Portrait of Benjamin Franklin Dickerman (1823-1830)

Sam Montgomery ’22 and Ellery Foutch (Winter 2021)

This sensitive portrait of a young boy was found in the Stewart Swift Research Center of the Henry Sheldon Museum of Vermont History. The child looks away from the viewer, to his left; his shirt is unbuttoned to expose the swelling of his neck. The curls of his hair are sensitively rendered in crayon, and the portrait is accompanied by a lock of light brown hair, sewn to the page in a loop encircling the inscription “14 months.” An identifying label bordered in black has been affixed to the page: “Franklin Dickerman/ Son of B.&Z. Dickerman./ Died Dec. 1830 Aged 7 years.” Although the paper has been marred by water staining at some point in its history, it is nonetheless a poignant portrayal of a child whose loss must have been keenly felt.

For many years, it was a mystery how this picture and its tenderly-saved lock of hair came to the Sheldon Museum. Research conducted over the course of this class revealed a family connection of love and loss.

As the inscription notes, Franklin Dickerman was the young son of “B.&Z. Dickerman.” Research revealed this couple to be Benjamin Franklin Dickerman and Zibia Bryant Dickerman, whose family is outlined in the book Families of Dickerman Ancestry.

If the Dickermans were based in Bridgewater, MA and moved West (to Missouri and Texas), how did the portrait end up in Vermont? As the Dickerman genealogy notes, Zibia was related to William Cullen Bryant– which reminded us of another Middlebury-area resident related to the famous poet and author: Charity Bryant.

Indeed, combing through the Bryant-Drake papers at the Stewart-Swift Research center yielded a heart-rending letter from Zibia Bryant Dickerman to her aunt, Charity Bryant, in the spring and early summer of 1830:

It is likely that this picture– and its lock of hair– were once filed among the Sylvia Drake & Charity Bryant papers but had been separated over the years. Charity Bryant must have affixed the black-bordered card after young Franklin Dickerman’s death, as part of a ritual of mourning. (For further discussion of hairwork and memory related to Sylvia Drake and Charity Bryant, see our entry on their double silhouette.)

Karen Sánchez-Eppler aptly describes why representations of dead or ill children are widely utilized in nineteenth-century America. In her essay “Then We Clutch Hardest: On the Death of a Child and the Replication of an Image,” she notes, “The loss of a child must be one of the most intimate of griefs, a fundamentally familial loss that makes little apparent rent in the social fabric. And yet the constant reiteration of this figure from Mary Morgan, Eva St. Clare, and Beth March to the myriad of nineteenth-century child elegies suggests that the death of a child serves a public function as well, enacting a loss that the culture needs to evoke and repeat. The repetitive portrayals of a dead or dying child work to articulate anxieties over the commodification of affect in an increasingly urbanized, industrialized, and impersonal America” (64). By creating illustrations like the one above, family members were able to express their grief and mourning with an image that would represent their child in the household. With that being said, it is interesting that the illustrations are not only created for the families themselves. The portrayals of the dead were also utilized to address the idea of an “impersonal” America that was becoming omnipresent.

The portrait is signed “Edwards from Life,” possibly indicating the Boston-based artist Thomas Edwards. The portrait might have been created as a medical illustration when the Dickermans went to Boston for treatment, making it part of the vast array of imagery representing children suffering from disease or injury that were produced for medical research and education.The inclusion of the lock of hair transforms it into an intimate object, one that evokes love and grief, beyond its representation of Franklin’s tumor.

Records indicate that Franklin was buried in Brockton, Massachusetts’s Melrose Cemetery (Vital Records 5, 322), likely near his grandfather, Mannassah Dickerman (1753-1818). Young Franklin’s gravestone would have been left behind when his parents moved out west, but drawings on paper– and hairwork– proved portable, allowing others to take Franklin’s memory far away. While we might think of monuments in stone and marble as more durable and lasting than pictures or locks of hair, the markers surrounding the graves of Mannassah Dickerman and wife Thirza Bryant Dickerman (1774-1844) are now weatherbeaten and have been rendered illegible, worn down by the passing years and obscured by the growth of lichen. The delicate portrait, now at the Stewart Swift Research Center in Middlebury, Vermont, helps us to remember or imagine Franklin Dickerman’s life.

We are grateful to Eva Garcelon-Hart for locating and scanning archival documents for our research, and to Ann Mici for traveling to Melrose Cemetery to search for Franklin’s grave and photograph the site for us!