This is a guest blog post by Erika Herman, a recent graduate of New York University, where she earned a master’s degree in museum studies. Erika is a 2025 Buchanan Burnham Fellow.
Language disclaimer: For this article, the author has used the word “queer” as an umbrella term for historical LGBTQ+ identities. Although the term has had negative connotations in the past, queer has become a common term among scholars writing about historical identities and relationships and has also been reclaimed as a positive identifier by many in the community.
Listed in Susan Travers’ 1905 will are bequeathments to family members, gifts to friends, and money left to charity. But item no. 8 stands out: “all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate and property…I give, devise and bequeath to my friend Mary Appleton.”[1] Who were these women to each other? Further research reveals elements of queerness in these two women’s lives.[2] Remaining unmarried and willing your house and land to an unrelated woman you lived with for a number of years fits scholar Holly Furneaux’s definition of queerness as “that which differs from the life-script of opposite-sex marriage and reproduction.”[3]
When discussing historical queerness it is important to remember not to impose a modern understanding on the past, as people “may have understood their feelings, identities, and behavior” differently than we do today.[4] This does not mean that queer people, or people who today self identify with LGBTQ+ terminology, did not exist in the past, rather how they understood and expressed their identity, and the language they used (or not), was tied to societal ideas and norms of the time.
Terminology and language is important when discussing historical queerness—does one use historical terminology (that most people would not connect with today) or anachronistic language that makes the existence of historical queerness immediately identifiable for a modern audience?[5] It needs to be noted that historical LGBTQ relationships and identities have long been buried and ignored by mainstream history purveyors (academic institutions, museum exhibitions, school textbooks) and there is an argument to be made that applying modern terminology—such as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender—to historical figures or relationships highlights the fact that queer people have existed throughout history. On the other side of the debate, some scholars chose instead to use the term “romantic friendship” to describe same-sex love and queerness in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Romantic friendship is a term used “to describe an intimately loving yet non-sexual (or perceived to be non-sexual) relationship between two non-related people of the same sex,” which were relatively common among upper middle class women at the time, like Susan and Mary.[6] Because same-sex social spheres were normal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women would often form close, intimate relationships with other women—sending love letters and tokens of affection—that were seen as non-threatening to the heterosexual institution of marriage that many of these women (though certainly not all) would eventually enter.[7] This social acceptance would change in the early nineteenth century with the medicalization and sensationalization of homosexuality, but for a time certain queer interactions were allowed to quietly exist.[8] The label of “romantic friendship” allows for many different types of intimate relationships between those of the same sex, sexual or not, to be considered queer. Therefore, I am personally comfortable with calling Susan and Mary queer, and in a romantic friendship, although others may find different labels more fitting.
Susan Travers was born in 1857, one of eight children to Maria Louisa Johnson Travers and William Riggins Travers.[9] Her father was a New York lawyer and financier who developed Travers Block on Bellevue Avenue and the Travers Building on Memorial Boulevard here in Newport.[10] Susan lived a life of privilege: through the late 1800s, her family had Irish, Scottish, and German servants in their New York City home, and Susan’s social engagements in both New York and Newport were mentioned in The New York Times society columns.[11] Mary “Minne” Appleton was born in 1850, one of four children to Mary Moody Worthen Appleton and New York publisher William Henry Appleton. She lived a similar life of comfort to Susan.
An undated image of “Boxcroft” by Clarence Stanhope. Collection of Newport Historical Society, P5795.
Detail of 1907 Newport City Atlas showing Mary Appleton as owner of “Boxcroft,” 7 Red Cross Avenue. Newport Historical Society collection.
We pick up the story of these two in 1901, when Susan purchased 7 Red Cross Avenue from Samuel and Annie Coleman, which Susan named Boxcroft.[12] In 1901, 1902, and 1904 “Miss Susan Travers” and “Miss Minne (Mary) Appleton” are listed in the Newport City Directories as residing at 7 Red Cross Avenue during the summer season.[13] Susan and Mary also lived together at Muenchinger King cottage (Redwood Cottage), occasionally renting it during the winter season, and it is here where Susan died of pneumonia, at age 47, in 1904.[14] Susan Travers never married. In the 1907 Newport City Atlas, Mary Appleton is listed as the owner of 7 Red Cross Avenue.[15] She continued to summer in Boxcroft and winter in Boston until she sold to James Coleman Drayton in 1928.[16] In the 1921 New York Social Register, a Miss Helen Ellis is also listed as residing at Boxcroft, and when Mary died in 1934, Helen was listed as a beneficiary.[17] Mary Appleton never married.
Susan Travers’ will, in which she declares “all the rest, residue and remainder of my estate and property…I give, devise and bequeath to my friend Mary Appleton.” Photo by Erika Herman, June 25, 2025. Probate Records (PR 61:260-61), Newport City Hall.
Glimpses of who these women were as people can be found in newspaper society columns, obituaries, and a museum object list. Susan’s luncheons and hosting duties in New York and Newport, and her travels between the two cities and abroad, were listed in various society pages. According to one article she was “very clever and extremely popular,” and in her obituary she was described as having “a kind and lovable disposition” and many friends.[18] Mary was a member of the Colony Club in New York and the American Women’s Club of London, and she made donations to the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, and even the Newport Historical Society.[19] In 1904, the two women each loaned paintings to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston—John Singer Sargent’s The Oyster Gatherers and Claude Monet’s The Seine at Giverny from Susan and Eugene Isabey’s The Inn Yard from Mary—from which we can perhaps learn a bit about their tastes in art.[20]
John Singer Sargent, Fishing for Oysters at Cancale, 1878, oil on canvas, 16 1/8 x 24 in., Ruth and Carl J. Shapiro Gallery (Gallery 232), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/32503. The provenance stated on the website reads, “By 1880, Samuel Colman, New York and Newport, RI. By January, 1903, Susan B. Travers (d. 1904), Newport; December 1904, by inheritance from Susan Travers to Mary Appleton, Newport; 1935, gift of Mary Appleton to the MFA. (Accession Date: May 2, 1935).”
We are provided tantalizing pieces of a larger story about Susan and Mary’s life together that may or may not ever be able to be told in its entirety. However, these pieces can help us better understand queer women of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Material evidence of historical same-sex relationships can be hard to find. Long have scholars lamented the lack of traditional evidence (diaries, letters, photographs) of queerness in archives, in museums, and in other institutions.[21] Individuals often destroyed their own documents and keepsakes out of fear—homosexuality was not completely decriminalized here in the United States until 2003—and family members and friends would dispose of records after death as well.[22] Documents were also strategically censored by archivists or collection managers who thought that mentions of queerness may tarnish the individual’s legacy (a practice definitely not condoned today).[23] There is information to be learned from these silences—about what was considered important, respectable, or safe to save. For example, the absence of surviving photographs or portraits of Susan or Mary (even though both of their fathers have Wikipedia pages), may speak to the position of unmarried daughters at the time or just an example of bad labeling practices in old photo albums. Could keepsake photos of Susan and Mary have been among destroyed documents? Or are there photo albums somewhere waiting to be discovered? Or perhaps both women simply had an aversion to having their picture taken.
Memorial plaque for Susan Travers in Trinity Church, Newport. Photo by Erika Herman, June 21, 2025.
Even with the lack of certain types of evidence, all is not lost. Sometimes moments of queer potential are found in unlikely ways, as is the case of Susan and Mary. Part of their story was highlighted in the house history of 7 Red Cross Avenue put together by NHS staff in 2023. Through land evidence records, Newport city directories, probate records, Newport city atlases, and obituaries, pieces of Susan and Mary’s lives between 1901 and 1934 were uncovered while compiling the report, which provided a valuable foundation for the additional research undertaken for this post.While it is important to uncover all the stories we can, we also need to think about whose stories evidence like this can help illuminate (predominantly wealthily, white landowners or socialites) and whose stories remain left out of such documents and records. However, the same documents can tell a multitude of stories if looked at in different ways.
The study of historical queerness often becomes a practice of being comfortable with the unknowable. Some things are, inevitably, lost to time. But somewhere, someone may have a bundle of letters in their attic, a photo album forgotten in a drawer, or a family story about their great-Aunt’s “friend.” You should follow those threads, who knows what stories you will uncover. Perhaps there is even more to uncover about Susan and Mary, but today a small piece of queer history gets the spotlight.
[1] “Probate Records,” Susan Travers, 1905, Newport City Hall (61:260-261).
[2] Holly Furneaux, “Victorian Sexualities,” Literature Compass 8, no. 10 (2011): 772, https://doiorg.
proxy.library.nyu.edu/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00834.x.
[3] Holly Furneaux, “Victorian Sexualities,” Literature Compass 8, no. 10 (2011): 772, https://doiorg.
proxy.library.nyu.edu/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00834.x.
[4] Susan Ferentinos, “Interpreting LGBTQ Historic Sites,” in Preservation and Place: Historic Preservation By and Of LGBTQ Communities in the United States, ed. Megan E. Springate and Katherine Crawford-Lackey (Berghahn Books, 2019), 171, https://doi-org.proxy.library.nyu.edu/10.1515/9781789203073.
[5] For an introduction to this debate, Furneaux, “Victorian Sexualities,” 771.
[6] Kathryn Antonelli, “Romantic Friendships,” In Her Own Right, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries, accessed June 30, 2025, http://inherownright.org/spotlight/featured-exhibits/feature/romantic-friendships.
[7] Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 2, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3172964 and Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (Quill, 1981), 16, https://archive.org/details/surpassingloveof00faderich/page/16/mode/2up.
[8] For introduction of medical history see Patricia E. Stevens and Joanne M. Hall, “A Critical Historical Analysis of the Medical Construction of Lesbianism,” International Journal of Health Services 21, no. 2 (1991). https://www.jstor.org/stable/45138244.
[9] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5.
[10] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5.
[11] “United States Census, 1860,” Family Search, accessed June 25, 2025, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MCHS-PTV; “United States Census, 1870,” Family Search, accessed June 25, 2025, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M8NN-HD3; and “United States Census, 1880,” Family Search, accessed June 25, 2025, https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MZ68-PPR.
[12] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5-6.
[13] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5. The 1901 directory has them both listed at the address in 1901 and 1902, and there is no mention of Mary living with Susan in the 1903 directory. This may be because Susan was in mourning for her sister during the 1903 season, and did not entertain “except at very small and informal dinners.” “Told in Her Boudoir,” New York Times, Sunday September 13, 1903, https://newspaperarchive.com/other-articles-clipping-sep-13-1903-5151069/.
[14] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5.
[15] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5.
[16] “Death of Miss Mary Appleton,” Newport Mercury and Weekly News, Friday, November 2, 1934, 3, https://newspaperarchive.com/obituary-clipping-nov-02-1934-5150887/.
[17] “Boxcroft,” Newport Historical Society Library File, 5.
[18] “Told in Her Boudoir,” New York Times, and “Susan Travers,” Newport Mercury, December 10, 1904, Newport Historical Society Obituary Files.
[19] “Miss Mary Appleton,” New York Times, October 28, 1934, 32, https://www.nytimes.com/1934/10/28/archives/miss-mary-appleton.html; “Red Cross Fun Reaches $5,000 Mark,” Newport Mercury and Weekly News, January 30, 1931, 6, https://newspaperarchive.com/other-articles-clipping-jan-30-1931-5150910/; “Boy Scouts Campaign Has Realized $2,000,” Newport Mercury and Weekly News, July 22, 1932, 5, https://newspaperarchive.com/other-articles-clipping-jul-22-1932-5150913/; and “For Historical Society: Honorary Committee and Patronesses for Coming Fete and Exhibit,” Newport Daily News, July 9, 1914, 16, https://newspaperarchive.com/other-articles-clipping-jul-09-1914-5150962/.
[20] “Objects Newly Installed,” Museum of Fine Arts Bulletin 2, no. 6 (1904): 28,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4423225.
[21] John D. Wrathall, “Provenance as Text: Reading the Silences Around Sexuality in Manuscript Collections,” The Journal of American History 79, no.1 (1992): 166, https://doi.org/10.2307/2078472.
[22] Susan Ferentinos, “Lifting Our Skirts: Sharing the Sexual Pasts with Visitors,” History @ Work, National Council on Public History, July 1, 2014, https://ncph.org/history-at-work/lifting-our-skirts/.
[23] Wrathall, “Provenance as Text,” 166.