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Vermont Legislature

How Ethan Allen Got Married to a Loyalist

Ethan Allen got married to his second wife in a bizarre ceremony after a whirlwind courtship to a woman half his age.

At least that’s how the witness, a two-year-old at the time, told the story.

In 1789, the flamboyant Revolutionary War hero was a 46-year-old widower with three children. Ethan Allen was not easy to live with. He drank heavily and often stayed away from home. He also hadn’t been happy with his first wife, Mary Brownson, an illiterate scold. While she fully embraced Christianity, he opposed it, even writing an attack on it called Reason: the Only Oracle of Man.

Then a rich, beautiful, well-educated young Loyalist widow fell for him six months after his wife died. They married almost immediately.

Frances Montresor, ca 1771

How Ethan Allen Got Married

After the American Revolution ended, Frances Montresor Buchanan boarded in the home of Stephen Bradley in Westminster, Vt. She chose Westminster because she had inherited large tracts of land there. With her imperious manner and New York wardrobe, she made quite a splash in town.

When Ethan Allen came to town, people began to speculate about a match between the two prominent single people.

Her friends said if she married General Allen, she would be the queen of a new state. She replied, “If I should marry the devil, I’d be the queen of hell.”

‘Fine’

Ethan Allen apparently met her at a party at Bradley’s house during the February session of the Vermont Legislature. And there Bradley’s son, William Czar Bradley, picked up the story and made a legend out of it.

Detail from statue of Ethan Allen outside the Vermont Statehouse

In February 1784, Frances Montresor Buchanan stood on a chair arranging china on a shelf when Ethan Allen walked into the room. She told him people didn’t make calls that early in the morning. He said he was on his way to Sunderland. And, he added, “If we are to be married, now is the time.”

She put a decanter back on the shelf, stepped off the shelf and said, “Fine,” but she needed her coat.

A group of judges happened to be eating breakfast in the Bradley house, so Allen asked Judge Moses Robinson to perform the ceremony.

Said Allen, “For myself I have no great opinion of such formality, and from what I can discover, she thinks as little of it as I do. But as a decent respect for the opinions of mankind seems to require it, you will proceed.”

Moses replied, “General, this is an important matter. Have you given it serious consideration?”

“Certainly,” Allen replied and looked at his beautiful bride. “But I do not think it requires much consideration.”

The judge started the ceremony until he asked Ethan Allen whether he promised to live with his wife, ‘agreeable to the laws of God.’ Allen stopped the wedding and looked out the window. “The law of God as written in the great book of nature?” he said. “Yes. Go on.”

Frances Allen

The judge pronounced them man and wife. They put Fanny’s trunk and guitar case were in the sleigh, she wrapped herself in a bear rug and the newlyweds drove off over the mountains.

Little is known about Frances Allen before she married the hero of Ticonderoga, and even afterward there is some question. Was she a girlish tease, a brainy, liberated woman or a shrewish stepmother? Who was her father? What was her real name?

Her daughter Fanny Allen (who became a Catholic nun) recorded her maiden name as Montresor. But her tombstone names her Montezuma, while an 1858 family history calls her Frances Montuzan, daughter of a British colonel killed in the French and Indian War.

Who Was Frances Montresor?

She was believed to be the illegitimate daughter of Anna Schookraft (or Schoolcraft) and John Montresor, a British military engineer and womanizer.

She was born Feb. 4, 1760, according to Ethan Allen. She grew up in New York City, well-educated with interests in botany and music.

An Irish Loyalist, Crean Brush, had come into her life. He had large landholdings in New York and the New York Grants. He adopted Fanny, but how that happened is another question. Brush either married her mother or married her aunt after her mother died.

At 16, she had married a British army officer, John Buchanan, who died in battle. According to legend, she could barely tolerate him but he doted on her. And then when Crean Brush died, he left part of his estate to his adopted daughter.

Much of her share of the Brush estate was conveyed to Ethan Allen two months after their marriage. They had three children, and historians say they had a happy, though short, marriage. Ethan Allen died five years after their wedding, on Feb. 12, 1789. Their daughter, Fanny, became New England’s first Catholic nun.

With thanks to A Treasury of New England Folklore, The Stories, Legends, Tall Tales, Traditions, Ballads and Songs of the Yankee People, edited by B.A. Botkin. This story about the second marriage of Ethan Allen was updated in 2022.

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Why Vermont Declared War on Germany Months Before Pearl Harbor

Nearly three months before Germany declared war on the United States, Vermont declared war on Germany.

Montpelier, where Vermont declared war on Germany.

Pearl Harbor, of course, triggered the United States’ entry into World War II. Two days after the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. The assault surprised Hitler as much as anybody, but he declared war on the United States on December 11. The next day, the U.S. reciprocated.

Vermont beat everyone to the punch. On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s Legislature reinterpreted a military order issued by President Roosevelt to establish a state of armed conflict with Germany.

Why War?

Was this another example of Vermont’s iconoclasm? The state always went its own way, having been established as a republic in 1777 before joining the United States. It was the first to ban slavery, the first to provide for a state university – and a Vermonter was the first to photograph a snowflake.

But Vermont wasn’t just trying to be different. Vermont declared war on Germany for a good reason.

In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Non-officers earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

Soldiers from nearby Fort Ethan Allan at the Champlain Valley Exposition at Essex Junction, Vt. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

For example, Marjorie Kenney Haselton, a war bride pregnant with a small child, worried frantically about money. From Massachusetts, she wrote to her draftee husband about her finances. She received $80 a month. Her expenses were $20 for rent, $36.50 for milk and groceries, $8.55 for utilities and $6.95 for insurance and laundry. That then left $8 for clothing, medicine, heat in winter months, newspapers, periodicals and amusements.

Why Vermont Declared War

Recognizing many such cases of hardship, the Vermont Legislature wanted to award a bonus to Vermonters called up to serve.

In September 1941, lawmakers got their chance. The Legislature held a special session to bail out the University of Vermont, then facing a financial crisis.

Lawmakers not only appropriated money to bail out the university on September 16, they voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees.

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

President Roosevelt signs declaration of war against Germany.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters.

Armed Conflict

Vermont lawmakers seized on the chance to redefine ‘armed conflict.’ They called it a state of national emergency in which the president orders armed force to protect lives or property endangered by any hostile foreign power.

In other words, Vermont declared war on Germany.

According to historian Vic Henningsen, the act caught national attention. One newspaper praised the state:

“The rest of the nation, perhaps, may be satisfied by assurances and euphemisms of our national leaders to the effect that we are not at war and have no intention of entering upon a shooting war with the [Germans] or their Axis henchmen. But not so Vermont.

“Vermont sees things clearly and is willing to pay for its vision.”

Image: “VermontMontpelierCapital2709w” by Walter Jeffries. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons. This story about how Vermont declared war on Germany was updated in 2022.

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Mary Jean Simpson, Breaker of Glass Ceilings

Mary Jean Simpson, the prim clerk pictured below, was a driven woman who shattered several glass ceilings in her lifetime.

Mary Jean Simpson

The photo shows her in her position as bill clerk in the Office of the Secretary of the U.S. Senate, the first woman appointed to the position, which she held from 1926 to 1933.

She was also the first woman to introduce a bill in the Vermont Legislature – that was in 1921 — and the first women’s dean at the University of Vermont.

Mary Jean Simpson

She was born in East Craftsbury, Vt., on July 18, 1988, graduating from St. Johnsbury Academy in 1908. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 1913, taught for a few years and did graduate work at Columbia University in New York City.

In 1924, back in Vermont, she ran for state representative as a Republican and won. That first bill was to tighten a 1921 billboard law.

Fellow Vermonter Calvin Coolidge was president of the United States when she worked as the Senate clerk.

In 1932, Democrats won Congress and the presidency, and Mary Jean Simpson went back to Vermont.

During the Great Depression she administered New Deal programs for women, including the Civil Works Administration, the professional programs of the Vermont Emergency Relief Administration, the Women’s and Professional Division of the Vermont Works Progress Administration and the Vermont’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

University of Vermont

From 1937-54 she served as dean of women at the University of Vermont, where she recruited students for the university’s first nursing program. During World War II she established a scholarship program for returning veterans.

At graduation every year, UVM presents the Mary Jean Simpson Award to a senior woman who best exemplifies her qualities of character, leadership and scholarship. The Simpson Hall dormitory is named in her honor.

A portrait of her hangs in the Fleming Museum. The explanatory text includes an excerpt from a letter she wrote to the parents of daughters entering UVM in 1945. A daughter, she wrote,

…should not let her work pile up, nor sacrifice regular study hours to pleasant social demands, nor give more time than she can afford to ‘dates,’ sports, or other extra-curricular activities… It is expected that the women of the university shall at all times conduct themselves with dignity and good taste.

One suspects those are words she lived by.

Mary Jean Simpson also had a cousin, Jean Simpson, who was quite different and left her mark on Vermont by establishing the John Woodruff Simpson Memorial Library in East Craftsbury. Mary Jean Simpson died in East Craftsbury in 1977.

This story last updated in 2022.

Photo via Shorpy.

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Vermont’s Alexander Twilight: The First Black College Graduate in America

One day at the Brownington school in Orleans County, Vt., a youngster approached the front of the class to answer an arithmetic question. His classmates, as a joke, pinned a handkerchief to his back and he unknowingly proceeded to the front of the class with it trailing behind, leaving a ripple of giggles in its wake. The school’s principal, Alexander Twilight, was not pleased.

Alexander Twilight

The year would have been around 1853, and Twilight, no stranger to schoolboy pranks, sat silent for a bit before he spoke up: “It is a fool that laughs at the folly of a fool,” he said. The words were calculated to silence the classroom, and they did. They made such an impression that at least one student carried the lesson his whole life.

The man who delivered the lesson was the first black man in America ever to receive a college degree.

Alexander Twilight

Twilight was a Vermonter from birth. Researchers believe his father was Ichabod Twilight, a soldier who served in the Revolutionary War representing Warner, N.H. Perhaps the chance to earn his freedom as reward for his service as a soldier drew Ichabod into the New Hampshire militia.

Following the war, Ichabod established a family in Corinth, Vt., where Alexander was born on Sept. 23, 1795. As a young man, Alexander worked on a farm as an indentured servant early in his life. But then Middlebury College accepted him as a student on the strength of his strong mind and schooling at Randolph Academy.

Though census records identified him as black, his racial heritage was mixed and he might well have appeared to be white at first glance. It’s not clear whether Middlebury knew it was educating a black man or not. Nevertheless, he graduated and went on to be a minister and teacher.

Brownington

The Brownington grammar school was established in 1823 when the citizens of Orleans County threw open the doors of their newly built schoolhouse and welcomed the first class. The school survived mainly on the funds raised by renting out land that it had been granted for the purposes of supporting education.

In 1829, the school’s trustees reached out to hire Twilight. He was by then a seasoned teacher, with several years’ experience following his graduation in 1823. The school itself was in dire need of new leadership, and Twilight began immediately making improvements.

But without a dormitory-style boarding house, students had to board with local farmers. The environment that Twilight wanted for the school required a more formal dormitory and classrooms. When the trustees declined to fund it, he insisted. Relations grew very tense for several years, but the trustees refused to fund the larger facility.

Twilight decided to build it himself. He paid for it with a combination of his own funds and money borrowed from others. He quarried granite blocks from the surrounding area and, working with an ox to provide pull a system of pulleys, he and anyone he could corral to help build a large stone structure from the ground up.

Athenian Hall, also known as the Old Stone House

By 1836, he finished the structure: a large four-story, granite building with dormitory, kitchen, classrooms and assembly hall. Alexander Twilight named it Athenian Hall.

Athenian Hall

The school would prosper under Twilight’s leadership. Classes cost $2 to $3 each for a term, and Twilight’s reputation kept the school full. Before he departed in 1847, more than 3,000 students would pass through the school.

Twilight would also win election to the state Legislature and represent the county in attempting to stop the state from stripping its school of its funding.

One of his students would recall Alexander Twilight later: “His peculiar gift was in the management of a school. He seldom failed to get the good will and high esteem of his pupils,. His power to stimulate and direct them in regard to their character, studies and future pursuits was very great, He governed them wholly by appeals to their honor and manliness, but could use sterner persuasives when they were called for. Sometimes, when the subject and occasion demanded it, and all other measures failed, his power of invective, sarcasm, satire and ridicule were tremendous. No sensible rogue would wish to encounter it but once.”

Departure and Return

He left in 1847 because of a falling out with the school’s trustees and the deacons of his church. After his departure, the school closed for several years. Orleans residents eventually persuaded Twilight to return from Canada, where he had moved after the dispute, and the school reopened in 1852. Twilight would only preach one more year after his return, but he ran the school through 1855, when he finally closed it for good for lack of students.

Twilight would die two years later, on June 19, 1857, at the age of 62. His wife, Mercy Ladd Merrill Twilight, would live on for 21 more years. When she perished, her body was buried next to his at the foot of the hill below the stone building.

Today, a building at Middlebury College bears Twilight’s name, and his achievements, thanks largely to his own determination and character, are still celebrated to this day. And the stone school house that he built still stands and open for visitors; its website has an interesting collection of his sermons.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Athenian Hall CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34745682.

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