She spent no money on fine clothes nor ornaments .... We younger ones were awed by her silence and reserve. But later ... came to recognize her character as that of one studious, gentle, and self-sacrificing. (Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, 1898)

In 1883 a Washington printer turned out a slim volume of homegrown poetry, whose title page reads: Poems of Sarah Shedd, Founder of the Shedd Free Library, Washington, N.H. The book was gathered and edited by Ashbury Howe, friend of the poet, and printed by his son Herman Howe. The occasion was the dedication of the new Shedd Free Library building in Washington, New Hampshire. The volume is handsomely put together, but it did not make a big splash in the history of American literature and, so far as I know, only two copies of it now exist, both in the Shedd Free Library, and not generally circulating. The person, the poetry, the local printing, the flowery preface, the occasion, the library -- these are all elements in a simple heartwarming New England nineteenth-century story. Is it more than just a a simple local story?

It certainly resonates with other versions of other stories, many with plots and protagonists so recurrent that they bear a representative, almost mythic, quality. This is the general plot: the local boy or girl, invariably of "sturdy peasant stock," self-sacrificing, devoted to family, goes off and does well in the world, maybe doesn't marry, ever mindful of humble origins, believes firmly in education, possibly writes sentimental verse, finally leaves a major bequest to the hometown. It is a lofty, inspirational, fictional sort of plot. We New Englanders have heard of these folks. But we also know something more: these representative people are sometimes real flesh-and-blood persons, part of the very history and fabric of our own towns. Miss Sarah Shedd (1813-1867) is the town of Washington's real-life entry for this venerable mythic plot.

She was born in Washington to John and Lydia Shedd in 1813, the second of four children. Her mother was a Farnsworth -- a name forever associated with the origins of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Washington. One of Sarah's cousins was William Farnsworth, a founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and famous for having fathered 22 children. So she had slews of relatives in town. Sarah started her professional life in the classic pattern: she began teaching school at age 15. When she was 17 her father died, leaving Sarah, her mother, an older si9ster, and also a younger sister and brother. When she was 20 the younger sister died; then the older sister married and eventually moved to the West, and nothing more can be discovered of her. It is now the early 1830s, and Sarah is living with a widowed mother and a young brother, and the prospects are not bright. Meanwhile, agents for the new textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts are fanning out to rural towns, offering farm girls (mostly already experienced at the loom) good employment in a chaperoned environment, and all the allure and independence of life in the city, with pocket money to boot. Like thousands of other girls, Sarah is interested. She goes to Lowell for a time, then comes home to teach school; then goes back to the mills to earn money for her mother's living and her brother's education.

And so it goes for decades, year in year out. Often she is teaching school in the summer, working in Lowell or Salem textile mills the rest of the time, frequently writing poems for her friends or prose for a factory publication. By the late 1850s, when she is forty-five, Sarah decides to stay home in Washington to take care of her aged mother, who soon dies. Sarah herself dies in 1867 (probably of tuberculosis), when she is fifty-four, and leaves a bequest of twenty-five hundred dollars in her will for a town library. People are amazed at her cheerful self-sacrifice through the years, amazed at the money she had managed to scrape together and save, amazed at her sheer goodness. Saintly, they said.

... That's the story's outline. Not myth or fiction, but history and fact. It is also more. Poet, teacher, laborer, giver of a library, universally admired: such a woman fits a certain familiar pattern. In her life and reputation she represents and symbolizes for her rural community what we might call the higher values, enacting its literary, artistic, and moral aspirations. Elements in 19th century social culture often implicitly assigned such a role to a local spinster lady of high moral standing. At such a time, such an environment, virtue itself may take on a markedly feminine quality. No wonder they called her saintly. Think of the Temperance movement; think of the innumerable female Improvement Societies that sprouted and flourished at this time. Sarah Shedd was given a role, and she filled it perfeñctly.

Be that as it may, one hopes to flesh out these spare factual outlines with more human detail. What was such a woman really like? What was her life like in the Lowell mills, and what her response to it? What did her friends say of her? Her students? Why give her town a library? What, if anything, did she find satisfying about living in Lowell, or in Washington?

There do exist some forgotten threads which will help us to weave a fuller story; and there is also a larger framework, fortunately already explored by historians, which will help us see in clearer light the Sarah Shedds of the world. That framework comes from the rise and early success of the mighty textile mills and their central place in the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century New England, and from the armies of farm girls who heard the bells of the mills and marched off to work. Sarah Shedd was a very intimate part of that brief andà significant piece of American history.

It is about seventy miles, as the turnpike once ran, from Washington, New Hampshire to Lowell, Massachusetts. But in 1813 when Sarah Shedd was born in Washington, a thriving rural town which would never have a railroad but which lay athwart two turnpikes, Lowell, Massachusetts did not even exist. There was only a canal and a small settlement near a large waterfall in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. But big changes were afoot. The first permanent waterpower textile factory for spinning yarn from raw wool or cotton began in 1790 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and in the next decades dozens of small waterpower spinning mills sprang up on the rivers of southern New England. Cotton from the slave plantations of the South suddenly had new and growing markets in New England, a fact to be dramatized a few decades later by the New England Abolitionists.

While spinning yarn, wool and cotton, became mechanized factory work, weaving yarn into cloth was still mostly done within the family on a domestic loom. That too began to change about the time Sarah Shedd was born (although the change did not show up immediately in remote towns such as Washington), when Francis Lowell and his partners, the Boston Associates, created a new factory system in Waltham, Massachusetts, with waterpower looms. (Lowell had spent time in England studying textile milling, studying the machinery, and came home with a head full of designs and ambitions; from memory he created new power looms exactly on the British model.) Their fully integrated textile mill began with raw cotton from the South and used waterpower machinery to pick, card, spin, dye, and finally weave the cloth. Meanwhile, of course, many a New England farm girl like Sarah Shedd worked by hand on a loom at home, often using woolen yarn also spun at home but, wQhen they could afford it, increasingly using cotton yarn from the power spinning factories in southern New England.

By 1820 the Boston Associates were on the prowl for a new site, bigger and better with more power. They liked the looks of East Chelmsford and the falls on the Merrimack River, so they quietly bought up the canal, bought the nearby farmland, bought up a few small mills, bought most of the water rights and bought nearly everything else in sight. Then they set about constructing from scratch a system of textile mills, new canals for transportation, then worker housing and, indeed, an entire factory city, again on the British model. Other companies, often with many of the same directors, joined in the activity on that site. Francis Lowell had died by this time, so in 1826 his name was given to the new city that was rising on the farmscape, and Lowell, Massachusetts, it has remained. It was a thoroughly integrated factory system, or set of systems, that they created, and was immediately successful: cotton cloth, gingham and calico, had a huge market and they knew how to make it cheaply. The Boston Associates also put up a machine shop, where they built the machines for spinning and weaving, built the turbines and locks and water wheels, the steam engines and shafts, the gears and pulleys, bells and whistles, and all the factory machinery. By the late 1830s they were even building locomotives in Lowell -- and thus inadvertently began to subvert their own water transportation system. In short, the Industrial Revolution that changed the face of rural New England was sponsored directly by the textile mills. Indeed, many historians believe that slavery itself might have died out in the South as uneconomical if the modern textile mills had not created a vast cotton market that revived the institution. At first, the- Lowell factory city was so outrageously successful that by the 1830s the only problem was the shortage of workers to tend the machines. Where could they be recruited?

It is likely that Sarah Shedd responded to one of the hundreds of recruiting posters that were spread throughout the towns of northern New England. This may have been about 1832, when she was nineteen, or even earlier. She had already taught school in Washington, but the details of what else she had done are unclear, although there is one little clue. Sarah's mill friend Harriet Robinson later wrote a book about life in the Lowell mills (published after Sarah's death), and about Sarah she said: "Her parents were in narrow circumstances; but they had endowed her with a good mind, and had given her a fair education, which was supplemegnted by tuition under Mary Lyon, of Holyoke Seminary, one of the first women preceptors of her time." Mary Lyon, in fact, was a well known teacher in several academies in New Hampshire and Massachusetts before she became famous as the founder of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (now Mount Holyoke College) in 1837, and perhaps the leading female educator of the 1840s. We don't know just where or when Sarah studied with her, but she certainly chose her mentor well. Her studies probably included literature, for this was her lifelong love, and no doubt also composition, for this too was one of her favorite pastimes. At any rate, to seek out Mary Lyon, wherever she was, and arrange to study with her surely required some special enterprise on Sarah's part.

Friends testified that Sarah had ardently desired to continue her formal education, but had been unable to vdo so. Perhaps she had studied with Mary Lyon before her father died, and his death may have been the reason she could not continue her education, but went to the mills instead. We cannot be sure. We do know that by 1832 Sarah's brother Joseph was 15 and ready and eager for academy work; but there wasn't one in Washington, so it would cost money for him to go elsewhere; and we know that Sarah helped to pay for it. Many young women, some younger than Sarah, went to the mills to help out with family finances, for one thing that a mill job promised was good company and a steady paycheck.

A mill job promised other things as well: a regimented life, incredibly long hours, and a working environment that was noisy, hot, and polluted with lint. There were things on the plus side too: companionship of friends and peers, nearby shops for stylish clothes, rich social life (lyceèums, concerts, lectures, lending libraries, literary circles, theater) better than anything imaginable back home on the farm; also freedom from parents and community, pocket money for new clothes and other things, and the thrill of real earnings to take back home. Not a life for everybody -- but a life freely chosen by thousands of young women.

For about twenty-five years (1830-1855) mill life at Lowell was almost exclusively a female life -- with male overseers. Many workers were teenagers and most came, as did Sarah, from northern New England farms. The mill owners had desired a predictable and compliant staff of mill workers (operatives, they were called) that worked together, lived together, and also dined and socialized and worshipped together, and followed the same rules. Perfect role for farm girls -- so the Boston Associates and other mill owners thought -- who had been born and raised among spinning wheels and hand looms on largely self-sufficient farms. The recruiters visited nearly every sizable rural community, put up posters announcing interviews, hired the young women, and arranged their transportation to Lowell, where they were met and conducted to their boarding houses, usually four to a room, and shown the rules. Usually the mill work itself was not physically strenuous and rarely dangerous; but it was long, tedious, in bad air, and uncomfortable. In some cases the amenities of the boarding houses were thought to be so excellent -- fine tableware, nice furniture, piano, sitting room, books, periodicals -- that the public was invited in to admire the facilities. By 1836 Sarah Shedd was one of about six thousand female workers in Lowell. Ten years later, one of ten thousand; and by the time of the Civil War, Lowell had the heaviest concentration of industry in America.

Gathered in such large numbers, the young women made a striking collection in more ways than one. The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, then living in Lowell, was dazzled by the sudden influx from the countryside: "Acres of girlhood, beauty reckoned by the square rod .... the young, the graceful, the gay -- the flowers gathered from a thousand hillsides and green valleys of New England, fair unveiled Nuns of Industry, Sisters of Thrift, and are ye not also Sisters of Charity dispensing comfort and hope and happiness around many a hearthstone of your native hills ... ! Who shall sneer at your calling? Who shall count your vocation otherwise than noble and ennobling?"

But the summer working day, including short breaks for food, was up to 14 hours, slightly shorter in winter. Life was run by the factory bells: wake-up bell at 4:30 a.m.; enter the mills at 4:50; machines start at the 5:00 o'clock bell; work until the 7:00 o'clock breakfast bell; to the boarding house and back at the machines again at 7:35; noon bell at 12:30; 35 minutes for lunch and back again by bell; then work with only short breaks until the evening bell at 7:00 p.m. Evenings were for reading, writing, socializing, but the curfew rang at 10:00, and it was lights out at 10:30. Although Saturday was sometimes just a half working day, some flowers, surely, had wilted by the the weekend. For the week's work, 70 hours at least, Sarah received about $3.75, and food and lodging consumed $1.25 of that. This was widely regarded, by parents and operatives alike, as good wages. Sunday was a day of rest and attendance at church was required.

There are letters from those times (not Sarah's) which testify to the high esprit de corps among these flowers from the hillsides, as they rapidly dejveloped a new sense of companionship and community, the veterans helping the new girls adapt to factory work and city life. Almost all of them had come from strong communities, in which individuals, especially women, tended to be submerged. Although at Lowell the girls had more liberty (not much by today's standard), they tended again to submerge themselves in strongly bonded communities -- in the workplace, in the boarding house, in the many societies (literary, religious, social) which they formed. An early and vivid example is this: by the mid-1830s the women were united in believing that their hours were too long, the machines running too fast, and the operatives responsible for too many of them at once. What could be done? There was a protest, then the firing of a ringleader, then a bold solidarity march through the city by other mill workers, a workers rally and fiery speeches, finally a strike by more than 800 operatives. It was a brave and communal effort, but it soon fizzled.

The women knew they could be dismissed for striking and be blacklisted, making them unemployable, yet in 1836 when the owners threatened a wage cut, there was a larger strike; and this time the united operatives got a few negative concessions: wages were not cut, machines were not speeded up. The owners found they were dealing with spunky farm women who had annoying habits of thinking for themselves, working together, believing in their rights as operatives. Later, the mill workers formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and 4,000 of them petitioned the Massachusetts legislature for a ten-hour day. Lowell's legislative representative opposed it, so the mill workers (who couldn't themselves vote, of course) lobbied the male voters and got him defeatxed in the next election. Still, the legislature as a whole was unmoved: there was no ten-hour law until 1874.

Was Sarah Shedd involved in any of this? The records, which are slim enough, indicate that she was not among the ringleaders, but they don't tell us more; we have to guess from what we know of her character After her death a friend wrote: "She was a good conversationalist, and when she spoke everyone listened .... Such a person would be at home with all intelligent and well-bred persons; and by them she was everywhere welcomed." Of course, she too would have found the work hours long and tedious, and the machines too many and too fast and too noisy, but from this personal testimony, and from others, which speak of her dignity and reserve, it appears that leading a raucous factory protest would not have been to her style. She was a more solitary person than that. An activist at that time and place had to have some real rebelliousness in her soul; it is unlikely that Sarah did. Surely she would have offered thoughtful and wise counsel to the agitators, and then probably retired to work on her next literary composition. Writing, rather than stoking up a labor protest rally, was the action that suited her temperament and talents.

Here is the place in the tapestry where we must pick up the bright thread of the literary and intellectual efforts of the mill girls. Professor Peabody of Harvard, who lectured regularly at Lowell lyceums, reported in the Atlantic Monthly that four fifths of his audience were factory girls, each one of them reading a book when he came in! And there were very few, he said, "who did not carry home full notes of what they had heard. I have never seen anywhere so assiduous note taking. No, not even in a college class ... as in that¥ assembly of young women." The Lowell Offering, a literary monthly (from 1841 to 1845) to which Sarah Shedd contributed, was distributed in Boston and Lowell and in other cities of New England, and in many of the rural communities from which the girls originated; it was written and edited entirely by the mill workers or, as they called themselves on the title page, "Factory Girls." This "factory girl" effort got considerable attention and brought a measure of celebrity to the mill girls, since it was seen as a quality publication and no one had expected farm girls working in a factory to turn to intellectual and literary pursuits!

In fact, several things were unique here: never before in Europe or America had young women as a class, and in such numbers, been working together in a factory. Moreover, women didn't usually write for publication, and they certainly didn't normally edit publications. And these writers are just self-described factory girls! What is going on here? Charles Dickens, visiting from London, took home copies and then saluted The Offering in his book American Notes: "Putting out of sight the fact of the articles having been written by these girls after the arduous hours of the day -- it will compare advantageously with a great many English annuals." President Felton of Harvard was in France and wrote that he had heard an entire lecture at the University of Paris devoted to -- of all things! -- The Lowell Offering, the point of which was to illustrate what women can do. (We can imagine the dramatics of the French professor: Women can't write you say? In America even factory girls write -- and publish, and edit!) Then a selection of Offering articles was published in book form in England. It may not be too much to say that this periodical made young women as a class historically visible for the first time, and not only as factory girls but also as budding young leaders and writers. In the 1840s there were at least seven self-improvement clubs in Lowell, and The Offering took its themes and its origins from such a society connected with a Lowell Universalist Church. Not surprisingly, some of the stories in The Offering were also thinly disguised critiques of the mill system -- the system which made the owners rich at heavy cost to young women.

Most alumnae of The Lowell Offering -- that is to say, most of Sarah Shedd's circle of friends -- left the mills within a few years, and some went on to conspicuous careers: poets, missionaries, novelists, teachers, lecturers, artists. The best known of these was Lucy Larcom, friend of Whittier and author of A New England Girlhood (in print today), An Idyll of Work, and other works. Eliza Jane Cate wrote five books, beginning with The Rights and Duties of Mill Girls, and Harriott F. Curtis, wrote many essays for the New York Tribune and also five novels. Margaret Foley became a well-known sculptor, in Boston and Rome, while Harriet Farley wrote and lectured prolifically in New York, and Lydia S. Hall, famous as a young poet in The Offering days, became a missionary among the western Choctaw Indians, keeper of a Kansas Temperance Inn, and briefly Acting Treasurer of the United States. Harriet Hanson Robinson became the author of the well-known mill memoir Loom and Spindle (in print today) as well as several other books, including the once famous poetic drama, The New Pandora. And there were others who did notable things. All this lay in the future, of course, but such was the circle of friends that surrounded and stimulated Sarah Shedd in Lowell. There she blossomed among Whittier's "flowers gathered from a thousand hillsides."

Harriet Robinson wrote "Miss Shedd was not a prolific writer, and her contributions for The Offering were always of a serious nature." Unfortunately, most of the material in The Offering was published anonymously, or with a pseudonym, so it is impossible to pick out Sarah Shedd's particular work. This submerging of individual women's voices reflects again, perhaps, the very powerful sense of community among the mill girls; it may also testify to simple modesty on their part, unsure as they were of their reception, unsure of their talents, sometimes insecure about their lack of education. The editors found that they got more and better material if it were made public without a name attached.

In Sarah's book of poems, only a few are direct reflections of her life as a mill girl. Rather, many of her poems are centered in Washington, New Hampshire, naming and meditating on particular people, or fields, or lakes, on Draper Hill or Lovell Mountain. Mill life too prosaic to inspire much poetry? Whatever the case, it seems that even if her mind was in Massachusetts, her heart was in New Hampshire. From her Washington home she could glance northeast across the village green and right there loomed the stately Town House. To that building she devoted the longest poem in the book, including lyrical lines like these: "Our Pilgrim fathers loved their God; / Their worship was sincere; / So our forefathers knelt to him, / And built this temple here."

Many of the young women left the mills before they were out of their twenties, and most of them married; but Sarah Shedd didn't marry and she came back to the mills year after year. By the 1850s the Lowell mills were hiring more and more immigrant( families, especially Irish, and The Lowell Offering coterie had dispersed; so this was probably the time when Sarah herself moved on to the mills in Salem, New Hampshire, and then to Biddeford, Maine. Perhaps she wanted to enlarge her experience, encounter a new city, make new friends; but in summers she regularly returned to Washington, there to rejoin old friends and often to teach school. Maybe, going back and forth, she really felt she had the best of the only two worlds that were open to her.

Meanwhile, she developed in her hometown a reputation as an outstanding teacher. A Washington native and neighbor, Carroll Wright, who rose to the position of US Commissioner of Labor (equivalent to Secretary of Labor today), remembered her as his first teacher. Wright came home to help dedicate thLe new Shedd Free Library building fourteen years after her death and to share his reminiscences. He spoke of his childhood teacher in warmly glowing terms: "The first school I ever attended was kept by her, in the front room of the store opposite the post office. Her genial smile won the hearts of the children ... We longed for her coming, regretted her going. Always a toiler, because she was a child of toil, she sought to make all around her happy. She wandered with us over the hills and fields, gave us instruction from her heart and mind, as well as from the books we used..... Her genial disposition lighted the pathway of many a boy and girl, and ... make her memory as fragrant as spring flowers." We know that she first taught school in 1828, and her pupil Carroll Wright, born in 1840, would not have gone to school until atÄ least 1848; so we may conclude that she taught off and on for at least twenty years, and probably more. Wright thus speaks for generations of Washington students whose pathways she lighted.

In 1858 Sarah finally left the mills for good and returned to Washington to take care of her mother. A few years earlier, in 1854, a Ladies Circle had formed around the Universalist Society in Washington, and Sarah's name is not among those who first attended the fortnightly meetings of this group; but in May of 1858 she was elected secretary of the Circle, although this appears to be the first meeting she attended. So Sarah Shedd was home to stay, and since she was clearly someone special in town, it was natural that she be elected to office immediately. According to the constitution of the Ladies Circle, the members felt "a deep and ardent interest in the cause of universal Grace and love, and believed that by united effort, much can be accomplished that is not now done to disseminate these great principles abroad." Again the theme: lofty ideals and united effort. Essentially this meant that it was an improvement society, the sort of organization Sarah Shedd would have joined immediately. The first record book of the Ladies Circle survives in the Washington town archives, and it shows that Sarah was not a typical secretary.

The main activity of the Circle was like that of a sewing group: sewing, knitting, making coats, vests, pants, pillow cases, rugs. Especially rugs. Innumerable meetings were devoted to cutting up rags for rugs! From her minutes: "For work -- cut rags. For talk -- amused ourselves with our own and others' short-comings." Another: "Cut rags for work. Rags seem to be eternal." Oh dear, what a life for Sarah to come home to -- she who had spent her life in textile mills! Her minutes as secretary show that the chatter and gossip at Circle meetings quickly bored her, and she records of one meeting: "Some useful hints on the medicinal uses of plants. How pleasant to record one useful thought." Then she decided to jot down the topics of conversation so that fifty years later people "might learn if the Circle, if it shall then exist, or the tone of conversation among ladies in general shall have risen, or whether among ladies in all times the world over it is 'chit-chat, laugh and grow fat.'" At a later meeting the talk was "of the confiding trusting nature of woman on the one side, and of her cunning and artfulness on the other," a conversation, she wrote, that "for variety and 'jeu de esprit' would compare unfavorably with many others." Was Sarah thinking back fondly twenty years to her mill town social life and literary friends and to those exciting days when The Lowell Offering was first born?

Life in Washington may have been a bit of a trial -- taking care of mother, attending Circle meetings -- but Sarah Shedd was a resolute doer of good works, and after two years as secretary she summarized in her annual report (May 30, 1860) the year's accomplishments. And they were quite significant. In addition to sewing projects (dozens of coats, vests and socks), it included refurbishing the Universalist worship space in the Town House, the removal of the box pews, the installation of new risers. All this, Sarah noted, "will remain to aftertime a standing monument of the Industry and Perseverance of a few Ladies with no 'capital' but their hands to work and their heads to plan," and she felt assured that "that indomitable spirit, will not now leave us ... but will continue ... while there is left us anything to perfect or to beautify."

"Anything to perfect or to beautify" -- it is a neat and true summary of her life-long aspiration.

It would be fully in character for Sarah Shedd, as she listened to the thin chatter of Circle meetings, to have thought: What this town really needs is not more quilts and vests, but a library. We need an open window and a larger loom, somePthing that points us beyond our little Circle and our tattered rags and our local gossip and chit-chat. Good books, and the habit of discussing them, could be the center of attention in this town. It was a typical Sarah Shedd idea. Something to perfect and beautify -- like the minds and hearts around her.

A town library was so significant a project -- and so unlikely -- mainly because of the extremely high cost of books. In rural towns like Washington in the mid-19th century, books were not a conspicuous part of the scene, and for good reason. At Sarah's mill wages with maximum savings of two dollars per week, it would take a week's savings to buy one good book. At that time in Washington, New Hampshire, a man's working wage was a dollar a day, not enough to buy one book -- even if the farmer were inclined to spend his cash that way. Accordingly, books were scarce luxuries in this and every other rural town. A public library in town with hundreds of books that could be freely borrowed by anybody was a spectacularly ambitious idea, beyond the dreams of all but the most idealistic, and certainly far beyond anything ever contemplated in the town's budget.

Sarah's friend Charlotte Curtice of Hillsboro records: "In 1861 she mentioned to me her plan of founding a Public Library. All her life she had toiled and thought of others, had lived for an object, and that object had been to do good: 'How' she said, 'can this money be put to the best use?' ... She was an ardent lover of good books ... and a library such as she contemplated ... would indeed be an inestimable boon to any community .... She loved music and poetry, but took the greatest delight in ethical and philosophical studies." So a town library it was to be. Here was a project so bold and idealistic -- and the available town resources so slim -- that nobody could expect to mobilize the community to create it from scratch. No, it would require heroic individual effort. Sarah nourished the plan silently and saved her money carefully, and not until a few weeks before she died did she put her design into her will. She left twenty-five hundred dollars for the town to start a library, a sum which in today's terms would be worth at least two hundred thousand dollars. Her ultimate commitment to her native place.

The library was formed almost immediately, and a Library Committee appointed whose first act would be to decide "that the library shall be known as the Shedd Free Library." Then temporary rooms were found, books purchased, a librarian named, rules drawn up, books lent. In 1881 a former Washington boy who had become a man of means, Lumen Jefts by name, built and then donated a fine new brick building to house the growing library, and these were the events celebrated in 1883 with the publication of Sarah Shedd's poems. At that time her beloved library was reported to be over 2000 books strong. Since then, and for well over a century now, the library has splendidly served the purpose which Sarah envisioned.

Sarah Shedd was married, not to a man, but to doing good works with and for others. She was in love with high ideals. Was she ever in love with another person? We cannot be sure, and no one, least of all herself, has given us any direct evidence, but she may have left us some clues. In her book of poems is a short series of Valentine Poems, and these may have a special and personal focus, for they are certainly love poems -- but the beloved one is not identified. Nor can we be certain whether these, and a few other love poems in the book, are more than just poetic exercises; for any poet or would-be poet, after all, love is a universal theme. Five of her love poems bear the simple title "Valentine." Was she moved to write such verses by the fashion ofº her time? Or by the passion of her heart? Or by both? Two of them were written when Sarah was thirty-five, and we may wonder why, as a mature woman, she should be writing such seemingly heartfelt love poetry. One poem carries a note saying it was written to a Mrs. Allbright of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1848 and refers to her within it as like a Mother, and appears to bid her farewell. Another Valentine poem of the same date, also datelined Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is clearly addressed to a male Valentine, and makes clear that the beloved is versed in legal language and in the law -- which is certainly unusual and may be a clue. Others speak of her beloved Valentine as far away. Peering into her life a century and half later, we may well wonder: do these poems thinly veil Sarah Shedd's best secret? And were there other poems, perhaps more specific, deliberately left out of the collection by the editor ìas too personal and private?

My own suspicion, which I cannot prove, is that the Valentine poems and a few others do testify to a specific unfulfilled love and longing in her own heart. If I had to guess I would say she might have long been in love with a Pennsylvania lawyer whom, for reasons unknown to us, she could not marry. One love poem ends: "I'll lay thy head upon my breast / And fondly kiss thee into rest, / And call thee all mine own; / And thou shalt sing, la-la, la-la, / And I will laugh, ha-ha, ha-ha, / With joy we ne'er have known."

Here is another love poem worth our attention. It begins: "I am still thy Valentine, / Bowing at no other shrine; / Of thy face I'm fondly thinking, / All thy love tones I am drinking; / Soul from soul no force can bar, / Witness I, from thee so far. And it concludes: Hear me, thou to me most dear, / I have loved thee many a year; / When we sat beneath the willow, / Rested on the self-same pillow; / I have loved thee many a year, / Am I still to thee so dear?"

Maybe there is an untold story there, but it is unlikely that we shall ever know for sure.

A Hillsboro friend wrote that Sarah "had a mind of great strength and versatility" and that "all snobbery and pretense seemed to retire before this really noble woman." Another wrote of "This gifted, heroic, and self-sacrificing woman." A mill friend wrote that "Miss Shedd may be called the philanthropist par excellence, of the early mill girls. Her whole life was one of self-sacrifice." Ashbury Howe called her writings "brilliant yet modest, reflecting ... the intrinsic excellence of her mind and character," and he referred to the Shedd Free Library as "the magnificent bequest of this noble, heroic, and truly gifted women."

Such is the language which those who knew her best were disposed to usçe -- noble, heroic, gifted, sainted. Editor Howe concluded his introduction by breaking out into his own verse about the Shedd Free Library: "Within these walls her angel form / Shall float on golden wings, / And feed the hungry soul on food / That sweet contentment brings. / O! Breathe her name in accents soft, / With reverence be it said; / We venerate that goodly name, / The sainted Sarah Shedd."

Note on Sources: Bits of information on Sarah Shedd's life and times may be found in the following sources, from which all quotations in this essay derive.

Washington, New Hampshire sources: History of Washington, NH (1886, reprinted 1976, 1998 with a new Foreword); Ronald and Grace Jager, Portrait of a Hill Town: A History of Washington, NH 1876-1976 (1977); Ronald Jager and Sally Krone, A Sacred Deposit: The Meeting House in Washington, New Hampshire (1989); Minutes of the Washington Circle, 1854-1860 (ms. Washington town archives); A.P. Howe, editor, Poems of Sarah Shedd (1883).

Other sources: Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community (2nd ed. 1993); Thomas Dublin (ed) Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860 (1993); Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women's Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (1994); Thomas Dublin, Lowell: The Story of An Industrial City, A Guide to Lowell National Historic Park (1992); Benita Eisler (ed), The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977); Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (1889, reprinted 1986); Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle, or Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898, reprinted 1976); JoAnne B. Weismam (ed) The Lowell Mill Girls; Mount Holyoke College Web Page.

© Ronald Jager

Ronald Jager received his Ph.D from Harvard University, and taught and wrote philosophy at Yale University until 1977. Since then he and his wife have lived in Washington, New Hampshire, where they have jointly authored three books on New Hampshire history. Ronald Jager has also been a Humanities consultant to the New Hampshire Legislature and, as a free lance writer, he is the author of Eighty Acres: Elegy for a Family Farm, and a New Hampshire memoir, Last House on the Road: Excursions into a Rural Past.