Vermont “Maternity Homes”

It began with a postcard. My husband Dave (who passed last April) collected them: colorful Vermont scenes, yes, but more importantly the black-and-white ones from the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s that showed actual scenes, especially in the Northeast Kingdom. There are hundreds of St. Johnsbury and Lyndonville images in his collection—but, proportional to both town size and events that seemed worth marketing as photographs, there are very few from, say, Granby or Victory in Essex County.

Or from Concord.

Dave plunged me into a new research project when he found a card labeled “Quimby Maternity Home, Concord, Vt.” His knowledge of postcard publishers and some quick investigation prompted him to added the information “1949–1953.”

As we, and then I, probed further, we found more than 50 documented births that took place, not just in the Quimby (also called Graves, for nurse Ardella “Nana” Graves — illustrated) Maternity home, but also in the Austin Maternity Home in the same small town (this one, run by Leah Virginia Austin). And both were clearly “supervised” by the local doctor, Frederick Russell Dickson, M.D.

“Maternity homes” in the rest of America seem to have often been places for unwed mothers to give birth and send their babies out for adoption. Dave and I found a single request from an adoptee born in 1946 at a Concord maternity home for clues to his parentage. But that turned out to be the exception. Online access led us to birth certificates of many babies simply born in these more supportive, medically encouraged “homes.” Mothers could arrive a day early, stay a few days afterward, have a break from parenting and get a good start with the new arrival.

But such maternity homes were not well documented. In the case of the ones in Concord, Dr. Dickson worked under contract for the local paper mill, which provided him space for a “dispensary,” and cared for many more illnesses, injuries, and preventive cases than the babies being born—and no records from the two maternity homes have been located.

So Dave and I went to local Facebook “pages” and “groups,” where residents current and past share their memories. To our astonishment, we discovered another maternity home that took patients at the same time period, the early 1900s, and it was about 20 miles from Concord, in Lyndonville, Vermont. Then word of a second Lyndonville maternity home came, with oral confirmation that it had started in Burke and relocated.

This is how a small postcard research project begins to spin outward!

The community of local history researchers is compact and supportive. This summer and fall, I began writing to others in other towns, to see whether the maternity homes of this part of the Northeast Kingdom were an isolated phenomenon or part of something wider.

After several negatives, I heard from local historian Joan Alexander of Glover, who passed along work by Darlene Young in her “A History of Barton, Vermont” (1998). Young outlined Barton’s medical providers in the late 1800s and mentioned Dr. Percy Buck, born in Charleston, Vermont. Dr. Buck arrived in Glover in 1914, and in 1935 moved to Barton. Young wrote, “During his career, he delivered over 2,000 babies, many of them at the Cottage Hospital.”

I hope your reading “ears” just perked up the way mine did. Eagerly, I discovered from Young’s account that the double factors of the 1918 “Spanish” influenza outbreak and the changes in World War I era medicine resulted in nurse Harriet Austin in 1913 working in Baron at the “Sunshine Sanitorium,” which Young said “served a number of functions, providing both professional nursing care as well as a suitable place to handle surgical procedures. Increasingly, the sanitorium attracted maternity patients as well.”

Then in 1923 a new medical graduate in Barton, Dr. Elwin M. Nichols, purchase a large home “with plans to establish his own hospital,” Young wrote. “He hoped to provide patients with both a comfortable, homey atmosphere and state-of-the-art medical equipment.” Soon the Nichols Hospital took over for the late 1920s.

When Dr. Nichols yielded to his own medical problems, nurse Bernice Atwell opened the Cottage Hospital in Barton. Her particular focus was on maternity patients. Young noted its advantages over home delivery, including sanitary conditions, modern equipment, and rest for the patients. The percent of births held there increased steadily, drawing from as far away at Coventry and Craftsbury. Around 1950, however, trends shifted, and in 1954 Atwell, then aged 65 herself, closed her little hospital.

Cottage Hospital! I darted to records of the historic Cottage Hospital in Woodsville, New Hampshire, across the river from Wells River, Vermont. It began in 1903, in a building that dated back to 1795, when it was the Cobleigh Tavern. Then it yielded to a “modern” and larger hospital opened in 1960.

Now the tiny maternity home trend of the Northeast Kingdom had merged into a statewide trend, for I found another Cottage Hospital at the opposite end of the state, Grace Cottage Hospital in Townshend, Vermont. Its timeline differed a bit, but it clearly belonged.

It’s surprising to realize that even in medicine, which relies so much on records, the phenomenon of maternity and birth has been relatively unrecorded. I hope this research will trigger more—in the footsteps of midwife Lydia Baldwin of Bradford, Vermont, whose records are represented at Dartmouth College today: 926 births from 1768 to 1819, of which only 2.9 percent were stillbirths, despite the challenges of conditions and knowledge.

Know more about maternity homes in your area? I hope you’ll share the knowledge!

Two Kinds of Truth

            Because I write historical fiction, I require two kinds of historical “truth” for my books: The first, obviously, is the dates-and-places-and-names kind, which underlies each scene and the forces of history. The second is emotional truth. And that is the harder truth to find.

           

As an example, consider Abolition: the movement to abolish slavery. Many Vermonters proudly proclaim that Vermont did away with slavery in its state constitution – which turns out to not be true in the first sense, since the phrasing was “no male person, born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person, as a servant, slave or apprentice, after he arrives to the age of twenty-one Years, nor female, in like manner, after she arrives to the age of eighteen years, unless they are bound by their own consent, after they arrive to such age, or bound by law, for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like.” If you read this precisely, you’ll find that child slavery was legal. Research in the past decade has uncovered a shocking amount of it.

            A lot of fair-minded Vermonters are sure that the Civil War veterans in their families joined up to fight to get rid of slavery – but more Vermonters fought for the sake of holding together the Union of states. People also picture their ancestors deciding that white people and dark-skinned were somehow equivalent and thus should be citizens and not enslaved. Here, emotional research shows a different picture: Most Vermonters who cared about Abolition did so from a religious point of view, considering the soul and the damage done to a soul by becoming an enslaver.

            Even tougher is figuring out the emotional truth of Vermont’s earliest years—the lives of veterans who’d fought in the Revolutionary War. A sort of fife-and-drum, Yankee Doodle Dandy image suggests merriment and derring-do. But the first sort of truth shows us soldiers who ranged from barely old enough to hold a weapon, to men in their sixties and older with seasoning in the “French and Indian War” (1754-1763). Some of these developed engineering and problem-solving skills they were eager to keep using. Others learned to pull groups of diverse men together.

            Among Revolutionary War veterans from my town of Waterford, in the Northeast Kingdom, I found men who probably knew each other in the “Colony of Connecticut” before they enlisted; others who ended up here fought together in some battles. (The war veterans of Wilmington, at the other end of the state, show similar patterns.) Why did veterans head so far north into what was wilderness at the time? (Col. William Williams of Wilmington ended up in Stewartstown, N.H., almost in Canada.)

            Possibly the rigors of battle made some of these men uncomfortable around the increasingly crowded towns of lower New England. The effort of clearing land, cutting trees, opening fields, erecting cabins, may have soothed them. I wish they’d kept the sort of journals that would let me confirm this, instead of just writing of weather and acres and bushels.

            Today’s military historians write about post traumatic stress syndrome as a consequence of those battles, mitigated by less time served for most Revolutionary War soldiers. PBS presented Dr. Matthew Friedman, Executive Director, VA National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, who spoke of “Soldier’s Heart,” a term in use after the Civil War to describe presumed changes in soldiers’ bodies after wartime service. He also mentioned “nostalgia,” which he suggested would be the urge of a Vermont soldier to miss his home. TheVeteransSite.com takes it back further, to the French Revolutionary Wars (right after ours): “The Austrian physician Josef Leopold Auenbrugger wrote about it as ‘nostalgia,’ because soldiers, who suffered from homesickness, reported feeling anxious and depressed while also experiencing sleeplessness.”

            So that’s where I can start, for the Revolutionary War veterans who step into the chapters of my 1850s series “Winds of Freedom.” I’ll look for their “nostalgia,” and make it concrete, with sleep disorders and more.

            And that, I hope, will suit both forms of historical truth.

Real or Not Real? Famous Words of the Vermont Supreme Court

The most famous quotation from a Vermont Supreme Court judge dates back to 1804, when [illus.] Theophilus Harrington (1762-1813), a man with plenty of experience but no formal legal training, examined a suit where an attorney for the “owner” of a fugitive slave presented a bill of sale for the fugitive, in an effort to get the “property” back.

The court that day met in Middlebury and it was Harrington’s first year. Even the court was new: Vermont’s constitution  established courts in each county in 1777, and the next year, the legislature created a Superior Court. According to the official Vermont Judiciary history (https://www.vermontjudiciary.org/supreme-court), the chief judge and four other judges were chosen each year by a hodgepodge of officials: the governor, the governor’s council, the House of Representatives. Meeting four times a year in four different locations, to spread justice around the state, these judges made decisions—but in turn, the decisions could be appealed, to the very same bodies that appointed the men in the first place.

A few years later, in 1782, the legislature restructured both the county courts and the upper court, which became the Supreme Court. The legislature got to elect its five judges, and these met as a court in each county once per year. Within seven years, legal training had prevailed and all the Supreme Court justices were lawyers, though clerking could take an aspirant to attorney status, without schooling.

Still, formality emerged slowly. It took until 1797 for the decisions to be put into writing and recorded. By 1823 those decisions even got published.

But not so in 1804. Numerous accounts of Harrington’s noted declaration cite each other, but there’s no existing court record of exactly what was said to decide that suit. What we do know is that when Harrington, as a first-year judge on the court, explained his reasoning to the attorney seeking the fugitive, chief judge Jonathan Robinson and assistant judge Royall Tyler concurred.

What was Harrington’s point? He insisted the bill of sale presented by the attorney didn’t go back far enough in time. Neither did the second one provided, showing purchase of the fugitive man’s mother. The frustrated attorney asked what documentation would suffice, and it’s reported that Harrington declared, “Nothing short of a bill of sale signed by God Almighty Himself.”

In the years that followed, Vermonters praised Harrington’s reported words as honestly representing the intent of the 14th state’s constitution. And after the Civil War, in 1886, the legislature promoted a monument to Harrington, at his burial site in Clarendon’s Chippenhook Cemetery.

All good background for writing historical fiction set in Vermont. But there are four major flaws in how “real” this story is. First, there’s no record of Harrington’s actual words, because court reporting hadn’t developed in 1804. Second, there are no accessible newspaper accounts to confirm this, either—Vermont’s early newspapers in current digitized form only date back to 1836. Third, we know more clearly today that the state constitution’s wording around enslavement—“no person born in this country, or brought from over sea, ought to be holden by law, to serve any person as a servant, slave or apprentice, after arriving to the age of twenty-one years, unless bound by the person's own consent, after arriving to such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs, or the like”—allowed de facto enslavement especially of children, a shameful aspect of our history. (See Harvey Amani’s 2014 book, “The Problem of Slavery in Early Vermont, 1777–1810.”) And fourth, alas, opinion around slavery and abolition was far from unified in 1804, “even in Vermont.”

More on that final point, in another “Real Vermont Story.” It matters—to our integrity, and to the books I’m writing in the Winds of Freedom series.