Square nails, knob-and-tube wiring, and the occasional signature on a beam are among the things contractors find when working in old houses. But electricians stringing wire in a Northeast Kingdom attic last fall discovered a portal back in time. Under the floorboards in an old home in the village of Passumpsic, they found a tiny stained envelope. Tucked inside it was a 146-year-old love letter.
“Hyde Park, Vermont, August 21, 1879,” it begins. “Dear Sumner: Your dear letter was received last evening Mr. Jewett brought it to me. He seldom brings our mail and I do not know how it happened that he did last eve.” Had the letter writer — who had signed only her first name, Carrie — known he would return to town, she would have sent a letter back with him: “I send a letter every time I have an opportunity.”
The prosaic opening sentences belie the pining, drama and heartbreak in the paragraphs to come. “It’s like a little novel,” said Lawuo Dolo Cummings, in whose house the letter was found.
The envelope was addressed “Mr. Sumney Pinney, Wolcott, Vermont” and carried no return address. The letter’s four blue-lined pages offer a glimpse of life in 1879 — illness was common; mail delivery, less so — and the faded ink reveals the yearnings of a young woman’s heart. Flourishes adorn her capital letters.
She is both flirtatious — she has made pillowcases for the two of them, she wrote, adding, “Do you think we shall ever need them?” — and reassuring. Sumner had expressed concern about his reputation. “There has been a good deal said about you but not one remark which was not praiseworthy,” Carrie reported. She is not ashamed to introduce him to anyone, she continued, nor does she think he was wrong to call on “Miss Lawrence.” It is unclear whether Sumner was courting Miss Lawrence.
“About teaching at Wolcott,” Carrie told Sumner, “I am undecided — do not know whether I would like the school or not for certain. Should like to be near you — so there is one great inducement for me to teach there. But come to think you have not said you would like to have me there. I will talk with you in regard to that subject when I see you.”
Sumner was apparently planning to visit. “If you cannot get here Sat. you will come early Sunday won’t you darling? It has been such a long, long time since I have seen you or had any of those sweet kisses.”
It has been such a long, long time since I have seen you or had any of those sweet kisses.
Carrie Noble, writing to Sumner Pinney
Cummings, a 33-year-old accountant, and her contractors were immediately invested in the couple’s story, eager to know what happened next. Cummings’ home had been the Passumpsic post office, prompting her to wonder if the letter had even reached Sumner or simply been lost in the mail. She enlisted help from her friend Ruth Johnson, a retired nurse-midwife and psychiatric nurse practitioner with a genealogy sleuthing hobby that she calls “playing ancestry.”
From an armchair in her Massachusetts home, Johnson logged into ancestry.com. She entered Sumner’s name, the approximate years of his birth and death and, betting on the success of the letter, typed “Carrie” as his spouse. Then, she said, “I just sat back to see who showed up.”
Ancestry.com links to census records, birth and death certificates, findagrave.com, and newspaper articles. Johnson learned that Sumner Putnam Pinney and Carrie Harriet Noble married in Morrisville on December 17, 1879. They lived with his parents in Greensboro in 1880, when Sumner worked as a farmer. They had two sons and a daughter, the last of whom, it appears, died as a baby. Shortly after, in 1883, Carrie died from tuberculosis. She was 29 years old. She and Sumner had been married less than four years.
After learning more about the couple, Cummings texted her contractor: “They actually used those pillowcases.”
Handwritten letters carry a bodily presence absent from electronic communication, said William Merrill Decker, a retired Oklahoma State University English professor and author of Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications. “Someone’s hand was moving across that page,” he said. Tears stain letters. People lick envelopes, then seal them with a kiss, he continued: “A person’s DNA is very much embedded in such documents.”
While mail delivery between post offices was quite regular in 1879, Decker said, traversing the final leg to an addressee’s home was “really a crapshoot,” often relying on someone traveling in that direction. Such uncertainty made letters even more dear and contributed to a sense of isolation. Carrie told Sumner she was lonely.
“The weather for the past week has not been very favorable for Luke and he has been feeling quite poorly,” Carrie wrote of her brother. “Mother has been about sick for a week, but I think she is a little better this morning.”
Carrie apparently wrote the bulk of the letter in the morning, then took a break, because she started the final paragraph with the word “Afternoon.” “Darling Sumner,” she wrote, “Luke died about an hour ago Was taken very suddenly with hemorage and died within twenty minutes after he was taken funeral Sat. the hour is not decided perhaps at ten. Do, do, come darling — Ever your Carrie.”
Death records show that Luke Noble died on August 21, 1879, the day the letter was written, confirming to Johnson that she had indeed found the right couple.
In 1898, 15 years after Carrie died, Sumner married widow Abbie Augusta Parker Burnell. The 1900 census shows Sumner, then 55, and Abbie, 50, living in Barnet, the town that includes Passumpsic, with Sumner’s sons, Jabez, 19, and Orville, 18. Sumner owned the Passumpsic general store, and Abbie was postmaster. They likely lived upstairs, Johnson said.
An undated photo of the post office was hanging in Cummings’ home when she bought it in 2023. She now knows the identity of the man sitting in the horse-drawn carriage out front because the same photo, dated 1917, appears on ancestry.com, where the man in the carriage is identified as Orville Pinney.
By 1920, Sumner and Abbie, apparently retired, had moved to Morristown. Carrie’s letter, perhaps under the floorboards by then, was left behind. Abbie died in 1923 at 72 years old and was buried in Wolcott next to her first husband, Milo S. Burnell. Sumner moved to Colorado, where his two sons lived, but he visited Vermont most summers. In July 1928, he fell ill and remained in Vermont. He died the following February at age 84.
Carrie was 26 years old the day she wrote her letter, unaware, of course, that she would win Sumner’s love and have a too-short life with him. The two are buried under a shared gravestone in Greensboro Village Cemetery. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Finding Love | Renovations in a Passumpsic home turn up a 19th-century love letter”
This article appears in Love & Marriage Issue • 2026.
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