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 […]