Episode Transcript
Meg Tamulonis: To be honest, it set off my gaydar. I was just like, who are these women? These tailoresses who lived together in Weybridge and wrote these really loving letters to each other and about each other?
Coco Moseley: We actually have this page from Sylvia’s journal where she is practicing writing her name as Sylvia Bryant. And she’s writing it over and over in this really incredible 19th century script.
Coco: I find it so heartwarming and universal. I mean, who hasn’t played around with writing their name and their beloved’s name together?
Tillie Walden: The fact that they had a cradle, that they would rock each other in. The fact that they lived in this tiny, tiny town in Vermont. The fact that they were devoutly religious.
Tillie: I had a sense immediately that this was also not a 30 page comic. I was like, this is going to be a full graphic novel.
Ryan Newswanger: Welcome to the Vermont Reads podcast, brought to you by Vermont Humanities. I’m Ryan Newswanger.
Kathryn Tufano: And I’m Kathryn Tufano. We both work at Vermont Humanities.
Ryan: We just heard from some of the people involved in the creation of our Vermont Reads 2026 book, Charity and Sylvia. Including the book’s author, Tillie Walden.
Kathryn: As we explained in last year’s podcast episodes, about The Light Pirate, Vermont Reads is our one-book, statewide reading program.
Ryan: This is now the 24th year of the program. Every year Vermont Humanities staff and community members—including librarians, teachers, board members, and even some high school students—choose a book for communities around our state to read and discuss and build programs around.
Kathryn: But Charity and Sylvia had a different origin story than most of our books.
Kathryn: Vermont Humanities commissioned Tillie Walden to develop a comic about two women who lived together as a married couple in Weybridge, Vermont in the early to mid-1800s.
Ryan: Weybridge is a small community, just outside of Middlebury. It’s even smaller now than it was when Charity and Sylvia were alive.
Kathryn: The story of the book starts at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury. Let’s return to Coco Moseley, the Executive Director of the Museum.
Coco: The Sheldon was incorporated in 1882 by an amateur historian, Henry Sheldon. And Henry did not possess a fortune. And as such, he collected objects of everyday life and crafted many of his own artifacts. But many of the objects collected by Henry himself were really objects of everyday Vermonters. They include things like tar buckets and apple cores, spinning wheels: the quotidian history of the life of people in Middlebury and Addison County.
Ryan: For those who aren’t as well-versed on Vermont geography, Addison County is in western Vermont, in the relatively flat Champlain Valley. Middlebury is about an hour south of Burlington by car.
Kathryn: Sylvia Drake, the younger of the two women, lived from 1784 until 1868. After she died, many items from Charity and Sylvia’s daily life ended up at the Sheldon.
Allison Cardon: Her favorite niece, named for her, Sylvia Louise, sort of oversaw her materials for the duration of her life. And then when she died, a family member brought all of Charity and Sylvia’s materials to Henry Sheldon.
Ryan: Allison Cardon, the Public History Fellow at the Sheldon Museum, researches and develops exhibits on various topics, including Vermont’s LGBTQ history.
Ryan: People in the Middlebury area knew at the time that Henry Sheldon was interested in collecting everybody’s stuff.
Allison: And then also they knew that he would be interested, in particular, because Charity was the aunt of William Cullen Bryant, who is a relatively famous, kind of national figure, abolitionist, poet, et cetera.
Kathryn: William Cullen Bryant was also the longtime editor of the New York Evening Post. A short piece he wrote about Aunt Charity and Aunt Sylvia – as he called them – serves as a coda for the book.
Kathryn: The many artifacts from Charity and Sylvia’s life, now at the Sheldon, provide some of the best documentation of a same-sex relationship in early American history.
Allison: The two most important objects are the silhouettes that they had made of themselves, and then also an adult size cradle. The silhouettes are really interesting. It’s of each of them, they’re facing each other, and then it’s sort of adorned with their hair in braids.
Kathryn: The braids come together to form a heart at the bottom of the piece…it’s very sweet.
Ryan: Before photography, silhouette portraits allowed people of modest means to have some documentation of their life. These were often done by a traveling silhouette artist.
Kathryn: Oil painting was reserved for people with more wealth.
Allison: The adult size cradle is exactly what it sounds like.
Ryan: This green, wooden cradle was made by Sylvia’s brother-in-law, Asaph Hayward.
Allison: They used it to rock each other back and forth. They were both quite sickly throughout their entire lives, and this was actually quite common in the 19th century for people to use cradles as a way to comfort each other when they were not feeling well.
Ryan: The Charity and Sylvia archives at the Sheldon also include a lot of papers, including many documents from their tailoring business.
Coco: Charity brought the skills of being a tailor and a seamstress to Weybridge when she moved to Vermont, and then she enlisted Sylvia to be her assistant.
Kathryn: Charity and Sylvia were both born in different parts of Massachusetts. Sylvia moved to Vermont with her family when she was a young woman, and Charity came north later.
Coco: We have business records which show a really kind of bustling, thriving economic enterprise that these two women had, which allowed them to live independently and have their own home and have the privacy of that space for their relationship.
Kathryn: The paper archives also include more personal records, like diaries.
Coco: Charity’s diary did not survive and is not part of the record, but Sylvia’s journal is. And we also have poems. Charity was a prolific poet and so we have poems that they wrote to each other.
Ryan: Many of the poems take the form of acrostics, which were very popular at the time. In an acrostic, the first letter of each line spells out a word, or a message.
Kathryn: History suggests that Charity burned her diary. So Sylvia’s journal became a foundational part of Tillie’s work to create a graphic novel. She based her work on what’s at the Sheldon, and on other primary and secondary sources.
Ryan: The Charity and Sylvia archives not only give a clear picture of an early queer relationship, but they shine a light on life in Vermont in the 1800s in general.
Meg: It took a lot of circumstances for those letters and diaries to survive.
Ryan: Meg Tamulonis is the Manager of Collections and Exhibitions at the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont. She is also the volunteer curator of the Vermont Queer Archives.
Meg: It took somebody being willing to write, and then somebody saving it, and then it not getting tossed away, and then it ending up in a library archive. So I think those are all these little sequences that had to happen in order to understand more about that life.
Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup: When I was growing up in the 1970s and then as a teenager in the 1980s, all we really knew about queer people was that gay men were dying.
Kathryn: Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup is the Executive Director of Vermont Humanities. He grew up in the town of Vergennes, a little north of Middlebury and Weybridge.
Christopher: That is what the message was in rural communities, that if you were gay, you were going to die. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic from about 1982 until about 1996, 1997.
Ryan: Christopher first encountered the story of Charity and Sylvia from a book written by Rachel Hope Cleves in 2014. But Charity and Sylvia had been mentioned in the Civil Unions debate in Vermont in the late 1990s, and also in an Addison Independent article in 2009.
Christopher: So being able to learn about Charity and Sylvia was a whole other realm of possibilities that queer people had existed essentially forever, even in our little rural corner of Vermont.
Kathryn: Tillie Walden grew up in Texas, but she came to Vermont after high school to attend the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction.
Ryan: When she was only 22, she won the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, for her graphic memoir Spinning. Her work has since included a graphic novel trilogy featuring The Walking Dead character Clementine and two middle grade graphic novels created with the musicians Tegan and Sara.
Kathryn: Tillie was named Vermont’s Fifth Cartoonist Laureate in April 2023. We’re the only state that has a Cartoonist Laureate.
Tillie: When I asked the previous cartoonist laureates what they did for their tenure, everyone was very vague and a little unhelpful, just kind of smiled and waved me on my way. So I was like, okay, I think the first thing I’ll do is I will just say yes to every email that comes in my inbox related to Vermont.
Tillie: And in the first few weeks I got a lot of emails from a lot of Vermonters, from librarians, from teachers, and I got an email from Christopher from the Vermont Humanities saying that he wanted to tell me about a little piece of Vermont history and would I make a comic about it.
Ryan: When Christopher and Tillie met for coffee in the Upper Valley, he outlined Charity and Sylvia’s story, and explained that their archives were at the Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.
Christopher: I always felt right from the beginning that it would be really great if there was an opportunity for Charity and Sylvia’s story to be even more widely known, maybe by people who wouldn’t necessarily think of themselves as being interested in history, but they would be interested in a story about these two women from long ago.
Kathryn: Tillie also read Rachel Hope Cleves’s book, and was inspired to visit the Museum and see the archives for herself. In the end, she spent more than sixty days at the archive researching the story, over the course of almost two years.
Tillie: My interest in history is an interest in the mundane. I really like knowing what people ate for breakfast. I like knowing what they wore. I like knowing about their anxieties and their neuroses and their towns and their gossip. I really like history on a small scale.
Ryan: The more time she spent with Charity and Sylvia’s archives, the more the story grew in Tillie’s mind. A fairly simple comic quickly became something larger.
Christopher: What I was really asking for was a much smaller project like some of the other comic books that we produced here at Vermont Humanities that have been sort of 32 pages.
Christopher: Yes, we could have done it like that, but Tillie made it so much more. There’s so many layers to the work that she created that I just never could have imagined.
Ryan: Beginning in early 2024, Tillie made regular trips to Middlebury, to spend time at the Sheldon’s archives.
Coco: It was a highlight for staff. It was like, “Oh, Tillie’s coming today.” Tillie brings such warmth and really a genuine enthusiasm to the museum.
Kathryn: Her guide was Eva Garcelon Hart, who had worked with the Charity and Sylvia archives for nearly 15 years.
Coco: We as an institution are really looking at the ways that these records and stories can help us understand who we are today. And so to see Tillie kind of doing that work in real time, it was great.
Coco: I mean, she spent hours, hours working with the collection. And I think Eva will say that she is probably one of the folks most familiar with the Charity and Sylvia collection at this point.
Ryan: The most-known piece of the collection might be the rare, two-person silhouette that Allison Cardon described earlier.
Tillie: I was moved when I saw the silhouette, but it’s very small, it’s very delicate. It’s behind glass. I don’t feel like it reached me as deeply as it did to hold Sylvia’s journal and flip through those pages. I was able to just sit at a table and hold her journal the way I would hold my own journal now.
Ryan: Tillie taught herself how to read Sylvia’s 19th-century cursive, written with a metal-nibbed pen dipped in an inkwell.
Tillie: Holding her papers and seeing her dashed off words about laundry, about being exhausted, about missing church because of the snow, about Charity being in bed sick again, it is trippy. It really gives you a surreal sense of your own mortality.
Kathryn: Weybridge, where Charity and Sylvia lived, is a little outside Middlebury. They came often to the bigger city for shopping, and they lived there early in their relationship.
Tillie: Every time I would walk the streets of Middlebury where they walked, every time I would hold their letters and their papers, it became very clear to me that they were not aware that they were history.
Tillie: They were just as present in their timeline as we are in ours. And as soon as you get past the historical script and the aging paper and you realize that this was fresh paper, the way I draw on fresh paper, it was crisp. It was clean. Their pens used ink, just like my pens use ink. It just kind of sends you on this spiral of, they don’t know. They have no idea that I am sitting here 200 years later reading their journal, putting them in a graphic novel. That I am in Vermont, the way they were in Vermont, that I am married to a woman the way they were married to a woman, and yet I could not be more different from them in other ways.
Kathryn: Tillie formed an unexpected bond with Sylvia, largely because most of the materials in the archives are from her pen.
Ryan: But she had to piece together her understanding of Charity, since Charity’s journal is missing.
Kathryn: In addition to referencing secondary sources like Rachel Hope Cleves’s biography, Tillie read Charity’s poems, Sylvia’s journal entries about her, and letters that other people wrote to them.
Tillie: A lot of people described her as the husband, her as the man. She was bold, she was brazen. She had many relationships with young women before she met Sylvia.
Tillie: Charity also came from a bigger family, a literary family, a slightly wealthier family. Sylvia, in contrast, was poorer, came from farmers and never had relationships with women until Charity except maybe one small crush.
Ryan: Tillie’s growing affinity with Sylvia surprised her.
Tillie: I would’ve thought going into it that I was going to vibe with Charity more because she’s kind of the crazy one. She’s the brash one. She’s the bold one. But I found myself really, really linked up with Sylvia through the story, and she’s kind of the heart of it for me.
Kathryn: Tillie has developed entire worlds for her other books, including some set in outer space. Sheldon archivist Eva Garcelon Hart, who worked closely with Tillie during her time at the museum, was impressed.
Coco: Eva was one of the early readers of the book. And Eva shared with me that she was just astonished by how much Tillie was able to pull from the material and create the world that Charity and Sylvia lived in.
Ryan: One of the biggest challenges was how to portray the landscape and material culture of an era before photography existed.
Tillie: Grounding it in reality, trying to make it as historically accurate as possible was a real goal of mine and very hard to accomplish because, there are paintings, there are photographs from 1860s Vermont. And so I did use those as like, okay, well, how much could it have changed between 1840 and 1860, right? There is going to be some commonality there.
Tillie: So there’s one image that I could find, one painting of Middlebury in 1810, which is perfect. It’s when they lived around there.
Kathryn: This was before the couple built their house in Weybridge, where they lived and ran their business until Charity died decades later.
Tillie: It doesn’t show me everything, but using my cartoonist brain, I can walk into the picture and sort of move the angle and think that, okay, well if I see the roof at this angle over here, I can kind of imagine it from the other side.
Ryan: Tillie also exhaustively read written descriptions of the area’s landscape at the time. And she read popular novels of the era, such as Pamela.
Tillie: So yeah, I did the best with what I could. I am sure I missed the mark on a few points, and I’m sure there are also a lot of people who are going to enjoy telling me what I got wrong.
Kathryn: An important part of the story in the archives is the depth of the social network around Charity and Sylvia during their lives.
Kathryn: Sylvia’s family all lived nearby—they had all moved up from Massachusetts—and the two women played key roles in that family, and in the Weybridge community at large. Here’s Coco Moseley from the Sheldon.
Coco: Charity and Sylvia were Sunday School teachers. They were a big part of the Weybridge Church. They took care of a lot of people’s kids. They were Aunt Charity and Aunt Sylvia. They were deeply ingrained in the fabric of their community and in seeing the way their community and their families accepted them, we also see the way that that allowed their community and families to benefit from what Charity and Sylvia could bring to that sort of small rural area in Vermont.
Kathryn: These benefits included making loans to male family members and training generations of tailor’s apprentices.
Ryan: Meg Tamulonis learned about Charity and Sylvia shortly after she moved to Vermont in the 1990s.
Meg: I felt relief to see this story of two women living together in the 1800s, that they had a great reputation in the town they were living in, right? People really admired them. People respected them as a couple. This actually existed and this was proof of that existence.
Meg: We’re kind of raised to think that the total norm is a male/female relationship. And this kind of relationship did not exist in the past. Or it totally didn’t exist, and now it exists because it’s the 21st century. But actually queer people have been around forever.
Ryan: Here’s Allison Cardon from the Sheldon Museum.
Allison: We always try to highlight that Charity and Sylvia are the best documented, but certainly not the only queer LGBT couple in Vermont or in the Northeast or in early America, right?
Kathryn: Allison notes that many people in times past talked about an uncle who had a roommate, or an aunt with a roommate.
Kathryn: However, Tillie’s graphic novel shows that most of the time, Charity and Sylvia’s queerness was less important to them than other concerns.
Tillie: As someone who’s gay and writes a lot of books, it’s nice to read a story where their queerness is also not really the main problem. Their identity as being two women living together is certainly a point of conflict and a source of pain for them at a lot of points. But I think that survival, getting through illness, finding enough to eat, and their religiosity is way more on their mind than the fact that they’re two women living together.
Tillie: I think it’s also really fun to read queer stories where you mix in elements that are somewhat unexpected. And there are not a lot of, especially graphic novels about queer people wrestling with their faith or queer people being devout, and sometimes feeling their faith is much more significant to them than being queer.
Tillie: And I really like that at this juncture in my career. I like seeing stories where queerness is an ingredient, but it’s not the main course.
Ryan: Here’s Christopher.
Christopher: This book is about a faith journey. This book is about family, a large, large extended family on both sides, right?
Christopher: This is a story about what it’s like to be women in the 19th century where it was really hard to have any sort of self-determination, but these women did it, right? They built their own house, they had their own business, they survived without being married to men for their entire lives. It’s about so much more than their sexual orientation and I hope people will really take that away, but it also doesn’t diminish the fact that they were in love.
Ryan: Tillie’s graphic novel reflects a different era, when people spoke more formally, lived without rubber boots or umbrellas, and interacted with a landscape that’s different than the one we live in today. But it is still unmistakably a story about our state.
Tillie: What makes it a Vermont story for me is…the big one is the environment. And I think the cruelty and beauty of the Vermont seasons sort of perpetually getting in the way of their fun and also being the fun.
Tillie: Their life cycle was so defined by the brutality of the winters, the beauty of the summers, and the fact that the seasons never gave them a rest.
Kathryn: Most of the book is comprised of vignettes of one or two pages, with 12 panels on each of those pages.
Tillie: It really expresses their life perfectly, because their life was one where they did the same thing every day. They were in this structure of this town. They’re in the structure of their church and their jobs.
Ryan: Over the course of the book—and their lives together—Charity and Sylvia see many changes: plagues, wars, the terms of 14 presidents, the arrival of the railroads.
Tillie: I think the rhythm being the same on nearly every page also makes it really exciting when you break that rhythm for something significant, which I’m not going to give away what I break the form for, but needless to say, there are points in their life that require some drama.
Kathryn: Late in the book we say goodbye, first to Charity and then to Sylvia, the younger of the two. They are buried together under the same headstone in the Weybridge cemetery.
Tillie: The love for these women in their town…they were so mourned when they were gone. I don’t think there was ever a question about them not being buried together. They were buried together like family, which is shocking for that time. They were spoken of as husband and wife. They were written about as husband and wife.
Kathryn: Including by Charity’s nephew, William Cullen Bryant, who wrote:
Ryan: “I would tell you how, in their youthful days, they took each other as companions for life, and how this union, no less sacred to them than the tie of marriage, has subsisted, in uninterrupted harmony, for forty years.”
Kathryn: Coco, Eva, and many others worked for years with the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation to erect a historical marker about Charity and Sylvia, beside the Weybridge graveyard where they are buried together.
Ryan: Meg was there at the unveiling in June, 2025.
Meg: I worked on a Pride 1983 marker several years ago that’s in City Hall Park in Burlington, and it was sort of a similar thinking where it’s like, let’s just get it out there. We don’t want people to forget about these kinds of events, and we want to remind people that these sorts of things have been happening here. That this community has existed.
Ryan: Tillie, Coco, Eva, Christopher, and others deeply involved in getting Charity and Sylvia’s story out to a wider audience were in attendance, along with Vermont Congresswoman Becca Balint.
Coco: We actually even had a family member of Charity, a descendant of Charity’s drive up from Tennessee to be a part of this community gathering. So I love that as their family accepted them in the 19th century, their descendants today are still very much proud of Aunt Charity and Aunt Sylvia.
Coco: And I love that when people travel through Weybridge, they now see this historic marker. And I’ve had folks come to the museum and say, “Oh, I saw the marker in Weybridge and it brought me to the Sheldon.”
Kathryn: Hopefully, Vermont Reads 2026 will do the same thing. We plan to distribute at least 6000 free copies of Tillie’s graphic novel around the state.
Tillie: Part of why Vermont Reads is so great is it gets books in people’s hands without the need to pay for it. It is truly just a celebration of reading, and it’s a way to make reading so accessible.
Christopher: We did not know that this would be a Vermont Reads book. We knew that we wanted to support Tillie’s research when she started it three years ago and we didn’t make any assumptions about whether or not there would even be a book, much less a book that we would want to use in our own programming.
Christopher: We put it through our regular decision-making process. It was read by librarians and teachers in draft form. It was read by students in draft form at a high school.
Christopher: It was a wonderful thing to support Tillie’s research and now it’s even more wonderful that the book is so great that we can use it in Vermont Reads.
Kathryn: The book is already receiving national attention. It’s gotten rave reviews on NPR, and in the New York Times, and Forbes Magazine. So maybe the book will send more folks to the Sheldon to see Charity and Sylvia’s artifacts, which are now on view in a special exhibit called “Drawing on the Archive.”
Ryan: And maybe even more will be reminded that as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, our stories are more diverse, complex, and multilayered than they often appear.
Ryan: Here’s Tillie, talking about Vermont Reads.
Tillie: It works so beautifully with who Charity and Sylvia were, because this was their community. And so it feels like a celebration 200 years later, ish, of reading and of storytelling and of the perseverance of Vermonters to continue to acknowledge our history and acknowledge the pieces of our history that are somewhat hidden, like queer history.
Tillie: I mean, I would love for this book to be a part of reading programs all over America, but nothing is really going to be more special than it being here in Vermont because the story, it didn’t start here because they weren’t born here, but it is where they were laid to rest. It’s where they remain and it’s where they’ll remain forever. And I hope it’s where I’ll remain forever.
Ryan: Thanks for listening to this Vermont Reads podcast!
Kathryn: We’re grateful to our supporters: the Trout Lily Foundation, the Jack & Dorothy Byrne Foundation, and Drawn and Quarterly, among many others.
Ryan: Vermont Public is our Media Sponsor.
Kathryn: And thanks to Junction Arts and Media and the South Burlington Library for the use of their recording studios.
Ryan: If you’d like to learn more about Vermont Reads, and perhaps host Vermont Reads in your community, visit vtreads.org.
