Margaret P. Welling and Anne P. Lehman Family Papers

The Dillen family, whose letters form the core of this collection, were first generation inhabitants of Houlton, ME. Catherine Lindsay is reported to have been born in England in 1789. She moved to County Down, Ireland, when her father was sent to oversee a plantation following the Irish Rebellion of 1798. There, she met James Dillen. Their eldest child, John, was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1817; all of their subsequent children were born after the couple landed in New Brunswick and settled in Houlton, ME. Eliza Ann was born in 1826; George in 1827; Matilda in 1828; Mary Jane in 1830; and William in 1832.

Eliza Ann (Annie) Dillen is the family member who preserved the letters and is one of the primary correspondents therein. She was the first child to be born to Catherine and James Dillen in the United States. She left Houlton to work in Lawrence, MA, in the fall of 1855; she had returned to Maine by July 1856. In January 1885 she married Ira Greenlief Hersey, an attorney who later made a career as a state and national politician. Though they did not have any biological children, Eliza Ann and Ira Hersey took care of their niece, Vera Adelma Dillen, who preserved and passed along the letters in this collection.

Matilda L. Dillen played a prominent role alongside Eliza Ann Dillen in the family letters. Like her elder sister, she spent time working in mill towns. While Eliza Ann remained in Lawrence for less than a year, Matilda wrote back from Lawrence, MA, as well as from Derry and Manchester, NH, from 1855 to 1857. Later in her life, she continued her work as a seamstress in the mill town of Lewiston, ME, from 1877 until at least 1880. It is worth noting that though Eliza Ann and Matilda Dillen both moved to mill towns to work, neither appears to have been employed as a mill worker. Matilda worked as a dressmaker; Eliza Ann was most likely similarly employed. Letters relaying information about life in the mills come not from the Dillens, but from two of their Maine friends: Jane Williams and Laurie Knowles. Williams wrote two letters encouraging Eliza Ann and Matilda to join her in the mills: in 1843 she wrote of good money for easy work to be found in Taunton, MA, and in 1856 she wrote to encourage the sisters to find work in Lowell rather than Lawrence, MA. Laurie Knowles, on the other hand, portrayed mill work in a negative light: in 1856 and 1857 she presents herself as having fallen in status and as one suffering from ill health.

Further information about the family can be found in the book inspired by the letters: Anne Pearce Lehman, Mother's Painful Secret (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2011).