Queer Places:
Barrett House, 79 Main St, New Ipswich, NH 03071
Central Cemetery
New Ipswich, Hillsborough County, New Hampshire, USA
Sarah Jane "Jenny" Wollstonecraft Bullard (1828 - October 13, 1904) was born in Boston to Mary Ann Barrett and Silas Bullard. Mary Ann Barrett was the daughter of Charles Barrett, Jr., of New Ipswich, N.H., who was an ally and an agent of Sarah Garrison Wollstonecraft in the abduction of her daughter, Jane Nelson Wollstonecraft, in 1818. Sarah Jane’s father, Silas Bullard, was a Boston merchant and an industrial partner of Charles Barrett, Jr., in a series of mills at or near New Ipswich early in the nineteenth century. The Bullards were an important, if non-elite, New England family from the early days of the puritan “Great Migration” to the New World in the 1630s. He was a member of a branch of his family that migrated north from the family core at Dedham, Massachusetts to New Ipswich early in the eighteenth century.
Mary Ann, a late adolescent, and several of her girlfriends, befriended Jane when she entered the household of Rev. Richard Hall in 1818. They apparently served as lookouts or decoys who got Jane far enough away from his house for the abduction to succeed that August. In newspaper debates over the episode, supporters of Barrett and of Jane’s birth mother printed purported letters from her—by then living in New York State—to Mary Ann, thanking her for her assistance in escaping from Rev. Hall, and implying continued friendship between the two. (It should be noted that supporters of Nancy Wollstonecraft, the de facto, if absentee, “evil step-mother” in this scenario, published purported letters from Jane to precisely the opposite effect.)
In 1820, Mary Ann married her father’s partner, Silas Bullard. They had four children during the next eight years, the last of whom was Sarah Jane “Jenny” Wollstonecraft Bullard. It is hard not to conclude that her names memorialized an event still resonating powerfully in Mary Ann’s emotional consciousness a decade later. Another daughter from this marriage, Mary Bullard, was a member of the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts, who in 1851 married John S. Dwight, a prominent transcendentalist teacher and musical scholar/editor.
Little is known about the early and middle years of Jenny’s life (or any of it, really). Silas Bullard died in 1835 and his widow married Alfred C. Hersey, a Boston businessman, in 1838. The U.S. Census catches Jenny in abstract slices once every decade from 1850. In that year Mary Bullard, still unmarried, and “Sarah J. Bullard,” lived in Boston with their mother and step-father. In 1860 John and Mary Bullard Dwight lived in Boston, housing her sister Jennie Bullard, along with a woman music teacher and a domestic servant. Mary Dwight died in September of that year while her husband traveled in Europe. By 1870, Jennie Bullard was living in her mother’s hometown in New Ipswich, listed singly as keeping house there. The Herseys lived until 1875 for Mary, and until 1888 for Alfred, probably still in Boston. Jennie may have kept house in New Ipswich at their summer residence, an increasingly popular amenity or asset class for Boston’s affluent elite inhabitants after the Civil War. She probably resided in the house of her late great grandfather, Charles Barret, Sr. who built the huge mansion next door, to which Jane N. Wollstonecraft had been brought, kicking and screaming by some accounts, in 1818, as a wedding present for Charles Jr and his new bride.
In 1880 Jane W. Bullard was again listed as heading a household in New Ipswich, now with two middle-aged female boarders, Mary F. Dean and Mary E. Miller, and an Irish servant. Neither of the boarders was identified by her occupation, if they had any. This ambiguity is bolstered by the fact that Massachusetts’s federal census records for 1890 were destroyed in a fire. In 1900 Jennie W. Bullard was still listed as residing in New Ipswich, now with Mary Dean but not Mary Miller. There was a new and younger resident, Laura N. Barr, who was related to Jenny.
Jenny’s first cousin, Enoch P. Bullard, was born in Boston and he grew up in Concord and Littleton, New Hampshire. He worked in dry goods and in private merchant banking in Boston. In 1857 he moved to New York City to marry Laura Jane Curtis, a feminist and abolitionist writer and editor who mixed literary production with suffragist and other women’s rights political work. He was an executive in a wholesale drug company that grew out of the Curtis’s family’s involvement with the distribution of patent medicines.
Jenny died in New Ipswich in 1904. Her probate executor and heir was her housemate and step-second cousin, Laura Maria Barr. She was a feminist, a suffragist, an activist, and an agent of change. She lived in the Old Barrett Place (at least during summers), as unmarried and as unconventional as Jenny had been for much of the rest of her life, which ended in 1949.
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