Announcer Funding for "Josiah Allen's Wife: The Story of Marietta Holley" is provided in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program, administered in Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence Counties by the North Country Library System.

Hello.

my name is Melanie Smith Golding.

You are probably familiar with the name Mark Twain, but have you ever heard of Marietta Holley?

If you wonder why you would know Holley's name as well as Twain's, please stay with us as we recover some of the life of the woman known as "the female Mark Twain."

She was a writer who sold 10 million books.

Her fictional characters were household names in the 19th century.

As an advocate for women's rights, Holley herself was invited to speak before Congress on that issue.

How and why did this famous writer's memory become lost to us?

I have lived my life in Jefferson County and teach English at a local high school, South Jefferson CS in Adams, NY and yet never heard of her until I recently read the Biography by Dr. Kate Winter entitled, Marietta Holley, Life with Josiah Allen's Wife.

When I finished this book I asked myself, Marietta, why don't I know you?

I grew up 10 miles from Marietta's homestead, have driven past her home numerous times and never even heard her name.

The question is- why don't more people remember Marietta Holley?

Please stay with us as people from Marietta's hometown, church and school district tell you the reasons why we should know her.

[MUSIC] Narrator: John Milton Holley and Mary Taber-Holley settled near Adams, New York in the 1820's.

At the time, the area was mostly wilderness.

Wolves, panthers, and bears that roamed the region made the area dangerous and challenging.

In addition to the terrain and wild animals, the climate in Northern New York was difficult.

The warmer waters of nearby Lake Ontario would mix with the colder winter air to inundate the area with extremely large amounts of snowfall.

In the summer, fierce thunderstorms would crash in off the lake.

But the land proved to be good farmland, and the Holleys took on the hard work of turning the wilderness into a farming community.

The Holleys built a small cottage near what is now U.S. Route 11, between the towns of Adams and Pierrepont Manor.

Pierrepont Manor at the time was known as Bear Creek because of the large number of bears around; the name was changed in 1822 to Pierrepont Manor.

The town of Adams, named for President John Adams, was settled around 1800 by hardy frontier people, many of whom had fought in the War of Independence and would later take up arms in the War of 1812.

Poor transportation along the plank and dirt roads which were often mud made Adams and each of the small villages and hamlets independently thriving places, boasting carriage shops, mills, and stores.

Early industries included tanneries, furniture factories, and distilleries.

The county bred and birthed such notables as Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System, and J.

Sterling Morton, the founder of Arbor Day.

Marietta Holley was born in her parents' house near Adams, New York, on July 16, 1836, the youngest of seven children.

Her mother had been in poor health, and the doctors of the time thought childbirth would be good for her.

Of course, the opposite proved true, and she nearly died giving birth to Marietta.

The oldest daughter, Angelina, was given instructions to take the baby and raise it as her own should her mother not survive the birth.

Dr. Kate Winters: "So into the Holley family came this ittle bundle, and unfortunately, the child herself wasn't very healthy.

She had a lot of upper respiratory problems, she didn't walk until she was almost two years old, and most significantly, I think, she was extremely timid and never wanted to be around anyone, particularly, except her mother, and would literally cling to her mother's skirts, and that aspect of her character seems to have been born into her because she never, as an adult, liked society that was close or liked great intimacy with other people.

She did have very good friends but there was always a need in her to be separate to some degree and be private.

And I think that unwillingness to be in intimate contact with other humans was an important element for her.

At the same time, it gave her a lot of interspace and she could listen, she could observe, she could pay attention to what the people around her were saying, the stories they were telling, and get all of that so she could reuse it in her fiction later on.

And I think that the solitude, the unwillingness to be close to other people, not to say she was stand-offish, but just that she didn't fall into intimacy quickly, was all part of her birth pattern."

Melanie: The Holley family was extremely poor and lived a spartan existence in a red farmhouse that once stood near here.

Neighbors were few and far between.

Days and evenings were filled with the hard work of running a very rural family farm.

No one in the family was ever idle.

Narrator: Marietta's 3 brothers left in the 1850's to work the gold fields in California.

It was up to Marietta to take care of her aging parents and her reclusive sister Sylphina.

In 1861, Marietta's father died and she soon became the manager of the family farm and household, taking care of the marketing, selling, and bartering of the goods they produced.

She was proud of her butter, her knitting, and her chickens.

The Civil War had stripped the region of able-bodied men, so she was able to keep only a boy for help with chores.

To supplement the farm income, she also gave piano lessons, one of the few acceptable occupations for a woman of the time.

From early childhood, Marietta was interested in poetry and writing.

She would scribble verses and the beginnings of little stories down on pieces of wallpaper, old books, old ledgers, anything she could find because good paper was scarce.

After the death of her father, she became serious about her writing and worked at being a poet.

She always believed that her poetry was her finest work, even when her novels became best-sellers.

Dr. Kate Winter: "Some people agreed with her, but her poetry, from our perspective now, it's very sentimental, it rhymes, it jogs along, some of it is interesting autobiographically, and it's fascinating that her first published work was all poetry, but she hadn't really found her voice yet.

She was still writing the sentimental kind of verse that popular women writers were writing in that period, that the magazines were publishing."

Narrator: In the 1860's, a man named Jay Allen was publishing the Adams Journal, and Marietta sent some of her poetry to the paper to see if he would publish it.

Women writers of the period often used pseudonyms to keep their public and private lives separate and to create a marketable persona.

Marietta's first poems were published under the name Jemyma.

Dr. Kate Winter: "So she brought the paper home and showed the family, including her Uncle David, who was a great literary character in the family, and they were raving about these two poems that she had published and so she finally told them that she was Jemima.

Some people had difficulty believing that, but after a while, and under the insistence of her mother, because her mother was her greatest fan, she began to get some acclaim for the poetry she wrote.

So she continued to do that for about a decade and gradually introduced short sketches written mostly in vernacular using the local North Country dialect and then some in what she called 'good English,' the standard gentile parlor English and she got a couple of those published in the serial magazines that were coming out at the time.

In 1870, which was just about the height of dialect comedy and dialect literary humor, she had three pieces she particularly liked and decided that she would send them to Mark Twain's publisher, Elijah Bliss, so she sent a poem, one of her dialect stories, and a story in good English.

She asked Elijah Bliss if he wanted her to write a book for him.

Which to me seems like an outrageous question for her to ask but she did.

And he wrote back, 'Yes I do, I want you to get started immediately.'

And unfortunately what he wanted from her was a book of stories in the dialect.

So she was very disappointed and got in touch with him again, and said, 'well, I would really prefer to write in good English' and he responded, 'no, I want a book in the voice of Samantha.'

So that began the Samantha stories.

She didn't tell anyone that she was writing a book on contract.

She didn't upset the family routine in any particular way to make this happen.

And a year later she sent him the manuscript.

She talks about cackling out like an old hen who's laid her eggs in a hidden place because she was so proud of herself."

Narrator: The result was "My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's" in 1873.

Published under the pseudonym Josiah Allen's Wife, the book was a huge success.

America was introduced to the character of Samantha Smith Allen.

In the fictional world of Jonesville, New York, Samantha Allen is an outspoken philosopher, the large and bustling center of the family, while her husband Josiah, with his small frame and smaller mind, fills the patriarchal role.

At 204 pounds, Samantha outweighs him in heft as well as intellect.

Women's fiction in that period relied on a single plot: a young woman is orphaned in some dramatic way, but instead of becoming a spinster on the fringe of the social sphere, she finds a way to make a living for herself doing some suitable work like teaching or being a seamstress.

Her reward for remaining virtuous and hard working is an eventual marriage to a suitable man, not because she must marry but because she chooses to.

Samantha does not quite fit this pattern, however.

Her stories pick up this plot after the romance has faded.

She is not a single woman; she is a matron who has been married for 14 years.

Josiah is weak, wrong-headed and lazy, far from the perfect husband, and Samantha often says, "I love him, though I know not why!"

Josiah has two children from his first marriage, a boy and a girl, and as Samantha raises them as her own children, she compares how women and men are valued and educated.

In Samantha, Marietta created a character who would talk about women's rights and women's lives, particularly in rural districts where life was very hard.

To defuse resistance to her radical ideas, Samantha had to be a woman who wasn't a rabid suffragist.

As a woman who could laugh at herself as well as her husband, Josiah Allen's Wife was accepted as a moderate thinker by the reading public.

[Josiah's Voice] [Samantha's voice] [Samantha's voice] Narrator: The character of Betsey Bobbet, was on the other hand, a man-hungry spinster whose only goal in life was to land a husband.

Betsey is skinny, with buckteeth, false hair, a bad complexion, and no chin.

Dr. Kate Winter: "To put it the way Samantha put it, 'she ain't handsome.'

And I think this character, Betsey Bobbet, who wants to marry anybody and wants to be the clinging vine to some oak of a man, is another wonderful reflection of the weakness that Holley perceived in the traditional role of the gentile female who is raised to do nothing except teach school or give musical lessons or become a painter who dabbles in art until she gets married.

You could do any of those things, but the ultimate goal was to get married.

And so Betsey Bobbet is on that quest.

Unfortunately Betsey Bobbet became more of a cultural icon for a while than Samantha did.

There were Betsey Bobbet clubs all around the country where people would get together and take parts and read the roles and read the books aloud to one another in the evening."

Narrator: In My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's , Samantha and Josiah leave Jonesville, which is much like Adams, New York, and go on a tour to New York City.

Specifically, Samantha wants to meet politician Horace Greeley, who is running for President.

Samantha says that she and Horace Greeley differ in their opinions on three things: 'boiled vittles, cream biscuits, and women's rights.'

In opposition to Samantha, Betsey Bobbet also gets the opportunity to speak with Horace Greeley.

[Voice of Betsey Bobbet] [Voice of Betsey Bobbet] Melanie: After the success of My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's , Holley took four years to produce her next book, claiming that she had already put everything she knew into the first one.

Publisher Elijah Bliss insisted and encouraged her until Samantha and Josiah made a trip to the nation's Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia.

Narrator: Thus Holley continued the pattern in most of the Samantha fiction: she and Josiah leave Jonesville and go on a tour to some well-known city or resort.

Because of that pattern, Holley's works are sometimes classified as travel books, but the deeper story lies in the encounters that Samantha has along the way with people who are more well-read, more cultured, and more sophisticated than she is.

Much of the comedy comes from these encounters and often the point is that the values rural Americans have are simple, sound, essential American values, and that all Americans should have equal rights under the law -- male, female, rich, poor, educated or not.

Dr. Kate Winter: "She tells us what life was like in a much simpler time when people could stay connected better, connected to their core values and connected to their land, and connected to their government.

Samantha is always wandering around buttonholing some politician; she assaults Ulysses S. Grant in Chicago to talk to him about the government, and she was furious with him for putting Elizabeth Cady Stanton in jail for trying to vote, and so this idea that politicians are just around the corner and that you have access to them is something that we've lost as Americans and I think that's another important reason why we should hang on to her work and why she shouldn't be forgotten, even though she is."

Narrator: Holley staunchly supported the temperance movement.

In the 19th century, with few rights, women were at the mercy of their husbands, and a husband with a drinking problem could leave a family destitute.

Holley was a steadfast believer in women's rights, committed to the idea that women voting could end the evils of alcohol.

In My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet's, Holley had written a scene describing a meeting between Samantha and suffragist Susan B. Anthony.

Samantha describes Anthony as "smart and sensible lookin', but she was some like me, she won't never be hung for her beauty."

In a scene that anticipated fact, these two very different women agreed on the need for women to have the vote.

Susan B. Anthony came to Jefferson County in 1880 and Marietta Holley attended her lecture.

Afterward, she visited Anthony in her hotel room.

The two of them talked about strategies for making women's rights, and particularly the right to vote, a more public issue and one that men weren't so resistant to.

While she never met Elizabeth Cady Stanton in person, both Stanton and Anthony frequently asked Holley to testify before the all-male Congress about how women were treated in society and the benefits of temperance.

She never went, because of her lifelong fear of speaking in public.

Instead, she let Samantha, who is never silenced or timid, do the talking for her.

Although they insist on women's rights, her books were popular with women and men.

Dr. Kate Winter: "And the reason is, I think, that Samantha herself has quirks and she's a little bit eccentric in various ways.

Primarily, she's so good to Josiah and he is such a fool that both male and female readers think she's so generous with him and so patient with him, that that makes her a more loveable, well-rounded character."

Melanie: Another reason for the Samantha books' popularity with men was Holley's skill with humor.

Using the style of the popular dialect humorists like Mark Twain, she poked fun at both men and women.

[Samantha's voice] [Samantha's voice] Narrator: Because she wrote under the pseudonym "Josiah Allen's Wife," and refused public appearances, Marietta herself was often mistaken for Samantha.

Mark Twain himself once called her by that name.

Dr. Kate Winter: "This confusion between Marietta Holley, the person, the writer, and Samantha and Betsey Bobbet came about I think partly because Holley kept to herself so dramatically that there were lots of opportunity for there to be rumor, confusion, speculation about who she really was.

In fact, she didn't look like Samantha, except in one way.

They both had noses she called "Roman" noses, but Samantha is a large, bustling country wife and Marietta Holley was a very quiet, very lady-like, very demure young woman.

Betsey Bobbet was a spinster, as Holley was, Betsey Bobbet is a poet, as Holley was, but Betsey Bobbet is the worst that could happen to a young woman if she follows the culture and what it tells her about who she is and what she is permitted to do."

Narrator: Holley's dearest friend was Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.

The two met while they were vacationing in the Thousand Islands of New York.

Though she had many friends, Marietta had been closer to her mother than anyone, and her mother's death in 1877 was a great sorrow.

The friendship with Barton, who was older than she, helped fill the gap in her life left open by the loss of her mother.

Both were proud patriots and women accustomed to fame.

Clara liked to travel and would often invite Marietta to go on tours with her.

Melanie: While Samantha traveled the world, her creator was afraid to travel.

She hardly left Jefferson County until she was 45 years old.

She was fearful of going anywhere alone and being far from home and hearth.

That changed when the president of Claverack College on the Hudson River showed up on her doorstep asking her to address his students.

Because he accompanied her, he got her onto the train and took her well out of Jefferson County for the first time in her life.

She discovered to her surprise that she could almost enjoy traveling.

From then on, she annually visited friends in New York City, Washington D.C., and other destinations in the Northeast.

Narrator: In 1885, Marietta made her first trip to Saratoga Springs, New York, the famous spa and racing city.

Though she stayed clear of the horse-race track because it involved betting, and as a Baptist, that was against her beliefs, she took in the sights and carefully observed other tourists.

The Spa City fascinated her.

She and a friend would take long walks through the city, visiting the springs and exploring side streets, downtown, and the park.

There were garden parties, socials in the park, music, and delicate foods.

When she returned home, she wrote Samantha at Saratoga, subtitled "Flirting With Fashion."

This was her best-seller, taking her readers along on a tour of the Spa City while mocking the shortcomings of genteel society and wealth.

The book outsold all others except the Holy Bible that year.

Dr. Kate Winter: "She made people laugh at her characters and laugh at the absurdities of the things that people in America in that period were clinging to.

Like, the gentile life of women, this fantasy life that very few women in America in that age attained, which was having the right clothes and new styles every season, aping the kinds of clothing and the styles that were being worn n Europe, and there was always this joke about people coming back from Europe with the latest fashions and immediately seamstresses out here in the country trying to copy those details so that the women out here would have clothes that were up to fashion.

One of the things Holley did was make fun of that in wonderful ways, so that this image of having a servant, having a parlor, serving teas, giving donation parties for the minister, singing in the choir and being part of a church family, all of those things were things that she could use to point out how there were these dramatic inequalities between the lives of men and the lives of women.

And from her perspective, the way to solve that was to, first, outlaw alcohol and then to get women the vote.

And she often speaks in her books about women being treated like lunatics and children, and she's pretty much right."

Narrator: Called 'the female Mark Twain,' Marietta Holley was often compared to him.

Both wrote in local dialect rather than standard English, and they shared the same publisher, Elijah Bliss, and illustrator, True Williams, and both critiqued American society while upholding democratic ideals.

Dr. Kate Winter: "Although Marietta Holley is often compared to Mark Twain, I don't think that he really liked the comparison.

He made no comment about her first book and in reviewing her second book he said, 'It's brilliant, far better than the first.'

So it seems that he recognized that she was competing in the same field with him, although her agenda was very different, and he may have felt that she was in some way demeaning the genre of literary humor."

♪ When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more ♪ Narrator: Like most rural families of the time, the Holley family was very religious.

Marietta's father joined the Unitarians, while the rest of the family remained in the Episcopal Church.

In 1853, when she was 17, Marietta left her family's church and joined with the Adams Village Baptists.

♪ When the roll is called up yonder ♪ ♪ When the roll is called up yonder ... ♪ ♪ When the roll is called up yonder I'll be there.

♪ "It was here and her experience here, why she joined here, and what she experienced after she joined here, that helped shape the voice that she used in the books that she wrote later.

Here women were allowed to talk, they were allowed to vote, they were allowed to participate, and they were allowed to really have a say in what was happening in the church.

Now, yes, there were some offices and some things that were closed off to women.

They were not yet, even here, allowed to speak in the pulpit too often about certain things, although there were some exceptions to that.

They couldn't serve as deacons yet, and they were not allowed to serve on trustees but almost everything else in the church was open and in 1853, that was not the case in almost any other congregation, Baptist or otherwise .

It took a lot of courage for Marietta at 17 to leave here father's church to come and to join the Baptist Church here, but she did that, she joined the choir, she sang in the choir the whole time she was here... She did not like inequality, she saw no reason as she studied scripture and she did other things and she lived with people that women should be second-class citizens.

And then when she came to the church, and she found that it was not necessary for a woman to sit and be silent, that a woman could be active and was accepted as an active participant and that made her life better, and the life better of people around her, she was very passionate about seeing that happen in many different ways in society and she used her books to tell people about that, to use the church and Josiah as a backdrop for Samantha to say, 'That's not right, don't forget the women, we have a voice, God loves us too, we have something to say, we have brains, you oughta learn to listen to us.'"

Narrator: Marietta would start every day by running her thumb down a page of the Bible, and wherever she stopped, she would use that verse as her guiding principle for the day.

But like the other contrasts in her life, a day that began with the Bible often ended with a Ouija board.

Spiritualism was a very popular trend in the 1880's and 1890's in Jefferson County, and the idea of talking to the spirits was very appealing to Marietta, who had by then lost so many important people in her life -- her mother, father, her beloved Uncle David, her brothers, and her sisters.

Dr. Kate Winter: "She was alone and this connection to the spirits was an attempt on her part to figure out at way to not have lost those people.

So even though it was against the church's teachings, it was something that she very badly needed to do and she became increasingly interested in spiritualism, in the Ouija board, in dream interpretation, in finding ways to connect to the other side, to the after-death experience.

So her Christian faith gave her the understanding that she didn't need to be afraid of what was going to happen after death, but the rage for spiritualism made her think that maybe she didn't have to be alone in this life, and she didn't have to wait until later to see her mother and talk to her mother again."

Narrator: When she was in Saratoga, Holley visited a fortuneteller who insisted that she must leave her father's home because the old farmhouse was dangerous and unhealthy.

Indeed, recently a hired man had fallen asleep with a candle burning and there had been a substantial fire in the upper part of the house.

The old place was plagued by dampness and mildew, and Holley struggled with upper respiratory illnesses.

She took the fortuneteller's warning as gospel and over the next year, she designed and built a new house near the old one, then had her father's house torn down.

She called her new home "Bonnie View."

It was a modest Victorian mansion, a great contrast to the farmhouses in the neighborhood, with large windows and plenty of sunlight.

She rejected the heavy upholstered furniture and drapes that were fashionable at the time, using wicker and woven furniture and lace panels at the windows.

The stained glass windows she designed used lighter colors than usual in Victorian decoration, bringing in more light.

[Music] The fireplaces were finished in Italian tile.

Upstairs she created a suite of rooms in which to write, and within view of each window were the extraordinary gardens she became known for.

The Holley place had become less and less of a farm.

The land still had its hold on Marietta, but her new association with the genteel lifestyles of her friends gave her an appreciation for the other uses which the soil could be put to.

Growing flowers meant that she had broken away from the bitter necessity of working the land.

At last she could sow and weed by choice, producing beautiful flowers rather than common sustenance.

On the south side of her house, she grew her Christmas roses that bloomed in December and January.

She would brush the snow off the roses to see and savor them.

Even in the harsh winters of Jefferson County, the roses could bloom and thrive.

She may have considered the Christmas rose as a metaphor for her own life: that she, like the rose, could prosper in the tough, demanding rural country of northern New York.

[Music] Holley provided a splendid life for herself without marrying or giving up her passion for poetry.

At Bonnie View, she had servants and hired help.

One of those was her hired man, Lew Hoxie.

He was a young jack of all trades, who served in many ways including as coachman, gardener and occasional cook.

He was also her secretary, and when she could no longer produce her manuscripts in long hand, he learned to type so that she could dictate her stories to him.

In the 1890's, Holley added a little girl named May Shaver to the family at Bonnie View.

The girl's mother and father were unable to care for her, so Holley adopted May, eventually changing her name to Marietta Holley.

The girl was a blessing and a trial to Holley who was by then too old to be the mother of a rambunctious girl.

In good weather, they would set out around the neighborhood by horse and carriage to collect the little girls who lived on nearby farms and take them back to Bonnie View for tea parties and ice cream socials.

Holley was introducing the genteel ways of proper manners and parlor talk to the farmers' daughters.

As a young woman, May needed more attention and guidance than Holley could give, and she was sent away to study with nuns.

Later she would marry and settle nearby.

Melanie: My quest to find out more about the life and works of Marietta Holley led me to some very interesting discoveries.

At the Jefferson County Historical Society in Watertown, New York, I found Marietta's writing desk on display.

And my good friend Anita Colby revealed that her husband had discovered a treasure in a barrel of discarded books.

Holley had created a scrapbook from and old farmer's yearbook.

On the cover, she had drawn her concept of what Josiah and Samantha would look like, and inside, pasted reviews of her books over the pages.

Anita Colby: "...And I think one of the amusing things is in one thing that I read that she was so conservative in saving money that if she had a piece of copy paper that was lined, she would put another line in between the two lines that were there and would write two lines that would suffice for most people.

And I laughed because by the time she put this together, she must have been doing quite well, but that frugality would not go away."

Melanie: Many copies of Marietta's novels still exist and are available through book collectors and the Internet.

19th century books were often sold by subscription.

The publisher's salesman or book agent went from door to door selling the book before it was actually printed.

Showing a sample cover and a few pages, agents sold books to families like Holley's.

Today we can find copies of her bestsellers like Samantha at Saratoga on the Internet.

Her most popular early works are more available and thus less valuable than the later ones because they were printed and reprinted, often in several editions with different degrees of elegance.

The Lament of the Mormon Wife, a short book of poetry published in 1880, is by far the rarest of Marietta's books.

Because The Lamen t criticized the Mormon faith severely, The Mormon Church bought and destroyed as many copies as possible.

No one doubted the social and political impact of a Holley book.

Holley wrote 16 Samantha novels and uncounted stories and poems, but her books are no longer in print and rarely read now.

The twentieth century saw Marietta's work decline in popularity.

Times were changing, and Marietta's work no longer seemed timely or appropriate.

Women finally had the vote.

Hollywood producers attempted to translate her books into the new medium of motion pictures, but the stories didn't fit film, partly because her humor is primarily verbal, not visual.

American culture was becoming urban, and the interest in rural stereotypes had passed.

"She didn't have any other important issue to take up, she'd already dealt with children's rights, she'd already dealt with temperance, she'd already dealt with the vote, and there was no other place for her to put that energy.

She wasn't passionate enough about any other problem to begin to write again."

Anita Colby: "Marietta Holley did vote.

She voted in 1918.

I realize that women didn't get the vote nationwide until later, but they did get it early in New York State, and she voted in Pierrepont Manor in the little church hall they had there, and continued to vote as long as her health continued."

Narrator: Marietta Holley died at Bonnie View during a March snowstorm in 1926 at nearly 90.

She left her house to the Salvation Army with the stipulation that it be turned into a safe haven for indigent women and children who had nowhere else to go.

Though there were various attempts to turn it into a women's shelter, the fine old mansion did not really lend itself well to that purpose.

Today it is a private residence, and the current owners have in many ways restored the home's original beauty and character.

Melanie: The question I began with, 'Why Don't I Know You?'

has shifted to why should we know you?

The life and work of Marietta Holley reveal a woman living creatively with contradictions: Marietta and Samantha, spinster and matron, private and public, silent and plain-speaking, poetry and prose, snow and roses.

She is buried here near her mother at the Pierrepont Manor Cemetery, formerly Bear Creek, where her father's family settled.

The monument with her name has outlasted her fame, but her stories are still powerful messages of freedom and justice.

Why should we know her?

She used her pen to fight for equal rights for all Americans.

She showed us how to laugh at human nature while insisting on its best behavior.

Her legacy is the right to vote.

Her faith in the ideals of American democracy and civil rights sustained her and her characters.

Through their voices, Holley changed America's history and its citizens' lives.

♪ MUSIC & SINGING: ♪ Oh, Marietta!

I need to find you Oh, Marietta!

I need to know you Oh, Marietta!

I need to find you Oh, Marietta!

I need to know you Oh, Marietta!

I need to find you Oh, Marietta!

I need to know you Oh, Marietta!

I need to find you Oh, Marietta!

I need to know you Oh, Marietta!

I need to find you Funding for "Josian Allen's Wife: The Story of Marietta Holley" is provided in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization program, administered in Jefferson, Lewis, and St. Lawrence Counties by the North Country Library System.