Remarks on the Occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Stewart-Swift Research Center

By Glenn Andres

July 7, 2022

We are celebrating one of VT’s great treasures. Among the State’s three major historical archives – VT Hist. Soc., UVM, Sheldon – the Sheldon stands out for its focus and completeness.

Here one finds a remarkably comprehensive coverage of every aspect of life in Middlebury and surrounding towns – touching on education, politics, industry, biography, architecture, commerce, literature, music, and daily life in one place. This is combined with the fact that that one place, Middlebury, not only has a long history, reflecting virtually every major pattern in New England from the late 18th century onward, but was also connected to, and influential in, the outside world. History of more than local significance happened here.

The archives are history in themselves. Henry’s collection is one of the three earliest history collections in New England – along with exact contemporaries in Concord and Deerfield, MA.

Its completeness was noted by scholar Walter Edgar, chair of the History Center at the University of South Carolina who, after arranging a leave of absence to work in the Sheldon collections, proclaimed that they may represent “the missing link in New England culture.”

Perhaps the first to use the archives for serious historic research was Storrs Lee, writing in the 1950s, who produced three books of Middlebury History based on them – Town Father (biography of Gamaliel Painter); Stagecoach North (a vision of town life in Middlebury in 1820s and 30s – at a time that it was briefly the largest community in VT); and Father Went to College, a history of Middlebury College in the 19th and early 20th century.

More recently Rachel Cleves, historian from the Univ. of British Columbia, utilized the Sheldon collections to publish on the lives of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake of Weybridge, the first documented same-sex marriage in America. Her book is credited as of significance to the Supreme Court’s deliberations over legalizing same-sex marriage. In its aftermath, the museum’s double silhouette portrait of the couple was borrowed for exhibition by the Smithsonian.

The researchers for the State of VT, who have spent the past two years refining the Middlebury National Register Historic District – one of the two largest and most ambitious in the state – were dependent on Henry Sheldon’s Housebook that records the history of every property in Middlebury Village up to 1901 and on longtime archive volunteer, Joann Langrock’s, meticulously researched record of every business in the core of Middlebury Village.

That housebook, with its access to names and dates provided the scaffolding which my students and I were able to flesh out through the like of newspapers (the archives contain every paper published in Middlebury from 1801 onward), letters (some 30,000 plus), hundreds of account books, and countless photographs to compile the Walking History of Middlebury.

Indicative of the way that the documentation assembled in these comprehensive archives can touch on richly complex interlocking local and national stories is the case of Isaac Markham.

 At age 10 the mechanical prodigy is credited with helping Eben Judd develop the machinery that would make Middlebury a pioneer in the water-powered manufacture of marble building elements.

Judd’s Middlebury Marble works flourished into the 1830s, shipping their products to places as far flung as Montreal, London, and Savannah and maintaining outlets in NYC and Boston. Besides Judd’s account books and legal papers, there are letters in the Sheldon documenting the fact that his wares, and particularly his marble fireplaces, were sought by the likes of architects Charles Bulfinch and Ammi B. Young then working in Boston, Washington, and Montpelier.

 (As an aside, the daybook of local builder Asahel Parsons in combination with historic photos in the archives gives us a clue that statehouse architect Young likely designed Old Chapel at Middlebury College, the old Middlebury Methodist Church, and the Salisbury Church.)

Markham as a teenager worked with Scotsman Joseph Gordon to build the second set of power looms in the U.S., from plans Gordon had smuggled out of Britain, for David Page’s mill at Middlebury Falls, the largest mill to that date in VT and the first in the country to be lit by oil gas to permit longer working hours.

Fire insurance registers in the archives document in detail every process that went on in such mills and the hours at which they operated, and letters in the collection permitted historian Deborah Clifford to publish on the lives of the girls who worked in those mills and ones in Lowell, MA, based on their personal accounts.

Markham, too, was active in Lowell at the time that its mills were being developed into the most important manufacturing complex in New England. His extensive and nationally significant set of drawings for early textile machinery, residing in the Sheldon archives, were borrowed and reproduced by the National Park Service for their National Textile Museum, and were published in a monograph by Polly Darnell and David Jeremy.

The archives also have the power to bring Middlebury persons and landmarks to life.

 E.g., a probate inventory  that Sheldon saved provides a remarkable vision of Gamaliel Painter’s household. Its record of the contents of every room in the house permits us to see how each was used. For example, Gamaliel Painter kept his fire brigade bucket just inside the front door. His bedroom on the first floor was adjacent to the entry hall in a location that was directly above the basement kitchen and thus the most consistently warmed room in the house. It was connected by a special service stair up to his third floor office, where he kept such things as the stocks he owned in the local turnpike companies, and where he could take visitors out onto the roof of the house to watch his town rising around him.

We can know what books he read (including technical books on surveying, others on philosophy and law), can see what farming implements he had, can know what his clothing was like, can learn what elegant furnishings his third marriage to a wealthy Connecticut widow brought to his home.

We know the room his beloved daughter Abby Victoria occupied, and where her portrait (now in the Sheldon) hung. The archives help turn that portrait into a person by preserving the memorial pamphlet published at Abby Victoria’s death, giving insights into her personality, her education, and her father’s heartbreak at her loss.

We know something of her education from the registration list of Emma Willard’s school. Abby attended there, along with daughters of other leading town families. Indeed, it is largely because the men who were instrumental in the founding of Middelbury College had daughters that the town was importantly pioneering in the early education of young women as well as young men.

Similar tales can be constructed for later figures like Columbus Smith, who made a fortune as America’s leading practitioner of international probate law. The archives shed insights into his remarkable house and grounds at Shard Villa, his family, his European travels, and his purchases and commissioning of art.

Or Joseph Battell, public figure, patron, environmentalist, horse-lover, and supporter of female education, but also quirky diarist, automobile opponent, and prime figure in the political battle over the reconstruction of the Main street Bridge.

Elizabeth Dow, publishing a catalog of the Sheldon’s manuscripts in 1991, appropriately entitled her book Treasures Gathered Here, based on a quote from Henry Sheldon:

“Lay no deft and lawless hands on the treasures gathered here, precious trusts from many lands, keep and add from year to year.”

As added to over the years these are indeed treasures for the historian. They make Middlebury perhaps the most completely documentable community in America and well bear out Walter Edgar’s judgment that they could be the missing link in New England Culture.