Sophia Bradley McGilvary and Sarah Blachly Bradley: Notes Towards a Family Biography

Herb Swanson

Introduction

One of the joys of historical research is how one thing leads to another, so that slowly over the course of days and weeks of research one begins to understand things that at first did not make sense. During the summer of 2003, I spent a delightful seven weeks (thanks to a small grant from the Luce Foundation), partly in visiting family, but primarily ensconced in the libraries of Berea College and Yale University tracking down data for a dozen different research topics. In particular, I was following up leads on the life of Sarah Blachly Bradley (1817-1893), a minor character in the history of Protestant missions in Siam who turns out to have been a quite remarkable individual. She is known in the missionary records, generally, as "the second Mrs. Bradley," the second wife, that is, of Dr. Dan Beach Bradley, the single-most Protestant missionary to serve in Siam during the nineteenth century. How I became interested in Sarah Bradley and what I have learned about her is the subject of this article; I ran out of research time in the States before I ran out of questions, and another summer in the United States may well turn up further data. However, before going on with that research, I would like to use this opportunity to "get down" what I know so far and share that knowledge with the readers of HeRB. As usual, citations are included in the text and the details for each source can be found in the list of sources at the end of the article.

Sophia & Sarah

My research on Sarah Bradley actually began with her stepdaughter, Sophia Bradley McGilvary (1839-1923), one of the key figures in the early history of the Laos Mission. I hope to "get going" again on my long-delayed history of northern Thai Christianity, and when I do it will be important to have on hand as much information as possible on the women members of the Laos Mission. Those women, especially the married women, pose a major challenge to the historian because there is so little readily available and obviously relevant data about them. Sophia McGilvary was the first woman missionary to serve in northern Siam; the daughter of missionary

Beyond her particular contributions, moreover, Sophia is important for another reason. When she became a Presbyterian missionary in 1861, the Presbyterian Church was still divided into two separate denominations usually known as the Old School and New School churches. These two factions parted ways in a bitter split that took place in 1837, and each claimed that it was the "real" Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). As their names suggest, the Old School was the more conservative, traditionally Calvinistic of the two sides. Old School Presbyterians were suspicious of theological innovation and, to a degree, of inter-denominational cooperation. The New School tended, on the other hand, to be more open to theological change and its members were quite willing to cooperate ecumenically with other denominations, especially New England Congregationalism. The Old School generally looked on emotional forms of revivalism with disfavor, while the New School was associated with the more enthusiastic "new measures" revivalism. The split was an acrimonious one, involving apparently underhanded political gamesmanship as well as theological dissension. Over the course of the years, however, the denominational crises of the 1830s grew increasingly less significant, and in 1869 the two separate churches reunited to form one PCUSA again.

The Siam Mission, which Sophia McGilvary joined in 1861, was an Old School mission, and the Laos Mission that she and her husband Daniel founded in 1867 was also, if only briefly, an Old School mission. Daniel McGilvary's

The problem is that it is very difficult to find answers to these questions concerning Sophia's theological orientation directly from the historical record of the Laos Mission itself. While both her father and husband have left us with a copious historical record, including Bradley's famous diaries and McGilvary's equally well-known autobiography, nothing has come down to us from Sophia but a paltry few letters. She did not write articles or correspond with the Board. She did, evidently, write family letters, but few of those are available, and we have to assume that most of the rest are lost forever. A full telling of Sophia's tale, in light of this dearth of data, thus requires a search for further information about Sophia's life before she became a missionary. It was that search that led me to Sarah Blachly Bradley.

I was looking, in particular, for was information about Sophia Bradley's childhood and her educational background that might provide some clues as to her later role in the Laos Mission. How was she raised? What was she taught about the Christian faith as a child and teenager? Where did she go to school? My search for answers to these questions almost immediately led me to discover Sophia's stepmother, Sarah Blachly Bradley. It turns out that Sophia's mother, Emilie Royce

Donald Lord's biography of Sophia's father, Dan Beach Bradley provides one important entry point into Sophia's life. As described by Lord, Sophia Bradley's education can be divided into four distinct phases. During the first phase, she was raised and educated by her mother, Emelie Royce Bradley, who according to the biographical notes of Paul Eakin was educated at the Clinton Female Seminary in Clinton New York. Three of her aunts ran the school, and at age 15 she became an assistant teacher, a position she held until she was 19, when she moved to Manlius, New York, to become the "preceptress" of a female seminary. That is to say that Emelie Bradley was herself an unusually well-educated woman for her day and age and had at least five years teaching experience before she began to home school Sophia, her second daughter. Lord, who has also written a brief article about Emelie, obviously has a very high regard for her, and she surely was a loving, competent mother for Sophia and her siblings. Emilie Bradley died, however, on 8 August 1845, when Sophia was still five years old. At that point her life and education entered its second phase, during which her father tutored her himself, this phase lasting until February 1847, when Bradley and his three living children arrived in Oberlin, Ohio. He left the children there with friends to attend school while he traveled to various places in the United States, and it was at this point that Sophia, age 7, started in the third phase of her young life. Her stay at Oberlin was the only time in her life that she received her education in a regular classroom situation. In July 1848, however, Sophia's older sister, Emilie, died, and her father rushed back to Oberlin, at which time he learned of a woman, Sarah Blachly of Dane, Wisconsin, who wanted to marry a missionary. After a courtship conducted by mail and a hasty arduous trip to the backwoods of northern Wisconsin, Bradley married Sarah in Dane in November 1848. From that point onwards, Sarah raised Sophia and her brother Cornelius; Sophia was just nine years old when she entered this final phase of her life and education before her marriage to McGilvary. Sarah had five children of her own with Bradley, and Lord writes that she "…prepared all seven for advanced study in a day when college admission called for a knowledge of Latin and Greek. Not handicapped by the limitations of her residence in Thailand, she also gave her children a foundation in Hebrew as well." (Page 131).

It is clear from Lord's sparse data on Sophia that Sarah Blachly Bradley was a highly important person so far as Sophia's educational and religious training are concerned. It is also evident, that Lord has as high a regard for Sarah Blachly as he had for Emelie Royce. He writes, "Sarah Blachly Bradley was a fiery woman who accepted her role in life much as Bradley had his. For twenty years after her husband's death, she managed the press and continued his missionary work. Eventually, Sarah's status in Thailand nearly equaled Bradley's." (Lord, Mo Bradley, 206). What impact did this fiery, competent, and socially influential woman have on Sophia? What theological background and orientation did Sarah bring to Sophia's education?

Trying to find answers to these questions confronts the researcher with a situation even more frustrating than Sophia's. If we are to understand how Sarah Blachly Bradley raised Sophia, we have to study Sarah's own personal history before her sudden marriage to Bradley. But where Sophia was born in the very midst of Thai missionary history, as it were, and some information about her is accessible through the ordinary archival and secondary sources of the field, Sarah Bradley was born, raised, and educated far beyond the pale of Thailand missionary records. In the records of the Laos Mission, in particular, she is a shadowy figure known only as "Dearest Mother" in a few letters written by Daniel or Sophia McGilvary to her. Lord's biography of Bradley provides very little background information about her other than she graduated from the Oberlin Collegiate Institute (later Oberlin College) and was from Dane, Wisconsin (Lord, Mo Bradley, 130). Bertha McFarland provides a somewhat fuller description of Sarah Bradley without resolving any of the questions about her background. McFarland states that she was a graduate of Oberlin College and a woman of "unusual intellectual attainment," who was clever and competent. McFarland also relates in a very long end note how Sarah provided her step-children and children with a very intense education that involved both a great deal of Bible memorization and knowledge of the larger world. (McFarland, McFarland of Siam, 28, 290).

Asides from impressions and character sketches, Lord and McFarland do not give us with much to go on in terms of actual information. Sarah Blachly went to

The Chase Begins in Berea

Logically, I should have investigated Sarah's connection with Dane, Wisconsin, first as it appeared (incorrectly) that she was originally from Dane. I began my research, however, at the Berea College library, which not surprisingly had a great deal more on Oberlin than on Dane.

One item that quickly came to hand was an entry in Oberlin College's Seventy-Fifth Anniversary General Catalogue, which reads:

Blachly, Sarah (Mrs. D. B. Bradley); enr. '41-'45 coll.; fr. Wethersfield, O.; d. Bangkok, Siam, Aug., 16, '93; A.B., Oberlin, '45. (p. 89).

The first thing notable about this entry is that Sarah is listed as being not from Wisconsin, but from a place called "Wethersfield" in Ohio. Obviously, things were going to be more complicated than I had expected, although if I had remembered that there was no such place as "Wisconsin" when Sarah was born in 1817, I would have anticipated a more complicated scenario. Dane, Wisconsin, did not even come into official being until only a few months before she was married! As it turns out, this entry misspells "Wethersfield." The correct spelling is Weathersfield, a typographical error that later wasted some of my time in the a frustrating search for a place that never existed.

The second significant piece of information contained in this entry is the fact that Sarah Blachly received her B.A. degree from Oberlin College in 1845. Both McFarland and Lord mention that Sarah "graduated" from Oberlin, but it was not clear that this meant that she actually received a bachelor's degree, the same as any male student. One could all but count on one hand or two the number of women in the United States in the 1840s who graduated from a regularly established college rather than a "female seminary." Oberlin was virtually unique in the fact that it admitted both women and African Americans to its regular degree program. The word "remarkable" constantly comes to mind in the unfolding story of Sarah Blachly, with cause. She brought to the Bradley family an exceptional educational attainment that, according to McFarland above, she passed on to her stepchildren as well as her

A third important fact contained in this entry is the dates she attended Oberlin, that is in the early 1840s. Hutchins Library at Berea provided several helpful secondary sources on the history of Oberlin College and the life of Charles G. Finney, which showed that Oberlin, both the college and the town, was an intensely religious place during the 1840s. Finney was the president of a college that had a sincerely evangelical faculty and deeply committed student body; the college in those days experienced frequent spells of revivalistic renewal. Sarah must have studied under Finney as well as other well-known Finneyite supporters on the Oberlin faculty, and it is evident that Sarah participated in central currents of Finneyite revivalism. It is clear, especially from McFarland, that she brought that same intensity of religious commitment to her stepdaughter's education and upbringing. That is to say, that Sophia Bradley's stepmother, Sarah, shared the same general theological and revivalistic orientation as Sophia's father. Whatever she herself believed, she was raised in a decidedly New School environment quite different from the majority of her future Presbyterian missionary colleagues.

Although I looked through several other sources on Oberlin while at Berea, I found nothing further relevant to Sarah Blachly, except for the following brief notice of her marriage to Bradley in the Oberlin Evangelist for 22 November 1848 (v. 10, No. 22). That notice contains the added information that she was the daughter of Miller Blachly and states, "Mrs. Bradley is one of the few ladies of our country who have received the first Degree in the Arts from a literary institution. She is a lady of excellent spirit and talents, and is doubtless the first foreign missionary from our new State." (p. 175) This notice helps to confirm the image of Sarah Blachly as an unusual, competent individual. It also proved very helpful in my further research to know her father's name.

Continuing the Chase in New Haven

It was this picture and few snippets of information that I took with me from Berea to New Haven and the several libraries of Yale University. Having accessed the Yale University online catalog from Berea, I knew that Yale had (unexpectedly) several histories of Dane County, Wisconsin; and virtually the first thing I did at Yale was to put in a request for several of those histories. Instead of being on the shelf of one library or another, those seldom used nineteenth-century tomes were being held captive in a mysterious facility known by the ominous acronym of "LSF" (Long Storage Facility), Yale's internment camp for old books that are n ot rare, just old. Twenty-four hours later, I opened the dusty, magic pages of the History of Dane County, Wisconsin, warmed up my trusty iBook, and discovered the following facts. The town of Dane was first settled in 1845. Early settlers, according to page 885, included three Blachly families, those of Miller, Eban, and Bell Blachly. The next page, 886, adds, "The first school was held in the Luse neighborhood in 1847, Miss Sarah Blachly being the teacher." Given her educational background and the fact that virtually the only profession open to single women in the 1840s was teaching, it was not at all surprising to learn that Sarah was a pioneer teacher. I now had some other family names, although it was not clear at that point whether Eban and Bell were Sarah's uncles or brothers (they were her brothers). That same page, 886, also states, "Rev. Mr. Blachly was Pastor of the first Congregational Church, organized in 1848." Which Blachly "Rev. Mr. Blachly" is, unfortunately, not stated, but the evident family connection to Congregationalism only serves to reinforce the sense that Sophia's heritage through her stepmother was definitely not Old School Presbyterian.

Another brittle old tome entitled, Madison, Dane County and Surrounding Towns; Being a History and Guide, provides still further information. The Blachly Family, it reports, immigrated to Dane in the summer of 1846 and was part of what was locally called "the Ohio settlement," meaning that they came with a number of other families from Ohio (pages 468-469). Of the Ohio settlement the book notes,

This was a valuable acquisition to the town, and it is seldom that a settlement is made up of men and women as well qualified for pioneer life; all, men of a high moral character, and in possession of a liberal education. They wielded a powerful influence in shaping the moral sentiment of the community. (Page 469).

Two of the prominent members of the Ohio settlement in Dane were Dr. Eben Blachly and his brother, Bell. The next paragraph on page 469 relates that "In this settlement the first school district was organized, and the first school house in the town was built in 1847; Miss Sarah Blachly teaching the first term." We also learn on that same page that her marriage to Bradley was the first marriage in the community.

Things were falling into place. For one thing, the reference to Wethersfield, Ohio, in that brief Oberlin College entry about Sophia, mentioned above, began to make sense. Wisconsin was still on the fringes of the western frontier in the 1840s. The Blachlys had to have come from somewhere else, and where they came from was Ohio. They appear to have migrated to Wisconsin as part of an organized effort involving several families. Clearly, some amount of planning and preparation must have gone into this move by a group of people who were anything but the oppressed refugees of our own age. This is not to belittle in any sense the difficulties involved in moving from Ohio to Wisconsin; it was no small matter to pick up and move over 800 kilometers on the all but impassable forest tracks of the North American frontier to the backwoods of frigid Wisconsin. How long did it take them? What conditions did they meet with? Had anyone gone ahead to make preparations? How did they survive that first long winter of 1846? What motivated them to move to Wisconsin in the first place? Finally, it is evident that Sarah came from a family and a community that valued education.

While I was accumulating this information on the Blachlys from their connection to Dane, Wisconsin, I was also getting Weathersfield sorted out from Wethersfield. The problem was that Wethersfield was apparently an alternative spelling for Weathersfield so my research in various databases got "hits" on "Wethersfield, Ohio," but those hits never led anyplace. It took a helpful reference librarian and the use of a different database to break the logjam. Once broken, I could begin to gather in the Ohio strand of this story, which had been dangling since Berea.

The Yale University online catalog lists among the university's holdings a microfilm copy of the two volume History of Trumbull and Mahoning Counties. Volume two, beyond all expectation, provided a veritable mother lode of information on the Blachlys. Page 223 contains the following paragraph, which is worth quoting in full:

Aaron Bell was an early settler [in Weathersfield], but sold out to Miller Blachly. Miller Blachly settled about one mile from Niles, a little northeast of the town. He had three sons, Eben, Miller, and Bell; and three daughters, Phebe (Dunlap), Eleanor, who remained single, and Sarah (Bradley). Eben became a doctor and practiced several years in Niles and Warren. He married Minerva, only daughter of Dr. John Seely. Miller, Jr., was also a physician and practiced here. Bell married and settled in Weathersfield. All moved to Wisconsin. Miller Blachly was a very good man, but positive, and even obstinate in adhering to his opinions. He was a devoted Presbyterian and a strong temperance advocate. In early days the roads in his neighborhood were very bad, and sometimes teams stuck in the mud and could not move their loads. Mr. Blachly was usually ready to lend his team to assist over the difficult places; but when a man who was hauling a load of grain to a neighboring distillery asked for such assistance, he obtained only a very stern refusal.

Historians live for paragraphs like this one! Eben and Bell Blachly were Sarah's brothers, not uncles. She had five siblings including a brother named Miller, so her father was Miller Sr. Two of her brothers were doctors, which in Niles, Ohio, in the 1840s meant that they were members of the local social elite and two of the best-educated individuals in their community. Eben married a doctor's daughter as well, doubly confirming his local status. We already had the impression of a well-educated family, but now we also see the Blachlys as a locally prominent family.

This paragraph even provides a hint of an answer to the question of why they moved to Wisconsin. It tells us that the Blachlys were early settlers in Weathersfield Township, although we do not know yet when they moved there. Since we know from this same source that settlement in the area of the township began in 1801 and the township was formally established in 1807, it seems likely that the Blachlys had moved to Ohio before 1817, when Sarah was born. The matter is not "nailed down," but Sarah was probably born in Weathersfield, Ohio; at the very least, she surely lived there from the time she was a small child. The move to Wisconsin, in any event, was not the first time this family had picked up and moved westward to the fringes of the frontier. In fact, it appears that they came from Pennsylvania. Page 222 states of the early nineteenth-century residents of Weathersfield, "The settlers of this township nearly all came from Pennsylvania, and many of them, after several years' residence here, moved further West…" The fact that Miller Blachly, Sr. was a Presbyterian strongly supports the supposition that the Blachly family actually came from Pennsylvania, the heartland of American Presbyterianism. If the family did move to

This paragraph also gives us the important information that Sarah's father, Miller Blachly, was a Presbyterian and tells us a rather unflattering little story about him, which provides us with an insight not only into the father but also the piety of the family. Page 234 of this history adds that the Blachly family participated in the founding of the Weathersfield Presbyterian Church in 1839 and that, "Eben Blachly and Miller Blachly, Jr., were appointed to the office of ruling elders, and at the same time were ordained and installed." Reading on that same page, we learn that the Presbytery of New Lisbon founded the church.

Given what we had known previously about Sarah Blachly, it comes as a surprise that she was a Presbyterian, although her family's strong commitment to education fits with a Presbyterian background. The Presbyterians played a major role in spreading formal education across the frontier and were invariably found among the local social elite in rural and frontier American communities. What is not clear at this point is whether the Weathersfield Church was an Old School or New School congregation. The fact is an important one; if the church was founded as a New School congregation, it would further strengthen our sense that Sarah came from a New School background and brought that theology and piety to raising Sophia. If, on the other hand, it was Old School church, we are suddenly confronted with a more complex scenario in which Sarah came from a mixed theological background that included both traditional Old School and innovative Finneyite elements.

With the data at hand as described above, we can construct at least the beginnings of a time line for Sarah Blachly Bradley's life before she moved to Bangkok.

This time line summarizes where our investigation of Sarah Blachly Bradley's life before she married Bradley has taken us. "The chase," thus far, has turned up a fair amount of information that is relevant to understanding Sarah's personality, family background, and educational experiences. It confirms that she was a strong, competent, and hardy person. She came from a highly educated and locally socially prominent family and achieved the highest educational level a woman of her generation could attain. Her family, however, also exemplified the restless, mobile, migratory habits typically associated with the nineteenth-century American frontier, and Dan Bradley found his intended hidden away in November 1848 on the very edges of a chilly, trackless wilderness. She was raised in a Presbyterian family, graduated from Finney's Oberlin, and became a schoolteacher. The daughter of a rigidly pious father, her own Christian faith was such that she jumped at the chance to become a

Conclusion

One cannot help but wonder how nine year-old Sophia felt about this woman who suddenly appeared on her doorstep in Oberlin and was introduced, we assume, as her "new mother." Her own mother had been dead for over three years and Sophia's memory of her was probably growing fuzzy; but those three years had been chaotic ones for Sophia, ones that included a long trip to the United States, an extended separation from her father, a period of living among strangers in a cold and foreign place where only her siblings spoke Thai, and the death of her older sister. Now, she was in the hands of Sarah, a person of noteworthy talents and background but also a strong personality. How did they get on? How did Sarah "manage" Sophia? Was she a stern disciplinarian, as seems possible? And, what did she teach Sophia about God, the person and work of Jesus, and the Bible?

We do not have any answers to the above questions and probably never will have. In speculating about how Sarah influenced Sophia, in any event, one cannot help but consider the parallel between Sarah's setting off for distant, unknown Bangkok in 1848 and the way in which her step-daughter, Sophia, set off with her family for equally distant, equally unknown Chiang Mai nineteen years later, in 1867. Did Sarah's influence have anything to do with Sophia's willingness to do that? Although not a Blachly herself, did Sophia "catch" something of the Blachly restlessness, along with its piety? Or was there another factor at work, one having to do with an inherent family sense of mission? Lord points out, as we saw above, that Sarah wanted to become a missionary, and it appears that her desire marks a continuity with her own family history rather than a break. From the comments in the history of Dane County, above, concerning the Ohioans who settled in Dane, it is clear that they had some sense of mission and purpose in bringing "civilization" to the frontier, civilization and evangelical Christianity being but two sides of the same coin for them. Sarah's family had probably been about that mission in Pennsylvania in the late eighteenth century, certainly in Ohio in the early and mid-nineteenth century, and then in Wisconsin in the mid-nineteenth century. Her family seems to have been a piously restless and restlessly pious parent, and Sarah expressed that same restless and

I hope that, after another summer trip to the United States, I will be able to share further information on the life of Sarah Blachly Bradley and her family with the readers of HeRB. Her story is important because of her relationship to Sophia Bradley McGilvary, because of her relationship to the work of her husband, and in its own right. The problems we face in finding out about that story are indicative of the challenges and frustrations of the field of women's history. The satisfaction and just plain fun in recovering something, however modest, of such a story is that we are reintroduced, albeit imperfectly, to a memorable individual who has all but disappeared from the memory of the church today.

A Note of Thanks

I would like to close with a brief note of thanks to the librarians at both Berea College and Yale University for the excellent assistance nearly all of them provided me during the summer. In tracking down as much as I know to date about Sarah Blachly Bradley, I had to consult (as you can see below) a flock of "strange" sources, most of which were stored in equally strange places. I would like to especially thank Martha Smalley at the Yale Divinity School Library for taking the time and going out of her way to put relevant materials into my hands. The Overseas Ministries Studies Center, where I stayed in New Haven, also assisted the process by providing letters of introduction from a locally respected place of reference, as well as providing an excellently congenial place to park myself when I wasn't in one library or another.

Sources