For decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Rose Cleveland, sister of President Grover Cleveland, and Evangeline Simpson, second wife of Henry Whipple, Minnesota’s first Episcopal bishop, wrote love letters to one another. They moved around the world on their own life trajectories, but they stayed in touch. The two eventually ended up together in Italy.

It’s a queer love story with a happy ending — a little bit of a surprise considering how long ago it happened. But these kinds of relationships between women were fairly common at this point in history.

The letters from Cleveland to Simpson, full of affectionate and passionate language, sat in the archives at the Minnesota Historical Society for decades. Historians and editors Lizzie Ehrenhalt of MNopedia and the Minnesota Historical Society and Tilly Laskey of the Maine Historical Society transcribed them and turned them into a book, “Precious and Adored: The Love Letters of Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson Whipple,” released in 2019.

At this community conversation, Ehrenhalt will talk about Cleveland and Simpson’s relationship, and the historical context, and show some of the letters and photographs from the collection. The discussion will be moderated by journalist Katie Moritz of Twin Cities PBS’s Rewire.org.

If you’re passionate or curious about the LGBTQ history of Minnesota, you won’t want to miss this discussion.

“You are mine, and I am yours, and we are one, and our lives are one henceforth, please God, who can alone separate us.” — Rose Cleveland to Evangeline Simpson, 1890