Jonathan Ned Katz: "Miss Willson and Miss Brundage", early 1800s

In America, in the early years of the 19th century, writes a reporter from that time, "two maids left their home in the East with a romantic attachment for each other" that continued for "many years."

"Miss [Mary Ann] Willson and her friend Miss Brundage" reportedly bought a few acres and lived in a log house in the town of Greenville, Green County, N.Y., a rural community of hardworking settlers.

"Miss Brundage was "the farmer and cultivated the land by the aid of neighbors, occasionally doing some plowing for them!" She "planted, gathered in, and reaped." Miss Willson "made pictures. which she sold to the farmers as rare and unique 'works of art.'"

Our reporter, identified only as "an admirer of art," wrote two accounts of Miss Willson and Miss Brundage. Admirer called the pair "my friends," often visited them, and wrote about them 50 years after those visits.

Admirer tells us that Willson's paints were "of the simplest kind," made from berries and bricks. "Occasional 'stove paint' "was also used to create Willson's "elegant designs."

The reporter, like Willson and Brundage, "takes great pleasure in testifying to their simplicity and originality of character their unqualified belief that these 'pictures' were very beautiful"--and their even "boasting how greatly they were in demand." The pair were quoted as having said that the pictures "go way to Canada and clear to Mobile [Ala.)!" We can almost hear the women boasting!

The good-hearted Admirer ends by asking us to let all Willson's and Brundage's "imperfections be buried in their graves and shield these and them from other than kindly criticism."

The "imperfections" referred to may be the unsophisticated quality of the two women's characters and of Willson's art--not anything illicit about their romance. For Admirer, romantic friendship between women had not yet become suspect as sexual.

Admirer says that the two women lived in Green County "until the death of the 'farmer maid,'" Brundage, at which Willson "was inconsolable and, after a brief time, removed to parts unknown."

In 1894, a Green County historian, R. Lionel De Lisser, published Picturesque Catskills and altered significantly the story of Willson and Brundage's intimacy. Quite possibly, this was to quiet growing suspi-