Drawing from the Sheldon Museum collections, archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart presents the story of two extraordinary women, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake, who were accepted in early 19th-century rural Vermont as a married couple.
The collection served as the basis of the popular book Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Couple in Early America by Rachel Hope Cleaves (Oxford University Press, 2014). Eva Garcelon-Hart is manager of the Stewart-Swift Research Center at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.
Underwriter: The Samara Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation
Statewide Underwriters
Image: Sylvia Drake (1784-1868) and Charity Bryant (1777-1851), double silhouette, c. 1810. Collection of Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History, Middlebury, Vermont.
