Bog Hag

Before she burned down her own house in protest and the courts sent her off to the state asylum, before her local newspaper discredited her published local histories as poetic romanticism, even before she sued her own nursing school all the way to the state supreme court, the woman who named herself Grace Greylock Niles knew she needed her independence. Everything that followed would stem from this. No husband or children or life under the financial thumb of a father or brother. She wanted to write poetry, to collect folklore, and paint landscapes. The wildest vistas drew her in. Every May and June, Grace put on a mid-calf skirt and high waterproof boots, packed her vasculum and drinking glass, whistled for her dog, Major, and headed for the wetlands to find her favorite spring blossoms. Purple fringed orchid, pink lady’s slipper, round-leaved sundew. The pitcher plants sent up dozens of burgundy-sepaled street lights—dumbwatches, the neighbor-children called them, for the shape of their stigmas. The bog was the landscape that saturated Grace’s heart, where she felt freest. It was where they found her, forty years later, soaking wet and shaking, after she set her house aflame.

It must have been clear from early on that Grace, born during the Civil War to a farming family on an eastern hill of Pownal, Vermont, would never fit into the cast-iron role of a farmer’s wife, so Paris and Sarah Niles sent their teenaged daughter a hundred miles away for high school. They may have been farmers, but they were well enough off for that. It was around then that Grace christened herself “Greylock,” claiming the Berkshire mountain visible from her childhood home that, earlier in the century, had inspired Melville and Thoreau and William Cullen Bryant. Many a message has gone from these heights to bless the busy world, she’d later write. She was a romantic from the start.

After high school, Grace moved south to Manhattan to pursue a passion for painting, for poetry—not that a girl could lead the bohemian life of an artist with her Ethan Frome background. She needed an income. She mostly disappears from the records until 1895, when, at age 30, she landed on a more permanent financial solution: nursing. Nursing was almost like painting. It took steady hands, repetition, a keen attention to detail. It took an ability to hold a full picture in one’s head and the creativity to adjust it each time the canvas of a patient’s symptoms presented an unexpected challenge. To be a painter and an author, Grace would become a nurse.

~

I first discovered Grace by reading her second and final book, The Hoosac Valley: Its Legends and Its History, a 1912 chronicle of the borderland pocket of the Northern Berkshires, where Grace grew up and which I now call home. She tells the usual stories of our area: Ephraim Williams, the Arnold family, Mr. Sampson’s shoe-factory strike. But it was also through Grace that I learned the names of runaway- slave, free-Black, and Indigenous families who settled in the secluded White Oaks glen, and it was through Grace that I met the baker Jeremiah Wilbur III, who built the first North Adams house in which my partner and I lived. Grace wasn’t the earliest historian of our area, but she was the first I read, which gave her an oversized presence in my mind. I didn’t know a thing about her then, didn’t know that she’d made history as much as she’d preserved it.

In every town or neighborhood, there live the story-keepers: the elders, the reporters, the researchers and resurrectionists. These are our local historians. They can tell you about the most notable and notorious former residents, but ask and you’ll see that they primarily protect the quotidian: the sugar bowls and nightgowns, the illnesses and infidelities. They are the forest wardens of all our family trees. Almost always it’s a thankless, unpaid labor, this knowledge-keeping, this puzzle-solving, this vacuuming up of whatever vignettes that neighbors, past and present, have been willing to share. Yet, for us, they preserve. They persevere, even when they’re tired or someone hands them a story or object they can’t possibly imagine the value of. To whom did this glove belong? Some nobody. They learn how to tell her story.

Grace wrote: The fields and woods are a good deal like the books we read: the more we become familiar with printed page or forest path, the oftener we return to certain thoughts and trails that lead us back to scenes and associations enjoyed before.

Also: These records are full of errors and confusion.

~

Like the historian, a nurse’s job is also to preserve: life, health, comfort.

Grace’s friends were already seated in the audience, her name already in the Orange Training School for Nurses’ commencement program, when after two years of education the superintendent informed Grace that she would not receive her nursing degree. There had been complaints, you see. When interviewed later, both patients and doctors agreed that Grace Greylock Niles did not have the temperament to be a caregiver. So she sued. She would secure her independence no matter what.

In the New Jersey Supreme Court, Grace smiled as the nursing school’s lawyer listed grievances against her. The woman sang, for starters—sang while she prepared medicine and changed bedding and arranged pillows. Then there was her poetry, which she read unprompted to her wards.

Flow on, fair Hoosac, with your gentle song,
Flow peacefully through all the centuries long

So Grace wasn’t the best poet, but there were more serious allegations too. Take the father who suspected that she’d illicitly sedated his young son—the boy compliant in the nurse’s presence and irascible after she left. The father had even sent off one of her empty medicine bottles for testing, only the package got lost in transit. Grace smiled through all of that testimony too. And yes, her reaction must have come across as a little sinister, a little strange, but consider what was available over the counter then: Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Dr. Winchell’s Teething Syrup, Kopp’s Baby’s Friend. Half of the patent medicines for children were laced with opium or diluted with alcohol.

Then there was the patient who demanded that Grace come sleep in her bed. Grace refused. For this, the woman’s husband lodged a complaint, though one of Grace’s own instructors swore in court to the impropriety of it, which made the whole thing twice strange, made me imagine alternate truths of power and play and pleasure, of refusal and repercussion. Repercussions such as the court’s ruling: Grace Greylock Niles would not be granted her certificate.

Even so, she was resolved. The hospitals wouldn’t hire her without a certificate, but she could nurse for private clients. For twenty years, this is how Grace made her living. Did she smudge the truth about her credentials the way she’d one day be accused of smudging local history? She moved to Harlem, took a room with a parliament of fellow nurses. In her off hours, she began research for a book about home and the flowers floating in her mind.

~

Part botany text, part local history, and part travelogue, the 1904 book Bog-Trotting for Orchids follows its author as she crosses stone walls and corduroy roads in search of the carnivorous plants and spring ephemerals of her native Northern Berkshires, all while explaining the taxonomy and history of the plants and landmarks she encounters. Wild blueberries were hereabouts called huckleberries, Grace explains, which is confusing because true huckleberries also grew in the area. Sometimes locals set public land on fire to improve the berry yield.

Grace wrote: With a ten-foot pole I probed the depths of the mud, and found [the bog] unfathomable, and no signs of terra firma about it. Pickerel-weed, eel-grass, frog’s-bit, and the leaves of arrow-head grew about the pools. I could not very well find an entrance here, unless for a permanent residence.

Dead holes, she explained, were the bog equivalent of quicksand, sections whose depth no human had been able to sound. To cross one of these, Grace used a single abandoned fence rail. She walked to the end of the plank, then stepped off into the peat, rapidly sliding the rail forward one more length while her hobnail boots sank into the moss. She pulled herself out and repeated.

Bogs are among our best preservationists. They’re living history museums. Laborers in places like Denmark, Ireland, and Florida have discovered in the peat human tools and ornaments thousands of years old: a leather cap, a cauldron, a keg of butter, a wool scarf with its woven pattern still discernable. More than 2,000 tannin-mummified human bodies have been pulled from bog beds too, many still with skin, hair, or internal organs. Some were so well preserved that scientists could take their fingerprints. The oldest last walked more than 4,000 years ago.

Bog-Trotting’s prose is beautiful, if a little overwrought; it’s astute and funny, with the close observations of a foreign commentator and a depth of reference only a local could offer. But readers must be shrewd as well, for Grace re-christens landmarks to suit her fancy. There is no Mount Œta in Vermont, that’s just her native Mason Hill; no Aurora’s Lake, that’s Fish Pond. She gives the name “Glen of Comus” to a valley that makes her think of Milton’s Sabrina lost among her enchanters (this alteration she admits). “Reality was too dull for her romanticism,” wrote the Bennington Banner fifty years after her death.

~

Though I knew her books, I wasn’t interested in Grace’s story until a woman with dark, curly hair held in a cloth headband stopped me at a local music festival and asked if I knew the name Grace Greylock Niles. This wasn’t entirely unusual. My local-history proclivities had garnered a reputation in town. Natalie Montoya Barnes had a familiar and frenetic way of conversing that immediately brought me in, as if picking up a conversation only just interrupted. She’d been on a real GGN kick, she told me, and had made it a goal to visit every location of significance in The Hoosac Valley, much to her son’s chagrin (“Great. Another cornfield”). She was still in the book’s pre-statehood era.

“You know she burned her house down, right?” Natalie said.

I did not. I hoped the tone of my reply said, Tell me everything.

Natalie didn’t have many specifics, and, it turned out, neither did anyone else I talked to, which only drew me in. The fire. Her institutionalization. What else had happened to this fellow woman writer with a passion for overlooked local stories? (At first I felt my way very cautiously, then grew bolder and forgot that I was in a dangerous place, for the farther I advanced, the firmer and drier and more enchanting became the field of my vision.) I spoke to the Pownal Historical Society and to the aging botanist who’d bought Grace’s land to turn it into a nature preserve. I built a multi-page family tree to locate her siblings’ descendants, attempted to contact a dozen of them, and heard back from only one. I was learning Grace’s story the same way Grace went about writing The Hoosac Valley. For at least nine years she’d read everything she could get hold of, interviewed old-timers, placed classifieds.

I don’t have Grace’s tenacity. I couldn’t have been a researcher before keyword searches or the Internet Archive or a subscription that scans thousands of old newspaper pages at the push of a button. On a cold January day, I can drive in a heated automobile to flip through land deeds at the Pownal town offices. I can sit at home and type an email to the county court or a nearby museum. “Fifteen years ago you hosted a lecture on Grace Niles. I’m wondering whether someone at the museum might be able to put me in contact with the speakers.”

In Grace’s book, footnotes are sparse, her sources sometimes vague, and she didn’t always delineate between local legend and history. There are always limitations to what one person can hunt down in the archives, but Grace was never the type to admit to shortcomings in her writing. It didn’t help that her community discarded her research when it conflicted with the stories they wanted to tell. Like when Massachusetts built the first automobile highway through our valley. The Mohawk Trail, they christened it, with plans for a bronze statue of a Mohawk warrior raising his arms to the mountain-peak sun. But, Grace pointed out, the Mohawk had never lived in this valley. In fact, she dedicated The Hoosac Valley to the Mohican leaders who’d long fought to keep the invading Mohawk at bay. Erecting a statue of a Mohawk warrior, she told the newspapers, would be like building a monument to the British soldiers of the American Revolution.

No one listened. It took twenty years to get the statue built, but Hail to the Sunrise still stands today along the Mohawk Trail Scenic Byway.

Each woman who contributed to my research wanted Grace’s story told, but her story shifted with each teller. Stories act like a gas, expanding to fill the gaps. Natalie’s “GGN” was defiantly self-possessed, unafraid to contradict the conventional colonialist narrative, then institutionalized for being herself. To the aging botanist, Grace was first and foremost an under-recognized scientist who met a sad end. To Niles family descendants, Grace’s Achilles heel was the mental health crisis that led her to burn down her house. The word genius kept coming up.

~

My neighbors see no value in pitcher-plants and sundew. They say there is no money in them, and pity me for investing my time as I do. Neither do I understand why the farmer chooses to cultivate squash rather than follow some other occupation. It is his business to cultivate squash as it is my business to cultivate sundew. Some crops are failures in their monetary returns, — others in their yield of pleasure. As many wish money only to procure pleasure, if pleasure can be procured without it, why not take the easy way?

~

The first fifteen years of the twentieth century were, I think, Grace’s happiest. She was a published author now, friends with a cadre of female poets and photographers. Nursing earned her enough that she could spend summers back in Vermont, where she rented a parcel down the hill from the old family farm. The land had an orchard, a stand of pine trees, and a grape arbor. Its main buildings had burned down years earlier, and the only structure that remained was a rough, four-room camp with no running water or electricity. Its widowed owner told Grace that if she paid $1,100 within two years, the property would be hers. Grace filled the cabin with books and paintings and christened it Swastina, from a Sanskrit blessing for health, luck, and prosperity. In the end, it was to bring anything but.

In the spring of 1915, during Grace’s two-year rent-to-own window, she received a notice that the widow’s family had accepted a different cash offer for Swastina. By the time Grace arrived in Vermont, signs plastered her boundary lines: “This is the property of Judge Tenney of Williamstown.” According to Grace’s sister Fleda, Judge Tenney had actually bought the land on behalf of another man, Dr. Adriance, who owned an adjacent parcel. Grace was distraught. She tore down the signs and put up her own. But she was afraid to return to New York, lest something irrevocable should take place in her absence. She sued Judge Tenney and the widow for rightful ownership, but courts can move slowly when they want to, when a judge is perhaps friends with another judge and has no incentive to hurry a case along. So she hunkered down at Swastina all through that summer and into the winter and through the next summer and winter and so on, for four years. She chopped her own wood to keep warm and read books by kerosene or candle. The farthest she dared travel was the eight miles by trolley to Fleda’s house in North Adams, and even then she was careful to tell no one. For four years Grace roughed it, alone, trapped on her Vermont hill as she waited for the law to grind out justice. In the first year, her brother Louis died, and Grace and her remaining siblings took his estate to court for funds each said they were owed. Judge Tenney helped the executors secure bond against the siblings’ claims. In year two, a brushland fire on Dr. Adriance’s property next door got out of control (perhaps by accident, perhaps not) and burned a thousand of Grace’s pine trees. For her lost acreage, Grace took Dr. Adriance to court too. The doctor hired Judge Tenney for his lawyer.

Grace planted the loveliest vegetable garden while under siege, her sister later wrote on the questionnaire sent to her from the state asylum. A wonderful garden kept very orderly and free from weeds. This last detail seems an odd one to include, as if Fleda needed to prove something else about arrangement and disarrangement. “Do you wonder her mind is upset?” she wrote the hospital superintendent.

I don’t know if Grace’s penchant for suing implied an unshakable faith in the judicial system or if suing was the only lever of power she knew—remember nursing school, all the way to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Yet this time, after four hard years, she finally succeeded: the land called Swastina, the court ruled, rightfully belonged to Miss Niles, provided she could pay the original $1,100 price. Having lived for so long only on her savings, she had to borrow from her lawyers to pay the sum. In the mortgage documents, she swears to insure the property against fire.

~

Recently I asked, of someone who keeps a history blog about his small town, when it was that he knew he was a local historian. He replied that he didn’t relate to that honorific as much as to the title “Old Man.” That’s when I realized local historian simply means “someone who knows more about this place than me.” By that definition, to certain newcomers in our community, I have become a local historian for this valley that Grace and I have each called home. I am not a historian. I’m a collector and still very early in my collecting. You should see some of the troves others have gathered, entire hippocampus cellars of knowledge. We forget how much of any local archive has no physicality whatsoever, how much exists only within the folded gray matter of one or two people.

~

Free at last to leave her castle, Grace returned to New York and her private nursing clients. But money remained scarce. She hadn’t held her deed on Swastina six months before she remortgaged with her lawyers. Seven months after that, she remortgaged again. Each transaction gained her a paltry couple of hundred in cash. This is the hard part of the story. Hard for what happens next and hard to differentiate between reality and perception. Grace, by this point, was starting to struggle with the same.

In hindsight, her sister later wrote, the delusions had been building for a while. Grace started carrying a rifle wherever she went. The family didn’t think much of this, what with all she’d been through when living alone. Then, one day, her gun went missing. She became convinced Fleda’s son had stolen it when visiting. When Grace returned from New York for the summer of 1922, everything was far, far worse.

A rich man from Long Island who’d used to own a steamship company had bought several parcels of land to the south and west of Swastina and was planting himself an orchard. Grace didn’t like that. She thought he was digging for something that would undermine her land, digging some kind of river of radio waves. She called Fleda to ask if she had a radio receiver. Grace was convinced that radios triggered abortions and compelled people to masturbate, convinced she could send and receive radio signals with her mind. Of course those were delusions, but the Long Island man wasn’t just planting a few dozen saplings. He planted ten thousand trees, brought fifty men and dynamite to clear what needed clearing. Imagine the explosions reverberating up the hill, remember all Grace had withstood during the lonely years at Swastina, and we can start to see what undergirded her first recorded psychotic episode.

That summer Grace would come to her fence and yell at the hired men while they prepared the orchard. She could yell the entire day, Henry Montgomery, one of those fifty hired men, recalled in a handwritten letter sixty years later. One of Grace’s brothers had married Henry Montgomery’s great-aunt. Maybe that’s why, as an eighteen-year-old, Henry became the only person Grace let past the threshold of her cabin. He tried to calm her down, told her the hired men didn’t know what they were doing. But now the Long Island man and Dr. Adriance were both badgering her to sell her land. Her suit about the acres of pine trees she’d lost to fire was still pending in court, and now they were coming again for what she’d fought so hard to make her own. What was it Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22? “Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.”

So it went all summer. Then it was a Monday morning in September, and a neighbor was passing Swastina on her way down to the trolley line. I imagine guarded pleasantries: Good morning and Good morning to you and What are you up to today? Perhaps Grace had already packed her valise, was dragging furniture into the yard, and the sight drew the woman’s curiosity. What did Grace have planned? A busy day. At two o’clock, she told the woman, she was going to set fire to her house. She said it like that, as if she’d written it into her diary weeks in advance, an appointment that couldn’t be moved.

Nobody had honestly thought she’d do it, the neighbor later told the newspapers. All the same, there must have been enough in her tone for the woman to seek out Henry Montgomery. And how tired he must’ve been, this kid Grace had started calling her guardian, this boy who wasn’t even her blood. “I was the only one who showed her any kindness,” he later wrote, and, whether that was true or not, what a burden that must have felt. Can we blame him if, when the neighbor shared her exchange with Grace and the two o’clock appointment she seemed keen to keep, he didn’t hitch up his horse to check on her until half past?

By then, it was too late. Grace was in her yard, under the grapevine, eating sweet clusters of fruit. Her furniture stood in the yard alongside a packed suitcase. Inside, all her books and paintings convulsed in flames. By the time the fire department ran their hoses, there was nothing to do. Nothing, except to finally take Grace Greylock Niles seriously.

Did anyone call Fleda? She and her sister weren’t on the best terms by then, so Henry found a neighbor to take Grace in. Immediately Grace ran away. When, at last, Henry found her, Grace was sitting in the rain, in a bog, a lady’s slipper orchid surviving in her natural quagmire.

Henry left her on the porch of a hotel while he went in to phone the sheriff. The sheriff sent down two men and a car. Henry never saw her again. “Did I do right or wrong? It has bothered me for 60 years,” he writes at the close of his letter. “I go to Lincoln Swamp where she set out the white orchids. I could go on & on. I wanted to turn to someone.”

~

There is certainly no experience like being stuck in a bog to arouse fearful forebodings. The discouraging effort to keep one foot above the ground only to find the other sinking deeper is most terrifying, and leads to hasty and excited movements which but increase the danger, and may finally lodge both feet fast in the mud.

~

Our car’s thermometer reads 88, with surely an equivalent percent humidity, when the wooded tunnel opens up and our phones inform us we’ve arrived at Eshqua Bog, a hundred miles northeast of Pownal. According to Grace, there were fifty-six species of orchids in New England in her time, at least forty of which could be found in the Northern Berkshires. The Cypripedium family of lady’s slipper orchids were so plentiful that boys at the local college annually harvested baskets of them to decorate the school chapel for baccalaureate. Children pilfered as many as they could carry home. By the time she published Bog-Trotting for Orchids, Grace could already see the effects of the delicate plant’s over-harvesting. The popularity of her book among orchidists only depleted the local populations more.

When I was a child, my plant-loving grandparents had three prized yellow lady’s slippers in their wooded garden. When they sold the house, my parents attempted to transplant one of the flowers into our yard as a sort of living family inheritance. The orchid never took. Lady’s slippers are notoriously finicky, difficult to propagate. There’s a hiking trail near Columbus, Ohio, where the park’s sole slipper patch is caged off to protect it from predators and fingers. Here in the Berkshires, there’s a pond where, in wet years, we can find as many as a dozen pink-slippered sentinels conversing under the pines, beeches, and maples. Each blossom feels nothing less than miraculous.

So when I emerged onto the sun-blasted boardwalk of Eshqua Bog and found myself among hundreds of pink and white showy lady’s slippers, the awe I felt hurt. Standing two to three feet tall, the Cypripedium reginae is the queen of her family. And here was her ancient castle, her court, hundreds on my left and hundreds on my right. Formed of layers and layers of semi-decomposed organic matter, which slowly decay and compress, it will take centuries for a peatland like Eshqua to form. A bog is technically an acidic type of peatland, nutrient poor, fed only by rainfall. Eshqua’s two acres are technically a fen: alkaline, mineral rich, and fed by springs. As I peered over the boardwalk to the water-logged sphagnum mat, struggling to comprehend the abundance around me, I imagined traversing this fen with nothing but a walking stick, high boots, and rubber gloves to keep me upright and dry. I thought of the dead holes and Grace’s single fence-rail. This was her world. This was the Vermont she knew.

~

If she had to be involuntarily committed in the 1920s, Grace was frankly lucky to be sent to the Brattleboro Retreat. She had her own room with her own window, the iron bars disguised in the sashing between panes. The ward hallways were purposefully wide and warmly furnished to encourage patients to socialize outside of their rooms. They were not limited to the ward either. There was a swimming pool and a bowling alley. If patients wanted to feel useful, they could re-cane chairs or work the dining room or the sewing room or on the farm that grew their food. There were twenty miles of trails where Grace could wander. Flower collecting was actually on the list of recommended activities. Moral treatment, the Retreat called this approach to care, which encouraged patients to live socially intertwined lives that contributed to the whole. Meanwhile, in Northern Vermont, the state’s other asylum was helping shape the eugenics movement.

It didn’t matter, though, how progressive and wellness-focused the Retreat was; to Grace, it was a prison.

~

Kurt White got me access to Grace’s Retreat records. A jovial clinical therapist, Kurt sees patients, teaches at a local college, runs an award-winning mental health podcast, and is the Retreat’s vice president of community partnerships, and also communications, and also development. He recently became president of the Northeast Society for Group Psychotherapy. Anyone that busy could have easily ignored my email inquiring after the existence of decades-old medical records. Kurt replied in a matter of hours. They didn’t have a process for releasing historic files, he wrote, but he’d figure one out.

Without Kurt I wouldn’t have gotten access to Grace’s files, but without a woman named Lorin Young, the files wouldn’t have survived in the first place. Lorin was the Retreat’s director of medical records when, in 2014, a heavy storm flooded the basement where filing cabinets and cardboard boxes held 180 years of patient proceedings. Like peatmoss, paper absorbs untold amounts of water. One of Lorin’s supervisors ordered her to toss everything that was no longer legally required. Lorin refused. “I knew my job was: You keep the records safe,” she told me. She often dipped into the oldest folders to get to know those early patients. They’d become family to her. This one was a teacher, that one had kids. One person listed his occupation as “Pirate.” He was her favorite. For six months, Lorin and one of her employees painstakingly separated the waterlogged pages and set up fans. It got so musty they had to wear masks. Sometimes they’d look at each other with expressions that said, “Why are we doing this?” But they kept going.

Six months after my initial email to Kurt, I sat in the Retreat’s tin-ceilinged staff break room holding a thick, faded blue medical folder that represented the final twenty years of Grace’s life. Its contents were dotted with foxing and wrinkled from the flood. On some pages the ink was so diffuse from moisture as to be almost illegible. I was likely the first person since Grace’s death to try to decipher them. Initial diagnosis: involutional paranoia. Subsequent diagnosis: dementia praecox.

But the first detail I noticed when opening the bloated blue folder were the two cream-colored intake forms. Two forms meant two separate incarcerations. Everyone I’d spoken to and all of my research up until this point indicated that Henry Montgomery had sent her away once and forever. I began reading. Out spooled Grace’s battle with Dr. Adriance and Judge Tenney, Fleda’s observations of her sister’s deterioration, and everything that was to come.

~

Soon after Grace’s arrival at the hospital, letters started appearing on the Retreat superintendent’s desk signed Grace G. Niles. Dear Sir, begins one dated November 1922, a little over a month after her committal: Will you so kindly give me a hearing or final examination according to the rules for a legal discharge from this Retreat? The postscript continues, My sister has nothing to do with my affairs, be sure of this since my friend holds my will and interests in all my affairs. While I will see my sister here I would not go away with her to her home. GGN.

The friend’s name and address followed—a Miss Hilda E. Carlson in the Bronx.

As I read on, Hilda Carlson reappears. She’s in Fleda’s letter to the Retreat about the years when Grace couldn’t leave her cabin for fear of forfeiture: “Miss Hilda Carlson, friend of hers in New York, was very good to her at this time.” I skip ahead to when Grace is released from her first committal at the Retreat, on Good Friday, 1923; the exit form notes that she’ll travel to New York and get in touch with Miss Carlson. Later, when Grace returns, a “Miss C” will write to the State’s Attorney, pleading Grace’s case for freedom.

I spend days searching every archive I can think of but find no trace of Hilda Carlson. That’s not true. I find too many traces, which is almost the same. There were thirty women named Hilda Carlson in the 1920 New York City census. Most were Swedish immigrants. Most were servants. Two were nurses. None lived at the Bronx address that Grace gave the superintendent. I make a map to triangulate the most promising of them, along with the Hildas listed in the 1922 New York City directory, the 1918 directory, and, for good measure, the 1925 and 1915 directories. I search the newspapers. Was Grace’s Hilda Carlson the nurse who, in 1920, was added at the last minute to the will of a Fifth Avenue dressmaker for the extraordinary sum of $50,000? Or was she the Hilda Elizabeth Carlson who authored a book on obstetric practices for nursing students? Obviously she wasn’t the Hilda Carlson (age thirty-one) who’d been moved upstate to the New York Women’s Asylum for Mental Defectives. There were so many more. I’d all but given up when the president of the Pownal Historical Society emailed to say she’d found their lost audio recording of a sixteen-year-old presentation, which then led me to a 1912 letter in the Dartmouth College archives. It was from Grace to a library assistant, about the plants on Mount Greylock, and Grace’s return address on the letter was a new one: an apartment building in Harlem already marked on my map—the 1915 New York Directory listed a Hilda Carlson there, no occupation, no apartment number. Grace lived in Apt. T. Neither of them are named in the 1915 New York State census. I read every line of every page of that address’s census forms to check.

But more important to me than Hilda’s address or occupation was the substance of this relationship so significant to Grace as to appear repeatedly in her records. Who was this woman who sustained her through four hard years of physical labor and mental strain as Grace defended her land from real or imagined siege, who held her will and interests in all of her affairs, whom Grace trusted more than her own sister? The filaments of female friendships are rarely preserved in the bog of time, but I dig into the peat, searching for answers to my own private, unfounded thoughts. These speculations turn hopeful when I find hospital staff noting that Grace “busies herself at the present time writing about ‘Sapho.’” Are there quotation marks because of the misspelling or because of what the Greek poet is meant to stand in for? I’m hardly the only one to project. Last year at a local museum, a speaker described Grace as a “queer local historian.” When I eagerly followed up, thinking someone had finally found definitive evidence, he replied, “We just claim her as such, Molly.”

Who can blame him? When certain truths are kept so closely guarded and certain types of archives are destroyed or never preserved in the first place, claiming is sometimes the best we can do.

~

[My neighbor] had always considered my propensity for tramping through these bogs and woodlands, searching for flowers, as rather “queer.” This habit, coupled with my fondness for the poets, led her to believe I had sustained some great sorrow,—perhaps the loss of a lover,—and in those early days she invariably eyed me closely through her green goggles as I met her on the road.

~

Did Grace the local historian intend to erase herself from the archive? I don’t even have a confirmed photograph of her, only a couple of newspaper sketches. I wonder, if Grace ever drew self-portraits, what they looked like, and how her pencil patterns might have shifted as disease began to affect her brain’s visual processing. We’ll likely never know. She burned all she owned save that one suitcase that she’d dragged into the yard—Contents: 1 small, black leather purse; 1 package of valuable letters from Albert C. Burrage, Pres. of American Orchid Society; 1 pair of shears; 1 soft rubber rectal tube 18 inches long; notice from P.O. for registered parcel from H.E. Carlson of NY City, parcel not received at all from Pownal VT office. Grace sets out this accounting in a letter to the Retreat, demanding that the effects be returned to her. The suitcase doesn’t survive, but the letter does. It’s only thanks to the place where she never wanted to be that I know as much as I do.

~

After six months at the Retreat, for reasons not captured in her records, the State Board of Supervisors ordered Grace released. Her condition is listed simply as “improved.” We know little about those spring-orchid months of 1923. We know she was going to look up Miss Hilda Carlson in New York. We know she registered with a nursing agency and got enough work to send $200 to her lawyer-bankers for the back taxes on her triple-mortgaged, burned-down house. The yellow lady’s slippers bloomed, then died back. The showy lady’s slippers opened their pink and white cups. July approached. On Vermont’s Bennington County court docket, at last, were the Niles siblings’ cases against their brother’s estate and Grace’s suit against Dr. Adriance for burning down her pine trees, by accident or not. Grace came up from New York for the second hearing with a small valise. When she arrived at her sister’s house in North Adams, Grace appeared optimistic for a settlement. Perhaps she and her sister had mended their relationship, or perhaps it had never been so bad as Grace suggested. Fleda was deeply relieved. To her and her friends, her sister seemed like her old self.

On Saturday morning, June 30th, Grace took the 11:45 trolley and hiked up the hill to check on her land and to see a man who owed her a small sum of money. She was back at her sister’s in time for supper. All Grace said about the errand was, My apple trees need pruning, and I am going to get a small saw and look after them.

At what time did Fleda serve the meal? I only wish I knew, because between five and six o’clock, within a mile of Grace’s land, someone set fire to Mr. Cary C. Northrup’s barn. The blaze killed two horses, destroyed harnesses and tools.

Did the police suspect Grace right away? Who even knew she was in town? Dr. Adriance knew. Perhaps he also knew there was an easy way to make this damage suit of Grace’s disappear. Dr. Adriance’s brother had once hired Cary C. Northrup for a building project, and Mrs. Adriance was on a club committee with Cary’s aunt. I’ve found no connection between Grace and Mr. Northrup. Of course none of this proves or disproves anything.

“I don’t think she knows a barn was burned,” Fleda would write to the Retreat superintendent the following week. “One thing I know, Dr. Adriance called upon Captain Perron of our police force and sent him up to my home to see my sister the following Monday after the fire.” Grace was not in. She’d gone up to her land again to call on witnesses in the damage suit. When Grace didn’t return home, Fleda thought nothing of it; her sister had made plans to stay at a friend’s for the Fourth of July. It wasn’t until she called from her lawyers’ office the morning of July 5th that Fleda learned her sixty-year-old sister had spent Independence Day in the county jail, the police having picked her up as she walked to the trolley line.

“She said she was well and brave through it all, for me not to worry.”

As far as court records show, there was no hearing for the barn-arson charges against Grace. It didn’t matter that she’d previously been deemed healthy enough to leave the Retreat; the police needed only hearsay to be able to use the previous ruling of insanity and send Grace away for the second and final time. The Retreat was told that the probate judge had sent her back to them; if that was so, his decision was not entered into any official record. The whole business was kept so quiet that the arrest never even made the paper; the newspaper reported only that the barn fire was “of incendiary origin.”

A full year after Grace’s final arrest, while she was miles away at the Retreat, four men walked her land to assess for the court the veracity of her claims against Dr. Adriance. It was time to settle and close the pine tree fire case for good. Four men meant two for the absent plaintiff and two for the doctor. Grace’s representatives were two local farmers from the neighborhood. And the representatives for Dr. Adriance? A school board member named Stocking and one Cary C. Northrup, barn owner. It all came together.

It was six years since the thousand trees had burned, but evidence of damage must have remained irrefutable, for the representatives collectively agreed to award the plaintiff, Miss Niles, $225, or 15% of what she’d demanded. After all, what need had she for money now? Grace Greylock Niles was never released from the hospital again. Her apple trees were never pruned. Her land was sold to pay off her mortgage, and her lawyers did nothing to stop the transfer. Why would they? They were her mortgagees, finally getting paid.

~

There’s part of me that wants to end the story here, with Grace’s possibly illegal, and certainly unjust, incarceration—part of me that wants to summarize her final years with something simple, like, “For twenty years, Grace Greylock Niles was cared for by nurses the way she’d once cared for patients. She was to remain at the Retreat until her death in 1943 on her half birthday.” I’d rather skip over the struggle and circularity of a progressive illness, the mundanity of hospitalization, but Grace’s life didn’t cease when she walked through the Retreat’s doors. This is what her living relatives, in the words of one of them, most want people to know: “that she was a human being, that she was intelligent. . . . People don’t understand mental illness the way they should.” Grace never acknowledged her disorder and took deep offense when doctors treated her as anything but sane. Something had changed in her after menopause, she admitted, but that was all. Several people I’ve spoken with want to agree: she wasn’t sick; she was an older, unmarried woman who refused to follow societal norms, so the powers that be sent her away.

Both can be true. The Retreat doctors’ diagnosis of dementia praecox—an early term for schizophrenia and related conditions—is, as far as Kurt White can see from Grace’s behavioral descriptions, at least in the right ballpark. Family history further confirms this, as the Nileses watched the disease continue down at least one of their lines. Today the second-youngest Niles generation carefully watch their children for symptoms. The Grace gene, they call it, a joke to hide the anxiety.

~

Many distant sounds came whispering to me from out this wild solitude of Nature. The mystery of wild wood isolation, in the presence of the scars of ages, took possession of me, and filled me with a nameless fear. I gave vent to a wild howl in order to relieve the tensity and portentousness of the situation.

~

Grace spent most of the rest of her days in her room, assembling her case for a habeas corpus hearing against what she never stopped insisting was her unlawful detention. As other parts of her mind faded, that one truth held firm. The staff noted that she was “verbose, tiresome, and fails to arrive at definite answers.” They encouraged her to go on walks, help out with chores, or enjoy the organized entertainment. She told them she was not there to be entertained. She wrote increasingly desperate letters to the Retreat superintendent, a handful of which the staff filed in her records as evidence of Grace’s delusions.

This now 47 days I am here. Rather a strange vacation for my health.
It’s now 9 weeks and 6 days I’ve been here.
It’s a curse-house here, all right, spite house is a good name for it. . . . I have been held a prisoner for 15 weeks for nothing.

It wasn’t long before she stopped thinking her lawyers would get her out and started thinking the two men were in on the plot to lock her away, alongside Dr. Adriance and the sheriff, and the judge who’d first committed her. The Catholics among them earned extra suspicion. Eventually, the conspiracy extended to the Retreat’s superintendent, her doctor, and every other person of authority at the Retreat, all colluding to keep her there. And here, I suppose, was the paradox: as the weeks turned to months turned to years, and her condition deteriorated, it became clear that the Retreat was the healthiest place for a person in her state. But the reality remained that neither Grace nor, as far as I can confirm, any judicial authority had signed off on returning her to the Retreat for that second iteration. She shouldn’t have been there, and yet she needed care.

Eventually Grace consented to participate in a few Retreat activities. She started going into town with fellow patients. She went on woodland walks and brought back plants to grow and care for in her room. Not long after this, she was caught smuggling letters into the town mailbox, and her off-campus privileges were revoked. Grace’s sixties turned into her seventies. Sometimes Grace was reported to be compliant and pleasant with the doctors and nurses; at other times she called them terrible names, barricaded herself in her room, refused a dentist (most of her teeth gone), refused the smallpox vaccine or to take a bath or brush her hair. She claimed her bodily autonomy in whatever small ways she could. She spent more and more time alone in her room, conversing with people who weren’t there, writing letters to those who would not receive them. She wrote about oceans and genealogy and “Sapho.” She wrote poetry, claimed to have discovered a new meter. “The patient apparently believes that she is superior and talented, especially as an author,” her medical chart states. None of this writing survives.

~

When I picture a hag, I see a ragged, snaggle-toothed, wizened old woman, often banished to the edge of the fairy tale (Eyes: Large, well-spaced, intelligent. Teeth: Poor. Only a very few remaining in front). She frightens, but there is a witch-magic about her. Hag is also a British term for an outcropping of bog peat, exposed due to erosion or human disturbance. Once uncovered, the peat dries, erodes more, dries and erodes, dries and erodes, in a never-ending cycle of deterioration.

In Denmark’s early Iron Age, ritual human sacrifices were buried in bogs, which were considered the liminal space between our plane and the realm of the gods. In the case of at least one preserved corpse, found in 1835, bogs were also where villagers took their witches—not burning them at the stake, but pinning them alive with long wooden crooks at the elbows and knees, so that not even their ghosts could rise from the peat. Christians in their churchyard boxes rotted centuries ago, but thanks to the acid tea of the bog, we can know the whorls of a drowned hag’s fingerprints, the way she plaited her hair, the clothes she wore. The townsfolk feared she was immortal. She wasn’t, until they killed her and made her so.

~

I watched Grace die in the neat cursive hand of Nurse Katherine Cyr over the course of one month in spring 1943. She wouldn’t stop sweating, but her flesh was cold. After an intestinal hemorrhage, they kept finding her in pools of her own blood.

June 8 (3:30 PM) Pt failing fast. Pt couldn’t take nourishment.
June 9 (6:00 AM) Failing. Have watched pt closely all night. Pulse very weak.
June 9 (8:00 AM) Pt can’t swallow.
June 9 (6:20 PM) Pt expired.

~

They buried her back home in Pownal, beside her parents, with a cheap stone whose lettering has already worn away. Someone posted an obituary in the local paper: “Miss Niles, a woman in her late seventies, was doubtless, from a literary standpoint, the most talented person native to this small Vermont town. . . . Hardly a summer passes that some visitor from a distance does not produce [Bog-Trotting for Orchids] and ask for directions to the bogs mentioned in the work.” Two days later, the newspaper ran its own editorial on her life: “The death of Grace Greylock Niles brings to an end a strange life that was probably as unsatisfactory to the principal as it was to her friends and family. Brilliant but broken is the summary of one of her early associates.” It went on, “Her works are not to be used as textbooks. She was too much the child of imagination for that.”

Today, very few people know the name Grace Greylock Niles, though she has amassed a cult-like micro-following. Each of us sees something familiar in this woman, I think—this self-taught spinster, this eccentric swamp-stomper and unlicensed nurse. She was our historian. She taught us about people and about the land. Sometimes the stories she found had altered in their humic pickling, but likely so have ours. What else can we do? “We just claim her as such, Molly.” We claim her, as together we inch to the end of our fence-rail raft. We step off, sink into the sphagnum, slide the rail up a length, and pull ourselves out. This is how we move forward.