The bonnets that Mary Woodbury Proctor trimmed in her shop at Harrisonburg were made, people said, to stand up to the weather of the Valley, and so was she. She was born in 1765 in the settlement on the Shenandoah that was then a scatter of farms around a courthouse crossroads and would within fifteen years be laid out as Harrisonburg, Virginia. It was limestone country, a long green trough between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, full of springs, caves and sinkholes, its farms fat with wheat and its wagon roads deep in mud through half the year. Her parents were Jonas Proctor, born in 1743, and Charity Woodbury, born in 1741, and both of them, by the Proctor family's account, were slayers of the White Ledger's line, though neither looked the part. Jonas was a surveyor's chainman, dragging the Gunter's chain across the Valley behind men who measured the lots of new settlers, and Charity was a herbalist who dried and sold the roots and leaves of the Blue Ridge from the family's kitchen.
In the ledger, Jonas Proctor is remembered as the Valley Scout, and Charity as the Meek Seal, and between them they made a household that had two occupations, an outward one that neighbours saw and an inward one that they did not. Jonas's chain work took him into wild and unsettled country, up hollows and along ridges that nobody else went near, and when the Revolution came the army made use of it. He scouted for the Virginia troops, moved ahead of columns, and reported on the country he knew as no one else did. Mary was a girl of ten when the war began, and she watched her father go and come with news, sleeping little, eating standing up and bringing back dispatches sewn into the lining of his coat. Her mother, Charity, ran the household, kept the herb trade alive and quietly hunted the things that the war made bolder, in the abandoned farms and the woods where deserters camped.
Charity Woodbury died in 1779, when Mary was fourteen, and the loss made her the woman of the house in an instant. She had three younger siblings: Obadiah Proctor, who was born in 1766 and who was not called, and Levi Proctor, born in 1774, and Lydia Proctor, born in 1775, both of whom became slayers. Levi was five and Lydia four at the time of their mother's death, and it fell to Mary to raise them, alongside her father's long and unpredictable absences. She cooked, mended and taught the little ones their letters. She also learned, by her mother's example and her father's silences, exactly what the family did. Mary was never called, and this remained a quiet disappointment to her, though she never allowed it to sour her. She was the one who read the situation of the house and kept it going, and she was fond of saying that every hunter needs a base, and that she was quite content to be one.
Her training as a milliner came through a widow in Staunton, to whom she was apprenticed for three years in her late teens, and a tidy, exacting trade it was. She learned to shape a straw bonnet over a block, to steam and stitch the brim, to line it with silk or linen, to make artificial flowers from muslin and wire, to trim a cap with ribbon and lace and to judge the width of a face at a glance. Fashions arrived in the Valley late and by strange routes, in a pedlar's pack or from a sister-in-law in Philadelphia, and the milliner's skill lay in copying them cheaply. On her return to Harrisonburg in the 1780s she set up shop in the front room of the house, and soon women were riding in from twenty miles around for a Sunday bonnet or a wedding cap. She was a tall, spare woman with a long face, a low voice and an air of great composure, and she had a way of holding a bonnet up to the light that made customers feel that their choice was a serious matter.
The shop was, as it happened, an excellent cover. Women came in to talk, and talk was the currency of the valley. A milliner heard which farms had lost stock, which families had been seen at odd hours, and what had happened to the girl who disappeared from a mountain cabin. She wrote none of it down in the shop, but at night she copied the useful items into a small account book and left it in a hollow drawer for whichever of her family was next through. Her brother Levi and sister Lydia, once they were old enough, worked the roads around the Valley and used her house as a base, and she fed them, mended their coats, dressed their wounds and kept their secrets. Her father Jonas, in his last years, sat by her hearth and dictated the entries of the White Ledger, which she copied out in a clear round hand for him, and he died in 1799, at fifty-six, with his daughter beside him.
She never married. The family put the reason down to her own choice, and the choice appears to have been an easy one: she had helped raise three children, had a trade that paid, and had no wish to exchange a house of her own for a husband's. She had no children of her own, but she was the aunt of a whole district. The Proctor youngsters of the Valley came through her shop, and she taught the girls to sew and to keep accounts, and the boys, in some cases, to read a ledger. The rivalry with the Faulkners was to her a matter of tallies and reputations, and she followed it with the alert amusement of a woman who kept accounts for a living. When word came in the 1810s that the Red Ledger's column was ahead in the eastern states, she remarked that Massachusetts always did have better light for its penmanship.
The War of 1812 touched the Valley lightly but firmly. Militia companies marched out of Harrisonburg and Winchester, prices rose, and imported ribbons and silks disappeared from the shops as the blockade tightened, so that Mary spent those years making bonnets out of homespun and dyed straw and finding, to her satisfaction, that the customers did not care. She was nearly fifty, and her hands had begun to stiffen. By the 1820s the shop was smaller, though she kept it going, and she lodged with the family of her brother Obadiah, whose farm lay a few miles outside town.
The winter of 1826 was a hard one, even by the standards of the Valley: snow came in December and lay through February, the river froze, and wagon roads stayed closed for weeks. Mary Woodbury Proctor, then sixty-one, took cold in January in a house that was hard to heat, and died in that hard winter, a death recorded by the family in those simple words. She was buried beside her mother, and her brother and sister came in over the drifts to see her laid down.
What survives of her is the account book, bound in the family archive with her father's entries, and the memory of a shop in which secrets were traded as calmly as ribbon. Her place in the Slayerverse is the one held by those who supported the slayers of the White Ledger from behind a counter: a Proctor of the Shenandoah who was never called, and who raised two hunters, kept a third family's house together, and made the Valley's bonnets for forty years while she quietly held its history in order.
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