Posted on behalf of Essex Community Historical Society
Susan Ouellette -- Saint Michael's College Professor of History and author of An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman: The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820 - 1830 -- will discuss her experience researching this diary and how local historical societies play a vital role in making projects such as this possible.
Memorial Hall, Towers Road, Essex; 7 pm
Her book is described as "A rare nineteenth-century journal of an everyday woman richly infused with the minutiae of antebellum daily life and work."
In 1820, Phebe Orvis began a journal that she faithfully kept for a decade. Richly detailed, her diary captures not only the everyday life of an ordinary woman in early nineteenth-century Vermont and New York, but also the unusual happenings of her family, neighborhood, and beyond.
The journal entries trace Orvis’s transition from single life to marriage and motherhood, including her time at the Middlebury Female Seminary and her observations about the changing social and economic environment of the period.
A Quaker, Orvis also recorded the details of the waxing passion of the Second Great Awakening in the people around her, as well as the conflict the fervor caused within her own family.
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