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The Curious History of New England’s Hermit Tourism

The Curious History of New England’s Hermit Tourism

The birds were her only family. In the decades after the American Revolution, gray and wearing rags, the local hermitess Sarah Bishop only descended from her tiny cave in the mountains to attend church in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The church ladies gave Bishop curt pleasantries, but the hermitess avoided all men who showed any interest.

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.