WHS Presents: Dangerous Characters: The Life and Crime of Delia and Charlie Potter

Saturday, March 22, 2:00-3:00pm. Discover Williston's most sensational criminals and their role in the 1865 killing of Sally Griswold, who had gotten rich in the Gold Rush. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Sally's adopted daughter Delia and Delia's husband Charlie were behind the crime, but no one has put together all the pieces of this intergenerational conflict until now. Follow the Potters from beginning to end, including their eventual imprisonment for robbery, their deaths, and their legacy. Illuminating life in Williston in the 1860s, the story of the Potters demonstrates the ambivalent effects of industrialization on a small Vermont community. The recently built railroad brought greater economic opportunities to the town of about 1700 people, but it also allowed a hired killer to travel up from New York City and do away with Sally. With Sally's death, modernity came to Williston as well as murder.

Biography: Elizabeth A. Allen's connection to Williston is through her father Richard Allen, former teacher in Williston schools and author of several books about town history. She first wrote about the Potters and Griswolds in a series of local history columns for the Williston Observer. Her further research on the Potters was sponsored in part by a research grant from the Williston Historical Society. She just published "The Mysterious Girl-Boy: Gender, Sexuality, and Madness in Victorian Vermont" in Vermont HIstory and "Letters to and from Santa in Victorian Vermont" in the Ephemera Journal. She is currently researching Wells Richardson Company's marketing to children in the 1890s, trans life in Vermont at the turn of the twentieth century, and the connections between antebellum women's cross-dressing and political activism. She is writing a book about the Potters and the Griswolds.