Harriet Phillips Lowe

Wife of Capt. Richard Blackmer Holbrook Sr., whom she married at Steilacoom on 24 Dec 1860, and mother of Mollie (Holbrook) Pfeiffer, who compiled the family typescript. Her ancestry is the Low side of the Holbrook-Low tree: her father’s side in research/low/Low_Master_Research.md (section 1 is hers), her mother’s in research/low/Tyler_Ginn_Line_Research.md.

Deer Isle. The eldest of Capt. Nathan Low and Hannah Read Tyler’s ten children, she was 16 in their household in 1850. Mollie says she was named for her aunt Louisa Tyler’s husband, Dr. John Phillips, and that “when she was eight years old she nursed her mother through the birth of one of her children, caring for younger children and the baby, doing the housework and even the washing.” As her grandfather Major Nathan grew old, “his granddaughter lived with him, until her own marriage, and kept house for him, and spoke of him always with the greatest affection” (Mollie; the granddaughter is evidently Harriet). She remembered “the dear little cottage her father and mother had lived in near her grandfather, a canary-colored cottage.”

First marriage. On 12 Dec 1852, at 18, she married Crowell Hatch Sylvester at Deer Isle. He was born there on 20 Dec 1825, a son of Crowell Hatch Sylvester and Hannah W. Saunders and a younger brother of Edmund Sylvester, the founder of Olympia (FamilySearch tree; Blankenship 1914). He was a widower, as Mollie says: he had married Irena Arey at Vinalhaven in November 1848, and she is said to have died in 1850 (the tree; not checked). The Crowell H. Sylvester who married Susannah Dodge at Deer Isle in 1854 was his widowed father. About 1856 they went to Washington Territory, where Edmund lived. Mollie: “After a few sorrowful and disappointing years in Olympia, her marriage was annulled in the legislature, and she found herself alone in a new and wild land, earning her living with her sewing-machine. A certain inborn pride had kept her from letting her family know what had befallen her, until her second marriage.”

It was a divorce, not an annulment, and it was contested. House Bill No. 45, “An act to dissolve the bonds of matrimony heretofore existing between Crowell H. Sylvester and Harriet P. Sylvester,” was brought into the House in January 1860 and failed a first attempt to hurry it through. In the Council “the testimony accompanying the bill” was read aloud, oral testimony was called for, and the Sergeant-at-Arms was sent for “the Hon. G. K. Willard”; a motion to clear the lobby “for the investigation of the bill and examination of witnesses” was lost, and a committee of the whole reported the bill back “without recommendation” before it passed. The session laws date the act 17 Jan 1860. The testimony is not printed. In the 1860 census she is “H P Sylvester,” 24, born Maine, in Thurston County. Crowell stayed there; he was at Olympia in 1870, married Edith L. Hall in 1879, and died at Olympia on 4 Aug 1899.

Second marriage. Mollie’s account (pp. 82-84, family tradition): Capt. Coupe of Whidbey Island told Capt. Holbrook “he knew just the girl for him to marry.” She refused him twice, rode her mare to the home of her friend Mrs. Ford near Fort Steilacoom, and was married there “that Sunday evening, Christmas Eve, 1860” (24 Dec 1860 was a Monday). “The lonely young bride had only a brown dress, (alpaca?) which she tried to make more bride-like by touching the cuffs and neck with swan’s down.” A young man named Howell “had ridden hard to reach Steilacoom, and getting there too late, leaned against a door-jamb in a half-fainting condition and watched the end of the ceremony.” They went on to Whidbey Island by sailing vessel and then “a canoe and six Indians to paddle all the last part of the journey”; in a storm she tied her husband’s bandana over her head, and at the head of Penn’s Cove their neighbour Mrs. Libbey greeted them: “Why, I thought you were an Indian woman, Mr. Holbrooks, I thought you had brought home an Indian woman after all!” The first spring she drove the horses while he broke “a fifty acre field.”

Whidbey Island. She was 36 in the 1870 census, with Richard and Horace. Her children, in Mollie’s order: Nathan Gideon, who died in infancy; Horace Greeley (1863); Josephine, who died at about four; Mollie Frances (1870), whose Washington birth record names her mother Harriet Phillips Low; and Richard Blackmer Jr. (1872). On 14 Jan 1887 she and R. B. Holbrook, “both of Coveland,” gave her brother Daniel W. Low of Beverly power to sell her interest, “as one of the daughters and heirs at law,” in her mother’s Maine land. Mollie remembered her as “known, all her long life, the kindest of neighbors, and the most indulgent of mothers.” A dying child told her, “Aunty Holbrook, you have such kind hands.” She taught Indian women “to knit and sew and cook and to care for their children,” wrote epitaphs for Indian neighbours, and told a grieving chief that his wife had gone to “a happier land.”

Seattle. In 1900 “H P Holbrook,” widowed, was in her son-in-law E. C. Pfeiffer’s household in Seattle; the index’s “3 children born, 3 living” is wrong, since she bore five. She died in 1918 at her son Richard’s house on Mercer Street and was buried at Coupeville. The Seattle Star of 27 Nov 1918: “Mrs. Harriett E. Holbrook, 84, Seattle pioneer, is dead at the home of her son, Capt. Richard Holbrook, jr., 560 Mercer st.” (p. 3).

Open questions

• Her obituary (Seattle and Island County papers, late November 1918), and the informant and cause of death on the certificate image.
• The territorial bill file for H.B. No. 45 (Washington State Archives), which may hold “the testimony accompanying the bill.” Who was “the Hon. G. K. Willard,” and what did he know?
• The Pierce County record of the 1860 marriage, and Thurston County records for her as “H. P. Sylvester,” 1857-1860.
• The 1910 census.
• The FamilySearch tree has a duplicate of her, “Harriet Lowe” (MWTW-9BT), as Crowell Sylvester’s wife, born 1850.