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Rumors of Sainthood: Sarah Shedd of Washington (cont.) 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 sister, 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 perfectly. 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 and significant piece of American history. |
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