Charity and sylvia: a webridge couple
Although Charity Bryant (1777-1851) and Sylvia Drake (1784-1868) grew up within 10 miles from each other, in North Bridgewater and in Easton, Massachusetts respectively, they met for the first time as young women in Weybridge, Vermont, in February 1807. For the next forty-four years, with the exception of one month, they spent every day in each other’s company until Charity’s death at eighty four. Together they built their family house, supported themselves running a well sought after tailoring business, were active participants in the local church and charities, and maintained broad contacts with members on both sides of their families. In doing so, they became accepted as a couple into the Weybridge community. And there, as in life, they rest together under one tomb stone as any married couple would.
The Sheldon Museum and the Stewart-Swift Research Center hold extensive documentation relating to Bryant’s and Drake’s lives. The collections include voluminous correspondence, poetry, diaries, business records, legal documents, material objects, and the only known visual representation of the two women, their silhouettes.
This exhibit provides a glimpse into the rich documentation of many aspects of Charity’s and Sylvia’s lives, which are available for research. The records trace the women’s relationship to each other, their involvement in the Weybridge community, their religious life, their tailoring business, and their relations with family and friends. The exhibit also celebrates the recently published book by Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, published by Oxford University Press in 2014.
Early Weybridge, VT, circa 1800 – 1850
When Charity and Sylvia settled into their cottage on the Hagar farm in 1809, Weybridge was fast becoming a prosperous village. Chartered in 1761 and settled in the mid-1770s, the town’s population soared from 175 in 1790 to 750 in 1810. Weybridge boasted several saw mills and grist mills, some bought or built by Sylvia’s brother, Asaph; featured a trip-hammer shop for making scythes; and was home to furnaces and forges, all powered by the myriad water falls of Otter Creek that courses through the town. Crop farming largely drove the local economy, which would soon be augmented by lumbering and sheep grazing.
The early residents of Weybridge were also a pious folk. They held prayer meetings in neighbors’ homes and gathered for Sunday services in a meeting house located on the south side of present-day Route 23 just east of the village a little distance into the woods. Although they organized the Congregational Church in 1794, the present-day brick structure in the village center was not built until 1847-48. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, servicing the Congregational Church fell to several resident and itinerant ministers, as well as to a few Middlebury College professors. Two Methodist Churches and a community of Quakers, all located in the “Twin Bridges” section north of the village center, soon added to the piety of Weybridge.
Adieu and Lydia Richards
Charity Bryant had several relations with women prior to meeting Sylvia in Weybridge in 1807. One of the latest was with Lydia Richards, a school teacher like herself, to whom she wrote a short poem, just before her trip to Vermont in February 1807, “Adieu, _________________].: Lydia soon replied with many passionate letters to Charity before finally succumbing to the realization that Charity was not coming back. Despite this personal setback, Lydia became a life-long friend of both women, corresponding with them until her death in 1846 of consumption.
Silhouette Cutting of Charity and Sylvia
Hollow silhouette portrait of Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant, braided hair over silk mount, n.d., artist unknown.
Before the invention of photography in the early 1840s, silhouette making was a popular, inexpensive method of portraiture. Often itinerant artists, usually men, but sometimes women, produced such portraits. Unadorned singular and double images were not atypical for the period. However, Charity’s and Sylvia’s double silhouette framed by a pink silk border and adorned with woven hair braided into heart-like shapes in between the two figures is highly unusual. It is possible that Charity and Sylvia created this final composition themselves out of images provided by itinerant artist. The silhouettes portrait was found among a trunk-full of letters and other archival documents given to Henry Luther Sheldon by Sylvia’s brother’s descendants in 1897.
Tailoring business
Charity and Sylvia supported themselves with a tailoring business throughout their lives cutting and making clothes by hand, prior to the invention of a sewing machine. Charity was an expert cutter of many different kinds of clothing items including vests, coats, suits, pantaloons, women gowns, bonnets and cloaks. Sylvia, a tireless seamstress, was later assisted by young local women who boarded with them. They made clothes for women and men, including local ministers.
Making clothes for men was usually reserved for male tailors, but Charity and Sylvia were able to assert themselves in this area due to their expert skills. Their meticulous accounting system often indicates bartering and generous giving of services for various mutual favors by neighbors and family.
Sylvia in her diary on Feb. 3, 1821 wrote: “Hard work + close calculation will not accumulate properties unless you have confidence + disposition to demand something for your labour,”
Adult Cradle, ca. 1815
Constructed by Asaph Drake.
Illness was a common factor of life in the nineteen century, and few effective remedies and treatments existed. This cradle belonged to Charity and Sylvia. Both women suffered from variety of ailments including heart disease, rheumatism, headaches, toothaches, and other sores and pains. They kept the cradle in their main room in front of the hearth and often rocked each other to bring relief and sooth the nerves. On March 9, 1821, Sylvia recorded that “Mrs. _____ most sick takes a refreshing nap in our cradle,” and on September 23, 1823, Sylvia wrote that she “Felt quite sick have all that I need brot to the cradle.”
Charity and Sylvia’s Passing
Sylvia and Charity built their cottage on a ¼ acre leased from Sarah Hagar. During their lifetime they expanded it and maintained a cheerful garden of roses around it. However, when their health began to decline, the house fell into disrepair, and in time, succumbed to ruin. After Charity’s death in 1851, Sylvia spent her remaining years living in her older brother Asaph Drake’s brick house on Morgan Horse Farm Road. After she passed away in 1868, Sylvia was buried with Charity under one headstone, like a married couple would.
William Cullen Bryant, after visiting his aunt Charity and her companion Sylvia in July 1843, published the following in the Letters of a Traveler, 1850, p. 136
William Cullen Bryant, a celebrated Romantic poet, was Charity’s nephew. He corresponded frequently with his aunt and visited Charity and Sylvia in Weybridge on several occasions. On page 136 of this 1850 edition of the Letters to a Traveler the poet provided an intimate description of his aunt Charity’s and Sylvia Drake’s relationship after visiting them in July of 1843.
“I passed a few days in the valley of one of those streams of northern Vermont, which find their way into Champlain. If I were permitted to draw aside 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 to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for 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 tenderly in sickness; for sickness has made long and frequent visits to their dwelling. 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 in her temper than the other, might be said to represent the male head of the family, and took upon herself their transactions with the world without, until at length her health failed, and she was tended by her gentle companion, as a fond wife attends her invalid husband. 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 attentions which their neighbors, people of kind hearts and simple manners, seem to take pleasure in bestowing upon them, but I have already said more than I fear they will forgive me for, if this should ever meet their eyes, and I must leave the subject.”
