Phebe Wilder Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Phebe Wilder Proctor learned her trade in a wagon. Born in 1741 in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, she was still a small child when her mother loaded the household onto a farm cart and moved the family down the valley road, and the first thing she remembered of her life, she said in old age, was the smell of hot iron tyres and wet hickory. She grew up to be a milliner, married a printer, raised two daughters and died in 1803 of a winter cough at sixty-two. She was not a vampire slayer, but she was born into a house of them, and both her brothers were called to the White Ledger's work. Her part was to keep the household, and its letters, standing while they were away. The valley of her childhood was the great limestone corridor between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, settled in the 1730s by Scots-Irish, German and English families who came down from Pennsylvania along the Great Wagon Road. It was fertile, well watered country of wheat, corn, orchards and cattle, dotted with log houses, stone barns and mills on every creek. Its towns were small: Winchester, Staunton, Woodstock, each a cluster of taverns, smithies and stores around a courthouse. The people were Presbyterians, Lutherans, Quakers and Anglicans, wary of the Tidewater gentry and of one another. The road was the artery of the place, and it carried wagons, drovers, peddlers and rumour in both directions. Her father, Levi Wilder, born in 1708, was a wheelwright, a maker of wagon wheels for a country that lived on wheels, and his shop was never short of work. The Great Wagon Road chewed up hubs and felloes at a fearful rate. Her mother, Rachel Proctor, born in 1712, was the bearer of the Proctor name and the Proctor knowledge, and the family described her simply as a farmer's wife who moved the household down the valley road when the frontier began to heat up. In practice that meant she planned and directed a removal of the whole family, livestock and tools included, over some sixty miles of rough track, and did it twice in Phebe's childhood. It says something of her character, and of the household's, that neither move was described afterward as remarkable. There were two brothers, Benjamin Proctor, born in 1735, and Jonas Proctor, born in 1743, and both were called to the work of slayers under the White Ledger. Phebe, in the middle, was not, and she came to terms with that early. The family tradition holds that she watched her elder brother clean his rifle at the kitchen table when she was eight years old and told him she would make a better ledger-keeper than a hunter, since she had a better hand. It was a fair assessment. Her handwriting was tidy, her arithmetic was sound, and she had a gift for remembering who owed what to whom. She was sent as a girl to learn the millinery trade from a widow in Winchester, who taught her to cut, pin and stitch caps, hoods, cloaks and gowns, and to trim them with ribbon, lace and gauze. In the valley, where fashion arrived a season late and in the luggage of any traveller, a woman with an eye for cloth and a supply of imported trim could make a decent living. Phebe was quick, neat and inclined to argue with her customers. By twenty she had a small shop of her own with a sign, a counter, and a row of hats on wooden stands in the window, and a name for making a gown that fitted. The wars with France on the frontier, which sent refugees flooding down the valley in the 1750s, gave her more custom than she could handle, and she took on two girls to help. Through her shop passed the news of the valley, and Phebe, like her mother before her, listened. A milliner sees every woman in the district in the course of a year, hears the small domestic disasters and picks up tales of dead cattle, sickly children and neighbours who kept curtains drawn at noon. She wrote down what she heard in a private book and sent the interesting entries to her brothers, and Benjamin and Jonas rode out on the strength of them. It was one of the several unrecorded lines of intelligence that fed the White Ledger, and the family later admitted that the number of its entries owing something to Phebe's counter was greater than the ledger acknowledged. In 1768 she married Asa Cutler, born in 1741, a printer, who had come up the valley from Williamsburg to set up a small shop for jobbing work. He printed handbills, sale notices, almanacs, land deeds and the occasional sermon, and he was a quiet, ink-stained man with a passion for good type and bad puns. They met over a bill for a new hat, so the story runs, and he argued the price down with such courtesy that she married him to see what he would do next. They set up house above the printing shop in Winchester, and her millinery counter and his press shared a street front and a stove. The house smelled of lampblack, lye and beeswax. Two daughters were born there: Hannah Cutler Proctor in 1769 and Ruth Cutler Proctor in 1772. Following the family's practice of carrying the Proctor name through its daughters, both were named Proctor, though their father was a Cutler, and Asa raised no objection. Neither girl was called to the work. Phebe taught them to read, sew and keep accounts, and she instructed them in the elementary precautions of a Proctor household, the threshold, the silver, the shuttered window, which she treated as ordinary housekeeping and which the girls took as such. The Revolution came to the valley in the form of recruiting sergeants and county committees, and Asa's press printed broadsides for the patriot cause and later, for the state, forms and proclamations. Phebe made shirts for the militia and bandages for the hospitals, kept the shop open through the shortages and wrote to her brothers whenever a stranger on the road seemed wrong. Her mother Rachel died in 1785, and her father Levi had died in 1772, the year her younger daughter was born. She was left the senior woman of the family. She kept her shop until she was past sixty, and died in the winter of 1803 of a cough she had carried through several cold months. Asa survived her by thirteen years. The White Ledger's clerks, going through the family papers, found her private book of valley news and copied it into the archive. In the Slayerverse, Phebe Wilder Proctor is remembered as the woman behind the counter who saw more than she said and wrote down all of it.