March
is Women’s History Month and the Cavendish Historical Society marks this
occasion by continuing their series “Cavendish Women You Should Know.” This
year we have gone back to our archives and are updating information to previously
collected materials.
In
their series “Beyond Brooms and Dustpans: Pioneering Women in Cavendish History,” on September 23, 1996,
Barbara Kingsbury, author of Chubb Hill Farm and Cavendish Vermont: A
Family and Town History and Sandra Stearns, Cavendish Hillside Farm 1939-1957 gave a talk called “Beyond
Cooking and Cleaning.” Focusing on women who worked “beyond housekeeping,” Part
I is by Barbara Kingsbury. She not only provides an overview of what life was
like for women who helped to settle Cavendish, but she discusses women who
worked in the mills, owned businesses as well as those who worked in health
care, including three sisters who became doctors.
If you have information you would
like to contribute to Cavendish Women’s History, please call (802) 226-7807,
e-mail margocaulfield@icloud.com or send to CHS, PO Box 472, Cavendish, VT 05142
Our title, “Beyond Cooking
and Cleaning,” obviously restricts this program to a discussion of Cavendish
women who have done something that took them outside the role of housewife. We
do not wish, in any way, to belittle the role of housewife. When we read the
diaries of some of the women who were early settlers, we are overwhelmed at how
much some of these women accomplished-besides cooking and cleaning, they carded
and spun wool, knit or wove clothes and bedding-besides making candles and
soap, and raising and processing much of the food for the family-in addition to
caring for the children. One housewife in her diary mentions that she made 10
pies before breakfast! They were great! Both now and back then; running a
household and raising a family takes great management and technical skills,
wisdom , and just plain hard work.
One thing that many of the
earliest women settlers did and that some women do today in addition to
household chores is actual farm work. It was traditional for women to garden,
raise the chickens, and feed the calves-but some did a great deal more than
that. In Europe, women were often the “milkmaids.” That was not so common a
role for women in Cavendish, but my mother-in-law, Ellen Kingsbury, did the
milking in her early married life and Sandra Stearns has done so more recently,
and probably several other Cavendish women. Many women have helped with
sugaring, but Sandra’s mother, Marjorie Field, was often the one in charge of
boiling the sap-a skilled job some men would not relinquish to their wives!
Sandra herself was boss sugar maker for Will Atkinson in later years. Many
Cavendish women could harness up a team of horses. A farmer’s wife and daughter
would often help with the haying or other field jobs if the man was short of
help. Sometimes the wife did the bookkeeping as well.
In the villages, women
often helped their husbands in their trade. Cornelia Bent assisted her husband,
Walker, in job printing, and continued that trade after his death. She is
listed as a job printer in Child’s 1883 Gazetteer. [The Gazetteer also lists
Bent as “dealer in drugs, medicines, confectionery, etc. Also listed in
Gazetteer for that year is Betsey S. Bigelow of Proctorsville, also a widow but
working as a dairy farmer.] Martha
Kendall is in that Gazetteer list as a milliner or maker of ladies’ hats.
Ladies were expected to have sewing or millinery skills. Some were shopkeepers
in their own right. Many of you may remember Anna Percy running what is now the
Cavendish General Store (1930s and early 40s). In the 1930’s Fanny Bacon and
Carrie Spafford had a gift shop on Main St. Many other women ran stores too.
The records say that Melvin and Grace Boyce ran the Cavendish Inn (now the
Black River Medical Center) from 1928 on for over 25 years. When I talk to
people, I always heard, “When Mrs. Boyce managed the inn....” Everyone seems to
mention her rather than Mr. Boyce.
But you might say it was
natural for a farm housewife to work on the farm where she lived or for a woman
in the village to have a little store in her home (usually storekeepers did
have their living quarters behind or above the store) or work with her husband
in keeping an inn-but women didn’t work much outside their home in the old
days. That was probably true in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, by the
mid-1800’s, several Cavendish women did work outside their homes in the woolen
mills of Cavendish and Proctorsville. This meant a 12 to 14 hour workday, too.
After Stearns Gay rebuilt the Cavendish Woolen Mill, with the help of his
father and brothers in 1886, more women joined the work force. The early
pictures of Gay Bros. Mill workers show only a few women compared to the number
of men, but later ones show a much higher percentage of women. Cornelia Bemis
was one of the first Cavendish residents to work for Gay Brothers Mill and she
worked there for 55 years before she retired in 1940. At one time, she, her
daughter, and a grand daughter were all working together at the looms. She
started at 10 years of age as a pooler in Fitton’s Mill; she was a young
married woman when she started at Gay Brothers.
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| Gay Brothers Mill in Cavendish |
From 1900-1950, many
Cavendish wives worked alongside their husbands, and brothers and sisters worked
together in the mills....Merton and Muriel Kingsbury (twins) got jobs in the
weave room at the same time and Muriel said they were paid the same price for piecework.
Whether women were paid the same wages on an hourly basis, I don’t know. Sophie
Snarski said she was given as much maternity leave (unpaid of course) as she
asked for and always was given her job back-so young married women could keep
on working even while they were in the child-bearing years.....
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| Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania |
At the turn of the century,
three Cavendish sisters, the daughter of Cyrus and Lydia Lovell of Cavendish
Center, all became medical doctors. Lucinda Sarah, the oldest, was born in
Boston in 1863 but her family moved to Cavendish when she was a child. She
attended Black River Academy in Ludlow, as did her two sisters. She graduated
from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1900. [Today part of the
University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.] She is listed in the 1900 census of Cavendish as a physician. She came
home to what is now Bud Johnson’s farm in Cavendish Center to help care for her
elderly parents. Her father, Cyrus, died in 1915 and her mother in 1926. Her
father’s obituary states that she had cared for her father the previous seven
years-that would make her living in Cavendish again from 1908 on. A local news
items in 1916 says she was raising hogs and had bought a pure-bred boar. She
was Town agent during the First World War and school director for a term in the
early 1920s. She seems never to have practiced medicine in Cavendish. Muriel
Kinsbury and Gertrude knew her well and say loved to visit with the neighbors
and was a great story-teller. She died in Cavendish in September 1945 at age
82.
Her next younger sister,
Martha. E. Lovell, also attended the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia
and graduated in 1899 (a year before her older sister). She spent the rest of
her life in Boston, serving 34 years as staff physician for the Massachusetts
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. [She was listed as the
“Examining Physician.”] At that time, she
was one of the best known physicians in the field of social work. She died in
April, 1940.
We don’t have as much
information about the youngest Dr. Lovell, Hattie. We know she was a physician
and that she lived in Boston with her sister, Dr. Martha until her death in
November, 1933.
Cavendish
resident Carolyn Solzhenitsyn, MD is currently a practicing physician in the
field of psychiatry. She is the Medical Director
at Hanover Psychiatry and a faculty member at The Geisel School of Medicine at
Dartmouth. Solzhenitsyn is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School
of Medicine, and completed her psychiatry residency at the Hospital of the
University of Pennsylvania. Interestingly, Solzhenitsyn attended the medical
school that incorporated the medical college the Lovell sisters attended. Like the Lovell doctors, she is an active
member of the community, having served on the Cavendish Fletcher Community
Library board as well as the Cavendish Recreation Committee. Most recently, she
was one of the driving forces in creating Cavendish Streetscapes, of which she
is a committee member.
We recently learned from Phyllis
Bont, RNP and her daughter Carole, that Sarah McCarty graduated from the
University of VT Medical School and is an internist in Huntington West Va.,
where Carole’s brother-in-law is also a doctor. McCarty was the Associate Dean
for Academic Affairs at the Marshall Medical School “She grew up in the brick
haunted house [ [Novak Federalist house that is now owned by Bruce and
Betty McEnaney] with her two older brothers Tommy and Denny...She used to faint
all of the time during health classes and at the sight of blood,” Carol noted. McCarty
went to Duttonsville Elementary School.
During the First World War,
Mary Victoria Pollard (Erminie’s older sister) joined the Army, along with her
four brothers. She was a dietitian in an Army hospital on Ellis Island until
June, 1919. After holding various jobs, she eventually became the Director of
the Madera School in Washington, D.C.
In
WWII, Imogene Morse Baxendale served in the Army as a nurse. She graduated from the Brattleboro School of
Nursing in 1928, and served in the US Army Nurses Corps in the Philippines near
the end of the War and in Japan immediately after the war. She was a member of
the Wallace-Hoyle-McNulty American Legion Post #4 and the Veteran’s of Foreign
War. She worked in several New England hospitals and died at age 84 in 1992.
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| Doris with her husband, Herb, son of Florence Eddy |
Mrs. Florence Eddy, was school
nurse in Cavendish from 1947 to 1950. Her daughter-in-law, Doris Eddy, would follow in her
mother-in-law’s footsteps and was the school nurse at Cavendish Town Elementary
School from 1999 to 2009. Just prior to starting at CTES, Doris was awarded Vermont
School Nurse of the Year for her work at Kurn Hattin. Doris is now the
Cavendish Town Health Officer and is involved in a number of community
projects.
Phyllis
Bont was a member of the University of Vermont’s
third graduating class of nurse practitioners (RNP). She worked at the Black
River Health Center with her husband Dr. Eugene Bont and eventually was part of
the faculty and clinical practice of Albany Medical Center’s Family Medicine
program. Read more about Phyllis in the 2018 Cavendish Women You Should Knowseries.
It
is interesting to note how few nurses were mentioned by Barbara Kingsbury in
her talk in 1996, let alone those who worked in other aspects of health care.
More than twenty years later, there are
a number of Cavendish women in the health care professions including physical
therapists, nurses, addiction specialists and complementary and alternative
medicine practitioners. The Black River Health Center provides office space to
several women who offer clinical social work-Mercury Ripley and Deb
Harrison-and there a number of female students who are pursuing careers in
health care, including several who are pre med majors in college.
 |
| Stone Church-Universalist Church |
Women have always taken
part in church work and religious activities in many ways (such as teaching
Sunday School and raising funds with church suppers), but usually the former
leaders, the pastors, are men. This was not always the case in Cavendish where
women have been church leaders. It is interesting to note that the first
recorded woman pastor of any denomination in Vermont was Ruth Damon who
pastored the Universalist Church in Cavendish from 1867-69. The Assembly of God
Church in Proctorsville was begun by a woman evangelist, Rachel Thibodeau, who
preached in a tent set up on Greven Field in 1958. Cavendish Baptist Church has
more recently been served by two women for a total of 24 years. Katie MacNeill
from 1965-1978 and Greta Down from 1979-1990 were each a very active part of
this community. These ladies were not from Cavendish but other preachers were.
When the Cavendish band of
the Christian Crusaders was formed in 1894, it was composed of three mean and
three women. It was a woman, Alice Hubbard Gay, who was chosen to be the leader
of the group. Her husband, Stearns Gay, managed the woolen mill, and was also a
member of the band. He was known as a man with very conservative religious
views, but he accepted his wife’s leadership. Alice Gay found it difficult to
go on out of the town trips a great deal because of her three small children;
Leon, Olin and Vernice, and so was not able to continue traveling with the band
very long. She then held weekly “cottage meetings” where she preached to a
small local group in Cavendish. Lorette Kingsbury thought she was a fine
preacher. ..Alice died in September, 1895, at the age of 36 from “quick
consumption.”
The first librarians in
town were men, with their wives as “assistant librarians.” But that was a job
evidently deemed proper for women and it didn’t take too long for women to
become librarians, a paying job. Marion White combined that job with her other
roles and then Mildred Ward was librarian of the Cavendish branch of Fletcher
Community Library for 25 years from 1955 till 1980. The librarian for the
Cavendish Fletcher Community Library is Kata Welch. This position was held for
many years by Joyce Fuller of Cavendish.
Articles
from Previous Years
Overview:
Includes Keepers of Cavendish History and “firsts” of Cavendish women
