupboard, bedchamber, dining room & kitchen, make crackers & bake them…”
Several days later, and still feeling ill, Drake writes, “My dear C rises before the sun. Does all the work. Sweats me with cat mint &c.” At numerous places in the diary, we see how the women care patiently and lovingly for each other in times of sickness.
Bouts of illness were not uncommon in their day. In a deeply religious time, with disease little understood, and with death seemingly lurking nearby, people feared for their souls. Drake was no exception. She worried she had committed crimes too sinful to allow her to enter heaven. She writes that she was “haunted with past and present guilt.” “Guilt,” she writes, “flashes in my face,” because of the “crime after crime which I have committed.”
“One wonders what these crimes were,” Murray and Rodney write in their article, “for she never mentions any of the more mundane forms of misbehavior.” It apparently didn’t occur to the professors, or perhaps they dismissed the notion, that Drake may have feared being judged for the life she shared with Bryant.
Vermont laws during the 18th and 19th centuries were silent on the issue of relationships between women. But they spoke loudly, if inconsistently, about relationships between men. At first the laws were clear and draconian. In 1779, the Legislature made it a crime for any man to “lieth with mankind, as he lieth with a woman.” The penalty was death. The law had been copied from Connecticut statutes, because Thomas Chittenden, Vermont’s first governor, had been a legislator in Connecticut and owned a copy of that state’s statutes. The anti-sodomy statute claimed a higher authority, the Bible.
Death was a common penalty in 1779. The statutes that year also called for death for such crimes as rebelling against the state, committing arson that threatens another’s life, maiming or removing another’s tongue, eyes or “privy members,” committing bestiality, or blaspheming God, Christ or the Holy Ghost.
The Legislature apparently believed the punishment for sodomy went too far. When the laws were revised the following year, the sodomy law was removed. The absence of a law probably went largely unnoticed until 1899, when a Vermont man, John LaForrest, was convicted of sodomy. LaForrest’s lawyer appealed the ruling, arguing that his client could not be convicted of a crime that was not in the state statutes. The Vermont Supreme Court, however, accepted the state’s argument that though no sodomy law existed, sodomy was still a crime under common law. In other words, court precedent showed that sodomy was a crime punishable by fine or imprisonment.
But no one seems to have been much bothered by Drake and Bryant living together.
In her diary, which is in the collection of the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Drake describes the many social contacts the women had in church and at home. People regularly stopped by for tea or they socialized at the homes of others.
What we know about the women’s lives together comes largely from Bryant’s nephew, the nationally famed poet William Cullen Bryant, who visited the women in 1843. He wrote at length about their unconventional relationship in a letter to a friend, since reprinted in a Weybridge town history:
“If I were permitted to draw the veil of private life, I would briefly give you the singular, and to me most interesting, history of two maiden ladies who dwell in this valley. I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred than the tie of marriage, has subsisted in uninterrupted harmony, for more than forty years, during which they have shared each other’s occupations and pleasures and works of charity while in health, and watched over each other in sickness…”
Bryant continued: “I could tell you how they slept on the same pillow and had a common purse, and adopted each other’s relations, and how one of them, more enterprising and spirited than the other, might be said to represent the male head of the family, and took upon herself their transactions with the world without. …I could tell you of their dwelling encircled with roses, which now, in the days of their broken health, bloom wild without their tendance; and I would speak of the friendly relations which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them.”
Then Bryant let the veil drop back over the women’s lives. “I have already said more than I fear they will forgive me for if this should meet their eyes, and I must leave the subject.”
