Tillie Walden's Forthcoming Graphic Novel Celebrates One of the Earliest Documented Lesbian Couples in America 

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• Courtesy of Vermont Humanities
• Tillie Walden's sketch of Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake

More than two centuries before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, at a time when women couldn't vote or own property, Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake made a home together in Weybridge. From their first meeting in the early 1800s until Bryant's death in 1851, they were partners in love and work, the proprietors of a successful tailoring business and, in every sense but the official one, a married couple.

Their relationship was no secret. In 1897, a Ripton man named Hiram Harvey Hurlburt Jr. wrote in his diary that he often heard "it mentioned that Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other." Local families sent their daughters to Bryant and Drake to learn the art of seamstressing, and friends and family often came to stay with them in their one-room cottage — including Bryant's nephew, the poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant.

He penned these words about the couple for the New-York Evening Post in 1843: "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."

Bryant and Drake are buried under one headstone at Weybridge Hill Cemetery — a privilege usually reserved for wedded couples that serves as a lasting monument to their standing in the community.

What we know about their relationship, regarded as one of the earliest on-record queer unions in America, comes from more than 900 pages of letters, poems and journal entries, stored in four boxes at the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History in Middlebury. This trove of documents will provide the source material for a new graphic novel by Vermont cartoonist laureate Tillie Walden. She will begin research for the book this summer as part of a yearlong residency with Vermont Humanities, which commissioned the project with the help of a $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For Walden, 27, who lives in Norwich with her wife and their 4-month-old baby, the story of Bryant and Drake feels intimately connected to her own. "It's sort of surreal to be a lesbian right now, living in the woods of Vermont with my wife, and these are two women who lived not far from where we are, doing the same thing," she said.

Walden's book won't be the first about Bryant and Drake; in 2014, University of Victoria professor and historian Rachel Hope Cleves published Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, which she wrote after stumbling upon the Bryant-Drake papers at the Sheldon Museum while on vacation in Middlebury. Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup, the executive director of Vermont Humanities, first learned about the Weybridge couple from Cleves' book. Then the senior philanthropic adviser of the Vermont Community Foundation, he awarded a grant to the Sheldon Museum to sponsor an exhibition of the Bryant-Drake archive and a lecture by Cleves at Middlebury College.

Around that time, Kaufman Ilstrup saw the possibility of rendering Bryant and Drake's relationship in a graphic novel. He thought the story of the two 19th-century women, who lived openly as a married couple before the vocabulary existed to describe their relationship, deserved a wider audience. When Walden, who teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, became the state's cartoonist laureate last year, "it was like a bolt of lightning for me, frankly," Kaufman Ilstrup said.

He emailed Walden and asked if he could pitch her an idea. They met at King Arthur Baking and sat outside in the rain. "I said, 'So there were these two lesbians in the early part of the 19th century...' and she was like, 'You got me,'" Kaufman Ilstrup recalled.

The graphic novel is the centerpiece of the $50,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded a total of $2.8 million last year to humanities councils across the country for projects that, according to the NEH website, "counter the destructive effects of hate-fueled violence on our democracy and public safety." Vermont Humanities is allocating $20,000 for the project, Kaufman Ilstrup said. That sum includes a $15,000 stipend for Walden, who will also give talks around the state on cartooning and queer representation in comics as part of her Vermont Humanities residency; the balance will go to the Sheldon Museum.

Originally, Kaufman Ilstrup had modest expectations for this endeavor. "I would have been happy with a 32-page comic book that we'd printed ourselves down the street," he said. But Walden, the author of five graphic novels — including Spinning, a memoir about her youth as a competitive ice skater, which won a prestigious Eisner Award in 2018 — had bigger ambitions.

"Tillie has totally elevated our thinking," Kaufman Ilstrup said. "She's envisioning a real book that's going to be distributed nationally."

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• File: Rob Strong
• Tillie Walden

Starting this summer, Walden will spend lots of time poring over the reams of yellowed pages in the Sheldon Museum's Bryant-Drake collection, most of which are written in Drake's spidery hand. According to archivist Eva Garcelon-Hart, Bryant, who had what one today might call "game," insisted that all of her diaries and letters be destroyed upon her death — though by pure luck, a few of her acrostic poems to Drake, along with some letters from her other paramours, have survived.

By the time Bryant arrived in Weybridge from Massachusetts, in the early 1800s, she had already broken more than a few hearts. "Women were very attracted to her," Garcelon-Hart said. "She had to relocate a few times, because tongues were wagging."

Drake, by contrast, was more reserved, a deeply pious woman from a less prosperous family who also grew up in Massachusetts, in the town bordering Bryant's. Drake moved to Weybridge following her brother, Asaph, who came to Vermont to seek his fortune. Bryant, likely fleeing the fallout of her amorous activities, came to Weybridge in 1807 to visit her friend Polly, who happened to be Drake's older sister.

No account exists of Bryant and Drake's first meeting, but we know from the historical record that they were rarely apart after that. (In fact, letters from one of Bryant's ex-lovers in Massachusetts, Lydia Richards, suggest that Richards was expecting Bryant to come back to her after her Weybridge sojourn, but the sojourn simply never ended.)

In the subsequent four decades, Bryant and Drake rarely left Addison County. ("They did take some trips — walking back to Massachusetts, for example," Garcelon-Hart said. "Can you imagine? Walking to Massachusetts?") They lived in a 12-by-12-foot cabin on the property of Sarah Hagar, a local woman who, happily for Bryant and Drake, was a widow in charge of her husband's estate; had Hagar's husband been alive, Garcelon-Hart explained, he might not have allowed two unwed women to build a home on his land.

When Walden first visited the Sheldon Museum archive last May, she was moved by the understated tenderness of Bryant and Drake's acrostic poetry. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, these are real people,'" Walden said. "They're just like me, just like everyone else." On one scrap of notebook paper, the words "Bryant Sylvia" appear over and over again, the idle marginalia of a person in love.

For all the telling artifacts in the museum's collection, there are also some poignant omissions. Drake's journals — those that have survived, anyway — do not explicitly mention sex, although references to a nameless guilt appear throughout her writings. "Arrive before 5 at the boarding place of Dear C., where we received marked attention from each member of the family. Troubles ever I have," reads an entry dated June 30, 1838. And the only extant image of the couple is a framed silhouette of the two women in profile on a mat of thick paper, bordered by thin braids of their interwoven hair.

At first glance, they look like twins — both are wearing identical buns at the crowns of their heads, with the same tendrils of curly hair sprung loose at the forehead and nape of the neck. But there are subtle differences: The woman on the left, generally assumed to be Drake, is slightly shorter, with a longer forehead; the one on the right, assumed to be Bryant, sports the beginnings of a double chin.

From this shadowy likeness, Walden will have to invent their faces.

"As I go through the archive, every time I can kind of glean a little bit of personality, I'll take that and try to apply that to the drawings," she said. "It's a very dreamy quest to be on."

Making a graphic novel about real people in a particular historical period poses a unique set of challenges, Walden explained.

"I don't have to check with anyone about how a zombie looks. I can pretty much do that on my own," she said, referring to her Clementine trilogy, set in the world of "The Walking Dead." "But for this book, every page, every image, is going to have to have a basis in their reality. Like — tables! Socks! Did they have a wooden floor? Did they have a dirt floor?

"I have to genuinely think about what was going on on their ceiling, because I need it to be right," Walden continued. "I want to understand what they saw when they laid in bed at night and looked up."