Born on her family farm in Fairfield in 1899, Consuelo Northrop attended grade school in Sheldon and high school in St. Albans, graduated from the University of Vermont in 1921, and later graduated from Boston University Law School in 1925. She married Henry Albon Bailey in 1940. Consuelo Bailey became the first woman city prosecutor for Burlington, the first woman lawyer in Vermont to try a murder case, the first Vermont woman admitted to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first woman elected Speaker of the Vermont House, and the nation’s first female elected lieutenant governor. Although she traveled widely and represented the state, she found no place more comforting than Fairfield, where she felt close to her family’s land and to an older America. She worked tirelessly for the local and national Republican Party until her death in 1976, and she left the Town of Fairfield money to build the Bent Northrop Memorial Library, which opened in 1988.