On June 4, 1871, Sara Baines hopped down from a wagon at Fort Bridger, a remote military and trading outpost at the crossroads of several pioneer trails in what would one day become Wyoming. Baines, a 24-year-old seamstress from Louisiana, had just spent several months traveling 1,500 miles through road-less territory, alone. But she wouldn’t be alone for long—she’d come to Fort Bridger to get married.
The groom was Jay Hemsley, a 48-year-old farmer who’d left Ohio some years before to seek his fortune out west. The two had met after Hemsley responded to an ad placed in the matrimonial pages of the October 12, 1869, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly. They corresponded via letter for more than a year before Hemsley proposed. The day after Baines arrived at Fort Bridger, they were married by the fort’s minister in a small ceremony on the banks of Groshon Creek. The next day, they left to open a general store in Placerville, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The Hemsleys were married for 51 years.
It seems like a tremendous risk—traveling thousands of miles into lonely territory to marry a person you met through an advertisement in a newspaper—but it was a gamble that many men and women in the 19th century were willing to take. It’s not quite the same gamble today, but that approach to finding a companionship, a partner in a life that can otherwise be lonely, is still important in 21st-century rural life.
The rise of personal and matrimonial ads—appeals for companionship in newspapers and magazines, as well as in specialist publications devoted entirely to matchmaking—in 19th-century America was a then-modern solution to an age-old problem. “The development of personal ads track the populating of America,” says Francesca Beauman, who wrote about Baines and Hemsley in her 2020 history of the American personal ad, Matrimony, Inc. Put another way, without personals, Manifest Destiny—flawed, damaging, racist doctrine that it was—couldn’t have, well, manifested.
America at the time was expanding at a tremendous rate, unprecedented for virtually any modern nation. The signing of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, for example, nearly doubled the size of the country with the flourish of a pen, and over the next 50 years, millions of square miles were added through wars, purchases, and the killing or forcible removal of the Native Americans who already lived there.
