Carla Occaso
A woman born in Calais in 1826 left behind a diary depicting parts of her life in rural Vermont living mostly as a single woman. Mandana White Goodenough lived 98 years, of which she was married for 15. So, for 83 years of her life, she got by as a single woman and later as a widowed mother in the early 1800s through 1920s — during which she held down a job and later ran a farm alone while raising young children.
The following is from an article written by Chris Burns, “Between This Time and That Sweet Time of Grace: The Diary of Mandana White Goodenough” published in Vermont History, Vol. 77, in 2009.
Mandana started her diary in 1843, perhaps written at the family farmhouse on 130 acres. Her father, Jesse, ran a farm that produced cows, milk, cheese, butter, wheat, oats, corn, potatoes, apples, and maple sugar. Mandana attended the Lebanon Institute and Teaching School in 1844–45. At 18, she wrote, “the future seems dark to me; what trouble is in store for me, I know not, but a heavy cloud seems to hang over my mind.”
She further writes how she would like to “procure employment,” but her friends think it would be a “disgrace” to work outside the home. Still, she found a job teaching in a nearby town. She writes, “I do not like the place very much, it is called Sodom (now Adamant).”
At the end of her tenure, she wrote, “This is the last day of my school and glad am I, for it has not been very pleasant to me, at least many things have occurred which have not added to my happiness. But it is now over and I hope it will be forgotten.” (1844).
She later taught during one winter in Marshfield, where she boarded with local families, but was plagued by gossip about her. Then, prospects of marriage ended her teaching career. She rebuffed the first man who asked for her hand, but accepted Eli Goodenough and they married in 1845. He died in 1860 when she was 34.
“It passed like a dream. No more will I hear his pleasant voice greet my ear,” she wrote. Soon after, she sold their property and bought a farm in Walden, where she raised her four children, starting when the youngest was five. She owned her home free of mortgage and was listed in the 1900 census as a widowed merchant. Mandana moved a few more times, and died in 1924. She is buried in the Old West Church Cemetery in Calais.
