Lyddie, Chapter 1, “The Bear”: The History Behind the Story

Part of the Park Service's Lyddie Books to Parks series, from Lowell National Historical Park.

The chapter

Thirteen-year-old Lyddie Worthen lives on a small Vermont farm with her mother, younger brother Charlie and little sisters Rachel and Agnes. In November 1843 a bear, drawn by the smell of the oatmeal Lyddie is cooking, forces its way in. The family scrambles into the sleeping loft; the bear gets its head stuck in the pot's handle and crashes back out into the woods.

The children laugh, but their devout mother takes it as a sign the world is about to end. She moves to her sister and brother-in-law's farm. The children want to stay and wait for their father, who went west to make money; their mother doubts he'll return. Lyddie persuades her to let someone mind the farm, and stays. Charlie comes back two weeks later.

Through the winter they run out of bread and milk, and shoot rabbits and boil bark for soup. In spring the cow calves, bringing milk and cream, and the maples give sugar — until a letter arrives: to pay the family's debts, their mother has let the fields to a neighbor and hired Lyddie out to a tavern and Charlie to a mill (probably a sawmill).

Cooking over an open fire. Lyddie's oatmeal hung over the fire from a long handle, like these pots. Fort Scott National Historic Site, NPS.

Fact check: the end of the world

Did people in the 1840s really expect it? Yes — some did.

• The late 1700s and early 1800s saw the Second Great Awakening, a great religious revival. Church attendance soared, and social movements sought to end slavery, improve workers' conditions and ban alcohol — partly in response to fast change: booming industry, but also financial panic.
• William Miller played on that fear, preaching that he had calculated the date of the end of the world: soon. By 1844 he had 50,000 to 100,000 followers, many in New England and New York, some in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic.
• Millerites spread flyers and periodicals and held tent meetings across the country. Many were poor, and hoped the Second Coming would end their suffering; only true believers, Miller taught, would escape punishment. Some were so sure that they gave away their possessions, stopped working or stopped caring for themselves.
• Historians note that Miller began lecturing in rural New York in 1831, that his movement took off after the abolitionist Joshua Himes began promoting it in 1839, during the depression that followed the Panic of 1837, and that a brilliant comet in March 1843 was taken by some as an omen.

Broadsides like this drew people to Millerite tent meetings. William Miller, editorial, Second Advent Herald, Boston, October 16, 1844.

A Millerite paper, Signs of the Times (Boston, July 1, 1840), warned that "the wicked of the earth will be cut off by famine, pestilence, and the sword."

Fact check: going west

Did many Vermonters leave their farms for the West? Yes. In the early 1800s, some went to Michigan, Ohio and Indiana for a better life, and better roads and new canals made the trip easier than ever — the National Road (begun in 1811), the Champlain Canal (1823), linking western Vermont to the Hudson, and the Erie Canal. Between 1820 and 1830, 39 of Vermont's 245 towns lost population as young men, alone or with families, left.

Historians also point out that hard times after the Panic of 1837 pushed people both ways: some saw a sign of the end times, others a sign to head for the territories.

An 1855 Illinois Central Railroad advertisement offering over two million acres of prairie farmland in tracts of 40 acres or more. Library of Congress.

Fact check: sent out to work

Were small Vermont farmers in debt, and did they send children out to work? Often, yes.

• Many Vermont farms in the early 1800s were subsistence farms, growing just enough to feed the family. Some farmers built bigger farms producing for regional markets; small farms stayed vulnerable — one or two bad years could ruin a family.
• Farmers borrowed from wealthier neighbors, and could lose the farm if they couldn't repay. To pay, some sent older children out to work, for food and lodging, and wages for the debt or a trade to learn.
• With their father apparently gone, Lyddie and Charlie would have counted as orphans even with their mother alive. Had she not sent them out, the town might have.
• Historians describe how poor families "bound out" orphans and children to farm and household service in wealthier homes, usually until adulthood — a practice from colonial times into the mid-1800s that sometimes gave children skills and sometimes left them worse off, but mostly kept them alive, housed and working.

The diary of Erastus P. Williams, a Vermont farmer born in 1809, shows the strain. A farmhand from 15, he married and bought a farm in 1835:

"March 1836 … Truly this is a hard winter and long will it be remembered…"
"January 1842 … I almost dread to settle with anyone for I owe almost every body but I hope some time or other, to pay up all my debts…"

Photos

The bear that broke Lyddie's door was a black bear like this one. Found throughout Vermont, black bears usually try to keep away from people. Image from the Park Service page.

More

• Voices from the field: black bear behavior, with a Massachusetts black bear biologist.
• Video: life on a New England farm, with an interpreter from Old Sturbridge Village.
• See it yourself: Vermont history at the Shelburne Museum; New England wildlife at the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center in Holderness, New Hampshire; Vermont farm life at Billings Farm and Museum in Woodstock, Vermont.

Questions to write about

• Opinion: how did Lyddie feel about her mother's belief that the world was ending? Support your answer with facts and details.
• Explain: how did Lyddie and Charlie get through the winter without their mother?
• Narrative: you're a young person on a farm in 1843 and a bear breaks down your door and eats your only food. What happens next? Use concrete, sensory details.

Next: Chapter 2, "Kindly Friends".

Sources

Based on "Lyddie: Chapter 01 — The Bear," Lyddie — Books to Parks, Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. It cites William Miller's 1844 editorial (Adventist Digital Library), Signs of the Times (1840), an Illinois Central Railroad advertisement (1855, Library of Congress), Erastus P. Williams's diary (Vermont Historical Society), and histories by Gary Scharnhorst, John Bicknell, Sarah Rooker, Jack Larkin, and Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, which this page summarizes rather than quotes. A personal photograph of a cabin and a portrait are not reproduced. The source calls the New Hampshire center "Squam Lake"; its name is Squam Lakes Natural Science Center.