A Statement from the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History

July 2026

In 1897, Asaph Drake Willard and his sister Lucy donated dozens of books to what is now the Henry Sheldon Museum, along with what museum founder Henry Sheldon recorded as “one old trunk containing letters to Charity Bryant including some from her nephew [William] C. Bryant and some silhouette pictures of the Drake family.” Over the ensuing decades, indefatigable catalogers, archivists, and researchers have fleshed out this account, bringing order to the “old trunk” and illuminating its actual contents and their significance. Subsequently, the Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake Papers have become one of the museum’s most treasured collections. This repository of personal and household records, letters, poems, and diaries (primarily from the period 1797-1865) is now carefully inventoried in a finding aid that notes the archive’s potential to “provide insight into gender roles, health and sickness, education, marriage and death customs, religious and social commitments, sewing and tailoring, economics, the barter economy, and other aspects of rural women’s lives from the unique perspective of a same-sex couple.” 

Indeed, generations of researchers have now consulted and benefitted from this collection. Charity and Sylvia’s example was invoked during debates about both civil union legislation (2000) and Vermont’s Marriage Equality Act (2009). Selections from the archives were featured in the 2014 exhibition “Charity and Sylvia: A Weybridge Couple” at the Henry Sheldon Museum, curated by archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, while the double-portrait silhouette of the couple has been included in prominent exhibitions such as the National Portrait Gallery’s Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now (with an accompanying catalogue, published by Princeton University Press, 2018)and The Getty Museum’s Queer Lens: A History of Photography (catalogue via Getty Publications, 2025). Today, the collection also serves as the core primary source material for a recently developed curriculum unit, “Charity and Sylvia: Identity, Community & Love” (2024). 

One of the most renowned explorations of and expansions upon the collection is the work of historian Rachel Hope Cleves. In public and scholarly talks, articles, and the award-winning book Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2014), Cleves argues for the depth of Bryant and Drake’s relationship and the central role the two women played in their home community of Weybridge. Cleves’s account draws not only on the Henry Sheldon Museum’s collection but also reflects her many years of deep historical research, which included the examination of additional archival repositories, interviews, site visits, and the scrutiny of period legal, medical, and theological texts, while also bringing a vast array of secondary scholarly sources and the rich literature of queer theory to bear upon her analysis. Cleves’s research has brought deserved national and scholarly attention to the story of Charity and Sylvia and has helped countless readers recognize the significance of both their lives and their surviving archives. The Henry Sheldon Museum is deeply appreciative of Cleves’s discernment, dedication, and the scholarly rigor with which she interpreted the story of Charity and Sylvia, convincingly arguing for their recognition as a married couple and surfacing many details of both their historical moment and their individual lives. 

In 2023, award-winning, Vermont-based cartoonist Tillie Walden also began researching the lives of Charity and Sylvia, consulting historical scholarship (including Cleves’s book) and poring over the couple’s extensive archives at the Henry Sheldon Museum. This research inspired Walden’s latest graphic novel, Charity & Sylvia (Drawn & Quarterly, June 2026). In interviews, press releases, a detailed website on sources and process, and the book itself, Walden repeatedly cites Cleves’s work as a significant and generative source for her imaginative rendering of the stories of Charity and Sylvia. Far from claiming a narrative of “discovery,” Walden has generously and effusively praised Rachel Hope Cleves’s scholarship and has directed audiences (and her large fan base) to the 2014 book. 

Walden’s book is an empathically imagined and sensitively rendered story of the world of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, daring to evoke not only the textures of their daily lives, but also their hopes, dreams, fears, prayers, annoyances, exhaustions, and desires. As part of her creative process, in addition to consulting Cleves’s publication, Walden also immersed herself in the archives and primary sources of the early nineteenth century, attuning both her eyes and her ears to imaginatively explore early Weybridge: developing a sense of what turns of phrase the women or their neighbors might have used in order to script their dialogue, sketching the kinds of clothes they might wear or sew, the crockery that might populate their kitchen, the meals they might cook or pies they might bake, the lamps they might read by– and in turn, reading what they were reading. In a series of vignettes that acknowledge the gaps of the archival record and her own subjectivity, Walden invites readers to imaginatively inhabit the world of Charity and Sylvia with her words, illustrations, wit, humor, and historical empathy. Walden’s Charity & Sylvia is a richly illustrated work of historical fiction that is rooted in her own rigorous research process. It is a work of art. 

As stewards of the Charity and Sylvia collection, the Henry Sheldon Museum believes that archives exist to be studied, interpreted, questioned, and reimagined. Community members, students, scholars, artists, and writers have long found inspiration in the letters, journals, and material traces preserved in our care. This openness is one of the great strengths of archives. They allow successive generations to encounter the past on their own terms and with their own forms of inquiry and expression, and to build on the work done by others before them. The Henry Sheldon Museum also recognizes and reiterates the importance of citational practices, crediting the contributions and labor of interpreters, collaborators, and predecessors, across disciplinary fields and methodologies, as both Cleves and Walden have done. 

We are grateful for the conversations sparked by both Professor Cleves’s scholarship and Tillie Walden’s creative work. Together, they demonstrate the enduring power of Charity and Sylvia’s stories to inspire artistic expression and to strengthen the visibility of queer history in a time of increasing threats of erasure– and in a historical moment in which the arts and humanities more broadly also face funding cuts, threats of censorship, and piracy by Large Language Models and “generative” AI.

We welcome and encourage all who are able to come to Middlebury, Vermont and visit the Henry Sheldon Museum to see the new exhibition “Drawing on the Archive: Tillie Walden’s Charity & Sylvia” and to support the arts, humanities, museums, libraries, and independent bookstores in their home communities.