Archival Adventures in the Abernethy Collection

One of the great joys of a special collection for the researcher is the serendipity: you don’t know what you will come across. While exploring the Abernethy Collection of American Literature, shared by Middlebury College in partnership with JSTOR, my eye caught a citation that read “Attestation of the Marriage of Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. I recognized two of these three names—but what was this?

Dated 1859, it’s a one-page, double-sided autograph document by Higginson...