Where Three Towns Meet

Where Three Towns Meet by Alice Morse Earle

"Where Three Towns Meet" by Alice Morse Earle is an essay centered on a lonely crossroads in Narragansett, Rhode Island, where the three towns of North Kingston, South Kingston, and Exeter converge. Using this specific geographical location as both a physical setting and a symbolic focal point, Earle explores an obscure and largely forgotten marital custom known as the shift-marriage, documenting its practice in colonial and early American New England with particular attention to the Narragansett region. The custom Earle describes was not an American invention but an English inheritance, carried across the Atlantic and practiced throughout New England, New York, and Pennsylvania into the nineteenth century. Its premise was straightforward and rooted in the legal realities of the time: a widow, by marrying in only her shift or smock, with no other clothing or possessions on her person, sought to protect her new husband from inheriting liability for the debts accumulated during her first marriage. The legal logic held that a woman who brought nothing into the marriage could not be said to have brought debts along with her. Earle notes that many of the surviving marriage certificates explicitly state the proceeding was conducted according to law in such cases, suggesting these were not merely superstitious rituals but ceremonies understood to carry genuine legal weight. Earle assembles a series of documentary records to illustrate the custom's actual practice in the Narragansett area. She presents marriage certificates and official registrations that describe specific ceremonies in precise and sometimes startling detail. In one, from 1717, Philip Shearman leads Widow Hannah Clarke across a highway in only her shift, the union then solemnized by a justice. In another, from 1719 to 1720, Abigail Calverwell crosses the road four times in only her shift and hair-lace. Earle pauses to explain the significance of the hair-lace detail, noting that women of the era were never seen publicly without caps, and that appearing without one signified complete dishabille, making its specific mention in the record more meaningful than it might first appear. Additional examples from Hopkinton, Richmond, Westerly, and other surrounding towns establish that the custom was geographically widespread and relatively consistent in its form across the region. Earle broadens her account beyond Narragansett to sketch variations of the custom elsewhere. She describes a Vermont bride who stood in her shift inside a closet, extending her hand through a hole in the door while her husband deposited wedding garments for her to put on, having formally declared that the garments were only lent and not given, so as not to compromise the legal protection the ritual was meant to afford. She mentions a Maine bride saved from freezing by a sympathetic minister who threw a coat over her as she stood on the road in winter. She references a Swedish traveler's account of a Pennsylvania husband who met his bride halfway and similarly lent her clothing for the occasion. She also notes that in early New York, Holland, and ancient Rhineland, widows accomplished the same debt avoidance through different means, such as appearing in borrowed clothing at a first husband's funeral or placing and then kicking away a symbolic object from the coffin. A more dramatic variation recorded by the traveler Gustavus Vasa describes a woman appearing at a gallows in New York in 1784, clad only in her shift, to claim and marry a condemned man, thereby saving his life, a practice Earle connects to a broader English tradition of rescuing condemned criminals through a woman's marriage claim. Earle situates all of this within its social context, pushing back against any assumption that these ceremonies reflected a rough or uncultured community. She emphasizes that South Kingston in particular was among the wealthiest towns in Rhode Island at the time, home to men of means and polished manners who attended church along the very road where the shift-marriages took place. The participants in these ceremonies were not necessarily poor or ignorant. The essay closes on a reflective note. Seated at the crossroads herself, Earle finds the setting romantically picturesque in summer bloom but ultimately dispiriting when she considers what the custom actually required of the women who submitted to it. The image of a bride shivering across a frozen road on a February night in New England, wearing only a linen shift, while the man she was about to marry watched and permitted the ordeal to avoid paying a modest debt, strikes her as containing nothing of romance and everything of sordid and ignorant superstition.

By Alice Morse Earle · First published 1893 · Genre: Historical Non-Fiction, Social History, Regional History · 1,819 words

First lines

In the heart of Narragansett three towns meet at a cross-roads; they are North Kingston, South Kingston, and Exeter. It is a lonely cross-roads, even in days of summer, though Weaver Rose's cheerful home is near it; but it is picturesque and beautiful in its extended view, its overreach of splendid locust-trees, and the tangle of wild flowers fringing the roadside and rioting along the stone walls. There is no monument or stone, nothing to mark the special tradition of this corner, as Squaw Rock at Indian Corner, half a mile farther on the road, a sinister rock with dark, blood-red veins and splashes, a rock whereon were dashed the brains of a Narragansett squaw by her drunken brave of a husband.

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regional history · American history · local history · geographic boundaries · colonial America · town development · settlement history · New England · community studies · historical documentation · cultural heritage · frontier life

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