Biography
Born in Townshend, Vermont, Betsey Carroll married at age 18 and, like many other young women in the early nineteenth century, experienced a religious conversion. Precipitated by a bout of spotted fever, her devotion to religion dominated her life and thinking. After she and her husband Timothy moved to the frontier town of Bakersfield in 1812, she held religious meetings and gatherings at her home and at one point became a Free Will Baptist.
She was entranced by revivalists who came through Bakersfield during the Second Great Awakening. Adventist Thomas Davidson, who preached that believers would possess strange powers and that Christ would return to earth as a woman, excited the community, including one man who hung himself. These happenings greatly affected Carroll. She documented her religious enthusiasm in a journal, included in Massachusetts Historical Genealogic publications.
Carroll continued to be active in her local church for the rest of her life and wrote a short pamphlet, "Piety in Humble Life," held in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society.Occupation
Author