Guest Blog - You Can Go Home Again

by Sierra Gitlin, Administrative Assistant

Spending your days sifting through old photographs and extensive genealogies, as we do at the Museum of Old Newbury, can make you question your bona fides as a Newburyporter. This small city, like many, I suspect, has a strong sense of the importance of its storied families. Familiar surnames repeat themselves on street signs, landmarks, memorials, buildings, and tombstones, and many descendants of the first European settlers who landed on the Parker River in 1635 still live here. How does someone like me then, who measures my time here in just a couple of interrupted decades, not in unbroken centuries or generations, come to call Newburyport home?

Market Square circa 1979

My earliest memories are of my own feet slapping along the bricks of Market Square, chasing pigeons on Inn Street to the sandy tot lot, breakfast at Fowle’s, preschool in the YMCA basement, and what seemed like hours sitting in Ferlita’s while my dad played (dominated, to hear him tell it) the Missile Command arcade game. My parents met at the Grog in 1974. Mom was a waitress and dad was in the band that was playing that night.

The Grog - still in business today in 2023!

She had moved here shortly after graduating with a fine arts degree from Boston University, because Newburyport was, at that time, an affordable place to live with a thriving arts scene. Her apartment on Dalton St. was $90 a month. My dad quickly fell in love, with my mother and with this seaside town, and relocated from Vermont where he had been spending his early 20s skiing and playing in a rock and roll band. When I was born in 1978, we lived at 48 Milk Street.

The South End was a different place then - our house was broken into often, my mom once had to buy her stolen wedding ring back from a pawn shop downtown. Eventually we moved just over the border to Newton NH, where I did most of my schooling, my parents attracted to the quiet, privacy, and breathing-room of the country. But Newton had no grocery store, no bank, barely a gas station at that time, so we would come to Newburyport several times a week, and always on Saturday mornings, to shop, do errands, see friends, and have breakfast at Fowle’s. As soon as I got my driver’s license, I’d come hang out in Newburyport, back on Inn Street. I was too old and too cool to chase pigeons, never too old for a jaunt to Fowle’s for hot chocolate, and just old enough to be making calls from the wooden phone booth in the front corner. But I was always a bit of an outsider, since I didn’t live here anymore, or go to school here. I was from two places - these brick sidewalks, and the woods of NH. 

Looking up Inn Street from the fountain. Note the balloon seller.

Despite living elsewhere from the ages of 6 to 24, my early years in Newburyport, and my family’s weekly, almost ritualistic, return throughout my childhood and teen years made it feel like my true home. Once I grew up and got married, it was the only place I could imagine living and raising kids. Luckily my husband was amenable, and we were able to buy a house back in the South End, just steps from where I started my life. My kids were born at Anna Jaques Hospital, and I pushed them in strollers to the new playground on Inn St, where THEY took their turn chasing the pigeons. We had many breakfasts at Fowle’s when they were very young, just before it closed and changed, and changed again. I was able to walk them downtown to preschool at Newburyport Montessori, run by the same remarkable women who ran Spring Street School, where my mom had walked my brother and me 30 years earlier. 

A last photo of Fowle's before it closed in 2012.

I've now lived here as an adult longer than I lived in New Hampshire or anyplace else, and though my genealogy has no ties to any early settlers at all - my ancestors immigrated from Ukraine, Europe, and the UK around the turn of the 20th century - Newburyport is my home, and my children’s home. My life’s seemingly wandering path has actually led me in a circle. I can see my first house on Milk Street from my bedroom window here on Orange Street, where I’ve been lucky enough to call the purple, turreted Queen Anne Victorian “Moody House” my home for the past 16 years. I am rooted here not by birth, but by choice, by luck, sometimes I think even by destiny, given how close to my starting place I now live. Once you've spent time in Newburyport, it’s impossible not to feel a deep connection to this spectacular bit of coastline and riverbank and marsh and woods. Working at the Museum of Old Newbury, learning more than I knew there was to know about Newburyport and the families and individuals who built it, that connection has only grown. It sounds like a cliché, but home really is where the heart is, and whether your family has been here for three years, three decades, or three centuries, it’s easy to be madly in love with the beauty and history of this remarkable city. 

Comfort and Joy

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

It’s three days before Christmas and I’m feeling blue. Scratch that. It’s three days before Christmas and I’m grieving. If you are feeling unequivocally merry and bright, you might want to give this post a miss. If, on the other hand, you are feeling out of step with the glitter and glitz of the holiday season, like so many of us right now, you’re in good company.

On Monday, we lost Cathy Strauss. There should be a descriptor after her name. I should say, Cathy Strauss, past co-president of the Museum of Old Newbury, or Cathy Strauss, friend to me and many others, or Cathy Strauss, beloved sister, mother, aunt. Cathy Strauss, master of the cheese plate, the devilled egg, the pigs in blankets, the arched eyebrow, the hearty laugh, the witty quip. Cathy sallied forth into the office here with a shout of “hello, lovely ducklings!”, or “hello, beautiful people!”, exclamations of delight at our very existence. She set the tone for what this museum is at its best – part garden party and part disco inferno with fabulous art and excellent snacks. Cathy was very much at home at the Museum of Old Newbury. She had been a docent, a board member, and most recently, co-president. Her roots in Old Newbury go back centuries, a descendant of Hales and Littles and Tenneys and Poores. Like me, she grew up “away”, but made a life for herself here, embracing the history and memory of her family, and for both of us, this connection had led us to the Museum of Old Newbury, where our circles grew deeper and wider.

Cathy Strauss speaking at the 2021 Annual Meeting in the Perkins Mint at the Museum of Old Newbury.

In the first moments of awakening this morning, when things were both softer and clearer for me, I brought Cathy’s face into my mind’s eye. She came into focus with her sisters, soon joined by my friend who just lost her father, another whose mother is disappearing into Alzheimer’s, dear friends who have lost soul companions of all kinds. Then, the letting go, the hard morning light, the pressing obligations. I went outside with a handful of carrots and spent some quiet moments with the animals.

Death, in all its forms, is a universal human experience. In a way, it is the most present reality of our work at the Museum of Old Newbury. Every day, we are thinking about people who have died, organizing their possessions, dusting their relics, looking into their faces in paintings, statues, photographs. We are talking to their children and grandchildren about who they were and what they left behind. The museum itself is a place where people make friends and meet neighbors, and it follows naturally that the loss of members of our community is deeply felt here as well. We are all swept along together in a deep river of friendship, love, and loss.   

At the intersection of Low Street and Rte. 1, I pulled up to a red light and found myself unable to control the tears that had been building all morning. I do not cry often, but when I do, it’s not pretty. A quick glance to my right confirmed that there was a woman in the car next to me, looking away. I sniffled. She looked over. She was crying too. The two of us, complete strangers, both wearing holiday sweaters and jaunty scarves, had a moment together weeping uncontrollably, and then, recognizing the ridiculousness of it all, laughing together at a stop light.

Cathy and her sister Beth share a secret at the Museum's 2022 Annual Meeting. Photo courtesy Bob Watts.

I took a detour after that. I drove down High Street into Newbury, pulled over in front of Coffin House, and crossed the street into the First Parish Burying Ground. I had a mission – I needed a picture of a stone for an upcoming story. But it was more than that. Standing among the people who have walked this bit of the earth over time comforts me. It reminds me that in our awareness of our mortality lies our essential humanness. Tonight, Ghlee Woodworth and I will lead a merry band of flashlight-wielding neighbors and friends through Oak Hill Cemetery on the longest night of the year. It will be dark and cold, but we will be together, travelling through time, lighting the path for each other, and celebrating our neighbors, living and dead.

I wish you comfort this holiday season, if you need it. If you have some to spare, share it with your neighbors. I will always smile when I think of Cathy, with her throaty chuckle and her perfect union of sass and class. We were lucky to be here with her.

For more information, see the obituary in the Newburyport Daily News.

The Center of the Universe

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Picture the scene - yours truly, perched on the edge of a comfortable leather sofa in a recreated pub below decks on the ship Queen Victoria, cruising through the Bay of Biscay between France and Spain. The occasion is the nightly pub quiz, a British tradition that, like other British traditions, forms the social calendar of our recent voyage. We are part of a team of 6, trying to identify songs by Fats Domino and Whitney Houston. I'm shouting over the throbbing strains of "I Wanna Dance with Somebody", recapping our plans for port excursions in Spain. One of the party declares that I must see the Alhambra. "The bus is full," I shout. "We’re going to Cordova."

The Spanish city of Cordova has been an important craft, trade, and religious center since the 2nd century BC. Courtesy image.

And then it happens. My quiz buddy says something about cordovan leather, and we're off to the races. “You know what's funny” I say, “I was always seeing these early Newbury records that refer to cordwainers. Did you know a cordwainer is someone who works in new leather? It's a derivation of an old French word meaning someone who works in cordovan leather, originally the finest leather from Cordova! The term cordwainer was used to distinguish people who made shoes from new leather from cobblers, who repaired shoes, in the medieval guild system in England. Did you know that cordovan leather is made from the connective tissue under the skin of a horse’s rump? Cordovan leather was so expensive that the term became synonymous with the finest quality leather, and so it became sort of a high-end brand, and everyone started using it on all kinds of leather goods.” My friend’s eyes were glazing over.

“Anyway, you probably know all that already,” I said, making the natural assumption that British people are all fonts of historical knowledge. “I didn’t, actually” he shouted politely, “but I do know that this song is 'Hip to be Square' by Huey Lewis!” 

These tiles mark the shop of a leather merchant in Cordova in eight different languages.

I had so much more to say about arcane adventures in leather. I wanted to tell someone about my recent discovery in several account books that dog carcasses, DOGS, were sold en masse to the Coffin tannery on High Road in Newbury, and that far from being some sort of aberration, dog skin was widely harvested, considered the best for making strong but supple gloves, particularly for women. William Shakespeare himself mentions the article in his jointly written play, Two Noble Kinsmen, as a character notes that “the next gloves that I give her shall be dog skin.” Our own Louisa May Alcott mentions the offending article in Little Women. "Uncle rushed out and bought a pair of dogskin gloves, some ugly, thick shoes, and an umbrella, and got shaved _à la_ mutton chop, the first thing." 

Of course, how these dogs were acquired is a depressing thought, but in the days before spaying and neutering, packs of semi-feral dogs were routinely rounded up and…this is usually where the look of horror on my audience’s face reminds me that I have gone too far. And then I make it worse.

The last time I told this story, I finished it up with a full run-down of the dog-skin products available to Newburyport consumers. In 1849, the newspaper related a humorous story involving a dogskin saddle. Twenty years later, nearly every shop in town had several varieties of dogskin gloves for sale. As late as 1930, at Harrington’s Men’s Store at 19 Pleasant Street, one could pick up the finest “Genuine Arabian Mocha (sheepskin), Peccary, Pigskin, Dogskin, or Cape (South African goatskin)” gloves. Gross, right?

This advertisement for Easter accessories at Harrington's store appeared in the Newburyport Daily News on April 10, 1930.

But, but…everything is illuminated by its history, I want to plead. Even the unpleasant things – perhaps nothing teaches us so much about our own lives as an examination of the things that were once part of everyday life and are now repugnant. We wonder how people could wear dogskin gloves much like people in the future might wonder how we can eat cows and pigs on such an industrial scale. I’m not preaching – I am wearing leather shoes at this very moment, but doesn’t it make you think? And isn’t that the point of life – gathering enough context and detail to become insufferable at parties? 

As we piled into the bus and wound our way through arid mountains from the Spanish port of Malaga to Cordova, I thought about another reason I am insufferable at parties (there are many). Anywhere I go, anywhere in the world, I think of Newbury(port). But unlike the generalized affection many people feel for their home, my thoughts are very specific. I think of Thomas Jillings, cordwainer, who bought a house on Middle Street in April, 1725 from John Norton, also listed as a cordwainer. Later that same year he married my distant cousin Hannah Myrick, and they were both members of the Third Parish Meetinghouse, whose weathervane, a stunning gilded rooster, was brand new then, and is now the centerpiece of an exhibit upstairs from my office. I think of how newspapers from Cordova were passed from ship to ship in 1808, reaching Newburyport with the breathtaking news of the plunder of the city by French forces and the subsequent defeat of Napoleon’s army as the Spanish people took their revenge. I think of all the Newburyport adventurers who sailed into Malaga, and Lisbon, and Cadiz, all stops on my recent journey. The structure upon which I hang my experience of the wider world is built of the stone and earth of this community.

Cordwainer's apron from an unidentified Newbury shop, c. 1820-1840. Courtesy photo.

I have described Newburyport as the center of the universe – it certainly is the center of my life and work, but that’s not exactly what I mean. It is something about how this place, which over time has been Indigenous land, an early New England immigrant community, a thriving port, a factory town, an artist community, a seaside resort, has cast out and reeled in so many threads that connect us, over time, to the rest of the world.

A few nights later, another pub quiz. The question is something about Elvis Presley. We all whisper, confer, choose a likely answer. My friend from earlier leans in conspiratorially. “You know what’s funny,” he says, “Elvis only visited the UK once, and it was right down the road from my house in Prestwick”. His eyes sparkle. “And the British Open was first played there in 1860. Nobody’s ever heard of Prestwick, but it’s an amazing place. Robert the Bruce was supposedly cured of leprosy in a well behind the church…!” As it turns out, his hometown is the center of the universe too, another thread connecting us across this wild and wonderful world.    

"Those in Peril on the Sea"

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Many of you have heard me speak about Eben Bradbury, a young Marine from Newburyport killed in World War One. He is in my thoughts every day, but especially during this time of year. The birthday of the Marine Corps is November 10, Veterans Day November 11, Eben’s birthday November 12.

Eben Bradbury, killed in World War I, is memorialized on this boulder on the Bartlet Mall in Newburyport, but buried in France. Image courtesy of Cynthia August.

This year, I spent a day with our Allies. For the second year in a row, I joined a group organized by the British and Commonwealth Remembrance Project to honor the British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors, and airmen buried in New England. Specifically, we went to visit the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Cemetery.

The poppy is an important symbol of remembrance, particularly in Europe.

I came to this event through a circuitous route. An English friend of mine invited me to attend and then was unable to go herself. I went along anyway. As I claim a certain amount of Canadian identity, having spent my childhood in British Columbia, Ontario, and Manitoba, I was adopted by this crew of ex-pats and pay particular attention to the Commonwealth citizens buried there – the Australians, New Zealanders, and yes, Canadians. It helps that my longtime friend Adam, whose association with the British Royal Navy goes back decades, is also part of this group. It also helps that I know all the words to God Save the Queen, although now we must sing God Save the King, which I will admit was a shock when the word first passed my lips.

We met in a parking lot in Kittery, Maine. We had already passed a background check. We were loaded into an unmarked van and driven on to the Portsmouth Naval Base. Our IDs were taken away, then handed back after we were through the checkpoint. We were reminded not to take pictures of the base as we passed through. This is not an easy cemetery to visit.

A New Zealand flag flies behind the stone of John David Wallace, a member of the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve, who died in 1943, age 21.

The cemetery is small and quiet, a few stones on a hill above the river. The stones are from a variety of time periods, and most of them are American. There was one section, however, where most of the stones look the same - concrete blocks with metal plaques affixed to them. Each stone is a memorial to a young man that died in World War II, and many of these are British and Commonwealth citizens.

It was a beautiful day, the last of the leaves still clinging to the trees and casting an orange and yellow glow. The weather was too warm for the coats we all wore, and I watched as one person after another carefully removed their poppy pin from their coat and then carefully re-pinned it to their shirt. We weren't exactly joyful, but we weren't somber either. Some members of the group were old friends, some went directly to the stone of someone they had researched or were connected with in some other way. It felt like a kind of reunion.

There was a short service, a song, a prayer. And then, a moment of silence, and that was when, in the playful light of late fall in New England, we brought the young men buried here, many of them just teenagers, into full consciousness. The silence was broken by a bugle playing the Last Post, and then we all took poppies and placed them on the graves, taking time to think of each one. The youngest I could find was sixteen – the oldest forty-five. Some were lost at sea and washed ashore, others were killed in training exercises or while defending the coast. All are here, on our soil, forever, so far from home, in a place that is hidden away and hard to visit. I was so grateful to the group that organized the trip and thought of the sons and daughters of Old Newbury buried abroad. Of course, I always think of Eben in France, unvisited for so long, but now remembered by so many.

Most societies have established rituals for remembering those long dead. We Americans seem to be a people of relentless motion, of expansion and forward propulsion. I often think of what is lost in this desire to leave the past behind – whether we can still believe as we once did that we would carry on into the future. The residents of Old Newbury burying grounds centuries ago had good reason to believe that their grave had something to offer the living. They offered advice to their descendants, reprimanded the frivolous and admonished the sinner. Later, they planned garden cemeteries like Oak Hill – public parks to lure in the public, to be remembered by picnickers and dog walkers. They speak to the primal hope that they will be remembered, propelled into the future with a plaintive “remember me as you walk by”.

The graves of Danish and British sailors from the freighter Empire Knight.

Tonight, I am thinking of a row of graves across a gravel path from the main graveyard, marked with concrete stones with names like Jens George Dahl and Leonard Johanis Hansen. These men were the crew of the Empire Knight, a 7244-ton British ship that went down off the coast of Maine on February 11, 1944. Twenty sailors were rescued. Twenty-four were killed. Sixteen are buried at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. Many of the crew of the Empire Knight were from Denmark. When the Nazis occupied their country, many Danes who were at sea chose to join the British Navy rather than sail home and live under Nazi rule. They were fighting for the freedom of their occupied homeland when they died, and it seems doubly tragic that they were fated never to return, even in death.

Sonar has captured the wreck of the Empire Knight on Boon Island Ledge, Maine.

In America, Veterans Day is for the living, for those who served the country in war and peace, at home and abroad. Remembering the dead is not enough, but it is how I honor the living. I will never forget that it was a living Navy veteran of the Korean War who put Eben Bradbury’s medal in my hand and sent me on this path.

But tonight, I will think of the brave Danes who met their death fighting fascism. And I will add them to the young men and women who I hold in my memory, and in my heart.

"They Were Innocent Persons..."

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

I woke up this morning before dawn, the only sound the muffled thud of our plow horse’s feet in the meadow below my window. I walked outside in my pajamas, barefoot, looked back at the outline of my old house, the great elm tree planted by my great-great grandfather all auburn leaves and gnarled branches. The sky was barely grey around the edges, a thick mist rising from the still-green fields. It was cold, a shimmering frost on the grass. A crow sat atop the flagpole, a repurposed ship spar, and cawed a reply to the last owl of the night. I was half awake, the shadow of a dream lingering. No wonder people believed in spirits, good and evil, I thought. This is a haunted land. I thought of the people accused of witchcraft mounting the scaffold in the cold hours of a fall morning in 1692, their village a warren of ancient houses and…

The Poore Farm fields at dawn on a fall morning, 2022.

My favorite ghost, my great-aunt, Emily Noyes Poore, came up behind me and snorted. “NONSENSE.” Hers is a true haunting, entirely internal. She does not float along in ethereal mists, nor does she appear as cold vapors in the corner of the room. No. She is, more’s the pity, very much actually dead, but she said just enough in her 96 years of life to be with me always, especially when I am succumbing to the charms of mythical nonsense.

And she thought, for good reason, that people dressed as witches and heading off to Salem as if this was connected somehow to the witchcraft accusations of 1692 was as big a pile of nonsense as she had ever encountered. I’ll recap her best arguments:

1. There were no witches.

2. There were no witches.

3. There were no witches.

Please do not misunderstand me. Aunt Emily was not without a powerful sense of fun. She tobogganed well into her 70s with any child who asked, loved a good go-cart race at Salisbury Beach, and occasionally landed a legendary zinger. Once, I said in my best romantic Anne of Green Gables voice that I wished I could live in the crumbling farmhouse owned by an elderly neighbor. “I think he’s single,” she snorted, and chuckled privately at the thought for hours.

Emily Noyes Poore did not have an easy life. Her mother, the sunshine of her dour old family, died in 1934, when she was barely 14. Her father, who could barely eek a living out of the rocky soil of West Newbury in the best of times, was paralyzed by grief as the Great Depression sucked all the remaining resources from the household. Furniture was sold. The house went unheated in winter. Milk was cut with water. I think that this figured into her general distaste for things supernatural or other-worldly. For her, this present world was hard enough. There was no energy or time to devote to the shadowy forces of darkness.

Emily Noyes Poore, second from the right, with her mother, Mary Dyer (Noyes) Poore, and sisters Charlotte and Louise, the year her mother died.

I respect that, but like so many of the Newbury families in the 17th century, I have an active imagination and veer toward superstition. I can certainly understand how, in a world where almost everything seemed beyond human control, people saw malevolence around every corner. The events of 1692 are so frightening to me because they are so normal, so much a part of the way that human beings often behave. I remember leaving a West Newbury town meeting years ago where a particularly contentious land dispute had been raised. One of the combatants, an older woman, walked out ahead of me while the person behind me said, “they used to burn people like her at the stake.” There was laughter, and a rising cold fear in my chest.

I know, I know, nobody in 1692 was burned at the stake. Nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death, and five people died in jail. Put your letter to the editor away. My point is that you can too-easily draw a straight line between the festering squabbles of small-town life today and witchcraft accusations three centuries ago. And the witchcraft trials seem uncomfortably close right now, and our bonds of civil cooperation particularly perilous.

And so, I am having a harder time than usual this year getting into the spirit of Halloween, particularly of the Salem, witch-hat variety. I know the ties between the costumed revelers and the actual witchcraft trials are tangential at best, a bit of wildly successful marketing that began with the sale of souvenir spoons in Daniel Low's late 19th century Salem shop.

Advertisement for the Salem “witch spoon” that helped solidify Salem as a tourist attraction.

I just can’t get past the fact that this town, this community whose history I love so passionately, was complicit in the judicial murders of 1692. Wicked complicit. Though no Newbury residents were executed in 1692, I can confidently say that there is not one single person involved in the trials, either as accused or accuser, that did not have some connection to Newbury. Their world was simply too small.

Ann Putnam, whose daughter, also Ann, was one of the “afflicted” girls, primary accusers during the witchcraft trials, was born Ann Carr. Her father, George Carr, was the ferryman first from Newbury to Salisbury via Carr’s Island in the Merrimack River, and then, as business boomed, just the leg from the island to Salisbury. The Carr family is tremendously important in the 17th century history of Newbury. The Carrs were a contentious and litigious family, and so their voices are well recorded in the Essex County Quarterly Courts, where I spend a great deal of my discretionary time. Ann Putnam Jr., granddaughter of George the ferryman, accused a staggering 62 people of witchcraft. Twenty-five people died as a result – five of them in prison.

Newbury’s John Atkinson, his wife Sarah, and Ensign Joseph Knight all testified against Susanna Martin, who was hanged alongside Rebecca Nurse. Judith Coffin of Newbury was the mother-in-law of both Joseph Knight and Rev. John Hale (1636-1700) of Beverly, author of A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft and one of the most influential voices in the 1692 witchcraft trials.

Rev. John Hale, married to Newbury’s Elizabeth Somerby, was considered an authority on witchcraft at the time of the trials.

And then there is Judge Samuel Sewell, who also grew up in…you guessed it…Newbury. His mother was living on High Road during the trials, in a house that Sewall later inherited.

Smibert’s 1729 portrait of Samuel Sewall. Image courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Aunt Emily (and I) descend from accused and accusers, judges and jurymen, the murdered and the reprieved. It did not take long for these families to begin intermarrying once again, the thin pool of possible spouses triumphing over any lingering bad feeling from that time your grandpa sentenced my grandma to death.

And maybe that is the lesson here, the ultimate triumph. Communities can only convulse for so long before a trauma becomes a fading memory, or conversely, a ginned-up tourist attraction, a celebration of a mythic past.

And I will leave you with this bit of hope. Ann Putnam, granddaughter of the one-time Newbury ferryman, was the only one of the 1692 accusers to apologize publicly. “I desire to be humbled before God…that I, then being in my childhood, should…(have been) made an instrument for the accusing of several people for grievous crimes, whereby their lives were taken away from them, whom, now I have just grounds and good reason to believe they were innocent persons…”

So, to recap my best arguments:

1. Apologize when you’re wrong.

2. Look out for each other.

3. There were no witches.

Happy Halloween, all! Despite myself, I love it – I promise!

The Good, the Baud, and the Ugly, Part III: John Atkinson and the Merry Widow Stickney

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

This is Part III in a series. For earlier posts, see Part I and Part II.

Picture it – yours truly, rising slowly from her seat on a cold meetinghouse bench, pointing to a robed figure high in a pulpit against the meetinghouse wall. “You are deceived, sir,” I say. “You…are…deceived.” There is death spreading its wings over the room. There is screaming, spitting, lies, courage, and love, all in one moment in time. One moment when things could have gone another way.

Amesbury's 1785 Rocky Hill Meeting House was aglow for evening performances of Arthur Miller's “The Crucible.”

This happened last week. I was called upon to speak the parts of both Rebecca Nurse and her husband Francis in The Crucible at the Rocky Hill Meeting House in Amesbury. I would do just about anything for Edward Speck of Theatre in the Open, so when he held out the binder to me festooned with a clip-light and said “surprise”, just before the performance began, I thought, “how hard can it be?” It was crushingly hard.

Morgan Amelia Fanning as Abigail Williams in Theater in the Open's "The Crucible" at Amesbury's Rocky Hill Meeting House.

I had just spent a good portion of the day preparing for this story, you see. I had teased with a John Atkinson link to murder and witchcraft, and I had spent some time looking at ancient records, death warrants, physical examinations, pleadings. It is wonderfully satisfying to see these words in print, to connect original records to people I know, but sometimes it rends the veil, and an icy finger comes through the page and pokes you in the throat.

This was the document that did it.

Death Warrant for Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin and Sarah Wildes. From wikitree.com

This is the warrant for the execution of Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin, and Sarah Wildes. Pause for a moment and consider Susanna Martin, a 70-year-old widow from Salisbury. The testimony against her is excruciating to read, and two of her accusers were John Atkinson and his wife Sarah.

John Atkinson found evidence of witchcraft in the purchase of a cow that behaved badly. “I went to the house of Susanna Martin to receive the cow of…her son. When I came to bring the cow home, notwithstanding the hamstringing of her and haltering her, she was so mad that we could scarce get her along but she broke all the ropes fastened to her…When we came down to the ferry, we were forced to run up to our waists in water, she was so fierce, but after with much ado we got her into the boat, She was as tame as any creature whatsoever.”

John Atkinson's testimony about his disobedient cow helped to sentence Susannah Martin to death in 1692.

Sarah Atkinson’s testimony was more damning. “Some time in the Spring of the year about Eighteen years Since, Susanna Martin came unto our house at Newbury from Amesbury in an Extraordinary dirty Season when it was not fit for any person to travel. She came on foot...I asked how She could come in this time on foot and bid my children make way for her to come to the fire to dry herself. She replied she was as dry as I was...I could not (see) that the soles of her Shoes were wet. I was startled at it that she should come so dry and told her that I should have been wet up to my knees if I Should have come So far on foot. She replied that She scorned to have a drabbled tail.”

That’s right. Eighteen years before, Susanna Martin failed to get muddy enough on her way from Amesbury to Newbury, and this, and other incidents equally mundane, were enough to have a woman murdered in 1692. It took great courage for Francis Nurse to stand up to the judges and look them in the eye and tell them that they were deceived. It could have cost him his life.

But all this ugliness was still a decade away when John Atkinson and the Widow Stickney duked it out in the Essex County Quarterly Court in 1682, when John Atkinson was found responsible for fathering Mary, the daughter of Widow Stickney. Incidentally, John Atkinson was in court in Ipswich for that session answering a variety of charges, including that he had tried to swindle the impoverished Woollcott family out of a piece of land for which they had paid him in barley, pork, and coin.

But back to the Stickney trial. Mary’s birth was entered into the Newbury town records as Mary Atkinson. After some contentious back-and-forth, John Atkinson landed on a solution. He would take responsibility for the child but find someone else to raise her. The court agreed and ordered that John would be freed from his weekly child support payments once he had found an appropriate family to give her to, but “in no case was he to keep the child at his own house. Should Sarah (Stickney) not deliver the child to the place he provided…she was to maintain the child at her own cost.”

John Atkinson went to Widow Stickney’s house to collect the child. Stickney told him to go pound sand, thereby giving up her right to child support. Atkinson then enacted part two of his plan. Having rid himself of responsibility for paying for Mary, he went after the Newbury town clerk. The court, rather unexpectedly, sided with Atkinson. “(Upon) being informed that the clerk of the writs of Newbery had entered the bastard child of Sarah Stickney of Newbury in the records of births as the child of John Atkinson, upon whom she charged it, although he did not own it, it was declared to be a high irregularity, and the clerk was ordered to appear at the next Ipswich court unless he give satisfaction to said Atkinson before that time.” The clerk was ordered to remove Atkinson’s name from the record, though he seems not to have done so.

The court was clearly ambivalent about the entire situation. They allowed John to petition to remove the “Atkinson” name from the child’s birth record but took a bit longer to relieve him of child support, since he had failed to find another placement for the child. In October, 1682, John’s wife Sarah tried her hand at petitioning the court. “(I have) been sorely troubled and perplexed by reason of the troubles falling upon my husband John Atkinson, which have been very changeable and vexatious by reason of the imperious dealings of Sarah Stickney…threatening and scoffing…so that mine and my children’s lives are wearisome to us, who cannot go up and down quietly, but meet with that which is grievous to us.”

The court extended the payments to Sarah Stickney to April 10, 1683, and if Widow Stickney had not handed over her daughter by then, all support would cease. Despite threats and cajoling and a serious financial motive, Sarah chose to raise her daughter alone, at her own expense.

The Merry Widow Stickney was not alone for long, however, marrying Stephen Ackerman (also spelled Acreman or Akerman) on December 17, 1684. They had two more children together, bringing the Widow Stickney’s kiddo count to at least twelve.

The Morse/Stickney/Ackerman/Atkinson dinner table, perhaps? Ballad print c. 1670, Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford

As for Mary (probably Atkinson) Stickney? She stayed with her mother until, at age 20, she married Daniel Poore Pettengill. Whatever the controversy of her youth, she honored the father she had known since she was five years old, naming her eldest son Akerman Pettengill.

The last laugh may be reserved for the long-suffering Newbury Town Clerk, in the end. Under Atkinson, we find the following entry into the transcribed Newbury Vital Records.

The Good, the Baud, and the Ugly, Part II: John Atkinson and the Merry Widow Stickney

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

This is Part II in a series. For Part I, see here.

Well, friends, you will all be happy to know that I survived the week, despite my titillating revelations about the venerable Atkinson family. I did fall off a ladder, so I leave you to wonder if Mae Atkinson has taken her revenge after all. To be fair, it was a rickety old step ladder, and I am not the sprightly waif I once was. Still, once one has decided that there might be a member of the spirit world with a chip on their shoulder, almost anything becomes suspicious. Look – I just summed up the whole plot of The Crucible! Incidentally, there is a superb performance of The Crucible being performed this weekend at the 1785 Rocky Hill Meeting House. Get tickets here.

But I forge bravely ahead. There are more scandalous tales to tell. When last we left the merry Widow Stickney, she had taken John Atkinson to court for fathering her child, a daughter named Mary. The town was divided on the veracity of her testimony, and dozens of people showed up at the Essex County Quarterly Court session to offer their take on the situation.

At the March, 1682 Ipswich session of the Essex County Quarterly Court, in which John Atkinson denied that he was the father of Widow Stickney's daughter, he is the first case on the docket for another matter - refusing to return a deed after a mortgage he held was paid off. He was found guilty.

There were other possible fathers for Widow Stickney's baby, Atkinson argued. Sarah Stickney had been heard accusing Samuel Lowell of fathering her child, including once near the birth of the child. Lowell himself was ready to step up and promised to bring his new daughter “wittles and clouts”, or swaddling clothes. A third lover for the Widow Stickney was revealed to another witness, who had seen James Merrick (John Atkinson’s brother-in-law) sneaking into her house at night. For those of you keeping track at home, this would indicate that Sarah Stickney, mother of nine, had three lovers going at one time in 1680. Where did she find the time?

Sarah accused John Atkinson of slander. John accused Sarah of slander. They were both found guilty. Neighbors testified that John had started being very nice to anyone that might witness against him, settling old debts and mending literal and figurative fences. Despite this, John was found by a jury to be the father of Sarah Atkinson’s child and was ordered to pay “12 shillings for the jury, 8 pounds for the past maintenance of the child, and 2 shillings, 6 pence per week until further order of court.”

John went away mad but was back in court soon for beating Sarah with his walking stick “so that her child fell almost into the fire”. Her uncle and brother were witnesses and John Atkinson was ordered to pay a 26 shilling fine. This did little to cool his temper, and two months later, he was back in court.

The c. 1664-1665 Atkinson House at 5 Hanover Street in Newbury. From “Old Newburyport Houses” by Albert Hale, 1902.

“John Atkinson of Newbury, being the reputed father of Sarah Stickney’s last child, complained that he was hard put to it to pay all charges, and court ordered that half of his payments should be in money and the other half provisions or clothing for the said child at money price.”

Four months later, he was back yet again, arguing that there was a shortage of money, and he should not have to pay so much, and besides, he should only have to pay half since he was only one of two parents.

“I cannot think it is the mind of the Court that the whole maintenance of such a child should be put upon a reputed father (it is evident it is hers, & therefore hath just reason to bear half) whereby ye maintenance of such a child should arise to be double what others pay.” He also revealed that Sarah had been pregnant once before in her widowhood and had threatened a paternity suit (there is no proof of this), and if she was continuously granted child support, it would be “a precedent to induce such persons to commit lewdness when by their accusation they can force on wealthy persons and get increased income”.

John Atkinson already had a wife and nine children of his own, and argued that paying the full amount would make him a pauper. He demanded custody of the child, so that he would not be “kept a continual slave to her who hath injured me, and Impudently and scoffingly insulteth me.”

The voracious widow was a popular subject of ribald ballads published in England in the 1680's. This illustration is from The Hampshire Miller, sung to the tune of A Languishing Swain.

Atkinson understood the law, as he was a frequent participant in it. In addition to the fornication case, in 1682 alone he was in court numerous other times for various reasons, accused of swindling his neighbors, accusing them of swindling him, witnessing in a forgery case, and more. He understood that the court’s interest was in the support of the child, not the parental rights of Sarah Stickney. If he could find another solution that did not involve him paying her, and did not leave the child without support, the court would likely honor his rights as Mary’s father, which, after all, Sarah Stickney had taken such pains to prove.

There is scads more scintillating testimony, including one memorable scene when all of Sarah Stickney’s lovers get together and draw lots to see who would take responsibility for the pregnancy. John Atkinson drew the short straw. Furthermore, Sarah Stickney seems to have been a bit of a moral relativist, telling James Merrick that she and Samuel Lowell knew their lovemaking was a crime, sure, but so was smoking a pipe in the street, and one was “no more a sin” than the other.

The court did not free John Atkinson from his paternal responsibilities, but they did the next best thing. They told him that he could have the child and give it to someone else to raise. Perhaps the court knew that Sarah Stickney would never let this happen. John Atkinson certainly knew it. If Sarah didn’t give him the child, she was to “maintain the child at her own cost”. The child’s name was entered into the birth record as Mary Atkinson, born January 10, 1680.

Mary's name as recorded in "Vital Records of Newbury Massachusetts, To the End of the Year, 1849; Vol. I - Births."

And then all hell broke loose.

Join us in the next newsletter when John Atkinson threatens the Newbury town clerk, buys a mad cow, and steals pork and barley from widows and orphans. It’s not all fun and games here in Old Newbury. John Atkinson is also about to take part in the murder of an innocent woman.

The Good, the Baud, and the Ugly: John Atkinson and the Merry Widow Stickney

A blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

If anyone haunts the dark halls of the Cushing House, I’m going to bet it’s Mae Atkinson. Mae, who spent thirty years of her life as a volunteer and board member of the Museum of Old Newbury, still appears in the oddest places here – she tucked little notes under chairs, made mildly draconian lists of tasks for the docents, and strictly forbade jeans or bare arms while on (unpaid) duty. She also worked incredibly hard for this organization, training docents, cataloguing objects, cleaning and organizing and researching. We owe her a great debt.

And she did not care for me one little bit.

Many years ago, when I was a fresh-faced twenty-something, my former employer, then known as SPNEA, made a decision about a property in Newbury and I blithely sallied forth into the community to spread the good news. Mae was adamantly opposed to this decision and came to see me, and I am sure I was wearing jeans and my arms were bare (as they are most days, truth be told). She excoriated me for the decision de jour, and then listed some 47 other reasons why she had a bone to pick with SPNEA.

The earliest of these complaints dated back to 1911. I kid you not. She was still angry that, sixteen years before she was born, SPNEA had swooped in and “stolen” the Swett-Ilsley House (I tried to interject that it had been purchased, actually, but to no avail). It was a pointed exchange which ended in my tearfully apologizing for my very existence and her throwing a look of such withering scorn as she exited that I shudder to recall it even today.

After this memorable scene, I sought my revenge in the only way I could – I set about to prove that I was an Atkinson heir which, in the reverse logic of old New England, would give me the right to disagree with her.

The c. 1664-1665 Atkinson House at 5 Hanover Street in Newbury was purchased by Mae and Bud Atkinson in 1985 and meticulously restored. Image courtesy of the Newbury Historical Commission.

Of course, here’s the tricky bit. Mae Atkinson, who lived in the Atkinson family homestead, and fiercely defended the rights of this ancient family, was not born an Atkinson. Still, I cracked my genealogy book open to the “A”’s, and there he was, John Atkinson (1636-1713), builder of Mae’s much-admired c. 1664 home. He is my 9th great-grandfather and the 8th great-grandfather of Mae’s husband Bud.

Recently, as I was answering a research inquiry, I ran into John Atkinson again, this time not in my tidy genealogy, but in the wonderful, bawdy scrum of the Essex County Quarterly Courts, which you may know is my favorite light reading.

On December 15, 1681, Sarah (Morse) Stickney, a widow and already mother of nine, swore out a complaint that John Atkinson “is the father of my last child, a fact which I had concealed upon his promise to maintain the child which he now refuses to do.” I backed up a bit. There she was, Sarah Stickney, in March, 1681, presented by the town of Newbury for “having a child born January last.” Two women present at the birth appeared as witnesses. Sarah Stickney, then 39 years old, was sentenced to be whipped or pay a fine. She did not name the father, even in the throes of labor when she would have been interrogated by the midwives present. She had made an arrangement with John Atkinson, who agreed to pay for the child if she kept their indiscretion(s) to herself.

Her first act, after paying her fine, was to slander the court, telling Sarah Haines and her husband Jonathan that “the court did not regard the sin (of fornication) so long as they could get the money.” But it was John Atkinson’s refusal to keep up with his secret child support that landed them both back in court.

Once Sarah Stickney had officially charged Atkinson with fathering her child, the whole town got involved. There was precious little to do in March, 1682, when her case was called, and every ambulatory citizen of Old Newbury seems to have shown up to the Ipswich court (held in a tavern, naturally) to have a drink and watch the show. Audience participation was encouraged, and dozens of people testified on one side or the other. Sarah Haines came to court to reveal that she was present at the birth of the child and that Sarah Stickney had never named John as the father. Oh, and she also mentioned that Stickney had insulted the court.

Witnesses come forward who had seen John Atkinson at Widow Stickney’s house before and after the birth of the child. Other witnesses overheard Sarah accuse another man, Samuel Lowell, of being her child’s father.

Sarah’s son, John Stickney, testified that John Atkinson came to their house, gave him some money, and sent him out to get some wine for them, and the children were all sent to bed and their mother and John “drank freely”.

John Stickney, testified that John Atkinson hid his horse when he came to their house, and that shortly after the baby was born, Atkinson “came to see her, took the child in his arms and kiss’d it.”

Sarah thought they had a deal. As she left for Salem court to be sentenced for her daughter’s birth out of wedlock, Atkinson came to visit. Sarah said he “called her out of her house, told her that the court was near, and he was going to Boston. He gave her 30 shillings in money and asked her to be true to him.”

And then he stopped paying, and Sarah followed him and his wife to a neighbor’s house. “Sarah came into Jonathan Haines’ house when John Atkinson and his wife were there and asked John if he was going to deny his child, whereupon John's wife called her an impudent baud (promiscuous woman). Then Sarah Stickney used such opprobrious, reproachful and reviling speeches (including calling Mrs. Atkinson a baud as well), that Haines told her to go out of the house but she would not depart. Then Goody Atkinson stepped to Goody Stickney and clapt her hand in her face and said she would spit in the face of any such that would call her a baud: and spit at her."

What happened after the baud-shaming and the spitting? Well, you'll have to wait until the next newsletter. Let’s just say, it doesn’t end well for anyone. There’s attempted murder, slander, witchcraft accusations, at least three lovers for the Widow Stickney, and an ongoing ferocious custody battle.

If you find me unconscious at the bottom of the Cushing House stairs after spreading this family gossip, you’ll know who came back from beyond to give me a shove. But tonight, whether she likes it or not, I will toast Mae Atkinson for all she did for this organization and for this community.

Bodkins are a Girl's Best Friend

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life…
-Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1

Okay, I admit that despite being a rather nerdy linguist and a bit of an Anglophile, I have never borne a “fardel” (burden) or wished for my own “quietus” (death) at the hands of a “bare bodkin”. But soft, here’s where I exclaim loudly that I am quite familiar with bodkins. They are a girl’s best friend, at least in Newbury in the 17th century. And the humble bodkin features prominently in one of my favorite court cases (and there are many) from the Essex County Quarterly Court.

Bodkin/dagger combination, c.1580, courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The bodkin of Shakespeare’s time was a murderous weapon, a stiletto dagger, an excellent way to hasten one’s “quietus”, if one were so inclined. But in Newbury in the 17th century, a bodkin was a long, flat needle, often with a small spoon at the end. It was a woman’s Swiss Army knife – used to fasten ribbon, tie up corsets, hold one’s hair in place, and perform certain funky acts of personal hygiene. The spoon? Dig out a good quantity of earwax with which to smooth your thread. No joke. As you will see in a moment, bodkins also doubled as toothpicks.

Bodkins, often silver and engraved, sometimes sporting a jewel, appear as valuable items in property inventories in Newbury and have been found in archeological excavations at the 1690 Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm. And in one notable instance of dubious parenting, all the way over yonder in Ipswich, a bodkin was used to keep a baby occupied during church.

This personalized c.1625 bodkin with ear wax spoon is likely much like Goodwife Hunt’s missing implement.

It was May 2, 1669. Elizabeth Hunt’s baby son Joseph, just beginning to stand, was growing restless in their box pew in the Ipswich meeting house. Elizabeth gave the baby her silver bodkin, engraved with her name, likely the only decorative item she wore. The baby, pulling himself up to giggle at the two young women in the pew behind them, dropped the bodkin on the floor. His mother heard it “glance down the wainscoting and jingle on the floor betwixt Sara(h) Day and Sara(h) Roper.” Elizabeth Hunt saw Sarah Roper reach down to the floor, seemingly to retrieve and return the bodkin, but then she just moved her footstool instead. After waiting impatiently through the sermon, an increasingly agitated Elizabeth Hunt asked Sarah Roper for the bodkin. Sarah pointed to the wood plank floor and shrugged. “T’wer in that crack,” she said, a phrase that has become a standard rejoinder in my household for anything that has gone missing. “Where are my keys?”. “T’wer in that crack.” “What happened to the rest of the cheesecake?” “T’wer in that crack.” The legacy of Sarah Roper lives on in the wilds of West Newbury. Elizabeth Hunt looked in the crack, and all over the meetinghouse floor, in fact, though she did not entirely believe Sarah Roper’s version of events. No bodkin materialized.

Sarah Roper’s testimony when, despite the bodkin’s later return, Elizabeth Hunt decided to take her to court for theft, offers a delightful view of a day in church, complete with fashion information and some keen insight into just how closely everyone in town was up in each other’s business.

First, Sarah loudly protested her innocence. “…you are pleased to charge me with stealing your bodkin, which is altogether false, I stole it not. I do affirm that I took it not up, neither did I see it nor feel it, until I came home, and a little before night, sitting in the house, I was turning up the cuff of my sleeve, and feeling something there, pulled down my cuff, and there I found a bodkin, which I presently showed to the folks in the house, who read the name and said it was Goodwife Hunt’s bodkin. I spoke to my brother to carry it…but he refusing to carry it, the next morning I gave it to my sister, who delivered it to her at the burial of Goodwife Whipple. And as the bodkin was suddenly last, so it was suddenly found, and as speedily returned to the owner.”

Case closed, you might think. You would be wrong. Although the bodkin had been returned to the offended Goodwife Hunt, feelings ran high in the courtroom and “there was such a “clamor and tumultuous noise, and such exclaiming and deriding,” that the judges could not hear the witnesses. They called for better decorum.

A stream of witnesses, 25 in all, provided testimony in this case.

People had heard the bodkin fall. Two teenage girls testified about exactly what Sarah Roper was wearing – “a dark colored waistcoat with a shallow cuff not lined, which was not close to the sleeve but hung down.” They also testified that "the next time Sarah Roper went to meeting, she had the cuff turned up a good deal higher." To add insult to injury, Goodwife Hunt herself testified that she believed she saw Sarah Roper picking her teeth with the missing bodkin. Another witness said, “it was impossible for her to see so far as to see Sarah picking her teeth of the bodkin.” The parade of witnesses, young and old, male and female, who testified in this case was astonishing.

Ultimately, the case was dropped, as the item had been returned, and the good people of Ipswich, like the good people of Newbury, went back to fighting, and building, and farming, and making babies.

Should you wish to reenact BodkinGate for yourselves, this English iron bodkin with ear wax spoon can be yours today on the website Etsy for only $1,135.00.

In my house this episode is known as BodkinGate, and it began when my husband James had a slow day at work and decided to peruse some Essex County Quarterly Court records. He came home, sat me down, and told me the story, gob-smacked that the entire town of Ipswich seemed to turn out to testify about this item. I have loved this story ever since, this one item revealing so much about how early New England towns behaved (and misbehaved), and how connected they are with each other.

Two centuries later, in 1881, a Newburyport inventor, William R. Whitmore, filed for a patent for a tool that combined tweezers and a bodkin. This was the discovery that spurred this article, but it turns out that this multi-purpose tool was intended “for use by printers in correcting forms of type.”

Until Christmas Next

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

I went for a walk through my old stomping ground in Newbury last week, a participant in a tour led by Dr. Tricia Peone, a research scholar at Historic New England. The walk, A Story of Slavery and Resistance in Newbury, centered on the story of an enslaved man named James, who escaped from the house of Richard Dole in 1690, near the site of the present Dole-Little House. James set off to join an ultimately unsuccessful uprising intended to free Newbury’s enslaved people and kill the townspeople. Dole-Little was under my management for two decades, a sleepy place better known for its repurposed timbers than its connection to enslavement and revolt and revisiting the site with this new and fascinating information was a rich and enlightening experience.

At the end of the walk, we all stood in a circle chatting and asking questions of Dr. Peone. One man asked how Dole’s descendants must feel knowing that he enslaved at least eight people on that site. He cast his eyes around the group. “Any Dole descendants here?” Several people I know in the crowd pointed to me, as my hand was slowly raised. The man turned to me, eyes flashing. He was having an experience. “How do you feel about that?” he said, pointing his finger at me. “Your family owned slaves. How does that make you feel?”

The c. 1715 Dole Little House, 289 High Road, Newbury. Photo by Bob Watts.

When confronted by something terrible or tragic, I often find myself at odds with the people around me. In my youth, I would have tried to determine how this man wanted me to feel and pretend to feel that way. He was angry, rightfully so, but what I felt was not shame, or anger, or guilt, although there is plenty of that to go around. My prevailing feeling at that time was that this story, this research that had illuminated a part of the past that had been ignored for so long, was beautiful and wonderful, and I was thrilled, and I said so. Let the sun shine on all of it, I said.

Let me just say, being at odds with the crowd has its advantages. I am great in an emergency. If the house is on fire, you want me there, methodically counting the pets and the silver. For many years, I felt bad about this. One of the beautiful things about getting older, however, at least for me, has been a calm curiosity about how I am reacting to a situation, a certain forgiveness when I am awkward, or silly, or detached when all around me are reacting. But I don’t get to skip it, whatever it is. It comes for me.

As I left the tour of the Dole-Little House, a heaviness settled on me. It is the same feeling I had when I found a death certificate for an early 20th century ancestor who had died under somewhat mysterious circumstances, and who I had been researching. The record proved a family story that they had choked to death. First, elation at being able to find the elusive thing, a research victory. Then a crush, a heaviness. Whatever my genealogical victory, they were human, and they suffered, and being human, I feel some measure of it.

Last night, I woke suddenly from another dream in which armed men with dogs hunted me and my children as we hid in the dark woods. There were three children in the dream, and I knew immediately why.

We were contacted last week by a man from Exeter, New Hampshire. He had purchased a collection of letters and found within the collection several receipts relating to Newburyport town business during the American Revolution. Men were working on the schoolhouse chimney, repairing the poor house, and in the case of Abel Greenleaf, taking care of a Mrs. Havoy at the town’s expense from March 1782 to January 1783. The man on the phone asked if we had ever heard of the Greenleaf family. I snorted and consulted my chart, packed with Greenleafs, and there was Abel, my 1st cousin, 7x removed. I talked the possible donor into coming down to visit the museum, knowing that he would be utterly charmed. I was right, and he was, in turn, utterly charming, a lover of history and family, whose interest was in returning these valuable documents to a place where these people could be known. He took a tour, we had a lovely chat, and then, just as he was leaving, he paused.

“Can I just ask you…” he trailed off. “I have these other things, and I really don’t know what to do with them.”

And then, as he pulled another sheaf of letters from a folder, he said, “my Black friends said to burn them”.

He handed me the letters and asked me to help find the right place for them to be of use to future generations, and he signed the necessary paperwork to donate all his treasures to the Museum of Old Newbury. He choked up as he left. He had been carrying a heavy burden.

John Denison letter of obligation to V.G. Wheat, 1859, Bourbon County, KY.

There were three separate documents in the collection he had given us, ten pages total. All of them are from Kentucky, and all relate to the sale, rental, and barter of enslaved women, children, and men, identified by name, age, and in some cases, monetary value. As I sat down with them and began to read, I had a familiar feeling, like I was outside my body, curious and detached. I paid attention. The last document I read was a March 1859 agreement between John Denison and V.G. Wheat for the hire of “a negro woman and her three children until Christmas next”. The woman, Ann, and her children, were owned by a 16-year-old, B.D. Estill, for whom Wheat was the guardian, and they were rented out to John Denison in exchange for their food and “two cotton dresses, two chemmies (chemises), two linsey dresses, two pair stockings, two pair shoes, one undershirt of linsey, and a blanket.”

Two weeks ago, the Museum of Old Newbury led a community reading of Frederick Douglass’ powerful 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” in the shadow of the William Lloyd Garrison statue in Brown Square. It is a community event, supported by Mass Humanities, where volunteers take turns reading passages from the speech to the assembly. No passages are assigned, and so I found myself reading these lines.

Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity which is outraged, in the name of liberty which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call into question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery – the great sin and shame of America! “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse;” I will use the severest language I can command; and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgement is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slaveholder, shall not confess to be right and just.”

Reading Frederick Douglass Together in Brown Square, Newburyport on July 3, 2022. The statue of William Lloyd Garrison bears the words that Douglass quoted in his speech.

Standing with my face to the statue upon which were written these very words, I read them as Douglass wrote them. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse…” and I felt those words as a punch to the chest, my body reacting to Douglass’ quoting of Garrison, who stood in front of me, grown from the soil of my town, surrounded by my family. Garrison, who went to prison for pointing out how Newburyport families were directly involved in the buying and selling of human beings in the United States, laying plain our community’s responsibility for the life of a woman and her three children in Kentucky in 1859.

We are working with archivists in Kentucky to ensure that these letters go to a place where they will be preserved, digitized, and available. If Ann’s children lived, if they told their children about their mother, if they know what county they lived in, if they are looking, they will find this document. But I will never forget her. This is the power of the original artifact. It will come for you. We must not equivocate. We must not excuse.

Hidden History: Newburyport's Swedish Connection

(originally published published June 10, 2022)

...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

My grandfather was born in Boston in 1909, the firstborn son of Irish parents (with a long stayover in Maritime Canada). When he was five years old, his father died, leaving his mother with four children. If you did that math, my grandfather was five years old and the ELDEST of four. Unable to support her young family, his mother put her children in a Catholic orphanage and then took them back, one at a time, starting with the youngest.

This is my grandfather’s story, and it is (mostly) true. What is certainly true is that after a brutal childhood – he was left-handed and was particularly targeted for this “sin” - he was sent off to work on a South Shore farm and became Swedish.

This is a story for another time, but let me just say that having determined that the life of a Swede was preferable to the life of a semi-orphaned Irish lad, my grandfather stole the identity of a recently deceased Swedish boy, and 13-year-old John Muzrall became 16-year-old John Erickson and ran away to New York City and hopped a ship. He spoke Swedish, lived with a Swedish family, the Dahlgrens, in Brooklyn, and was even elected as a spokesperson for a Swedish labor union. For four years, my grandfather was Swedish.

John Muzrall’s application for certification of identity in 1927, approved in 1929.

John Erickson was finally laid to rest when John Muzrall was 17 and shipped out on the Leviathan under his true name and age as a “messman”, but for the rest of his life he thought of himself as a bit more Swedish than Irish. My grandfather died at 91, here in Newburyport. In his final days, he slipped in and out of consciousness, speaking only Swedish.

Such is the shifting nature of identity.

When Swedish artist Tina Rawson, a friend from years ago, stopped by the Museum of Old Newbury several months ago to check out my new(ish) digs, I thought of my grandfather, the fake Swede. At one point in the conversation, she made a comment to the effect that, historically, she did not believe there was a significant Swedish population in Newburyport. Being the obstinate history nerd that I am, I set out to prove her wrong.

When I was writing my second book, A Newburyport Marine in World War I: The Life and Legacy of Eben Bradbury, I came upon a startling statistic. Almost one-third of WWI draft registrants in 1917-1918 in Newburyport were foreign-born. One third. This, to me, speaks to the ethnic diversity of our fair city, at least in the past, and so I was reasonably sure I would come across some Swedes.

As you may imagine, this being a port town, there were Swedish connections long before Swedish people begin to appear in Newburyport census records as permanent residents.

In 1850, Joanna Jackson, 49, is listed as the wife of Nathaniel Jackson, surveyor of the port. This is the first census in which Sweden appears as the country of origin for Newburyport residents in significant numbers. Along with Joanna, Francis C Stromberg plied his trade as a gilder, Charles Johnson as a painter, Augustus Hanson as an able seaman, Lewis Stanson, mariner, and more. With their families, they constituted about a dozen residents.

The Swedish population of Newburyport seems to have grown steadily until it numbered over 30 in 1900. Keep in mind that this number does NOT include the children of Swedish parents, and so the community was significantly larger. Deeper research will reveal a network of business, neighborhood, and family networks that will shed further light on how these people lived and worked in this community, but knowing that they were here, that they often came over as adults, and that their community seems to have shifted from maritime workers and fine artists to factory and domestic labor is also an interesting part of the story.

The 1910 census includes a “real” John Erickson and his family, employed in the comb factory and living on Bromfield court.

Whether you have a Swedish connection, true or invented, please join us on June 25 for Midsummer Magic: Creating Swedish Folk Art in the Garden. We hope to explore more of this community’s immensely rich history in the future, and creating art seems like an excellent way to start. I will be painting for my grandfather, and for his Brooklyn substitute mother, Naomi Dahlgren, who let him live as a Swede. She had secrets of her own…but that really is a story for another time.

Whether you're Swedish or not, you are welcome to make some art in our garden on June 25!

A Stitch in time

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

This morning, a package arrived at the Museum of Old Newbury.

It was not a ball.

This, you see, is a joke in my house. Whenever a package arrives that is flat or rectangular, or clearly a jewelry box, my dad earnestly declares, “I think it’s a ball”. It was a busy morning at the Museum of Old Newbury, and our newest intern, Lilly, had been stuck with a series of rather dull tasks. To make it up to her, Lilly was given the pleasure of opening this package. She undertook the challenge with characteristic efficiency. She worked quietly, an occasional small "hmm" to remind us that she was still working on it. She removed tape, bubble wrap, and a moving blanket. When she was done, she stood up without saying a word and looked at me, wide-eyed, holding a large framed sampler, stitched in 1811, by a girl named Eunice G. Sawyer.

Eunice G. Sawyer sampler, 1811. Photograph by Bob Watts.

I have a complicated relationship with samplers. I grew up in a bit of a crafty household, and we were all expected to learn how to sew and crochet and knit. My talents lie in other areas, and I hated sitting still. I was, I suppose, what once was called a tomboy. I thought draft horses and battle plans and books about locomotives and drilling rigs and aircraft carriers were amazing and that was enough to set me outside the ribboned (and later, lip-glossed) throng of girlhood.

The author, age 10. While my sister was learning to embroider, I much preferred the company of draft horses and goats.

And so, samplers to me smack of a certain kind of oppression. What if, like me, the girl in question wanted nothing more than to be driving a wagon or threshing grain or climbing a tree? What pleasure would there have been in painstakingly stitching a row of letters to be hung in the parlor and framed - an advertisement that this girl would be a patient, cultured, literate wife?

Of course, what I overlook is that nobody is exactly like me. This is the beauty of humanity, and, for historians, the sorrow. How can we know, unless she tells us, how Eunice Greenleaf Sawyer, age nine, felt about hours of stitching on her sampler? She may have loved the feel of the silk thread slipping through her fingers - the colors, now faded, that she wove into her masterpiece. She (though she is my fourth cousin), is, and will remain, a mystery to me, until such time as we find that cache of letters where she expounds upon her ecstasy (or agony) at the prospect of working the needle.

The story of this sampler, and the girl who worked it, will be told as we uncover it. With a certain amount of envy, I have handed over the lion’s share of the research on this piece to our very capable, very thorough Williams College intern, Annabelle, who dived right in. If Eunice Greenleaf Sawyer is to be found, Annabelle will find her.

I am not a sampler expert. I have already confessed my instinctive aversion to girlhood arts as a broad category. But any one sampler is a document, and though patterns and schools governed certain elements of sampler creation, there were always choices made in the selection of subject and text. Eunice, who turned nine years old in 1811, chose a rather somber poem about grief, depression, and comfort, and the last line reveals that the poem is an admonition to herself. In particular, it is a wish to be a balm to the wounds of others. A noble sentiment, and one that seems appropriate to the recently bereaved.

In 1811, Eunice Greenleaf Sawyer’s father had been dead for two years, and a brother had died the year before she was born. There was not, as far as can be easily ascertained from the record, a close recent bereavement, though death was closer at hand in the early 19th century than it is today. I wondered if this was a mourning piece.

The voice in my head, the same one that repeats “It’s a BALL!” in my dad’s voice, also repeats “The simplest answer is often the right one,” in my great-aunt Emily’s voice. Oh, how I miss her.

In 1811, when these threads were worked, joyfully or otherwise, Newbury had a new (as of 1808) meetinghouse in the Belleville neighborhood, officially the fourth parish of Newbury, stretching from the northwest side of Oakland Street to the Artichoke River. Though we do not know (yet) exactly where she lived, Eunice Sawyer had relatives all over Belleville.

The Belleville section of Newbury, c.1851 – North Street is now Oakland Street.

The poem that she carefully stitched was pulled from a didactic text, an English book of romantic sensibilities authored by a Miss Charlotte Palmer and published in 1780. It’s title? Female Stability; or the history of Miss Belville. Coincidence? Perhaps, but Aunt Emily would have told you that there is no such thing.

Although I am not drawn to samplers, I do love a darkly romantic poem, rendered extra gloomy by rows of “x”s. But the element of the piece that caught my eye, and stole my heart, is a piece of paper affixed to the lower left corner. It says, “Mother has promised to give this sampler to me. If she ever gave it to anyone. It was worked by her sister Eunice in 1811”. It is signed “Elisabeth R. Titcomb”.

The historian in me loves this note because, in a world where there were multiple Eunice G. Sawyers alive in 1811, we can determine conclusively that this was our Belleville gal. But it’s more than that. It captures a chain of memory, a sister’s affection, and a little possessiveness from a third born child who wanted to make sure her siblings knew that this piece was claimed.

Eunice died just after her 20th birthday, of tuberculosis. She was staying in Boston with an uncle who had taken on a paternal role after her father’s death, and she is buried there. Her sister Hannah, the “mother” in the note, lived for another fifty years. Elisabeth R. Titcomb, her niece, died in Chicago in 1917, and somehow this treasure wound up in a thrift shop back in New England. According to the letter from the donor, it was purchased around fifty years ago and made its way to Nevada, to be packaged back up and sent to us.

The owner of this sampler, perhaps aided by the note identifying it as a precious family piece, knew that it needed to be with people who know her family. We know the Sawyers and the Emerys and the Greenleafs. We can connect Eunice to her neighbors. We know that she was named after her aunt, and that her brother died in France, and that her grandmother left Eunice some shares in the Newburyport Turnpike. And so, while we will likely never know how she felt about her needlework, this gift is a gateway into her too-short life, her sister’s love, and the ceaseless pull toward home.

Where's Waldo? Why Newburyport, of course.

Painting by Waldo Peirce, gift to Paul Plourde, oil on canvas, 1969

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

I fall in love with dead people about a dozen times a day, by which I mean that some turn of phrase, some item on an inventory, some bit of a recollection or an object saved, a dusty bit of something is added to a keepsake box in my heart. It’s strange, but that’s how it feels – like love, like finding an essential bit of humanity and understanding something about what it means to be here right now, alive in this moment.

A few months ago, someone challenged my description of an ancestor as one of my “dead friends.” It is a bit of a disingenuous turn of phrase, of course, as a living friendship is mutual and ever-changing, but it feels true in that I think about many of these people the same way I think about my living friends. Who did they know? What would they think about the state of the world? How do their lives and passions connect with other friends of mine?

It will come as little surprise, then, that today I am in love with Waldo Peirce. He knows other friends of mine, living and dead, and memories of him are all around this community. He is a new friend, and I think the story of our meeting bears repeating.

Portrait of Waldo Peirce by George Bellows (1920), image courtesy de Young Museum

Several weeks ago, a woman contacted the museum to ask if we were interested in a painting by a local artist. We said yes, somewhat hesitantly, because “are you interested” often means “Would you be interested in buying?” Imagine our delight when this woman and her husband came to the museum with a large painting of a man with a flock of chickens, and reams of background information – letters, bills, exhibition catalogs, things they had found in the yard of their house, where Waldo Peirce once lived. They were moving out of state, they said. They loved this painting and they wanted it to stay in Newburyport. They had received the painting from the previous owner of the house, whose death from COVID rendered their gift even more poignant and meaningful.

And it was a gift. They understood its monetary value and chose to honor their few years in the community by giving the painting and its associated materials to the Museum of Old Newbury, and, by extension, to all of us. This, to me, is always a bit of a shock, accompanied by deep gratitude. In a world of people who grab and hoard, I am still in awe of the givers, who understand what it means to leave something important in trust to a community.

The painting is temporarily displayed in the office, and so when one of our board members came for an event, she stopped and laughed. “He worked on Inn Street before everything was torn down,” she said. “We used to try to sneak a peek and see if Mr. Peirce had any naked people in his studio.” And this is what happens to me in a moment like this. This board member, who I know well, is suddenly a girl with an ice cream cone, and Inn Street is a warren of artists, shops, and alleys, and Waldo Peirce is alive again and be-smocked, a dripping brush held in his mouth, as he considers whether to paint clothing on a reclining model, much to the delight of Newburyport’s roaming young folks.

Inn Street, c. 1960’s. The Plourde barber shop and Waldo Peirce’s studio are out of frame along the left side of the street.

Waldo Peirce, though related to Newbury’s early Peirce family, grew up in Maine. It is beyond my power to do justice to his remarkable life, so I will quote a 2018 article in the Portland Monthly magazine. “Rabelaisian, bawdy, witty, robust, wild, lusty, protean, lecherous, luscious, the kind of man Ernest Hemingway wished he could be, Waldo Peirce (1884-1970)…devoured life.” Waldo Peirce was a Harvard football player, a competitive swimmer, a voracious lover, and by all accounts, a devoted father and grandfather. But it was his personal courage, evidenced in his role as volunteer ambulance driver for the American Field Service that made him my friend. You see, I know them, the Harvard and Yale boys who thought the Great War would be a grand adventure. I know them, in part, because for 21 years I had a role in the management of Beauport, the home of Henry Davis Sleeper, who was one of the founders of the American Field Service with his friend and neighbor A. Piatt Andrew. Sleeper, Peirce, and Andrew were all awarded the Croix de Guerre for conspicuous bravery by the French government. Waldo Peirce’s portrait of A. Piatt Andrew, given to their mutual friend Isabella Stewart Gardner, is a striking memento to all involved in the service.

A Piatt Andrew by Waldo Peirce, c. 1918

Of course, the most famous ambulance driver in World War I is Ernest Hemmingway, and it was the shared wartime experiences of these two men that forged an intimate friendship. In 1927, the pair ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and for the rest of their lives, both inspired the art of the other.

Peirce and Hemingway in 1959. Image courtesy Tucson Sun.

Waldo Peirce lived in Newburyport off and on for decades, and the first gift of this painting was made from the artist to Paul H. S. Plourde, Peirce’s barber, whose shop was near his studio on Inn Street. 53 years later, it walked through my door.

I think of how many times I have met someone and found myself using the shorthand “I’ve heard so much about you,” a way of saying, “I know you a bit already.” This is how I feel about Waldo Peirce. I know him a bit already. How could you not, with quotes like this? From his nephew, “I remember a musty tobacco smell coming from a huge, gentle, and confident man with an impressively grizzly beard. He had a deep, gruff and beautiful voice,” and from an old friend, Vincent Hartgen, “Waldo was a pretty good artist, but he was truly a great man.”

The Barber Shop, 1949, oil on canvas, by Waldo Peirce.

For me, the beard is key to his allure, as is the height – he was over 6 feet tall, but it was his writing, not his art, that I will tuck into the keepsake box in my heart. Here is his homage to his friend Richard Hall (1894-1915), published shortly after Hall’s death while driving an ambulance in France.

Gentlemen at home, you who tremble with concerns at overrun putts, who bristle at your partner's play at auction, who grow hoarse at football games, know that among you was one who played for greater goals--the lives of other men.

There in the small hours of Christmas morning, where mountain fought mountain, on that hard bitten pass under the pines of the Vosgian steeps, there fell a very modest and valiant gentleman.

-Friends of France, 1916

Waldo Peirce sketching on the side of an ambulance, circa 1915-1916. Courtesy of the Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs (AFS Archives.)

Imagine my surprise, and then no surprise at all, when one of the artifacts from Waldo Peirce’s Newburyport home turned out to be a small piece of type with the name of Harold DeCourcy, a fellow ambulance driver in France. Did it fall from the pocket of his old friend when he came to visit Peirce decades later in Newburyport? Was it a memento of their time together? We will likely never know. What I do know, for certain, is that the gift of that painting ripples outward into my life, and that of the museum and the community. It is a powerful reminder of how much is yet to be learned, and how many dead friends we have yet to meet.

Found while metal detecting at the Waldo Peirce home. Harold DeCourcy was a fellow ambulance driver in WWI.

Do you have images and/or memories of Waldo Peirce? Please share them with the Museum, as it will enrich our understanding of this artist's time in Newburyport. Email info@newburyhistory.org.

Bloom Where You’re Planted

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

On April 7, 2020, I was alone in my house. We were all alone in our houses, except for those of us who were locked in with our family members. It was too early for “bubbles” and “pods”. I thought, perhaps we all thought, that this would all be over soon, and so, while I waited, I thought I would get to know my landscape a bit better. And since what is now my yard has been my family’s farm for over two centuries, there is much in it that has been there my whole life, and I never questioned it – never asked why the peonies were pushing up through the foundation of the old barn, why there were poppies in a bramble patch next to a culvert. I never asked these questions of my landscape until I became its steward, five years ago.    

Bursting forth from the southeast corner of my house is an ancient, unruly run of old-school lilac bushes. Their blooms reached to my old bedroom window on the second floor, and in my youth, they were gathered by the armful, shoved into every pitcher and pot in my room, hauled to picnics at Maudslay with my friends and given by the fistful to my great-aunt Emily, who would exclaim over them as if we had just discovered a secret treasure, as if she had not been born next to the window that looked out on all of this beauty. Aunt Emily had an endless supply of delightedness with small, natural things brought to her by eager children. It never occurred to me that she was probably also, for her whole long life, remembering her mother.       

Philip and Mary Dyer (Noyes) Poore, about 1905.

Mary Dyer Noyes, my great-grandmother, was born in Byfield in 1886. Her own mother died when she was six, and she was raised by her bachelor uncle, the much-loved George Washington Noyes. I do not know how she and Philip Poore met – the families are so intertwined it is likely that they had known each other their whole lives, but when she married my great-grandfather 1905, his pinched face was brightened and softened by her company. Philip was also a motherless child – his own mother died giving birth to him. Perhaps because of this shared loss or because of the steadfast, lifelong love of her uncle, Mary Dyer Noyes Poore was a tender wife and a joyful mother. She was also a fellow breadwinner on a farm that was barely able to feed her growing family, let alone turn a profit. These are the things I know about her from the memories of her six children. She worked all day and often all night, planting, weeding, harvesting, and canning vegetables, caring for six children, and doing all the washing, cooking, and cleaning of a busy, dusty farm. She was always laughing, and she gave her children tricycles and let them ride through the house, and they had an indoor see-saw. She cared more than anything about their education, and she caned chairs late into the night to make a few extra dollars that she could save for her children. And somehow, she read voraciously and was part of an old-fashioned reading club and helped to establish an Episcopal church with the Emery sisters, and even more extraordinarily, from where I’m sitting, she planted flowers.

The lilac at the corner of the Poore house, 1910s.

My great-grandmother died in 1934, just 47 years old. Though the cause of death was pneumonia, Aunt Emily told me that her mother “worked herself to death”. I can only imagine how exhausted she was, what a heavy burden her life must have seemed at times, and yet, she planted flowers. The run of lilacs appears in nearly every posed photograph of her young children in the 1910’s and 1920’s.

The six Poore children and cousin Evelyn Rogers in 1920 in front of the lilacs.

The poppies and peonies in the briar patch by the culvert? She planted those, and every spring, when the plate-size poppies unfurled their papery petals, it felt like a visitation to her children. I never met her, of course, and neither did my mother, and so her poppies remind me of Aunt Emily, the last person I knew who understood deeply what planting these flowers meant to her mother, how they reflected her belief that life and hope would always return.

In April 2020, as I explored my landscape, I was determined to rejuvenate the lilac bushes, a task that I did not complete. The original bushes are over twenty feet tall, woody and gnarled. Suckers spread from its base in waves. I started to dig up the suckers and cut them away as I had been told this would give more energy to the base plant, but with all the sadness and fear in the world, killing something with such a will to live was hard for me. And so, I put out the call. No-contact lilac pick-up, bring your own shovel. And they came, friends and friends of friends and strangers. One such visitor, a woman who grew up nearby on Chase Street, came by. My mom popped out to say hello, and mentioned that our visitor’s great-grandmother Mary, and my great-grandmother Mary, were best friends. "When they finally got telephones, they talked every day", she said. The two great-granddaughters of best friends from a century ago now share this lilac bush.

I love my town, and my house, and the benevolent whisper of the past when you least expect it. And as the lilac blooms fade for another year, I am reminded that hope, and memories, and love, can outlive you. Plant carefully.

1918 West Newbury directory listings for Mary Knowles and Mary D. Poore - a prolific lilac bush would lead their great-granddaughters to meet during the COVID19 pandemic.

The Cushing Contralto Controversy

...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

I popped into The Thirsty Whale the other night, my first time back since they reopened. I can’t say I’m a regular, but The Whale features prominently in many of my favorite stories and is where I can reliably run into some of my favorite people.

Which is why it was no surprise that I ran into a friend of mine from my decadent adolescence, who shall remain nameless. And this, dear friends, is the beauty and the sorrow of remaining in, or returning to, the home of one’s youth. In the presence of our teenage friends, we get to be eternally sixteen. We have both changed, my friend and I, but it was the reunion of our old selves – him a Teen Beat-worthy heartthrob, and me a bright-eyed punk rock girl with a jawline that could slice bread. Ah, youth.

And then, while catching up with my old friend, he revealed that he recently worked on the set of the HBO series Julia, about the early years of Julia Child's’ television career. James and I went home and binge-watched all available episodes. I was completely and utterly charmed. Since I am a nerd, I wanted to read more, and because I am a provincial nerd whose loyalty is bound inexorably to Old Newbury, I unearthed a local mystery, a possible subterfuge involving a patrician suffragette, a “luscious” contralto, and Julia Child’s husband. Oh, and some post-mortem landscaping.

Julia Child cooks a hearty meal for the Cushing family - both true and false. Photo credit: Lynn Gilbert, 1978, Wikimedia Commons.

First, Julia. What a gal! Next, Paul Child, her husband. What a guy! They met in Sri Lanka. He was setting up the war room there. And then - imagine the sound of a needle sliding across a record - there was this. From a biography of Julia Child, “their mother, Bertha CUSHING Child moved the two boys and their sister back to Boston, where she had grown up.”

Cushing is a common name, you say. Millions of them. Not necessarily related to the Newburyport Cushing family. You’d be right, and wrong. There are a great number of Cushings in the world, and our branch of the family was not especially prolific. Caleb Cushing himself was childless, as was his niece Margaret, the two people most involved with the Cushing House Museum. But lo, a smoking gun.

The Richmond Daily Times announcement of Bertha Cushing’s Virginia performance. The body of the announcement says, “She is the daughter of the Rev. John Russell Cushing of Boston, a nephew of Caleb Cushing, the eminent jurist”, April 6, 1902

Bertha Cushing Child introduced herself, and was introduced to the public, as the grandniece of Caleb Cushing, at least in early performances. Now, since I collect Newbury connections like some folks collect stamps, I plugged her into my family tree. Well, I tried to. As hard as I tried, I could not make a connection between her father and Caleb Cushing, even as a step- or half-nephew.

I am making this story sound much better than it is. There is no connection between Bertha Cushing Child and Caleb Cushing, at least none after the 17th century that I can find. Bertha may have lied, she may have been passing on a lie from someone else, it may have been a rumor or family story that was repeated until it seemed true. She also referred to herself as a “native of Boston” but was born in Connecticut. What is provable is that she did not claim to be Cushing’s great-niece when she moved to Boston after the death of her husband in 1902 and performed there frequently to support her family.

Bertha Cushing Child and her children, L to R Mary, Charles, and Julia Child’s future husband, Paul. Boston Globe, April 7, 1907

Perhaps it would have been too easy to check her story when in such proximity to the family of her alleged relative. Margaret Cushing, his actual niece, was alive and well in Newburyport and may have objected to the singer claiming such kinship. Perhaps Bertha understood that she would get more traction from a relationship with Caleb Cushing in Virginia.

It is dangerous to guess at people’s motivations, but sometimes putting the pieces together requires a bit of supposition. What the promotion of Caleb Cushing as great-uncle of the singer reveals, beyond a doubt, is that twenty-plus years after his death, Caleb Cushing was still a national celebrity. What is perhaps uncomfortable to consider is that he was also less problematic in the American South.

I am just beginning to do a deep dive into the legacy of Caleb Cushing. He is one of those figures who seems to evoke devotion and anger in equal measure. He was praised by his contemporaries as “the most learned man living”, a brilliant orator, a skilled negotiator, and a pioneer in the establishment of trade and conflict-of-interest rules. He was regarded by many as a highly ethical man.

On the other hand, as Attorney General, Cushing supported the March 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States and were not protected by the Constitution. Throughout his political career, Cushing opposed the abolition of slavery and supported states’ rights, though he supported the Union during the Civil War.

In 1874, President Grant nominated Cushing as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. His nomination was withdrawn when Cushing's friendship with President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis was made public. His withdrawal from nomination was explained away by his supporters as “purely partisan”, but it is pretty damning. Cushing wrote a letter of recommendation for a member of his staff directly to Jefferson Davis, already the leader of the burgeoning Confederacy, on March 23, 1861.

The New York Times, page 1. January 14, 1874.

Though this could be explained by a long-term friendship between the two men, President Lincoln had issued a proclamation prohibiting communication with the rebel leaders, and Cushing clearly and knowingly violated it. The New York Times declared the “DOOM OF CALEB CUSHING” and published a summary of the “TREASONABLE LETTER OF MR. CUSHING”. President Grant quickly withdrew his nomination.

It is fascinating from a distance of over a century how people are lionized, vilified, excused, and excoriated in the public mind. But we know that at the dawn of the last century, Caleb Cushing's name was enough to help launch the career of Julia Child’s mother-in-law, who Julia referred to as “an utterly impractical, pre-Raphaelite creature”. And the post-mortem landscaping? Bertha Cushing Child died in Paris in 1933 and her ashes were interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Since her grave was leased, not owned, however, after 30 years, her ashes were sprinkled on a lawn.

I am a little bit sad that my plans to recreate the Julia Child kitchen at the Museum of Old Newbury in honor of her family connections here are dashed. I did so want to think of Paul Child as the urbane, witty heir of a long line of Newburyport folks. Plus, if he had been Caleb Cushing’s great-great nephew, Julia Child would have been my sixth cousin-in-law, and THAT would be worth boasting about.

After all, I have followed Julia's advice closely, at least when it comes to history. “Find something you're passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it."

A New Look for Old Newbury

by Bethany Groff Dorau

The poster for this year’s 43rd annual Garden Tour reveals a new element to our evolving identity at the Museum of Old Newbury. In August 2021, the museum contacted Matter Communications, a public relations, social media, and creative services firm, to explore a refresh of the look of our materials. It started off with a simple request – I needed business cards and stationery, and it set off a search for a logo.

The Museum of Old Newbury, like many venerable institutions, has a complicated identity based on a century and a half of evolution. Matter had shepherded Lowell’s Boat Shop, the Custom House Maritime Museum, and other respected colleagues to new and refreshed brand identities, and I was hoping that they would have some ideas for us as well.

My first contact at Matter was an old friend who works in a different branch of the company than the one that could help me with a logo. She sent me to a colleague. The whole thing seemed quite simple – invite some creative people over, show them some cool stuff, and voila…a logo. First, we went on a hunt for past marketing and branded materials. They were legion.

Our legal name is still, and will likely always be, the Historical Society of Old Newbury. Our official letterhead bears that logo – squarely based on their interest in the early years of European settlement. The year of settlement is at the top of the seal, the date of the founding of the Historical Society is at the bottom. There are not one but two people brandishing weapons, a view of a castle, and another of ships in the harbor. It is laden with meaning, with elements that spoke volumes about who the organization was in the first years of its founding, and who they wanted to attract. Aside from some problematic imagery, there was little about this logo, aside from the ships in the harbor, perhaps, that spoke to who the Museum of Old Newbury is today, and who we want to be in the future.

We also had a logo that featured just the Cushing House, others that represented elements of the garden. We had been known as the Hist, 98 High, the Cushing House, The Society, and MOON, among other things. It was a delightful walk-through time celebrating generations in the life of this place I love.

The Matter team came to the museum, and during our conversation, it became clear that this would not be a simple matter of popping some compelling image onto a business card. We needed a deeper dive into who we are.

So, who are we? Our mission statement says what we do, and it is a good place to start, but who are we to our members, our visitors? What do we have that sets us apart? We preserve significant elements of the collection of the Newburyport Marine Society, along with centuries of other maritime history. So, a ship? But wait – the key elements of our collection are just that – the collections. So, a silver spoon? A pewter flagon? A chair? A figurehead? Detail from important local wallpaper? But wait – don’t people really identify us with the wonderful architecture of the 1808 Cushing House? And what about the years, decades, even, of work that has been done on the garden and landscape? Our peach orchard used to be world famous.

This is when you realize why, like so many other professions that look like “fun”, branding and marketing are hard work. Matter took it all in, ran it around in their considerable brains, and gave us some options and some reasons why those options could work for us. In the end, the logo you see represents four elements of who we are. The ship, of course, represents our maritime heritage and collection. The wisteria represents a recognizable element of our landscape (those of you who have ever had to fight with wisteria may wish we had chosen differently). The flagon represents our incredible collection of objects from Colonial Newbury, particularly affiliated with the church, and the Cushing House is our home. Any of these images can be called out and used individually, but as a group, they speak to what we have to offer.   And as a group they represent a window, a window not only into our past and the history that built this community, but it also represents a window into what comes next for our growing and evolving community and the role our museum will play. Because after all, a window goes both ways.

Selection means elimination, and there are numerous elements that we wish we could have included. One logo idea featured the weathervane from the First Religious Society, an iconic rooster. In a logo, however, it did not work as a representation of the museum. The image on the most recent run of business cards, and on the sign outside, was Triton, a remarkable maritime figure discovered during a harbor dredging operation. Known affectionately as the “Merman”, he is an amazing artifact, but rendered in miniature, he is difficult to place. There is nothing that speaks explicitly to our incredible art collection and archive.

The museum will change in the decades, and with any luck, centuries ahead. We will continue to search for the best ways to communicate with our friends old and new. In the meantime, beginning on June 2, you can come see it all for yourself. Buy tickets here. 

The 1950 Census - a quick how-to

by Kristen Fehlhaber and Bethany Groff Dorau

A few of the occupations listed by 1950 residents of Fair St and Orange St in Newburyort.: brander at a radio tube factory, payroll clerk at a shoe factory, telephone operator, and floor sweeper.

On April 1, the 1950 U.S. Census was released. It’s completely free and available from the U.S. government at archives.gov. Indexing isn’t complete yet– if you know the name of a family and their location in 1950, you can try to find them, but you might strike out. So at this stage, many people are scanning the census by location. The census was broken down by state and county and then by Enumeration District (referred to as ED going forward). For a city like Newburyport, each ED was drawn to have no more than 1000 people in it. In rural areas, EDs might have a up to 1400 people.

To look at Newburyport, you can a see a map of the 1950 EDs here: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/12171739.

If you’re looking for West Newbury, the EDs is 5-477 for the western part, 5-478 for the eastern part, and 5-479 for the boys’ orphanage at the current Page School. For Newbury & Byfield, look in ED 5-289 (east of Rt. 1 and Plum Island) and 5-290 (west of Rt. 1). The first page you’ll see is a card summarizing the number of people in the ED. Scroll ahead to see the pages detailing the residents. Newburyport was still full of manufacturing at the time – occupations are listed on the right hand side.

Wondering about the Museum of Old Newbury home at 98 High Street, we clicked on the Newburyport ED map and located the northeast corner of High St. and Fruit St. in ED 5-299 (we added an “X” there).

To see the census records for all the residents of 5-299, follow this link and click on Population Schedules (the button in the lower right corner).

Moving to page 2 of the 36 pages of this district, we see 98 High Street as the first household recorded – lucky us! Streets are written vertically along the left-hand margin.

Margaret W. Cushing is the first person listed, age 95, never married. Below her is Mary M. Driscoll, lodger, age 66, also never married.

Scrolling to the right, we see more information about Margaret Cushing and Mary Driscoll.

Sometimes the census can shed some light on how people described themselves, which can be very useful to a researcher. For example, Mary Margaret Driscoll, who went by Margaret, is described as a “registered nurse”, which is then crossed out and “lodger” substituted. This is likely an error on the part of the census-taker, as her occupation appears in another place on the form. This is where it gets interesting. Though she is described as a lodger, rather than “maid”, the only obvious category for a female employee, Margaret Driscoll clearly believed herself to be employed by Margaret Cushing. When asked what she was doing for most of the previous week, she said she had worked 84 hours, or 7, 12-hour days as a private nurse in the home.

Margaret Driscoll seems to have come to the Cushing household in the mid-1920s to care for Margaret Cushing’s older brother Lawrence, who died in 1933. An article published upon the occasion of Margaret Cushing’s 100th birthday notes that “Miss Margaret Driscoll, R.N.” was unable to attend as she had died one month before. She is described here as Margaret Cushing’s “nurse-companion” for 30 years.

In the years that Miss Driscoll spent with Margaret Cushing, and in the years since, she was described as a “companion” to the older woman, a title that has come to mean something slightly different than it did in the past. At the time, it was somewhere between friendship and employment, a genteel way of blurring the lines between equality and servitude, but Mary Margaret Driscoll’s answers to the census takers tell us that she clearly thought of herself as employed by Margaret Cushing and described all her long days in Margaret’s company as work. This does not detract from any warm feeling these women may have had for each other. The newspaper article notes that she is “missed from the pleasant event.”

Article on Margaret Cushing's 100th birthday. Newburyport Daily News, page 6, February 10, 1955.

We hope you'll take a look at some of these census records – there is much to be learned. And if you discover something interesting, please share it with us at info@newburyhistory.org.

Chasing Duncan

by Bethany Groff Dorau

I was having lunch at the Grog recently, when my companion pointed to the portrait of a sea captain that hangs over the fireplace. “Who do you think that is?” she said, taking in the white beard, the nautical cap, the sparkling eyes. “That be Duncan Chase,” I said in my best fake pirate voice. “Ooh,” she said, trailing off…”Captain Chase.”

Duncan Chase, painting by Jim MIckelson courtesy of The Grog restaurant

Well sort of, though he answered to Colonel. I told her what I knew of the man – he was drunk all the time, and he was tall and loud. He told people he spent the winter in Cal-E-Fornia. He was a panhandler, meowing loudly at tourists and friends alike, usually wearing a jaunty scarf around his neck. After he died, he was given a plot and a headstone at Old Hill by kind Newburyporters.

My friend had questions. Was he born in Newburyport? Was he from the old Newbury Chase family? Where did he sleep? Why did he drink? Was he a veteran?

History, or historians at least, abhor a vacuum, and so I began to fill in the gaps. Maybe he was once in the Navy, I said. Seems the right age for World War II or Korea. He was probably the black sheep of an old Newbury family, returning from the war with a legacy of trauma and…hold the phone. I reeled it in. I had veered dangerously away from facts, or even rumor or memory. “I’ll see what I can find,” I said, and then forgot all about it until a few days later, when I ran into his headstone while looking for someone else. That’s two Duncan Chase sightings. And then I was looking up Chase & Shawmut online and up popped this picture of Duncan. That’s three. I can take a hint.

Duncan Chase, photo by Robert Atwater, mybigphatphotographs.com

I know right away that this was a picture of Duncan Chase passed out in a doorway, a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag next to him. I even thought I knew which doorway. I remember him there. I remember his signature call to passers-by, “I’m a cool, cool cat from NEW YORK CITY”. I contacted the photographer to ask permission to use the image. He kindly agreed.

And then it started to bother me – not the image, which was an accurate portrait of the man, but my lack of concern about it, my willingness to share it without context. To me, Duncan Chase was not a man worthy of my professional due diligence, but a caricature, a symbol of the town drunk, some charming relic of bygone old Newburyport who had become, in memory, one-dimensional.

And then I did the math. Duncan Chase and I never met. He died in 1980, when I was six years old and living in Canada. I knew him only from the stories I had been told. Maybe his ghost was in that doorway when I was hanging out at Inn Street, but the flesh and blood was long gone.   

So I began at the end and worked my way back. I found his death record, then his birth record, then his parents’, then, voila, his paternal great-grandmother, Jane Merrill, already in my family tree. With a satisfying click, I added Duncan to my tree, watched his ancestors and mine match up and dance around. He settles in as my sixth cousin, once removed – one more piece of information that is about me, not him, really, but it gives me a place to start.

Duncan Howard Chase was born on Chestnut Street in Groveland on October 19, 1919, the youngest of four children born to Raymond Chase and Charlotte (Buxton) Chase. Duncan’s parents met in Haverhill and married young – Charlotte was just 16, Raymond was 22, and though both could read and write, neither had a high school education. Duncan’s father Raymond worked at a Haverhill shoe findings shop. At some point between 1930 and 1935, Charlotte Chase left her husband and moved to Newburyport with teenage Duncan, who had left school after 5th grade. They lived in a small apartment on Washington Street, then another apartment on Fair Street. She is listed as a sewer, working for the WPA, then a dressmaker, later a “practical nurse”, or uncertified health aide. It is possible she chose to come to Newburyport because her brother Myron Buxton was already here, listed in the 1931 directory as living on Kent Street with their mother. By 1937, Duncan Chase’s mother, uncle Myron and grandmother, Lenora, were living at 2 Orange Street, and it was this address that Duncan gave the police when, in 1939, he was apprehended in Florida for forgery, check larceny, and stealing a car from a Newburyport shoe factory foreman. He spent two months in jail, got out, worked as a laborer for Oscar Traister for about a year while stealing more checks, and then took off with another car.

Newburyport Daily News, Thursday, December 14th, 1939

This was the end of the line for Duncan’s family. His mother informed the newspaper in October 1941 that Duncan Chase was no longer at 2 Orange Street. When he went before a Salem judge in 1942, he promised to join the army “if he can be accepted.” He had nowhere else to go. The judge was encouraging. “You might make a record for yourself in the army. You might get the Distinguished Service Cross.”

Duncan Chase never entered the army. Two years later, he was sentenced to two years in prison for grabbing a woman’s purse on Bartlett Mall. In 1946, when Chase was 27 years old, he was arrested for breaking into his mother’s house on Orange Street and stealing his brother’s knife and shoes. It was the first time the record cited alcohol as a contributing factor.

In 1949, Duncan Chase and Hilda Olsen Carpenter were married in New London, New Hampshire. She gave her occupation as waitress, his as handyman. It was his first marriage, her second, and was over within a year. The next two decades were a slow slide into homelessness and addiction, and Duncan was repeatedly arrested for drunkenness and petty theft, unable to make bail, and veering between prison, locked hospital wards, and the streets of Newburyport and Haverhill.

By the time I was born in 1974, Duncan Chase had become one of the notable “characters” of Newburyport. In a nostalgic Boston Globe article, Jeremiah Murphy opined that “Old Newburyport is my kind of city,” while “Duncan Chase is still hanging around Market Square, except for an occasional vacation at the expense of the county. Almost every town has a Duncan Chase.”

Recently, the number of people living on the streets in American cities has sparked a heated, and recurring, debate. Some argue that unhoused people with addictions and mental and physical challenges should be placed in guardianships, effectively ending their rights to self-determination and legal adulthood. It is a thorny issue, with civil rights advocates arguing that the right to live on the fringes of society, to be weird, and make mistakes, and yes, even to drink too much and sleep on the ground if one chooses, should be protected. It is a slippery slope, they say, and once a person is placed in guardianship, it is extremely difficult to get back out. For others, the human rights issue is that those who most need help are least able to get it, and so someone else must advocate for them.

I do not have the answer. I could convincingly argue both sides of this issue. As for Duncan Chase. I do not know why he drank – he may not have known himself. Most people who met him have a story, and most of these stories are about how funny and charming and interesting he was. But there are others. He was frightening when he was angry. He would destroy things – break store windows and throw bottles to get locked up so he could have a place to sleep. Sometimes when the weight of his life settled in on him, he sobbed inconsolably. Some wish that there had been more intervention in his case. Others feel that he lived exactly as he chose and find nobility in that.

Duncan Chase is buried at Old Hill Burying Ground, the plot and stone paid for by his friends.

What I believe is that everyone, living or dead, deserves to have the truth told about them, so far as we are able, and that Duncan Chase, like all of us, is a complicated person, not just a picturesque symbol of old Newburyport, but not just a figure of pity either. The next time I look at a picture of him, all blue eyes and white beard, over the fireplace at The Grog, I will tell a truer version of his story, including the truth of the untrue parts. He was not from New York. He did not spend the winters in California. But he was a cool, cool cat.    

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