Clarina Nichols - Brattleboro Historical Society

Mary Palmer Tyler, Vt. resident 1796-1866, Trailblazer

Mary Palmer Tyler was a trailblazer. In 1801 she moved with her young family to a farm on Meeting House Hill. Royall Tyler, her husband, had just inherited $3,000 and they chose to invest the money in a 150-acre farm owned by Micah Townsend. Prior to the monetary windfall, the Tyler’s had been living in Guilford, Vermont. Royall Tyler was making his living as a lawyer. Five years earlier they had moved to the area from Massachusetts. This is how Mary Tyler described her 1796 arrival by carriage sleigh, “It was a glorious winter’s day, that of my first entrance into Vermont. About four o’clock in the afternoon we reached the banks of the Connecticut. There was no bridge then, except one formed by the operation of turning a cake of ice, as it was called. This was our bridge; it was so situated as to bring us over directly by old Fort Dummer.” In […]

Clarina Nichols and Women’s Suffrage (1840’s-1920)

In August, 1920 the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution granted women the right to vote in state and national elections. In the 1800’s, here in Vermont, women’s rights were very limited. Property, personal and voting rights did not exist for women in the early 19th century. Local woman Clarina Nichols worked to change that reality. Nichols was Vermont’s first well-known female leader for reform on women’s issues. In the 1840’s Clarina Nichols was the editor of the local newspaper, the Windham County Democrat. She wrote editorials that argued for women’s rights, African American rights, children’s rights and prohibition. Her advocacy led to a change in Vermont law for married women. In 1847 the Vermont Legislature passed statutes which established more rights for women. Married women gained the right to own property, write their own wills and protect themselves from the debts of their husbands. In 1851 Nichols went on the national stage for women’s rights […]