Nathan and Sarah's wedding - Cornish, 1794

Nathan Smith, a doctor and surgeon in Cornish in the late 1700's, married Jonathan Chase's daughter Elizabeth in 1791. Elizabeth was 26 and Nathan was 29. They had only been married for two years when Elizabeth died. After Elizabeth died, Nathan married her younger sister Sarah, who was called Sally. At the time of their marriage, Sally was 18 and Nathan was 32.

Many of the rules of American society changed after the Revolution, and the customs of courtship and marriage were no exception. Although marriages had ceased to be an economic negotiation between the fathers of two families, families still viewed marriage as a way to align the leading families of a town or county. It was common for sisters to marry brothers, and it was not uncommon for second cousins to marry. If a mother or father remarried after their original spouse had died, often the children would marry into the stepfather or stepmother's family. Prudence Chase married married a man named Nathaniel Hall, who was almost certainly related to her stepmother, whose maiden name was Hall.

The Chase's were the leading family in Cornish, and would have been happy to have their daughter marry a doctor. Although Nathan was a doctor, he was the son of a farmer from Chester, Vermont, and gained considerable social status by marrying a Chase. Fifty years earlier, the marriage would have been negotiated between the parents of bride and groom, or between the groom and the bride's parents, with little input from the bride. By the late 1700's, the bride had much more voice in the decisions surrounding her marriage, although exactly how much voice she had depended on the family.

Regardless, it wasn't a matter of falling in love with a boy and presenting him to her father as the man she wanted to marry. Girls saw boys at school or at church or at other social events, usually weddings or funerals. Girls and boys didn't “date” like they do now. There was very little privacy in small houses where there were lots of siblings and often an unmarried aunt or grandparent. Sometimes if a couple were interested in maybe getting married, the family would let them “bundle”. “Bundling” was a custom invented to give a couple some privacy in order to get to know each other better. Each young person was tied or sewn into their clothes, and maybe tied or bundled into sheets and blankets, and put into a bed together, then left alone in order to be able to visit in privacy. Sometimes the parents would put lay a board up on its side between them – called a bundling board.

We often imagine the families of young unmarried guys and girls during this era being very strict, not letting them out of the house unsupervised and guarding the morals of their young people very closely. Actually, in the late 18^th century, one girl in three was pregnant when she was married, and the theory is that bundling had a lot to do with it. As long as girls were married by the time the baby came along, a premarital pregnancy wasn't the calamity it would be later in American history.

Obviously we don't know if Jonathan and Sally Chase allowed Elizabeth to “bundle” with Nathan Smith. We do know that neither Elizabeth nor Sarah was pregnant when they were married, although Sarah and Nathan's first child, a son, was born almost exactly nine months from their wedding day.

There is a story about Sarah and Nathan, that I have found in multiple sources. Apparently at Nathan's and Elizabeth's wedding, Sarah managed to get in between Elizabeth and Nathan for a few moments during the ceremony. One account portrays Sarah as a little girl, so I envisioned a four year old who had a crush on her future brother-in-law. No, Sarah was sixteen at Elizabeth and Nathan's wedding, so she may have had an eye on Nathan from the beginning. Keep in mind that wedding ceremonies were much simpler in those days. The bride and groom were married in the bride's parents' best room – the parlor if they had one, with close family members from both sides of the family in attendance. All attendees wore their best clothes, but not anything different from what they wore to church on Sunday. Afterward, there may or may not have been a big meal. Probably in Elizabeth and Nathan's case, there was, and probably there was a big meal for Sarah's wedding as well, although we don't know.