From Constance Fenimore Woolson: Collected Stories
When Constance Fenimore Woolson was in her teens, her family often took trips to a variety of resorts away from their home in Cleveland. A favorite destination was the isolated Separatist community in Zoar, about seventy miles to the south in the Tuscarawas Valley. A utopian commune founded in 1817 by German immigrants who had separated from the Lutheran Church, the Zoarites never numbered more than three or four hundred individuals. By the time the Woolson family began visiting, Zoar was already going through significant changes: the commune’s charismatic leader, Joseph Bimeler, died in 1853; the village hotel (built in 1833) prospered as light tourism was encouraged; the community began investing in or loaning money to outside businesses; and many of its young men went off to fight in the Union Army and returned with a less parochial view of the world.
The Woolsons made several journeys to the Zoar Hotel between 1856 and 1866. Near the end of her life she looked fondly back on those trips: “I see it was the romantic side of my father’s nature that was pleased with the little Tuscarawas community,” she wrote to her nephew. “Father had so much romance. It had but little to feed upon in Ohio.”
After her father’s death in 1869, Woolson determined that she would write to support herself and her mother. Her first two articles, both travel sketches, appeared in July 1870, and one, which was published by Harper’s as “The Happy Valley,” was a romanticized account of a family trip to the Separatist community. In addition, Woolson used Zoar as the setting in two of her early works of fiction, including “Wilhelmina”—a story that got her into a bit of trouble with the Zoarites. You can read that story, along with an introduction both detailing the “scandal” and describing how Woolson’s broken engagement inspired much of her fiction, at our Story of the Week site.
