Were events in Emmeline’s life a matter of fact or fiction?
It’s a most unlikely story, but it may have happened.
With the permission of her family, Emmeline Bachelder, born in Fayette, Maine, around 1817, went to Lowell, Mass., as a “mill girl” to work in the newly constructed textile mills there along the Merrimac River.
She was only 14 and one of hundreds of others like her from rural northern New England. She saved money and sent some home to her family, who needed it badly. However, she was seduced by her boss and bore a son, whom she gave up for immediate adoption. She hid this by telling her family she was sick and would return to Fayette when recovered. She did and said nothing about the child.
Years later, she married a man and had another son, both of whom disappeared, probably heading west. When she was 62, she married again, this time to a younger man from Massachusetts who had come north to Fayette to work on the roads. A year later, his family visited the couple and discovered that he had married his own mother.
The first I heard of that story was in the novel “Emmeline” by Judith Rossner, published in 1980. I found it in the Lovell Library and read the book jacket about the settings in Maine and in Massachusetts where I had lived. I enjoyed the book because Rossner researched quite thoroughly and wrote well. The Oedipal marriage, however, I found difficult to swallow, even in a novel. At the time, I thought it so far-fetched that “suspension of disbelief,” the essential thing a novelist must enable in her readers, was rendered impossible by the seemingly implausible ending.
It wasn’t until I saw an episode of “The American Experience” series on PBS called “The Sins of Our Mothers” (1989) that I learned any more about Emmeline’s story. It was narrated by David McCollough, a respected historian. He didn’t say the story was true, but indicated that it might be. Judith Rossner was interviewed and explained that she believed the story but, although she found some corroborating evidence in town records, she couldn’t nail it down positively. Consequently, she wrote “Emmeline” as a novel. Just after the copyright page and before the novel’s dedication, Rossner wrote: “Nettie Mitchell told me about Emmeline. Nettie is ninety-four years old and still lives in Fayette. She knew Emmeline when she herself was a child and Emmeline was an old woman.” Nettie is interviewed in “Sins of Our Mothers,” and believed the story to be true. She died March 8, 1981.
By all accounts, Emmeline was ostracized by the townspeople of Fayette at the time, even though she hadn’t known the man was her son when she married him. She lived out the rest of her poverty-stricken life in a tiny cabin at the shore of Mosher Pond on the Chesterville Ridge Road. It’s more of a swamp actually, as I found when I visited there last April. No trace of her cabin is left now, but I wanted to visit the site. I also wanted to know if the ordinary people living in the area now were aware of this interesting story from their town’s history, and, if they were, did they believe it?
Most of the people I spoke to in the stores of Fayette or nearby Chesterville and in the town office had never heard of Emmeline, and that did not surprise me. Traveling around Maine and New Hampshire, I find that residents tend not to know much about the history of their town. They know what happened last week or last year, but don’t know much about what happened before they were born.
They like to hear the stories, though, when I tell them why I’m visiting. One young woman working in Caroline’s Corner Store in nearby Chesterville said Bachelder was her last name, but she’d never heard of Emmeline Bachelder.
I stopped to speak to a man raking beside the road in Fayette. He didn’t know Emmeline, but said his elderly mother would, and she was inside. Sure enough, the old woman (who asked that I not identify her in this column) knew Nettie Mitchell, the woman referred to in Rossner’s book. She also believed the story. So, there I was talking to a woman who had talked to a woman (Nettie Mitchell) who had talked to Emmeline herself. Considering history this way makes events two centuries old seem less distant.
Fayette hasn’t changed much from what was depicted in “The American Experience” episode. The old store in still old. People there, who were very friendly and willing to help, referred me to the town’s librarian, Suzanne Rich. “If anybody knows about Emmeline, it would be Suzanne,” I was told, and it was so. Suzanne knew everything I did and more. When I asked if she believed the story, she shrugged and said, “Who knows? It could be true.”
Tom McLaughlin, a teacher and columnist, lives in Lovell. His e-mail address is tommclaughlin@pivot.net.
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