White wedding dresses, associated with the Victorian period and growing in fashion even in the decades before the era’s namesake queen, were not yet ubiquitous in the middle of the 19th century. One mid-century bride who chose to wear a gray silk gown rather than white was Maria Griest (pronounced “Mariah”), born on March 7, 1840, to a prominent Pennsylvania Society of Friends (Quaker) family in Adams County.
Just before her 20th birthday, Maria met future husband Charles Tyson and his brother Isaac while the two men visited Adams County on a business trip in February 1860, almost by accident. In a letter written to his sister Ruthie in Philadelphia, Charles explained how a winter storm had interrupted the brothers’ travel plans and led them to share a horse-drawn sleigh with a stranger, who introduced them to the Griest family at the nearby Menallen Friends Meeting. Charles was clearly instantly smitten with Maria, and while his letter describes all of the Griests, he especially noticed Maria. Charles described her as “…a sweet girl somewhere about twenty […] very intelligent and very mild – my “beau ideal” of a “nice girl”.” Charles barely contained his enthusiasm, insisting to Ruthie that he was not yet in love, “but to speak candid, I think a few more visits up there would teach me how it feels to be in that predicament.” If Maria wrote about her own impression of Charles, it hasn’t survived, but in an addendum to the same letter, Isaac assured Ruthie that he had “…pitched in with [the Griests] generally and Lizzie [Griest] in particular, occasionally with Maria but found there was no show when Charlie was about.”
Charles and Maria wed three years later at the Griest family home on May 3rd, 1863. Maria’s wedding dress, a gray silk taffeta gown now in the collection of the Fashion Archives & Museum, probably originally pagoda or demi pagoda sleeves in addition to a skirt shaped for bell hoop. Maria likely considered a single-use wedding dress wasteful, and so by approximately 1866, she modified it to update to the coat-sleeves seen today, with a smooth skirt front and side pleats supported with an elliptical (rather than round) hoop, and a fuller “ski slope” style in the back. Other modifications include the new belt, bias trim, and worked buttonholes replacing possible original hooks and eyes. The gown’s excellent condition over 160 years indicates that while Maria updated the dress’s style and clearly wore it more than once, she reserved the gown for special occasions.
Less than two months later, as Maria and Charles settled into married life in a Gettysburg townhouse, they found themselves on the edge of perhaps the most significant battle of the Civil War. On the morning of July 1, 1863, Charles (by now an established photographer) descended into his darkroom to emerge a short time later to find a decidedly abnormal day. His waiting customer paid, and quickly vanished into the emptying streets as news of the Confederate invasion spread. Hurrying home, Charles met Maria coming the other way, close to the town square, looking for him. She had already packed their “wedding suits”—including her taffeta gown—into a trunk along with a few other belongings, and the Tysons fled, joining the stream of Gettysburg residents rapidly moving out of town. They hid the trunk in the basement of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Brenner, who kept it safe behind Confederate lines by building a makeshift bed over top of it while the Rebels occupied their home above. The dress, along with the Tysons, survived the war, to eventually make its way to the FA&M. The gown’s matching bonnet and shawl–not pictured–survive in a private collection.
Charles sold the photography business to William Tipton, who became one of the better known photographers in the region during the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Charles bought and sold interest in the business multiple times, but by the 1870s he was far more established in the apple tree orchard and nursery business, and founded the Susquehanna Fertilizer Company in 1877. Charles passed away on December 22, 1906. The business passed to Maria and Charles’ sons, and years later, Maria wrote about attending that year’s Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg to make sales and further the company business.
Maria, meanwhile, kept the Tyson home throughout her marriage to Charles. The couple had three sons and one daughter—Edwin, Chester, William, and Mary. Many of their children and grandchildren attended the George School, a private Quaker establishment in Newton, Pennsylvania, carrying on their parents’ Quaker and educational values.
The Fashion Archives also holds another dress from Maria’s wedding trousseau, a lightweight summer dress that she eventually “demoted” to a daily work dress. Unlike the wedding gown, Maria’s work dress is a more ordinary, simpler garment designated for utility in its current form, and lacking the decorative elements and fine fabric of the more elegant wedding gown. Like the wedding gown, the wool challis work dress underwent modifications, although in this case the changes reflect restyling and repair rather than fashionable updates. The faded sleeves indicate that Maria likely wore this dress while washing clothes or similar tasks requiring her to plunge her forearms repeatedly into soapy water.
Maria survived Charles to live several decades as a widow. Correspondence with her granddaughter Margaret still survives in family archives, where Maria writes about attending Menallen Friends’ meetings and events, her sons’ continuation of the family businesses, and her grandchildrens’ education. In one letter with which many modern parents and grandparents of adult children can certainly identify even today, Maria writes that her granddaughter has not written back in many weeks, and asks for a reply.
Maria passed away in 1927 of heart disease and “the infirmities of old age.” Maria and Charles are buried beside each other in the northwest corner of the cemetery at the Menallen Friends Meeting, along with many of their children, descendants, and relatives from both Tyson and Griest families.
Special thanks to Edyth Sarnoff and Charity Johnson, descendants of the Tysons who opened their private archives and shared their family histories with the researchers.
Researched and presented by Shippensburg University Applied History graduate students Andrew Chesnut, Patrick Hartinger, and Sierra Harvey
HIST 541 — Museum Education — Fall 2024
