As early as 1781, hermits dotted the landscape of New England—but they were not recluses. These vibrant personalities of the wilderness were active worshipers, amateur philosophers, and even mechanics-turned-bar owners. By the 1800s, New England was flourishing with a tourism industry based around eccentrics in the woods: newspapers carried their sad stories, pamphlets popularized their biographies as moral instruction, and locals trekked out to find them.
Why visit? “Hermits are more rare than ghosts,” says New England folklore expert Jeff Belanger.
From the time she appeared on the New York–Connecticut border in 1781, Bishop, then just 27 years old, was a blank slate. In 1804, a trio of male reporters terrified Bishop by hiking out to her squat, stark cave for an unannounced interview; one coldly described her as a “rare phenomenon.” Nineteen years later, in 1823, author Samuel Griswold Goodrich penned a posthumous ode to Sarah Bishop, inspired by nostalgic memories of witnessing her in the woods. Goodrich’s poem “Sarah Bishop” ignited interest in the woman who scorned society. This “Nun of the Mountains” became representative of the sufferings of the early American Republic: newspapers told of a woman, allegedly abused by the British, who had fled to live in a cave with nothing but rags and a Bible. Robert Rodriguez, owner of Hermitary.com, describes the appeal of visiting Bishop by how she overcame the “roadblock” against female hermits. Women hiked through thick woodlands to get a glimpse of Sarah’s tiny cave, even after her death in 1810, because of the uniqueness of her absolute freedom.
Rodriguez describes similar interest in another New England hermit case from 1829: Robert Voorhis in Seekonk, Massachusetts. After escaping from slavery, Voorhis’ story came to prominence after it was published in a popular abolitionist fundraising pamphlet: Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of Massachusetts. Voorhis had fled society for the wilderness due to a traumatic life: he had been sold into slavery twice, in Maryland and New Jersey, twice escaped captivity, lost his first wife and child during his first abduction, and (upon his second return) his second wife rejected him. All of that suffering, Rodriguez says, resulted in Voorhis contemplating a life in the woods: “‘Well, I can’t take any more. Society doesn’t offer me a way to address all these problems. So being a hermit may be all right.’”