Almira Edson

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Almira Edson (1803–1886) was an American folk artist known for painting family registers that also show mourning‑picture features. She was born in Halifax, Vermont, the daughter of Jesse and Rebecca Edson. After Jesse died in 1805, Rebecca married Captain Edward Adams of Colrain, Massachusetts, and the family moved when Almira was seven. As an adult she created several family registers around Halifax, Vermont. Her early work, the Woodard family register (circa 1837) in watercolor and ink, gained attention and was discussed by Jean Lipman and Alice Winchester in The Flowering of American Folk Art 1776–1876. Later, another register dated about 1838 for David and Anna Niles appeared at auction, followed by others for Dennis and Lois Stebbins, Oliver and Olive Wilkinson, and James and Jane Clark. The Clark register is signed “Executed by Almira Edson, Halifax, Vt.”

Edson joined a religious community in Putney, Vermont founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1841 and fell in love with John R. Lyvere. They eloped to Hinsdale, New Hampshire, and married on September 18, 1842. Noyes banished them, and they moved to Vernon, Connecticut, where Edson lived for the rest of her life. Her last known register, for William C. and Emily Porter Russell, was painted around 1847 in Ellington, Connecticut.

Little else is known of her life, though collectors Arthur and Sybil Kern studied her work. The Clark register is owned by the New-York Historical Society, the Stebbins register is in Historic Deerfield, and the Niles register sold at auction in 2018 for $4,305.