The Lockdown Chronicles 7: Sarah

Click on the image below to read the comic strip in full size. Sources and references on this post under the comic strip below.

 

Sarah Bishop was a hermit who lived in a cave on West Mountain, straddling Ridgefield, Connecticut and North Salem, New York, during the Revolutionary War. A newspaper report from 1828 indicates that she “was often heard to say that she dreaded no animal on earth but man. Disgusted with men, and consequently with the world, about twenty three years ago [ca. 1781] she withdrew herself from all human society, and in the bloom of life, resorted to the mountains which divide Salem from North Salem, near New York, where she has spent her days in a cave or rather cleft of the rock.”  She lived there until her death in 1810. [Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library]

Text adapted from: Beach, W. (1828) “Sarah Bishop: American Hermitess”. The Telescope, Saturday, May 3, 1828. No. 49. Via the Sarah Bishop Bushwhack web site.

Source image: Sarah Bishop’s Cave photographed by Marie Kendall, .ca 1900, gelatin silver print on cardboard. Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library collection. Object number 2000.178.180.

References

Beach, W. (1828). “Sarah Bishop: American Hermitess”. The Telescope, Saturday, May 3, 1828. No. 49. Via the Sarah Bishop Bushwhack web site, available at https://www.sarahbishop.org/about-sarah-bishop/about-sarah-bishop-2/ [Accessed 16 April 2020].

Sarah Bishop’s Cave, Photographed by Marie Kendall .ca 1900 (American, 1854 – 1943). Connecticut Historical Society Museum & Library collection. Object number 2000.178.180.  Available from http://emuseum.chs.org/emuseum/collections [Accessed 16 April 2020].

Odone, J. (2016). The Cave-Dwelling Hermitess of Colonial America. A graphic history of Sarah Bishop’s unusual life near the Connecticut-New York border. AtlasObscura, 27 December 2016. Available from: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-cavedwelling-hermitess-of-colonial-america [Accessed 16 April 2020].

—

The Lockdown Chronicles is a series of periodical comic strips made at night (in candlelight!) adapting and reusing openly-licensed or public domain items from online digital collections. Publication and tweetage are scheduled in advance. Historical sources are adapted and updated for the current pandemic; please refer to each strip’s references on each post for further context.  Catch up with the series at https://epriego.blog/tag/the-lockdown-chronicles/.