Courage, Cowardice, China, and Cushing

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

On June 17, 1843, Caleb Cushing went to dinner at Faneuil Hall. It had been a bruising year, and Cushing had barely managed to snatch victory from the jaws of humiliating defeat.

Cushing, then a Congressman from Massachusetts, was becoming known for his inconsistency and willingness to vote both for and against bills and change political parties as he saw an advantage. He had been nominated by President John Tyler to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, but the Senate refused to confirm him. He was nominated three times in one day, and as many times rejected. President Tyler, whose long relationship with Cushing deserves more than a passing line here, then appointed his friend to lead a delegation to China to secure a trade treaty. It was an opportunity for Cushing to rebuild his reputation, and he took full advantage of the months between his appointment and his departure to talk up the importance of his mission. Hence the dinner at Faneuil Hall, at which both President Tyler and Daniel Webster were also guests.

The occasion was the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument, memorializing the battle where Cushing's fellow Newburyporter, Samuel Gerrish, had ignominiously contributed to the American defeat.

This seems to be a theme in my life and work, dear reader. Begin the week thinking about Caleb Cushing and the China Trade as we plan the China Trade Conference on October 28 (you should come, of course - click here for more), and then take what seems to be a completely left turn to write about Samuel Gerrish. Then, oh serendipity, find Cushing doing what you could not have imagined could be done - linking, as only a career politician could - the Battle of Bunker Hill and trade with China. I'll let Cushing take it from here...

 Not merely relating to the conflict of 1775; not to the ever-remembered victory which ushered in our national existence ; nor to the scene which was the glorious dawn of our existence ; nor to the mere military triumphs, glorious as they were in that battle-day which is first among our annals of the war. I...see now, that peace has her triumphs, no less than more brilliant war...

I have myself been honored with a commission of peace, and am entrusted with the duty of bringing nearer together, if possible, the civilization of the old and new worlds - the Asiatic, European and American continents.

For though, of old, it was from the East that civilization and learning dawned upon the civilized world, yet now the refluent tide of letters - knowledge, was rolled back from the West to the East, and we have become the teachers of our teachers."

Cushing then turned dramatically to President Tyler, addressing him directly. "I go to China, sir, if I may so express myself, in behalf of civilization, and that, if possible, the doors of three hundred millions of Asiatic laborers may be opened to America. And if there is to be there another Bunker Hill monument, may it not be to commemorate the triumph of power over people, but the accumulating glory of peaceful arts, and civilized life."

Cushing's vision of China as an ancient center of learning, now fallen so far behind the United States that "we have become the teachers of our teachers", is patronizing at best. There are many other elements of Cushing's vision of his mission "on behalf of civilization" that are deeply problematic. Closer to the truth was his telling line about the "three hundred million" who would be "opened to America". Whatever else Cushing sought to achieve, his mission was clear. Through threat and flattery, coercion and conviction, he was to secure for the United States a treaty that would open up Chinese markets to American goods and vice versa. If he were to fail, England would have a critical advantage over the United States in international trade.

If the subsequent journey to China and the 1844 Treaty of Wanghia interest you, come to the conference, where Eric Jay Dolin and Dane Morrison will describe its impact far more eloquently than I ever could.

When America First Met China by Eric Jay Dolin, is an excellent overview of the early years of the China Trade. Dolin is a featured speaker at the Newburyport and the China Trade Conference on October 28.

Memory and meaning are my obsession. The Battle of Bunker Hill was, to Cushing, and many others, "the glorious dawn of our existence" as a nation, and there is some truth to that. Though the Provincial troops were defeated that day, they inflicted horrific casualties on the British troops, killing or wounding some thousand of them, out of a force of 2400. It was a watershed event, worthy of remembrance. Cushing employed the memory of Bunker Hill to argue that peace, and, self-servingly, diplomacy and trade were the new path to American victory. His speech was widely quoted in the publications of peace leagues across the country. It is worth mentioning, however, that Cushing arrived in China in February 1844 in a convoy of warships.

1848 View of Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, built 1824-43, Solomon Willard architect. Digital Commonwealth

Any historical event is unknowable, in a way. It is experienced differently by every person, whose perspective, experience, bias, and status influence what meaning they make of it. Facts can be secured, carved in stone, but meaning is endlessly shifting. Samuel Gerrish hiding behind a haystack, the blood and chaos and smoke of the fight before him, may be a coward, or a realist, or he may have been suffering the traumatic effects of decades of bloody military service. Several later writers argued that he had been a scapegoat for widespread failures of leadership at the battle. Caleb Cushing was certainly not representing his experience as he prepared to sail for China.

It is easy to distill a whole life to one line. The title of the earlier piece does just that. "Cowardly Colonel of Bunker Hill" is not the sum of Samuel Gerrish's life, though there is ample evidence that this is an accurate description of his observed behavior. Nor is Caleb Cushing's celebrated negotiation of the Treaty of Wanghia in 1844 an accurate summation of the life and work of a very complex man whose failure to speak and work against slavery may have been typical of his time, but still stands out as a failure of conviction. Today I am mulling over the meaning of courage, how it shifts in one's life, how I have been courageous or cowardly, and at times both simultaneously. It is part of the human condition to look for inspiration in the past. I think we can learn as much from moments when our courage fails.

New Acquisitions for Old Newbury (Originally published September 27, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

"Hey, let's go to the Annual Meeting!" is not a phrase that is generally met with great delight, in my experience. It generally lands somewhere between listening to a long sermon and watching paint dry, in my experience.

Between financial reports and procedural votes, for the average member of a small museum, these meetings can feel like an obligation rather than a pleasure. And yet, we must have them.

If you were to ask any one of the staff members or volunteers at the Museum of Old Newbury what they most enjoyed over the past year, however, they would tell you about a special object, a meaningful experience, a new connection, and it is this passion that guided our September 11, 2024 Annual Meeting. Well, new acquisitions and great food.

So now, sit back and enjoy a short recap of the program, with special thanks to the guest presenters and to Bob Watts for these images. Not pictured - Sierra's presentation of the "masterpiece" cane, which you can read about here.

Operations Manager Shelley Swofford laid out a feast for our members, much of it donated by our board members, as James Dorau from Ipswich Ale Brewery and board member Eric Svahn tended bar.

Noah and Sam Clewely, our Future Leaders Interns, spent the summer cataloguing our military collection, focusing on artifacts from the American Revolution. Of particular interest is Long Tom, a gun whose extraordinary size - over 9 feet long - made it an interesting flagpole in this article from April 24, 1861. While this is not a new acquisition, their research brought its long and fascinating history to light.

Collections assistant Sierra Gitlin presented images from the Scott Nason Glass Plate Negative Collection, a very large group of images from Plum Island and Newburyport, donated in 2024. Sierra brought out other examples of glass plate negatives so attendees could get a sense of their size (see image of unknown man at the beginning of this article).

Family member Keith Lunt donated this daguerreotype of Samuel Henry Lunt and his daughter Sarah, along with a miniature painting on ivory and other records of his life. Shortly after this image was taken, Lunt died of "brain fever" or meningitis, in Mobile, Alabama, on July 28, 1865, while serving in the Union Army.

Archivist Sharon Spieldenner shared two important new purchases; a letter from Joseph Lunt aboard the prison ship Chatham in 1814, and a rare glimpse of Lord Timothy Dexter from a man who was passing through town in 1802.

This wedding dress, veil, and memory book, complete with receipts, photographs, and notes compiled by the bride's father, was a very recent gift to the museum, and costume historian Lois Valeo and yours truly shared it with the membership.

Harriett Currier married Leon Noyes on October 10, 1953 and the collection was given to the museum by her daughter. She recalled that her mother was "a kind, caring person and a great friend to many. She sang in the church choir at Belleville and was very close to her parents being the youngest at their Chapel Street home." Harriett (Currier) Noyes died in 2002, and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery.  

Board and collections committee member Monica Reuss, an American Art specialist, introduced three new paintings of the Newbury salt marsh. Lilian Wescott Hale (1880-1963) painted the larger work in the early 20th century. It is one of only two marsh paintings by women in the collection. The two smaller pieces are by Henry Curtis Ahl (1905-1996), who lived in Byfield and is best known for his coastal scenes.

Finishing out the presentations, the audience was introduced to one of the largest - and strangest - gifts received this year by the museum. This large section of an oak stump was used to hammer out punch bowls in various sizes by the Moulton family of silversmiths. It resided in the Towle offices for many years, and was left behind when the company was sold in 1994. As one of the oldest examples of silver working devices in the United States, it holds a place of honor in the carriage barn.

Bob Watts, board member and friend, caught us hamming it up behind the bar! Thanks to all of you who came out to celebrate another year of change and growth at the Museum of Old Newbury, and thanks especially to our presenters, board members, and volunteers. We love sharing some of our many new acquisitions with you!

The Magnetic Mr. Poyen, Part III (Originally published September 15, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Well, friends, we have returned for the third and final edition of the mesmerizing (see what I did there?) tale of Charles Poyen, member of the French refugee family of Poyens who escaped to Newburyport during the French Revolution. In case you missed the previous installations of this series, Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

When we last saw our gentleman friend, it was 1836, and Charles Poyen was just embarking on a career as a passionate advocate of Animal Magnetism, the belief that magnetic forces could be channeled and manipulated by trained mesmerists, and this process could cure disease, depression, and anxiety. It could even get you to work on time.

In February 1836, Poyen had gained a measure of success when the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (BMSJ) published an essay that included parts of his lectures on mesmerism. With interest thus piqued, Poyen managed to publish his translation of a French treatise on the subject. His real bread and butter, however, came from the lecture circuit.

There are no images of Charles Poyen on stage or otherwise, so we must rely on the description of the man given in the BMSJ.

"In person, Dr. Poyen was of a middle height; rather slender, yet well formed. Nearly one half of his face was covered, or rather discolored, by a naevus, of a dark-red hue, which greatly modified the natural expression. The cranial region for firmness was raised quite high enough to indicate obstinacy. He was habitually grave, thoughtful, industrious and studious, but not a close reasoner, nor by any means an original or profound thinker. Whatever was marvellous or extraordinary engaged his earnest consideration, particularly if it could be dragged into the service of the dearest of all interests—animal magnetism."

Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866), famed spiritual healer, who was an early supporter of Charles Poyen.

Poyen went to Portland, Maine to see his cousin Abigail (Poyen) Whitter, who had married John Greenleaf Whitter's brother Matthew. While he was there, he gave some lectures which proved modestly popular. He also gained a few ardent fans, one of whom, Phineas P. Quimby, went on to famously mesmerize Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy.

As 1836 wore on, however, the lecture circuit was proving to be a bit of a slog. Worse yet, Poyen's book was hardly flying off the shelves. He needed money, and sent home to his family's sugar plantation in Guadeloupe for an infusion of cash. As author Emily Ogden noted, "had it not been for the proceeds of slavery, American mesmerism might never have gotten off the ground."

Thus financially fortified, Poyen headed off to the mill city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where his lectures could command a whopping 75 cents a head. This was several days wages for a (generally female) textile factory worker, so attended primarily by the (male) management of the mills. Women were a cheaper workforce than men, and the use of power looms meant that the labor, though dangerous and tedious, was not hard labor. Women were also considered more tractable and easier to manage. Still, productivity at the mills declined when their workers, who put in six 12 to 14-hour days a week, suffered from exhaustion, depression, and physical illness.

Poyen understood his audience, and his lectures began to focus on the benefits of animal magnetism for worker productivity. He also realized that his enthusiastic speeches needed a little more sparkle. He needed a dramatic demonstration, and for this he needed a partner.

Meanwhile, power loom operator Cynthia Ann Gleason was having stomach pains and trouble sleeping. She slept too much, too little or too late, and when she woke up, she felt groggy and listless. Though we may ascribe this to her grueling schedule, Niles Manchester, the part-owner of the factory in which she worked and also a factory physician, thought that Gleason might be "cured" through magnetism.

The Wilkinson Mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, built in 1810, would have been a familiar sight to factory worker Cynthia Ann Gleason. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Poyen and Gleason must have sensed an opportunity in their pairing. Poyen met with her, under the watchful eye of factory management, for over a week before their meetings culminated with Poyen placing Gleason into a trance. He “mentally requested the somnambulist (sleepwalker) to go to bed… and told her mentally to sleep until 8 o’clock exactly." And in the presence of senior management, Cynthia Gleeson managed to get her first full night sleep in years, awakening refreshed and ready for her 14-hour shift at 8 a.m. sharp.

Poyen remained in Rhode Island for nearly two months, and when he left to continue his lecture tour, he took Cynthia Gleason with him. They perfected their stage show, with Poyen putting Gleason into a trance and then demonstrating his power over her by having her identify objects held up behind her head, remain asleep despite loud noises or bright lights, and, in one notable case, pass out suddenly at a party while he magnetized her from another room in the house. Bells were rung next to her head, ammonia passed under her nose, pistols shot near her, but Gleason remained entranced. The pair became an overnight sensation and spent 1837 touring around New England. Poyen also published the scintillating Progress of Animal Magnetism in New England: Being a Collection of Experiments, Reports and Certificates, from the Most Respectable Sources. Preceded by a Dissertation on the Proofs of Animal Magnetism. In this book he responded to the criticism that if he really had such magnetic powers, they would work on anyone, not just the talented Miss Gleason. He was not at the height of his powers, Poyen explained, what with the tour and all, and because Gleason was an "experienced somnambulist", she required less of his "magnetic fluid" to get in the zone.

The Newburyport Herald took notice of the pair early in 1838, and was unimpressed. Under the headline "How to Wake a Somnambulist", the paper related a story from a demonstration in Waltham where someone had shouted "Fire", and Miss Gleason, "having no notion of being burned to a crisp", jumped out of her seat and ran.

In December, the Newburyport paper feigned sympathy as it reported that Gleason was "dreadfully frightened" when some young men shot a pistol near her head as she "pretended to be in a profound magnetic sleep". To make matters worse, in the ensuing melee, Gleason was kidnapped by a member of the audience, who "succeeded in running away with the fair imposter" and hiding her for two days.

The story of Gleason's disappearance spread across the country - it was reported from New Orleans to Bangor, Maine. In the end, despite his fervent, and perhaps genuine belief in the healing power of magnetism, it was all too much for the delicate sensibilities of our friend Charles Poyen. In the summer of 1839, he packed up and returned to France.

And then a curious thing happened. Other practitioners of animal magnetism took up the mantle and Charles Poyen's book sales picked up. As his fame grew and he contemplated a return to America, Charles Poyen died suddenly in Bordeaux in 1843, just 36 years old.

Charles Poyen's cousin by marriage, writer and journalist Matthew Franklin Whittier (1812-1883). Private collection.

Animal magnetism obsessed the nation in the 1840's and beyond, attracting the attention (and derision) of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even making its way into Moby Dick in 1851 as Captain Ahab wields hypnotic power through his "magnetic life". It even became a trope in pornographic literature of the time, with writers describing debauches with mesmerized women.

By the 1860's, animal magnetism had been eclipsed almost entirely by spiritualism, which offered a grieving nation the ability to communicate with the dead. Still, here in 2024, amazon.com will happily sell me a magnetic fork with which to heal myself and my loved ones, and the National Institutes of Health includes magnetic therapy on its list of alternative healthcare options.

Much as I will miss our adventures, I will pull the curtain on Charles Poyen, for the moment anyway, with the kind words spoken of him by his cousin-in-law, Matthew Whittier, in the Portland (Maine) Transcript.

Doctor Poyen...will be remembered as the first propagator of the now popular science of Animal Magnetism in the United States. (He) seemed to see with prophetic vision through the clouds of prejudice the almost universal favor with which that theory is now received. Doctor P. was...an urbane, upright gentleman."

The Magnetic Mr. Poyen, Part II (Originally published August 30, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

We're back with another scintillating edition of How to Magnetize Friends and Influence People! In case you missed our last episode, which offered a peek into my bouncing brain, once described as "squirrels locked in a small room", it is linked here.

We met Charles Poyen, a member of the Poyen family who landed in Newburyport along with other refugees from the French West Indies, learned a little bit about Animal Magnetism, and discovered that healing with magnets is still very much a thing.

This episode begins a generation before, in the 1790's back in Guadeloupe, with a murder or two. We are told by the nonagenarian Sarah Smith that the French Revolution "reached the French West Indian colonies with even more intense cruelties than in the mother country." This beggars belief somewhat, as the mother country was cruel as can be, but let's just say there was plenty of violence to go around. The rather more cool-headed John J. Currier said simply that there were "scenes of anarchy and confusion" in the French West Indies.

Sarah Smith was closer to the mark. The French Revolution came to Guadeloupe like a wrecking ball. The wealthy planters were tied by blood and money to the aristocracy of France, and the revolutionaries hated them equally. To further stoke the flames, the revolutionaries abolished slavery, upon which the West Indian economy was based, and the planters invited the hated British to invade in order to preserve the institution of slavery in 1794.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Two years earlier, the Poyen family, wealthy sugarcane planters from the village of Habitation Piton near Saint-Rose, Guadeloupe, were attacked. The oldest and youngest sons, Robert de Poyen and Saint Sauveur de Poyen were "killed by the brutal mob of republicans", according to Smith. 51-year-old Pierre Robert de Saint Sauveur Poyen fled with his three surviving sons, two daughters, and a step-nephew, Count Francis de Vipart (François Félix Hector de Vipart Morainvilliers). They managed to get aboard a Newburyport brig, one of many sent to bring molasses and sugar back to the distilleries that dotted the waterfront. The family arrived in Newburyport in March 1792.

I'll get back to Charles Poyen, I promise, but first, I must tell you about the Poyen step-nephew,  Count Francis de Vipart. Well, more to the point, I must tell you about Mary Balch Ingalls, distant relative of Pa and Ma and Laura Ingalls, and my 4th cousin. Apparently after some time in Newburyport, the Count made his way up river, and in 1805 he wooed and married Mary Balch Ingalls, just 18 (he was 27 or 28). She died three years later and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Haverhill. The bereaved Count returned to France and eventually to Guadeloupe.

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose brother married the Count's cousin, Abigail Poyen, wrote a romantic poem about the grave of the young Countess. The poem inspired such paroxysms of grief that her grave became a pilgrimage site of sorts, and then people started chipping off bits of it as souvenirs. The family erected a cage around the stone to protect it, which did the trick for many years, but the stone is now gone - some say hidden away for safekeeping.

The rest of the Poyen crew settled in Newburyport, at least for a few years after their arrival in 1792. Pierre, called "Peter" in his probate record, and entirely without a first name in the Newburyport death record, didn't last the year, dying of "loss of home, change of climate, grief and anxiety", according to Smith.

Pierre's son Joseph stuck around as other family members found their way back to Guadeloupe. And what does a young French aristocrat do for cash in late 18th century Newburyport? Open up a dancing school, naturally. Four years later Joseph, now styling himself as "Poyen Rochmond", placed this ad in the Newburyport Impartial Herald.

Two years after that, in 1798, he was also teaching "the useful and necessary art of self-defense" by broad sword. He also apparently played the violin, which he put to good use as a fiddler for country dances later in his life.

Joseph Poyen married a local gal, Sally Elliot, in 1805, and their nine children and their descendants spread across Haverhill, Amesbury, and Merrimac, where they can still be found today.

The Poyen Sampler, wrought c. 1819, likely by Elizabeth Josephine Poyen, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So many people to meet! But, I have promised you a story about Charles Poyen, nephew of Joseph the dancing, fiddling self-defense instructor. Charles Poyen was the son of Mathieu Augustine Poyen, Joseph's younger brother.

Many of the French refugees returned to Guadeloupe once it was safe to do so, and, of course, once Napoleon had reinstated slavery in 1802, making the sugar plantations economically attractive once again. Charles Poyen was born in Guadeloupe around 1806, where his father had returned to re-claim the family plantation.

When Mathieu Augustine Poyen died in 1827, he left a large, profitable plantation, enslaving some 90 people. Charles inherited this wealth along with his mother and siblings, and seems to have set off to France to study medicine. Sometime in 1832, he developed a painful and complicated "nervous disease" that effected his stomach and right side. He was treated by a doctor who employed a clairvoyant named Madame Villetard. Poyen was healed, he began reading voraciously about animal magnetism, and he returned to Guadeloupe to try it out on the people his family and others enslaved. Thus convinced that "the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties", in other words, anyone could be mesmerized.

Determined to spread the word of healing through animal magnetism to America, Charles Poyen sailed for New England and descended upon his uncle Joseph Poyen, who was then living in Rocks Village, in 1834. He stayed for five months before moving on to Lowell, where he set up shop as a French and art teacher.

Charles Poyen appeared in the Lowell directory in 1836. It is not known, though it is likely, that the Louis Poyen staying at the same place is a relative.

Charles Poyen claimed that he never mentioned animal magnetism for six months when he was first living in Lowell, until he found himself in conversation with the mayor, Elisha Bartlett who seems to have convinced him that there was a market for his passionate advocacy of mesmerism. Poyen, thus encouraged, set out to find a publisher for an existing treatise on the subject.

When no publisher bit, Poyen decided a round of lectures and demonstrations of the mesmeric trance that was the cornerstone of the practice of magnetism would help him build an audience. January 1836 found him lecturing in Boston. In February, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published an essay, then his translation of the Report on the magnetical experiments made by the Commission of the Royal Academy of Medicine, of Paris was published in June.

Though his star was certainly on the rise, in the fall of 1836, he sent home to Guadeloupe for money to continue his lecturing, as it was not yet profitable. It was not until he took his lecture tour to the mill town of Pawtucket and met Miss Cynthia Ann Gleason that he became a real celebrity.

Well, friends, here we go again. I'm out of space with so much more to tell. Stay tuned for the next newsletter, in which I promise to wrap it up already as Charles Poyen uses magnetism to get the factory gals to work on time, launches the career of Miss Cynthia Gleason, and inspires generations of magnetizers here in Newburyport.

The Magnetic Mr. Poyen (Originally published August 16, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Late 18th century print depicting the healing power of Animal Magnetism. Sufferers hold painful or diseased body parts against iron bars connected to the bacquet, a wooden tank filled with magnetized water. The woman on the left is in a mesmeric trance, having been magnetized by a healer. Image courtesy of Wellcome Images.

Well, my friends, Amazon Prime Day seems to have turned into numerous Amazon Prime Days, and I somehow found myself wandering down that technicolor rabbit-hole a couple of weeks ago. When I came to my senses some minutes (hours?) later, I was staring at an image of a hand pressing a knobby fork into the back of a presumably consenting adult. It promised HOLISTIC HEALTH BENEFITS! I was invited to “Harmonize Body Pathways” and “Release Trapped Emotions”, among other things. The fork thingy, you see, was magnetized, and so assaulting yourself or a friend with it, in a circular motion, could accomplish amazing things. 

This all rings a bell, thought I. I had been in the middle of a bit of research on the crazy story of the escapees/refugees from the islands of Dominica and Guadeloupe who came to Newburyport during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution. It is a wild tale, and one which has been asking for attention recently.

To make a very long, very interesting story a bit shorter, Newburyport and the French West Indies, especially Guadeloupe, had a long and prosperous relationship based on, well, slavery. By which I mean that the sugar, molasses, and rum that were flowing into Newburyport in the late 18th and early 19th century, were produced on French plantations that depended on enslaved labor. Nearly 80% of the population was enslaved. With the French Revolution in 1789 came waves of violence against the royalist plantation owners in Guadeloupe, who fled for their lives, some with the help of their Newburyport friends and business partners. There are stories of planters escaping after members of their families were killed, frantically rowing out to Newburyport ships in the harbor. We know of at least two captains, William Bradbury and Offin Boardman, who brought refugees to Newburyport from the French West Indies.

This headstone in Old Hill Burying Ground memorializes Pierre Poyen, one of the French refugees who came to Newburyport during the French Revolution, dying a few months after his arrival. It reads:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
MR. POYEN DE ST SAUVEUR
WHO FOR A LONG TIME WAS
AN INHABITANT & A REPUTABLE
PLANTER ON THE ISLAND
OF GUADULOUPE
DIED OCTOBER 14TH, 1792
AGED 52 YEARS

In my years of researching and writing, I have learned to listen to the people and events that rise up and knock on my metaphorical window – there are stories that want to be told. Often these appear as a series of seemingly unconnected events. I notice a gravestone while looking for another person, or a last name suddenly seems to be coming up all over the place. I’ll visit another museum and there they will be, on an object I had no idea existed or in a book I’ve never read. Or I will wonder why I paused on an Amazon listing for a magnetized fork.

Here's where I take you inside the squirrely warren of my brain. Follow me. I have been researching a sampler made by a Mademoiselle Marie Dumans from our collection, one that we know very little about. With the help of several other researchers, including the intrepid Ellie Bailey, we have determined that the sampler is likely connected to the family of a Charles Joseph Benjamin Cherot Dumaine, who was baptized on April 17, 1801, in Newburyport.

Then, on a trip to Old York, I came to a dead stop in front of a painting of Nathaniel Barrell, who was familiar to me from my days working at the Sayward Wheeler House, owned by my former employer, Historic New England. It was not the subject, but the artist that grabbed my attention.

Newburyport’s Moses Dupre Cole, whose work is also well represented at the Museum of Old Newbury, was born Moise Jacques Dupree Cools de Godefroy, in Bordeaux, France. He fled from St. Lucia with his father in 1795 and landed in Newburyport. Then, at Old Hill Burying Ground, I stumbled on the grave of Jaque and Louis Mestre, who died in 1793 and 1792, age 21 and 17, respectively. And, you may find this a stretch, but Annabelle, who has been working with me since she was 17 years old, and who co-wrote the main story in this newsletter, is headed to France for graduate school next month. And then there’s the Olympics. Suddenly France, and the French West Indies in particular, seems to be everywhere. 

Portrait of Nathaniel Barrell (1732-1831) by Moses Dupre Cole (Moise Jacques Dupree Cools de Godefroy). Courtesy Historic New England.

And what, you may ask, has this to do with the magical magnetic fork? Back into my squirrely brain we go. For many years I have been interested in the social and cultural impact of early photography, particularly of the sort that claimed to capture images of spirits and other supernatural phenomena.

There are adherents of spirit photography today – just visit Salem to have your aura snapped – but they were big business in the 19th century, when many people’s understanding of the photographic process was rudimentary enough to render them gob smacked at what we would see clearly as a double exposure.

One such practitioner, Edouard Isidore Buguet, who I had studied at length in graduate school, began taking supernatural photographs in 1874, and was a fervent believer in animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism, the belief that the body exerted a magnetic force that could flow between bodies if connectivity was established, generally through some sort of fluid. If this magnetic force was blocked, it could cause a host of problems from depression to infertility and beyond. Sufferers would be “mesmerized” to remove these blocks and promote all the benefits that the amazon.com fork promised me. Buguet routinely had himself and his cameras and equipment mesmerized to remove obstacles to, well, double-exposing plates and then selling them to gullible French people for an exorbitant amount. 

Now, if you haven’t thrown your computer across the room in frustration while screaming, “GET TO THE POINT,” you’re a better person than I am. I had to stare blankly into the middle distance for a long time to figure out what all these things had to do with each other. 

And then it came to me (as in a mesmeric trance). One of the families that had escaped from Guadeloupe was the Poyen family. Their story, like so many others, is a bloody one, with twists and turns that will make your head spin. More on that later. And it was Charles Poyen who brought mesmerism to the United States from France, making it so popular that the word “mesmerized” and the term “animal magnetism” have became part of our common vocabulary. I also “met” Charles Poyen in graduate school. I was briefly obsessed with how animal magnetism became the great obsession of American literature in the 19th century, captivating Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others.

The Poyen family coat of arms, as rendered by Sarah Smith Emery in her 1879 book Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian.

How many Poyens are there in France, I asked myself. Must be thousands. I did a quick bit of research on Charles Poyen. Born in Guadeloupe in 1808…that seemed promising, but the Poyen family that escaped to Newburyport had arrived in 1792. Probably not. And then, the smoking gun…

From an April 1960 article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (I cast a wide net) “Poyen sailed in 1833 for a sugar plantation owned by his relatives in the French West Indies…His health had shown little improvement, however, and so he decided to visit the United States to see if another change of climate would benefit him. In late 1834 he landed at Portland, Maine, and proceeded to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where lived a paternal uncle who had immigrated to the United States at the time of the French Revolution.” Haverhill? Had to be the same family. And they are – Mesmerizer Charles Poyen’s father, Mathieu Augustine Poyen, came to Newburyport with his brother in 1792, then went back to Guadeloupe to reclaim their sugar plantations after Napoleon reinstated slavery in 1802.

Portrait miniature of Abigail Rochemont Poyen (1816-1841), Charles Poyen's first cousin (once removed), who married my cousin (but didn't everyone?).

As I have repeatedly claimed, if you spent more than ten days in Newbury(port) during your baby-making years, I am most likely related to you somehow, and this has proven to be true even of Charles Poyen. His first cousin (once removed) Abigail Poyen, married Matthew Whittier, brother of the poet John Greenleaf Whitter, both my second cousins six times removed. So we zip Charles Poyen into my family tree and we are off. 

And now, as with the subject of my last blog series, my dearly beloved John Bartholomew Gough, I have exceeded the word count for this newsletter. Stay tuned as we meet the rest of the Poyen clan, Charles Poyen becomes a clairvoyant management consultant for Lowell factory workers and his distant cousin (by marriage) Elisha Perkins begins the healing silverware tradition.  

Other Duties as Required... (Originally published August 2, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Images and video in this story are courtesy of Bob Watts, Shelley Swofford, Steve Crosby, and Alex Yablin. This one is from Bob.

When I began working at Historic New England nearly 25 years ago, I was presented with a job description that closed the "Primary Responsibilities" section with "other duties as required". It made me chuckle then as now, since this one line seems to sum up what museum work can involve - literally anything.

Over the course of my career, I have invoked this line when I found myself called to crawl in a manhole with a video camera on my head, fish a live muskrat out of a rain barrel, sleep on the ground with an ailing sheep, test a stuffed pheasant for arsenic, drive a fire truck...the list goes on and on. I can honestly say that no two days are alike. I would go so far as to say that on any given day I must have at least two outfits at the ready - one for looking like I am the director of a venerable museum, and one for crawling around in an attic. Yesterday I had a three-outfit day, and the third outfit involved flying down Federal Street with a model ship on my head.

Other duties as required.

It began with James Brugger, an esteemed board member and friend. He suggested that we should enter a Museum of Old Newbury bed in the Yankee Homecoming Bed Race, organized by the Lions Club. Because another part of museum work involves being chronically short of staff and funding, I gave my wholehearted consent, if it did not cost the museum any money and the work was done by volunteers.

Enter Steve Crosby, preservation carpenter extraordinaire, remembered by many as the man who staged the terrific Halloween tableaux on Marlboro Street for years. James and Steve and I got talking at a party, and we were off to the races, pun intended.

It began with an idea and a drawing...

The concept was fleshed out by Steve and James. Supplies were ordered, measurements and weights debated, race rules pondered, and slowly but surely, thanks to Steve's incredible plywood-bending skills, the bed took shape.

Now, just in case you are scratching your head at the whole idea of a "bed race", let's back up for a moment.

On June 27, 1984, the Newburyport Daily News announced the first running of the beds as part of Yankee Homecoming. The rules were very similar to those of today. The bed must be of a standard size, there could be a maximum of 5 runners, and someone must be in the bed.

In 1984, the bed races started at the corner of State and High Streets, raced down High Street, then down Federal Street, and terminated at Atwood Street. It was twice the current 1/4 mile length. Nobody was sure how it would go, including American Legion commander Alan "Buster" Driscoll. "I didn't think too much would come of it." Driscoll said. It was wildly popular in the end, with over 30 beds registered.  

Bed races were not new in 1984, though the "ladies bed races" held in Newbury since the 1950's were very different. In these races, women were tucked into bed, and when an alarm sounded, they had to don full firemen's outfits, run across a field, and spray targets (and sometimes each other) with fire hoses. This was generally held as part of a benefit for a local fire department, as was the case here in this 4th of July event in Newbury in 1969.

We are not alone in our fondness for combining beds and racing. Rutgers University has been holding bed races since 1966, the same year that the Knaresborough Round Table in North Yorkshire, England, began holding bed races that covered a grueling 2.4 mile course. Since 1990, Kentucky Derby Bed Races have been held in an indoor track.

With the decline in American Legion membership in the area, the Newburyport Bed Race ended in 1995, but was revived in 2002 by the Lions Club. It has been a steady crowd favorite at Yankee Homecoming celebrations ever since.

Meanwhile, in the carriage barn of the Cushing House, Steve and James were working tirelessly on the Museum of Old Newbury racing bed. As the process neared completion, other volunteers jumped in. Shelley painted and added the clock faces with Sharon's help. I donated an old porch chair which was cut down, stabilized, and painted. My husband, James, recorded chiming clocks and lent his portable speaker and his tricorn hats. We had fans made out of the memorable face of our beloved Landlocked Lady, a figurehead who never went to sea.

And then there was the small matter of the runners. James secured the services of the Charles River Rats Run Club to speed us to victory. And then, one day before the big race, the bed was declared ready, and a hearty crew of interns, volunteers, and staff took her for a test run. Our archivist brought in a hat with a model ship screwed atop. My entire outfit changed to accommodate that stellar chapeau.

Race day dawned hot and humid. The interns and staff donned tricorn hats and grabbed fans to hand out. The runners assembled, and Steve and James dressed to the nines, though Sharon outdid us all. I hopped aboard and we walked down to our place at the head of Federal Street.

After a fun wait while we fraternized and sampled the beverages brought by the runners of several nearby beds, it was our turn.

We were fifth in line to race, and though the lads put in a tremendous effort, in the end, the wheels on the bed went wonky and we had to slow considerably. Still, the sirens blared and the crowds cheered and Old South rang her bells, and we hurtled down the street and it all went by in a flash.

After the race, the runners wheeled the bed back to the museum, trailed by the laughing interns and Shelley in their tricorn hats. James and Steve wandered off to their respective parties, and I walked slowly back up Federal Street in search of my family.

I will never forget all of us at the starting line singing La Marseillaise in honor of Annabelle's looming departure for graduate school in France, or how Shelley gave me her fan, Sharon her hat, my daughter Meg her dress. I will think of Steve in the carriage barn late at night and early in the morning, and James with his buckle sneakers, always thinking of new things to try.

I will remember each of you who came over for a hug and a high-five, the little boy who asked to touch my wings, the ringing of the steeple bells, laughing with Kristin as we waited for Senator Tarr, Bob behind the camera with his megawatt smile.

After the race, a photographer asked me to step into the street for a picture, and the smile on my face says it all. I am so proud of all of us. So much effort and thought went into this project, all in service of this wonderful museum.

Joy and friendship and love and wearing wings and a ship on my head are not in my job description, friends. Thank goodness for Other Duties as Required.

The Mysterious Disappearance of John B. Gough: A Temperance Blog, Part IV (Originally published July 19, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

John Bartholomew Gough, from his 1880 memoir, Sunlight and Shadow or Gleanings from My Life Work, Comprising Personal Experiences and Opinions.

If you missed it, read John B. Gough Part I here and Part II here and Part III here.

Well, dear reader, over the past months, I have spent a great deal of time with the fascinating personage of Mr. John Bartholomew Gough. I have wandered down the dark alleys of Newburyport, Boston, and beyond with him, read his speeches and his memoirs, galloped up and down his family tree, perused his newspaper ads and his court records. It seems impossible that I had never heard of the man until Scott Nason dropped him into my lap a few months ago.

But, I wager none of you had heard of John B. Gough.

In his time, however, he was as famous as Charles Dickens. He was known as the Prince of the Lyceum. He amassed an international following and a fortune. When he died in 1886, the New York Times wrote that he "was probably better known in this country and in Great Britain than any other public speaker." 

Just after his death, Gough was impersonated by the famous actress Helen Potter - from the waist up, at least. Potter avoided censure by hiding her skirted lower body behind a table until the end of the show. Her other famous subjects? Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony. I'll bet you've heard of them. But John B. Gough? Fame is fickle, friends.

But for now, let us pause our musings on the vicissitudes of fame, and return to a younger John B. Gough, a rising star on the temperance stage, who has just exited Newburyport. It is May, 1845, and Gough has just managed to extort fifty bucks from young Jacob I. Danforth, who served him a drink (or two, or three) at his family's Washington Street restaurant after Gough delivered a stirring public lecture on the evils of drink, and then blabbed about it.

THAT John B. Gough looked like this...

Above - This etching, from the 1845 Autobiography, was made just before he bellied up to the Danforth bar (or didn't, depending on who you believe) in Newburyport.
Below - newspaper advertisement for Gough's first Autobiography, May 12, 1845.

Despite the kerfuffle in Newburyport, 1845 was a banner year for John B. Gough . He had just published the first of several autobiographies, this one with the catchy title An Autobiography by John B. Gough, and book sales were brisk, with ads placed in newspapers from Vermont to Georgia. After his return to Newburyport in May, Gough continued his frenetic pace on the temperance lecture circuit, with summer engagements from the top of Vermont to southern Connecticut. By mid-June, he had made 120 speeches, nearly one a night, quite a feat at a time when travel by rail was still in its infancy. A Gough Temperance Society sprang up in Baltimore, Maryland. He headlined the Rhode Island Temperance Convention. Everything was coming up roses.

Newspapers across the country carried the votes of temperance associations to secure funds for a Gough appearance. On June 10, 1845, the Milledgeville, Georgia Southern Recorder was already planning a Georgia trip for Gough in the fall of 1846.

And then, on September 6, John B. Gough vanished.  

Above - John Bartholomew Gough, engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph, from The Drawing-Room of Eminent Personages, Volume 2
Below - This notice from the New York Express was republished in the Newburyport Herald and offers a wonderful description of John B. Gough in 1845. He has "long, straight black hair, dark complexion, sharp features...," and was heavily accessorized in gold and carrying a small fortune in cash and gold. 

Gough had been missing for a week when, on September 11, placards went up around Manhattan offering a reward for his return. The following day, all the New York newspapers carried the announcement. On September 13, with a certain amount of glee, the Newburyport Herald, which had ultimately come out in favor of Danforth in the May controversy, carried the news.

The Herald was not alone. Gough's disappearance was reported across the country, and almost immediately, opposing rumors began to circulate. Supporters of Gough suspected foul play driven by the "rum merchants" whose business was threatened by temperance. Critics began to hint that Gough had fallen off the wagon before, though few would say so outright for fear of a slander charge.

Above - The steamer New York brought John B. Gough from New Haven to Manhattan, arriving on September 6. Courtesy of the Mariners Museum.
Below - The Five Points neighborhood in New York where Gough was found was notorious for vice and squalor in the 1840's. Courtesy of the New York Library.

And this, dear reader, is where things get interesting. It seems that Gough had taken the steamer from New Haven, arriving in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday, September 6. It was supposed to be a quick trip back to the city of his youth. After a weekend of meetings in the city, Gough was scheduled to hop a train to Albany to meet his wife (he had remarried in 1843) and head to Montreal for a series of lectures.

Gough checked into room 63 of the Croton Temperance Hotel at 142 Broadway, dropped his bags, changed his clothes, had some tea, and went back out. He stopped in at the bookstore of Saxton & Miles, and then...nothing.

By the time news of Gough's disappearance reached Newburyport, he had been found, on September 12, by two reporters from the Police Gazette, in "a back building up an alley", in "the garret of a house of ill fame" on Walker Street. He was brought to the house of a friend in Brooklyn. This friend and temperance supporter, George Hurlbut, despite finding Gough in a "state of delirium", managed to cobble together a narrative, complete with quotes, to explain where Gough had been. It strains credulity now, and certainly did then as well, though Gough stuck to the broad outlines of the story for the rest of his life.

"On Friday evening, he left the Croton Hotel to take a walk, preparatory to retiring for the night, went into Saxton and Miles bookstore, and afterwards stopped to look at the prints in Coleman‘s shop window, where a young man accosted him as an old acquaintance. Mr. Gough did not at first recognize him, but afterwards remembered that he worked with him several years ago in the Methodist book concern. “This is a fine new business you are engaged in”, said the man. “It is new to me," replied Gough, "but much happier and more congenial to my feelings than my old acquaintances, and I hope that you too are on the side of temperance”. "No", said the young man, "I can’t do that. I take a glass once in a while when I want it."

Does this sound like the incoherent ramblings of a man who was at death's door after a week-long bender to you? Me either. It seems more likely that his team was in full damage control and significantly embellished (or invented) the reason for his disappearance.

To make a very long, very convoluted story shorter, the young man in question, whose name Gough later remembered as Jonathan Williams (he also said Williamson), finally prevailed upon Gough to have a soda water with him in a little place on Chatham Street. Gough had his water with raspberry syrup. Shortly after, Gough "very soon became giddy", bellied up to a Bowery bar, ordered a brandy, and that was pretty much all he remembered until a week later when Mr. Camp and Wilkes of the Police Gazette poked him with their canes.

Here's Wilkes. "There we found him - John B. Gough, the mere shadow of a man, pacing the floor with tottering and uncertain steps. He was pale as ashes; (his eyes glared with a preternatural luster), his limbs trembled, and his fitful and wandering stare evinced his mind was as much shattered as his body. The pompous horror had dissolved from its huge proportions, and shrunk into a very vulgar and revolting commonplace. The man was drunk. That was all that was the matter with him — the man was drunk (and apparently did not carry his liquor well)." Ouch.

The location of the Croton Hotel is marked in red on this 1845 map, with the house where Gough was found is in blue.

What is certainly true is that when Gough was found, he was full to the brim with liquor. He was also "relived of a considerable quantity of laudanum (opium tincture)". There was only one possible explanation, he said. The raspberry soda was drugged by haters of temperance.

The temperance community, by and large, rallied behind Gough's version of events. Others were not so kind. Gough's story had several glaring holes. First, no one could identify a Jonathan Williams (or Williamson) who worked with Gough. Second, there were no soda shops in Chatham Street. Third, he had been seen walking quite willingly along the pier in the company of a woman. Stranger still, he had not been robbed. Gough was found still in possession of his gold watch, his gold ring, and a quantity of cash, though at some point he had switched shirts with someone and lost his gold buttons.

Most damning of all, this was not the first time Gough had hauled down to New York for a bit on the side, according to Wilkes.

"One day, about six or seven weeks previous to the 6th of September, the period of Gough's last arrival in New York, he accosted a certain tall, good-looking woman dressed in black and with dark hair and eyes while in the Broadway stage. This was between the hours of nine and ten o'clock in the evening. In the conversation which ensued, he said he had been out riding on horseback, that he was very much fatigued, and that he wanted to accompany her home. To this she replied that she could not take him to her home, but would take him somewhere else. The arrangements being thus concluded, she conveyed him to the same house in Walker street which he afterward rendered so memorable."

Gough effectively went into hiding through the rest of September, as newspapers across the country continued to publish scintillating details of his misadventure. Gough's camp released news items that he was terribly ill, that he was unable to speak, that he would make a full confession when he was well. So great was the public demand for an update that several fake confessions made the rounds.

On Saturday, October 4, the Newburyport Daily Herald published Gough's full confession on the front page. It seemed that, as one newspaper put it, "the lost star of temperance went down ingloriously between Venus and Alcohol." the Police Gazette was less polite.

"Notwithstanding his solemn vows and pledges before the altar of his God, and his sacred pledges before man, (he) returns back to his vomit, and seeks solace for his forced abstemiousness in the secret orgies and caresses of drunken prostitutes."

In the end, however, John Bartholomew Gough must have known that Americans love a comeback. Now more famous than ever, forgiven by his church, his movement, and his wife, Gough rolled the drugged soda water/brothel story into his stirring temperance tale and took it back on the stage. Audiences laughed, they cried. Maybe they thought he was a loveable rogue. Whatever the attraction, over the next four decades, John B. Gough performed steadily on the temperance stage in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He would often say that he wished to die in the harness, and it was on the lecture stage in Frankfort, Pennsylvania that he met his end, age 68, felled by a stroke. He had delivered over 9600 lectures to some 9 million people.

Though I could say much more on the subject of John Bartholomew Gough, I will leave the last word to the man himself, with Helen Potter's help. Potter heard Gough speak many times and made careful notes of his delivery. This is from a speech given in the late 1870's and annotated by Potter. He's pretty dang funny. I won't toast you, Gough, but I will miss our time together.

John B. Gough Returns to Port: A Temperance Blog Part III (Originally published July 5, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

John Bartholomew Gough (1817-1886), in (even) later years.

If you missed it, read John B. Gough Part I here and Part II here.

First of all, a correction. The W.T.A.S was not, as I had assumed in the last newsletter, the WOMEN's Temperance Society (though there was one of these also in Newburyport), but the WASHINTONIAN Total Abstinence Society. More on that in a moment.         

Next, a confession. I was in New York this weekend, and after imbibing the best Manhattan in Manhattan followed by a VERY old fashioned Old Fashioned, I felt a certain kinship with John B. Gough. New York City had been his home, after all, before Newburyport, before the wife and child and the temperance pledge and the lecture circuit. I can imagine the pull of the dark alleys of lower Manhattan. I was not on the wagon, clearly, but if I had been, a seat in a worn-down tavern might have tempted me away.

But before John B. Gough could belly up to a Bowery bar, he went for a visit back up to Newburyport.

On May 4, Gough was the opening act for Daniel Kimball in Newburyport. This advertisement ran on May 2.

When last we left our dubious hero, actor, bookbinder, and erstwhile pyrotechnician John B. Gough had taken the temperance pledge, promising to eschew drink, and while relating his tale of woe and degradation, had found the audience moved to tears. A career on stage had long been Gough's goal, and, despite a tipsy trip back to Newburyport and a bender in Boston in March, 1843, Gough seems to been on the straight and narrow, his star on the rise in the popular (and lucrative) temperance speaker circuit.

On May 2, 1845, the Washingtonian Total Abstinence Society (W.T.A.S.) announced a lecture in Newburyport’s Market Hall (where the Firehouse Center for the Arts is today) featuring Daniel Kimball, editor of the Temperance Standard, a Boston newspaper. The Washingtonians were the hottest new development in the temperance world, and their emphasis on the individual "drunkard", in the parlance of the time, suited the stage perfectly. Founded in 1840 in Baltimore, the Washingtonian movement promoted total abstinence, with members relying on sharing their experiences in a mutually supportive environment. Most other temperance organizations of the time focused on larger social and political change, seeing the individual as helpless victim of a societal problem. The Washingtonians, at least in the early years, followed roughly the same format as today's Alcoholics Anonymous, summoning the power of a supportive community to help members abstain completely from alcohol. Because of the element of the individual, supported by sociability, the W.T.A.S. was instrumental in launching the careers of various temperance speakers who, like Gough, relied on the strength of their personal testimony, rather than professional credentials. Along with the doctors, scientists, and politicians that tended to headline the meetings of other temperance societies, the Washingtonians loved a good personal narrative.

And so John B. Gough was invited to open the May 4 meeting of the W.T.A.S. with his unique combination of pathos, humor, and song. It seems to have gone over well, and Gough decided to spend a day seeing some old friends in town. He would return to Boston by train on May 6.

The first sign that something had gone awry appeared on May 10 in the Newburyport Daily Herald. Under the shipping news appeared a public notice from John B. Gough, and below that, another from Jacob Isaac Danforth.

These two notices appeared on May 10 in the Newburyport Herald.

John B. Gough, who had spent his dissipated youth in Newburyport, does not seem to have found the warm welcome he had expected during his brief return. He found himself first accused of failing to pay his debts, and so, to salvage his reputation, Gough announced that he would return to Newburyport to settle up with anyone who could prove a claim against him.

And then, twenty-four-year-old Jacob Isaac Danforth, who was helping his father Rufus at his Washington Street restaurant next to the train station, served John B. Gough a drink (or two, or three), and told a friend, who told a friend.

This 1851 map shows the location of Rufus Danforth's restaurant (R. Danforth, map center, next to the tracks), where his son Jacob was working on May 6.

John B. Gough, whose livelihood depended on not touching the stuff, caught wind of the rumors flying around Newburyport that he had been drinking. These stories were credible, to be fair. He had come to Newburyport two years before to lecture on temperance, having just come off a brandy and oyster bender in Boston, and seems to have rambled incoherently.

Gough marshalled support from the legal team of Dexter Dana of Newburyport and John Ross of Boston, and the trio showed up at the Danforth establishment with a Gough look-alike, asked Danforth if this was the man he had served, and when he hemmed and hawed and then said yes, they revealed their ruse and threatened to sue him for libel unless he immediately printed an apology and swore that he had not seen Gough at his bar.

Danforth, who clearly felt threatened and lacked the resources to fight such a suit, signed the apology, and the resulting retraction was printed in the newspaper on May 9, 1845 and then, in more detail, on the 10.

And then Gough got greedy.

Gough and his team told Danforth that despite his retraction, he would be paying $50 for Gough's legal bills, which would increase by the day if he did not pay up. Danforth, who had already admitted his alleged misidentification, paid the $50. Then, he sat down and wrote his own letter, two pages in all, to the paper.

Jacob Isaac Danforth was listed as a confectioner on Middle Street in the 1849 Newburyport City Directory, while his father is listed as a "restorator (restauranteur)" on Washington and Winter Streets.

"I now ask again, did Mr. Dexter Dana tell me the true purpose for which he wanted my signature, or did he want to make it appear, to operate against me as a liable against Mr. Gough in order to extort for me the sum of $50?... I now leave the matter with a candid public to draw their own conclusions of the actors who performed each his part in this affair."

Poor Jacob Danforth, confectioner, known for his pillowy-soft wedding cakes and his tasty taffy, was out $50 for good. Letters to the paper followed on both sides of the argument, but for the most part, the matter drew to a close.

And then, on September 13, with a certain amount of glee, the Newburyport newspaper carried an article from the New York Express. John B. Gough had vanished.

This notice from the New York Express was republished in the Newburyport Herald and offers a wonderful description of John B. Gough in 1845. He has "long, straight black hair, dark complexion, sharp features...," and was heavily accessorized in gold and carrying a small fortune in cash and gold.

Gough arrived in New York City on September 5, checked into his hotel, dropped his bags, and, nattily attired and flush with cash, went out on the town. It was nearly a week before his wife (he had remarried late in 1843) reported him missing. The disappearance of Gough was national news, another bit of publicity that ultimately made him a household name.

Well, gentle reader, this is embarrassing. We have barely arrived in New York City, and I have come to the end of my allotted space in this fine publication. I fear the many adventures of John Bartholomew Gough will require a Part IV. It's worth it, I promise.

John B Gough and the Joppa Gal: A Temperance Blog Part II (originally published June 21, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

John Bartholomew Gough (1817-1886), in later years.

If you missed it, read John B. Gough Part I here.

This happens to me all the time, dear reader. I am introduced to a fascinating character who once graced the mean streets of Newbury(port), and I become immediately taken with their story. As I write about them, I do more research, and I find more things, and suddenly this blog is thousands of words long and I despair.

And then, voila, a solution. I will write a series! But life, and work, come at me sideways and I am distracted (or making sure you know all about the Garden Tour), or another article is more timely, and so I wander off the path only to discover, months later, that I have left some readers hanging. 

Popular images such as this 1832 lithograph promoted temperance long before John B. Gough found his calling on its stage. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Gosh, I love thinking of you sitting around waiting to hear more about John B. Gough, because it made me return to this story, which returns to me with the ease of a visit with a high school chum. So let us pick back up where we left off.

When last we left our dubious hero, actor, bookbinder, and erstwhile accordion player John B. Gough had followed the Bunker Hill Diorama to Worcester. It was there on May 20, 1842, that he lost his "Joppa gal", 21-year-old Mary Cheney, and his infant daughter, Mary Jane. According to his enthusiastic biographer, the death of his family led to a new low for John B. Gough. He attended a church revival meeting and clumsily (and, I admit, a little hilariously) tried to steal the collection with a spittoon. 

“Amid a fusillade of glorys, hallelujahs, and amens, the tipsy actor seized a huge, square, wooden spittoon, filled with sawdust, quids of tobacco, and refuse, and passing down the aisle, said: "We will now take a contribution for the purchase of ascension robes." 

He was ejected, arrested, bailed, and turned to singing dirty songs in dirtier pubs for drinking money, and as summer turned to fall and Gough faced a long New England winter homeless, with “no flannels, no woolen socks, and no coats”. Destitute and despondent, he drank everything he had, bought a bottle of laudanum (a mixture of alcohol and opium), and “proceeded to the railroad track, put the bottle to his lips, and was about to make an exit from life through the door of suicide”.

At the last moment, he failed to throw himself under the train as he had planned. A few days later, as he was wobbling down the street to “a rum-hole in Lincoln Square to get a dram”, a man tapped him on the shoulder.

Lincoln Square, Worcester, where Gough met the waiter who would change his life, c. 1852.

The man was Joel Stratton, and he was a waiter at the Temperance Hotel. He noted that Gough was drunk and invited him to a temperance meeting the following night. To make a very long story somewhat shorter, he went to the meeting, told his story to an appreciative audience, and signed the pledge to never drink again.

This sobriety pledge from the 1840's is likely similar to the one signed by Gough in 1842. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

How we understand what followed depends on what you think of John Bartholemew Gough. On the one hand, Gough the actor must have quickly noted the effects of his heart-rending tale on the audience, who proved willing to offer not only sympathy but food, clothes, and cash. On the other hand, Gough the hard drinker walked through the door looking for help. That his story struck a chord and led to wealth and fame beyond his wildest imaginings was a stroke of luck. Was he a desperate addict, a cynical opportunist, or both? Well, I can tell you one thing – John B. Gough knew a good thing when he saw it, and by December, 1842, an announcement in the Worcester Waterfall, a temperance newspaper, announced that he was available to lecture (for a fee), and was also selling subscriptions of the Waterfall on commission. Of course, his entire career now depended on not drinking, or at least keeping his drinking a secret.

The Massachusetts Cataract and Worcester County Waterfall was a short-lived temperance newspaper where Gough first announced his availability as a lecturer.

When the spring lecture season began, Gough set his sights on Newburyport, where he could return in triumph in his flashy new suit. By his own account, he made his way first to Boston, where he met with some chums for oysters and brandy and then went to his hotel to sleep it off. The next morning, he “started in the cars for Newburyport”. What exactly happened there is a mystery, though on March 20, a scandalized representative of the Women’s Temperance Society wrote to the newspaper to apologize for their speaker. “In all my experience and my knowledge of temperance lectures, I never saw one before who had the bold affrontery, the deliberate vulgarity, the cold impedance, to get up before respectable audience like that convenient in Phoenix Hall, and pour out such a heterogeneous mass of unmeaning, unintelligible sentences without the least connection and without point, and which could be understood only by those were in the habit of visiting those miserable abode of vice and infamy when the language used can only be equal by the vices which engender them.” Was this Gough, still in his cups? It seems likely, given his next move. Gough, humiliated, his blossoming career in jeopardy, returned to Worcester and did the only thing he could do – he confessed that he had fallen off the wagon, blaming some medicine given to him by a doctor for a headache. To his surprise, after tearfully pledging that he would “rise up and combat King Alcohol”, he found himself not shunned, but exalted by his audience, whose attendance, and donations, at his events only grew.

"King Alcohol", which Gough swore to "combat", was a common image in temperance literature. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress

On May 2, 1845, the Women’s Temperance Society announced a lecture in Newburyport’s Market Hall (where the Firehouse Center for the Arts is today) featuring Daniel Kimball, editor of the Temperance Standard, a Boston newspaper. The events of two years earlier a distant memory, the redeemed Gough was invited to open the May 4 event with his unique combination of pathos, humor, and song. Though his performance that evening was generally well received, some Newburyporters had a bone to pick with John B. Gough, who had pilfered their wares, run off with their women, and, perhaps most egregiously, failed to pay his debts. And when, on May 6, he passed the time while waiting for his train bellied up to the bar at Jacob Danforth’s establishment, Newburyporters had a thing or two to say about it. 

You see, I did it again, gentle reader! Stay tuned for Part III as John Bartholomew Gough dabbles in extortion, visits a phantom soda fountain, and wakes up in a brothel.

John B Gough and the Joppa Gal: A Temperance Blog (originally published April 26, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

 Scott Nason is infuriatingly fascinating. If you have never had the good luck to meet Scott Nason, he is a walking treasure trove of information about this community, past and present. He has worked on Newbury(port) boats, bought and sold Newbury(port) antiques, and lived many other lives here that he tells me about in dribs and drabs with a wry smile. Ask him about the Joppa nicknames sometime.

I am regularly in the middle of some mundane but necessary task when Scott comes in and I ask him a question and then I find myself hours deep into some crazy story that has entirely, deliciously derailed my day.

Here's how it happened today: Scott came into the museum office to sign some paperwork. I asked him if he had an image of a Temperance Spa that once graced the corner of Middle and State Streets. That corner of the street is out of frame to the left in the image below, but you can just see a sign offering Hot and Cold Temperance Drinks, as the A.W. Thompson Oyster and Eating Room, later the decidedly non-temperance Grog, beckons from just beyond.

"Well", he says, "there was a famous temperance guy, married a Joppa gal, name was Cough or something like that." And we're off.

It is nearly midnight as I write this. I am still in the office, the three David Wood tall clocks within earshot tolling the passing hours. I have been in thrall to John Bartholomew Gough for something like five hours now.

It started with the Joppa gal. A quick rummage through the vital records reveals Mary B. Cheney marrying John B. Clough in 1838. She was 19 and he was 21. A detour into her ancestry links her to my family tree - her grandmother was a Sawyer - and so I plug her into the tree and she zips right up - my 5th cousin. Her father, Samuel Sawyer, drowned in a December fishing accident when she was 15, and the news was reported in New York City.

Meanwhile, in New York City, John Bartholemew Gough was having a very bad time indeed. Gough was born into a poor but respectable family in England and educated by his mother, a seamstress. When he was twelve, his father died, and he was sent to the United States to find work. After two years upstate, he returned to New York City and went to work as a book binder. His mother and sister joined him when he was sixteen. It was a hard life - they were very poor, but Gough later recalled his short time with his mother in New York with great fondness.

Jane (Gilbert) Gough, John's mother, died of a stroke in June 1834. John recalled holding her hand all night as she lay on their kitchen floor before the undertaker came for her body. She was buried in a pauper's grave. John B Gough, bereft, began to drink and, emboldened by the drink, he began to contemplate a career as an actor. It was his acting, not his book-binding that propelled him out of the big city, and landed him, through many twists and turns, in Newburyport, in the arms of a Joppa gal.

The Lion Theatre was built in 1836, and was later re-opened as the Bijou. Private collection.

It was to the newly built Lion Theater that Gough went. His first appearance in Boston was, ironically, a satirical play lampooning the "prominent temperance men" of Boston. And then, as is the way, the play closed, and Gough was once again thrown out of work.

After several failed attempts at regular employment, when all seemed hopeless, in a "destitute situation", Gough heard that a man in Newburyport was looking to hire a book-binder. Gough, "travelling partly by stage and partly by (railroad) cars" entered Newburyport late in the evening of January 30, 1838 and began work the next morning.

1838 was an interesting time to be a poor man in search of hard liquor. Just three days before Gough's arrival, Massachusetts had passed a law banning the sale of spirits in quantities of less than 15 gallons. This led, not to a reduction of the drinking of aforementioned liquor, but to a precipitous rise in cooperative drinking. Men (and women) would pool their money, buy 15 gallons of rum or gin, and go on a bender. Whole shops and whole ships were emptied out for days at a time. Individual towns also had the right to issue licenses for liquor for medicinal purposes, which they handed out liberally in port towns like Newburyport.

It did not take long for Gough to find himself part of a Newburyport drinking club. He joined a fire-engine company, and before long, was once again on the "high road to dissipation" and irregular employment. He joined a fishing crew, drank quantities of rum whenever he went on shore or encountered another vessel, and having met, wooed, and possibly impregnated the lovely Mary Cheney of Joppa (there are some indications that a child was born and died in 1839), he married her on November 1, 1838.

And then in March, 1839, with a wife to support, he thought he would give performing another go, this time with an accordion in Amesbury. Gough, billing himself as "the celebrated singer from New York and Boston Theatres", which was only partially untrue, was still drinking in quantity, and his performance was not the breakout event he had hoped for.

And so, Gough went back out to sea, this time a short- six-week stint to the Bay of Fundy with his brother-in-law, John Clark Cheney, and was then unemployed once again. It was a harsh existence, despite the support of his wife and her family. Gough tried to go into business for himself, but was swindled by a "Newburyport rum-seller" who rented him stolen tools. It was all repossessed, and Gough, sending his wife to stay with his sister in Rhode Island, went on such a bender he began to hallucinate and a doctor was called.

Mary returned, Gough sobered up for a short while and then the theater came to town once again.

The Bunker Hill Diorama came to Newburyport in 1841 amid the national push to complete the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument. Gough was hired to do some "comic singing" and as a general assistant to the production, turning the cranks that marched the model soldiers up Bunker Hill.

When the Diorama left Newburyport, Gough went with it, sending his wife back to stay with his sister. The show spent three months in Lowell, where "rum claimed nearly all my attention", and then moved on to Worcester. Gough was responsible for basic pyrotechnics as part of the show, which he hated, "half-suffocated with smoke, blackened with the (gun)powder, sometimes fingers burned, or hair and eyebrows singed".

Things went from bad to worse in Worcester. Gough's hands were too shaky to turn the crank. He was clumsy and careless, and audiences hissed and threw things at him. Determined once again to sober up, Gough sent for his wife, installed her in a tenement, and secured a steady job, having his employer pay his board and tobacco so he would not have money for alcohol.

Mary was pregnant and increasingly unwell through the cold winter and early spring of 1842. Despite having no access to cash, Gough began to drink again, asking for medicine at the pharmacy, selling their furniture and other possessions.

When Mary Cheney Gough went into labor on May 11, the women attending her told Gough to get two pints of rum to ease her pains and, one may assume, for their use as well. He drank most of it, and so, nine days later on May 20, when Mary Cheney Gough of Newburyport, and their infant daughter, Mary Jane, both died, John B. Gough was, by some accounts, passed out on the floor.

The Worcester death record reads, Mrs. Mary B. Gough, wife of John B Gough, died May 20, 1842, aged 22 years - Puerperal fever. Mary Jane Gough, child of above, died same day, aged 9 days.

It was the death of John B Gough's Joppa gal that led to a bender so severe that Gough tried to drink laudanum and throw himself under a train. And it was this bender that led him to take a kindly Quaker up on his offer to take the temperance pledge, and it was this pledge that led him to a life as the best-known temperance speaker of his time.

John B Gough would make a fortune on the stage after all, but not until after he returned to Newburyport for just one more scandalous pub crawl. More on that in the next newsletter.

And thank you, Scott, for introducing us. My evening spent imagining the dark streets of Newburyport in the 1830's was delightful.

Silverware, Sex, and Stirpicults: John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida Community Silver

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Part Three This is a continuation of a previous article. For the last installment, click here.

Don't you worry, my friends. This is the last naughty spoon ad to which I will subject you. But still, it does get the point across, does it not? Over fifty years later, it still gets a "whoa!" from my very worldly officemate.

The overt sexiness of Oneida in the 1960's is a not-so-subtle nod to the Oneida Community of a century earlier, a bastion of "complex marriage" where all community members were considered equally married to each other, their sexual "interviews" charging the spiritual batteries of the community in which they lived, worked, and played.

When we left our dubious hero John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, whose family hailed from Newbury, and whose exploits were breathlessly reported in the sizzling pages of the Newburyport Herald, he had fled from the law for the second time in his life. First, in 1848, he had hightailed it from Putney, Vermont, to establish the community in Oneida, New York which, by almost any measure, had been a roaring success. Then, thirty years later, amid internal upheaval and national debate over the Mormon practice of polygamous marriage, and believing he was about to be charged with statutory rape, Noyes left New York for Niagara Falls, Canada, never to return.

Two months after his exit, Noyes sent word to his followers that it was time to end the practice of complex marriage, the foundational principal of the Oneida community. At 10 a.m. on August 28, 1879, the doors closed on the last "interview." It should have been the end of it all, and in a way, it was. But it was also the beginning. 

John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886), leader of the Oneida Community, shortly before his flight to Canada.

The Community was in turmoil. Noyes' attempts to install his son Theodore as his successor had backfired after the younger Noyes turned out to be less devout and more monogamous than his father had realized. The industrial endeavors at the heart of the Community were increasingly complex and the Community was nearing bankruptcy. And so, in 1881, the group abandoned communal ownership, the other foundational principal of the group, and formed a joint-stock company. Members of the Community were given stock in this new company, Oneida Community Limited. Older members received support payments, and Noyes himself was provided with a house in Canada, a horse and carriage, and a stipend for life. John Humphrey Noyes lived for seven more years, dying on April 13, 1886. His body was returned to his beloved Oneida and buried there with other members of the Community.

And then what? I will admit that my heart goes out to the children of Oneida, those who had been raised to believe in the possibility of sinless perfection and a benevolent, sustaining community that would provide for them. And this is where my own experience of the end of communal life intrudes on this tale.

I was raised on a commune too, except we had no successful industry, no free love, and no mansion houses. My parents were followers of a charismatic preacher named Sam Fife, and, guess what? He was all about sinless perfection. Unlike John Humphrey Noyes, however, Sam Fife preached that the chosen people had to survive the end-times and the best way to do that was to decamp to the wilderness of northern Canada. So, I suppose we have that in common with Noyes as well. We all ended up in Canada, though I think he may have had the better deal.

Let's just say that I understand deeply and personally how difficult it is to transition to society at large when you have been raised apart. For the Oneidans, there was the sometimes desperate scramble for a spouse as the Community disintegrated. And there was the question of whose children were whose, since in some cases only the mother was known conclusively. And if men had fathered multiple children, there was the question of which mother to marry and which adult children could marry each other. In the game of marital chairs of the early 1880's, some lost out and experienced isolation and profound loneliness for the first time.

The managers of Oneida Community Limited did their best to parcel out the assets of the Community, building houses on formerly shared land and trying to provide some measure of financial and social stability, but the business, controlled by older members of the former community, was floundering.

John Humphrey Noyes was at it again, this time from beyond the grave. So attached were his former followers to the advice of their charismatic leader that the board members of Oneida would have seances to seek financial advice from Noyes who, perhaps unsurprisingly, generally came back from the dead to agree with whoever was asking.

Finally, in 1893, one of the "stirpicults," children born as part of the Oneida Community's genetic engineering project that began in 1869, put an end to the seances and wrested control, finally, from the cold dead hands of his father. Twenty-five year old Pierrepont Noyes replaced the elderly board, hired his half-brothers and sisters to help run the company, and at twenty-nine, became General Manager of the Oneida Corporation.

It was Pierrepont who decided that the company should sell off the animal traps business and focus on silverware. A new factory was built in 1913, and the company was reorganized to honor many of the principals that were the best of the Oneida Community. Decisions were made by consensus, intellectual pursuits, recreation, and leisure time were valued, and profits, which soared, were often put to community purposes. Still, the sexual exploits and fringe beliefs of their parents and grandparents was increasingly embarrassing, and a liability to the thriving international corporation, and in 1947, much to this historian's dismay, the documents and records of the Oneida Community and John Humphrey Noyes were taken to the dump and burned by their descendants.

By 1956, re-branding was in full swing, with a full-page advertisement in the Ladies Home Journal touting the company's "small beginnings in agriculture" and their principals of "hard work, meticulous craftsmanship, and never underestimating the value of a woman." And the clean-cut 1950's young executive looking back from the page? John Humphrey Noyes' grandson, P.T. Noyes, who controlled the company until 1981. No mention of communism, unsurprisingly.

Still, if the descendants of John Humphrey Noyes knew anything, it was the power of sex and industry, the twin pillars of the original Oneida Community, and by the late 1960's, a time when, once again, America was examining its feelings about monogamy, work, and spirituality, Oneida silverware was sold in the mouths of beautiful young women. John Humphrey Noyes must have been smiling.

Silverware, Sex, and Stirpicults: John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida Community Silver

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Part Two This is a continuation of a previous article. For the last installment, click here.

First, an apology. It has been a month since the last installment of the wild and wonderful tale of John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, whose family hailed from Newbury, and whose exploits were breathlessly reported in the sizzling pages of the Newburyport Herald. When last we left our dubious hero, it was 1848, and the good people of Putney, Vermont had just called for his arrest, based on a scandalous letter inviting a woman into a "complex marriage". He was facing charges of “adulterous fornication”, and had failed to convince his neighbors of his Perfectionist inability to sin. It was high time for Noyes and his band of self-identified Bible Communists to get out of New England.

Destination: Oneida, New York, naturally, in an area of the country so swept with spiritual fervor, emotional revivals, and the fire of religious awakening, it had become known as the Burned-over District. It was here that Noyes would build his Perfectionist community, and where I would spend my 9th wedding anniversary. 

My one and only spouse, James, snaps a pic at the Oneida Mansion House, October 12, 2023.

Nothing says romance like a night in a free-love commune, right? Upon discovering that John Humphrey Noyes is my third cousin (5x removed), and that it was possible to stay in the mansion, I announced to my long-suffering husband that he would be joining me for ten hours in the car and an overnight in the place where spooning had a whole other meaning. "You mean Oneida like the silverware?" he said. I rolled my eyes. "I'll catch you up on the way," I said. And off we went.

The Oneida Mansion House in its current incarnation is part modern hotel, part museum, and part apartment complex. After five hours of highway, past a looming fluorescent casino and miles of cornfields, there she was, atop a rise, surrounded by neat little houses that seemed nearly all from the first half of the 20th century. We were the only hotel guests, though several of the apartments in the rear of the building were occupied. Our room was beautiful, clearly very recently renovated. We were given the keys to the building and left to wander at our leisure. When the staff left for the night and we were alone, the long halls and disorienting stairways took on a bit of "The Shining" vibe.

The Oneida Mansion House sleeping rooms, unlike public spaces, were plain and utilitarian.

Down the hall from our room was a very different kind of space. The "sleeping rooms" of the Oneida Community reinforced their core beliefs. They were sparse and plain, unlike the beautifully decorated, well-appointed common rooms nearby, which included a theater, libraries, and sitting rooms. Community members were encouraged to spend as much time as possible with each other. There was a small space for personal items, as most everything was to be held in common. And, of course, the bed was very small. Nobody was supposed to get too comfortable. "Sticky" or individual attachments were to be avoided.

The sexual visits or "interviews" held in these rooms were private, but prolonged coupling was discouraged. After all, everyone in the community was married to everyone else. At the core of Noyes' teaching was the idea that non-procreative (though heterosexual) contact produced a kind of electricity, charging the spiritual battery of the community and bringing its members closer to God. The more "interviews," the better.

One of several communal sitting rooms in the Oneida Community Mansion.

John Humphrey Noyes fled to Oneida in 1848, after his unorthodox sexual doctrine led to his arrest in Vermont. Noyes and his followers, now called the "Community" were given land by a Perfectionist sympathizer. Determined to live without "egoism and exclusiveness", Noyes oversaw the construction of a common house for all 84 members of the Community. Within the next five years, he also established branches in Brooklyn and Wallingford, Connecticut.

By the 1860's, the community had outgrown the original mansion house, and another, much larger complex was built, including a separate house for the rearing of children, who could be occasionally visited by their parents. Undue attachment was punished with prolonged separation, however.

Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886). Private collection.

Freed from the demands of motherhood and the management of a household, women were free to work at whatever best suited them. They cut their hair short, wore pants, and served as journalists, accountants, or worked in the fields and factories as they wished. Thus fortified with a full and vigorous workforce, the Community embraced capitalist endeavors, first attempting to grow and preserve fruit for sale, and then, when a Community member turned out to be an excellent trap-maker, throwing their energy into trap production. Later, the Community added silk thread twisting to their endeavors, and after 1877, they began to make the spoons that would found their silverware empire. Community members believed deeply in self-improvement, however, and work was limited to six hours a day, with the remainder of the time for socializing, music, and education.

The Oneida Trap Company laid the groundwork for a utopian community grounded in manufacturing.

John H. Noyes (standing, second row) and his community, shortly after the move to Oneida.

As the Oneida Community became more prosperous, an ageing Noyes began to look to the future. Inspired by current evolutionary theories, he began his own selective reproduction program in 1869. He called this "stirpiculture", and instituted a process whereby morally and physically suitable couples in the community could apply to have a child. Noyes, of course, thought of himself as the most evolved member of the community, and in the end, 10 of the 62 children, called "stirpicults", born between 1869 and 1879 were fathered by him.

This satirical illustration of a young couple applying to be parents was published in 1870.

The Oneida Community's success in its communal phase was dependent on the magnetism and energy of John Humphrey Noyes, and on the devotion of his followers. The stirpiculture program, from which some were excluded, caused rifts in the Community, and there was no clear successor to Noyes, who was growing increasingly deaf and inflexible. Then in June 1879, amid national debate over the Mormon practice of polygamous marriage, Noyes, believing he was about to be charged with statutory rape, left New York for Canada, never to return.

Stay tuned for Part 3, as the Stirpicults rebrand themselves as humble farmers and build an empire from the ashes of the Oneida Community.

Silverware, Sex, and Stirpicults: John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida Community Silver

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Part One

The Noyes family was in ascendancy this summer at the Museum of Old Newbury. This happens periodically. For a month, every visitor to the museum was a Plummer, it seemed. Then images and artifacts from the Morrill family came out of the woodwork - sometimes literally – every day for a while. This summer, visitor after visitor proudly proclaimed their lineage from Nicholas, reported to be first to come ashore on the hallowed shores of Newbury in 1635, and/or his brother James, beloved assistant minister to their cousin Thomas Parker. They recount, their bright eyes shining, how their families had made their way from New England to California, Iowa, New York, or in my case, well, all the way from Byfield to West Newbury. People as different in temperament, age, appearance, and political leaning as you can imagine embraced and hailed their long-lost cousins, examining noses and hairlines for a family resemblance. It gets weird. I love it. 

The James Noyes House, parts of which are believed to date to as early as 1646, is privately owned but visited by many Noyes descendants to Newbury. Image is from our collection

At the beginning of October, I went out to my old stomping grounds of Amherst to visit a former colleague from Historic New England at the Emily Dickinson House. My good friend Doris Noyes was with me, and as we wandered over to visit Emily’s grave, we both scanned the gravestones for familiar names. There were a few – Boardmans and Browns and Perkins, but no Noyeses. Doris mentioned that her husband (she is a Noyes by marriage) had an aunt named Dickinson, and we were off to the races.

The Dickinson family plot in Amherst, Massachusetts. Author photo.

Turns out Newburyport’s own Edmund Greenleaf Noyes married Sarah Stetson Dickinson, who shares an ancestor with Emily. Oh, and Edmund Noyes is the first cousin (once removed) of former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. Noyeses, as I predicted, turn up everywhere. Doris went on to tell the story of how her children had given them a weekend getaway to another Noyes family landmark, the Oneida Community Mansion in New York.

“Oneida Community like the silverware?” I said.

“Oneida Community like the free love commune,” she whispered. “And silverware.”

Advertisements for Oneida Community Silver often included attractive women, including this advertisement from 1923.

I staggered back. Anyone with a drawer full of older silverware has some Oneida Community Silver. Oneida and Towle were neck and neck in the mid-20th century, vying for supremacy in the silver-plate market. And what did this have to do with the Noyes family? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886). Private collection.

John Humphrey Noyes’ family had lived in Newbury since Nicholas, his 3rd great-grandfather, jumped off the boat in 1635. His father, a one-term Congressman, left the area and moved to Vermont a decade before John was born.

For three days, July 6-8, 1848, John Humphrey Noyes was front page news in the Newburyport Herald. The titillating coverage began, “(T)here was published in the Battle Axe, a Perfectionist paper, a letter dated January 1837 written by Mr. Noyes, of which the following is an extract. “When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage The marriage supper…is a feast at which every dish is free to every man. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarrelling, have no place there, for the same reasons as that which forbid the guests at a Thanksgiving dinner to claim each separate dish and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law than eating and drinking should be and there is as little occasion for shame in one as in the other… I call a certain woman my wife - she is yours; she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints. She is dear in the hands of the stranger, and according to my promise to her I rejoice.”

John Humphrey Noyes corresponded with Newburyport's own William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830's, hoping to explain his doctrine of Perfectionism through Garrison's Liberator newspaper.

Noyes was front-page news some decade after the publication of this original letter because of the release of a personal letter, written by John Humphrey Noyes himself, asking a woman to enter into a “novel and curious matrimonial relation”, an arrangement that would exist solely on a spiritual plane and would allow for unfettered sexual relationships between Noyes, the woman, and pretty much everyone else who was among the chosen people in their Godly circle. Of course, he was already legally married and had children with his wife and at least one other woman. Noyes and his merry band of Perfectionists were enjoying “complex marriage” up in Putney, Vermont.

Perfectionism, the belief that mankind, made in the image of a perfect God, could achieve perfection if they increased their spiritual vibration to a heavenly level, was one of many new religious movements sparked by the emotional revivals of the so-called Second Great Awakening in the first half of the 19th century. It was a turbulent, active, volatile time that also sparked movements like Adventism and Mormonism, as well as increasing interest in Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and the occult. Most Perfectionists were not interested in complex marriage, but Noyes’ assertion that he had surrendered his will to God and therefore could not sin was in line with their beliefs. 

Oh, but the good people of Putney, Vermont were not convinced. John Humphrey Noyes had just been arrested based on the contents of the letter reprinted in the Newburyport Herald, among other assertions, and was facing charges of “adulterous fornication”. It was time for Noyes and his band of self-identified Bible Communists to get out of New England.

John H. Noyes (standing, second row) and his community, shortly after the move to Oneida.

And where did they go? Oneida, New York, naturally, in an area of the country so swept with spiritual fervor, emotional revivals, and the fire of religious awakening, it had become known as the Burned-over District. Perfectionist sympathizers would offer land to build one of the most fascinating utopian communities in American history, and arguably the most successful. 

Stay tuned for Part 2, as John Humphrey Noyes builds a mansion, joins the fur trap trade, and produces an army of genetically engineered children, called Stirpicults, all while working just six hours a day.

The Towle Photos of Arthur Schuh

by Kristen Fehlhaber, Associate Director

Arthur Schuh made his career photographing babies. Lots of them. Founded in the 1950s, Hospital Picture Services offered new parents a photo of their baby, taken in the hospital, and delivered to them in three days (women were in the hospital for a week at that time). Schuh was president of the company responsible for developing the camera technology that was installed in hundreds of hospitals across the country. Hospitals got a percentage of the sales, parents got a sharp photo of their newborn, and Hospital Picture Services grew. 

Newborn photos by Schuh's Hospital Picture Service were often featured in local newspapers.

What does this have to do with Old Newbury? Schuh, born in Quincy, MA, lived in this area for about 18 months, beginning in the late summer of 1940. Fresh out of Harvard Business School, he got a position at Towle Silver and lived as a boarder at both 4 High Road and 49 High Street. His passion for photography was already in place when he came to Newburyport. 

Soon after starting at Towle, Schuh began taking personal photos of his workplace. After he took the photos and made prints, he pasted them in an album and had the subjects sign their names next to the photos. It seems that Schuh gave away prints, too, as one such print was given to the museum years ago. For a researcher, the album is a goldmine; the photos not only have names, but signatures next to them. 

Schuh’s daughter Joanne Smith donated this album, along with additional photos and negatives. Arthur Schuh seemed to spend his brief time here shooting portraits and weddings, as well as photographing historic homes in his neighborhood.  

Schuh in his Harvard Business School Class Book of 1940

The Towle photos show a mix of younger and older workers, both men and women, many of them workers in the Cost & Art Departments. Roy Hardison is working with Vena Searway. In February, 1941, a headline grabbed the attention of Louise Searway. Freda Bryant is working with spoons. For another photo, he interrupts Jean Kennedy while filing (more on her later). Future VP of Manufacturing Randolph Thurlow works at his desk.

Schuh’s time in Newburyport would end abruptly in December 1941, when he received a commission as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve. Many others at Towle would join the armed forces; his name would appear on a plaque of Towle employees in the war in late 1942.

Schuh was back in town in 1943 to marry Jean Kennedy, the woman he photographed at the filing cabinet. They would soon head together to San Francisco, and he would go on to serve in the Philippines. They would never live in Newburyport again.

The marriage announced next to photo of Roosevelt and Churchill.

The newlyweds stopping at West Point on their way to California

The couple received a set of Towle Silver (the Benjamin Franklin pattern) as a wedding gift from the company. It is still used by their daughter.

After the war, Schuh connected his passion for photography to his work life through his Hospital Picture Services.   Kudos to the man who believed in the importance of capturing life’s moments and who believed in labeling everything! 

Below is a list of people in Schuh’s 1940-1941 Towle album. If there is someone whose photo you’d like to see, please reach out to the museum at info@newburyhistory.org.

Parmira Arata, Mildred Ballou, Roderick Brooks, Freda Bryant, Walter Bryant, Hallett A. Carey, James M. Carey, Barbara Chesley, Donny Chisholm, Jack Coffin, Bob Davenport, Roger F. DeMerritt, Esther T. Dodge, Elizabeth Dow, Edith Erickson, J.O. Evans, Duncan Farr, Jack Farrell, Helen Fennelly, Julie Foley, Barbara "Bobby" Gagnon, Charlotte Gale, Gertrude  Gault, Martha B. Gremore, Roy P. Hardison, Ruth Hopkinson, June Hudson, Aram Kalashian, Peggy Kelleher, Gertrude M. Kelley, Jean Kennedy, Jerry King, Jack Learned, Gert Littlefield, Kay Lucey, Al Lunt, Evelyn L Melvin, Joe Morrow, Esther Noyes, Helen V. O'Brien, Sally Parsons, Thelma H. Plemmons, Betty Poland, Ross Pollard, Helen Poznek, Ethel Rand, Hazel Roberts, Louise Searway, Vena Searway, Camilla M Smith, Cato Smith, Evelyn Southwell, Robert J Stevens, Mary L. Taylor, Randolph L. Thurlow, Marion S. True, Hazel White, E. Whitney (female), Carmen Worcester.

With thanks to Joanne Smith for her generous assistance with this story.  

"Demoralized, Intemperate, and Vicious": Saving Star Island Souls

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Well, friends, another two weeks just flew by. Life races along at break-neck speed these late-summer days. Two weeks ago, before the kids went back to school, before the leaves on the maple tree on the lane began to hint at the red and gold to come, I was invited to speak at the New England Heritage Conference on Star Island on the Isles of Shoals. I could only get away from work, farm, and family responsibilities for one night, but I squeezed every drop from the experience, going out on the early morning boat on Monday and returning on the last boat Tuesday. I am a bit obsessed with the Isles of Shoals, I admit, though I’m not entirely sure when this passionate attachment began. Could it be the worn copy of Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter on my grandmother’s bookshelf? A romantic longing for solitude and the sea? Whatever it is, there is no cure. I am smitten.

Slate gravestone of Judson P. Caswell in front of the Oceanic Hotel, Star Island NH

And, of course (and why would I be surprised), Newbury(port) is everywhere on the Isles of Shoals. First, I ran into Bob Cook, a garrulous architect who used to give fabulous tours with me at the Coffin House, and his sister, Amy, who convinced me to jump in the ocean shortly after sunrise the next morning. And then, there was Laurie, my friend for many Newburyport years and now helping to raise the Star Island Corporation to new fundraising heights. It was Laurie that said it first. “Newburyport follows me around,” she said, laughing. “Go read that monument over there.” 

The Tucke Memorial is the largest gravestone in New Hampshire at 46.5 feet. 

Across the wild roses and low bush blueberries, rose an obelisk, black against the grey-blue sky. “Go look,” she said, and floated away. Everyone seems lighter on the island. I floated up the boulder-strewn path, past the stone chapel with its pump organ, through the turnstile, exclaiming in delight at every little bit of it. And there, on top of the island, stood what I later learned is the largest gravestone in New Hampshire, atop the mortal remains of Reverend John Tucke, who became the minister to Gosport, the name of the town on Star Island, in 1732. One side of the obelisk was a wall of words.

Underneath
are the Remains of the
REV. JOHN TUCKE, A. M.
He graduated at Harvard
College A. D. 1723, was ordained
here July 26, 1732,
and died late in August, 1773,
Aet. 71.
---
He was affable and polite in his
Manner, amiable in his disposition,
of great Piety and Integrity,
given to hospitality,
Diligent and faithful in his
pastoral office, well learned
in History and Geography as
well as general science, and a
careful Physician both to the
Bodies and the Souls
of his People.
---
Erected 1800 in memory of the Just.
---
The inscription above is taken from
the sandstone slab placed over the
grave of the Rev. John Tucke
by
Dudley A. Tyng of Newburyport, Mass. (emphasis my own)
---
In 1914 a kinsman,
EDWARD TUCK,
renewed in permanent form
this memorial.

“Dudley Tyng of Newburyport, Mass,” on the Tucke memorial. 

And so, like so many of you, I had myself a bit of a chin-scratch. What in the blue blazes was Newburyport’s customs officer Dudley Tyng doing erecting monuments to ministers on obscure islands in the middle of the sea in 1800? Now, Dudley Tyng is a story all by himself. Born Dudley Atkins, he changed his name to Tyng (which was once spelled THING) in order to qualify for a whopping great inheritance from his third cousin. Apparently, as Newburyport customs agent, he had dealings with, and heard stories about, Star Island’s “demoralized, intemperate, and vicious” fishermen who were “living in open violation of the laws of God and man”. These were the people who had repopulated the island after it was evacuated at the start of the American Revolution, not the formerly pious congregation of Rev. Tucke.

Dudley Atkins Tyng, painted by Gilbert Stuart, c. 1810

And so, Tyng first told these Shoalers to lay off the booze and “curb their evil passions and appetites”, and then he called his other wealthy friends and put together a spiritual first aid team to put things to right on the lawless neighbors to the north.

Tyng appealed to the Society for Propagating the Gospel Among Indians and Others in North America, who dispatched a missionary to the island in April, 1799, and Tyng went on a fundraising tour around New England with his equally fervent buddy Rev. Jedidiah Morse, another Newbury descendant, to raise money for a new church. Tyng arrived on the island on October 20, 1800 with materials and 14 carpenters and the church was built, and some island houses repaired, in less than 10 days.

Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, he tripped over the body of the community’s long-time minister, John Tucke, dead since 1773. Okay, he tripped over Tucke’s disintegrating grave marker, but the effect was the same. Tyng, never one to pass up the opportunity to make a moral message stick, erected the sandstone tablet mentioned in the current marker to remind the rag-tag residents that Star Island had once been a Christian community.   

Yours truly relaxing in front of the church that Tyng built in 10 days in 1800.

Star Island had long been a part of Rye, New Hampshire, but in 1715, it was established as the town of Gosport, and since a town had to have a minister at the time, lucky John Tucke got the job – to be paid in fish. Now, before you start feeling bad for Tucke, the fish paychecks were valuable and he did quite well for himself, being considered at one time to be the highest paid minster in New Hampshire (some say New England). Gosport was a busy, if tiny, town, and during his long four decades on the island, he managed to baptize some 700 babies. He died, conveniently, just before the American Revolution, and the evacuation of the Isles of Shoals, from which the town of Gosport never quite regained its spiritual footing, at least not enough to satisfy old Dudley Atkins Tyng. The 19th century in the Isles is a catalogue of murder, stand-offs, isolation, and, well, okay, thanks to Celia Thaxter, gardening, poetry, and art.

I must say that the lawlessness on Star Island these days seems to be kept to a minimum, though there were boxes of wine on the porch in the late afternoon. I did wonder as I sat on the sprawling porch of the Oceanic Hotel, what Dudley Tyng would think of the laughing day-trippers pouring out of the ferry Thomas Leighton. Would he meet them on the pier with his Bible? Or would he sit with me in a rocking chair and consider all the laughing, gentle people around us, the affirmations written on the blackboard in the lobby, the volunteers lovingly re-caning the dining room chairs, and think that Star Island turned out to be a sacred place, after all.   

Port to Port: A Sojourn to Remember

Two weeks ago, I filled my ageing minivan with members of the Museum of Old Newbury, and we set off on our (second annual) Summer Sojourn to Portsmouth. Last year we followed artist Cecilia Beaux around Gloucester. Each year we set off in a merry band to test my theory that Newbury(port) is the center of the universe. 

The gun ship USS Washington by John S. Blunt

This year’s sojourn began with a close examination of paintings of the Washington and the Constitution by artist John Blunt that hang in the front hall of the Cushing House. Board member and American art expert Monica Reuss kicked off the day with an insightful examination of the paintings, and then we were off to Portsmouth. The Washington (above, launched in 1814) was the first ship built in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard (PNSY), and so this was our first stop. Actually, we stopped in the parking lot of the USS Albacore, where we loaded onto a United States Navy bus where, as the carefully vetted guests of the Navy, we were charmed and enlightened by historian Joseph Gluckert. 

I’ll spare you the full travelogue, but anyone who knows me has heard about the PNSY cemetery, though I was unaware that behind the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Heritage Center, there is also a pet cemetery that contains the worldly remains of Old Tom, a United States Marine (horse), born in 1892. He served in Cuba and was retired in 1928 before dying in 1933, at the ripe old age of 39. I connect to the experience of animals the way some people connect to ceramics or wear patterns on floorboards, and so, perhaps uniquely for me, visiting Old Tom enriched the experience immensely. 

Inside the center is a great deal of information on the activities of the PNSY from the distant to the recent past, presided over by a group of enthusiastic volunteers, including World War II veteran Bill Tebo. Many of us spent some extra time with the model and memorial to the Thresher submarine, lost in 1963 with all hands, many with ties to Newburyport.

The U.S.S Thresher, seen here at her launch in 1960, was lost on April 10, 1963. The entire crew of 129 died and are memorialized at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Heritage Center. 

The afternoon began standing outside the Portsmouth Atheneum, discussing all the ways that Newburyport and Portsmouth had inspired each other. Once inside, we ogled the “pinky sky” in their famous Blunt painting, Piscataqua River from Noble's Wharf and discussed the future (and the past) of books and newspapers in the company of their gracious director, Tom Hardiman.

This painting by John Blunt hangs in the Portsmouth Athenaeum

Heading inside

Learning about the 2nd & 3rd floor library from Director Tom Hardiman.

We closed our day wandering through the enchanting gardens and exploring the jaw-dropping décor (and a staff favorite, the 1869 composting toilet) at the Moffatt-Ladd House. 

Inside Portsmouth’s 1763 Moffatt-Ladd house.

The height of modern convenience - a Moule's Patented Earth Commode, c. 1869, fascinated our group during the house tour.

I rolled back into town late in the afternoon, grinning from ear to ear. My history cup was full. I can’t wait to find more proof that Newbury(port) is the center of the universe as we plan next year’s sojourn!

The annual Summer Sojourn is a members-only event. Join us for this and many other adventures all year-round by becoming a member.

Newburyport's Albert Pike Toppled, Part Three

To read previous articles about Albert Pike, click here and here
Warning: this article contains racist language.

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking downtown when an old acquaintance fell into step with me. We walked along together, chatting about this and that. She asked me what I was working on, and that, gentle readers, is often a mistake unless you want a ten-minute explosion of information about whatever long-gone Newburyporter I’m obsessed with at the moment. Generally, there is a pause and a smile, and my listener says something like, “well, you clearly love your work”. This time, I went into a tear about Albert Pike, stopping only when my companion’s eyes began to widen, and she looked visibly worried. I paused. “Well, that’s not very nice, is it,” she said, and turned a corner. 

Friends, Albert Pike is not very nice. In fact, one of my first interactions with him was this quote from a letter published in 1875, when he was the Grand Commander of the Supreme Council A.A.S.R (Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite) Southern Jurisdiction (Freemasons). 

“I took my obligations to white men, not to Negroes. When I have to accept Negroes as brothers or leave Masonry, I shall leave it…I am interested to keep the Ancient and Accepted Rite uncontaminated, in our country at least, by the leprosy of Negro association.”

Albert Pike in Masonic regalia, c. 1880, private collection.

Albert Pike, the only Confederate general whose statue stood in Washington D.C., was so honored because of his Masonic leadership, though his racist views clearly extended to Masonic governance. At least, this leadership was the argument made when the Masons began planning his monument shortly after Pike’s death in 1891. And he was a very important leader – the highest-ranking Mason in the world at the time of his death.  

Lest one argue that it is unfair to judge a man of the past by today’s standards, let me assure you that this memorial to a deeply racist man accused of war atrocities, treason, and a host of other crimes was objectionable from the outset. As the sculptor, Gaetano Trentanove, worked on the statue, Pike supporters looked for sympathetic Congressmen to offer public land on which it would be placed. Numerous branches of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal organization of Union veterans, petitioned Congress to reject the statue, submitting their case in the most strident terms. As one Connecticut GAR leader wrote:

“We desire to express our solemn and unqualified disapproval of said bill as pregnant with evil for the future welfare of our beloved country, and dangerous in its tendencies as a gross perversion of history (when northern statesman advocating its passage, eulogize said Pike as “a distinguished citizen and a brave soldier” instead of a traitor to his country and a convicted coward in battle). Further, we consider the bill an insult to the memory, not alone of those brave boys in blue who at Pea Ridge were murdered and mutilated by his orders but equally so to every patriot who gave his life for liberty and a source of deep and lasting regret and humiliation to every loyal citizen.” 

Newburyport's GAR Post 49 does not seem to have formally protested the installation of the memorial statue of Albert Pike, though chapters across the country testified against it.

Despite these objections, public lands were given for the memorial on April 9, 1898 with the agreement that Albert Pike would be portrayed as a citizen and not a soldier. The reconstruction of Albert Pike’s legacy had begun. Or, rather, it was enshrined in 11 feet of bronze on our national land. In his 1901 acceptance speech on behalf of the American people, President of the District Commission H. B. F. McFarland praised Pike as a “victor in the honorable rivalries of peace”. In fact, so thoroughly had Pike’s legacy been twisted to suit the times, McFarland set him up as a noble foil to the war memorials throughout the city. “It is well that you thus add to the comparatively small number of statues in the city of Washington that honor the victories of peace rather than of war.”

Back home in Newburyport and Byfield, as the years rolled by, Albert Pike became a bit of a local hero, his Confederate past described as unfortunate at worst, heroic at best. In 1943, George W. Adams, then the oldest living alumnus of Governor Dummer Academy, swelled with pride when he wrote of Pike, “perhaps the most distinguished and honored son of this (Byfield) parish…” As for his Confederate service, Adams wrote that he “naturally and properly went with his state”. And his firmly entrenched, well-documented support of slavery? Adams claims a reluctance that Pike's own words prove false. “Never a lover of slavery, his attitude was that of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln whose hand was forced by the fanatical abolitionists.” The enslaved people themselves, including those who fled from his service? “Pike’s own slaves were a few domestic servants who at the close of the war refused to leave him and whose support was a burden.”  

1957 Daily News article was even more effusive. “He had an unbounded physical energy, an avid mind, marked independence and a great determination, all of which he may have inherited from that old major Robert Pike of Salisbury, one of his early ancestors.” The piece ends with this apology. “It is felt by many that Gen. Pike was illegally imposed upon, and he did not deserve much of the opprobrium that was cast upon him. There is nothing to show that his conduct was other than honorable at all times.”

The Albert Pike Memorial at the corner of Indiana Avenue and 3rd St.NW, a decade after its installation in 1901. Library of Congress

Albert Pike, at least the bronze effigy of him, was not destined to rest in peace, however. In 1992, amid weekly protests, Washington D.C. Councilmember Bill Lightfoot introduced legislation to remove the statue, though according to Lightfoot, his efforts “kind of faded away”. D.C. had more pressing issues to attend to at the time. One protest saw Pike in the mask and robe of a Ku Klux Klan member. A Washington Post editorial reprinted his poem Death Brigade, long seen as a love-letter to the secret violence of the Klan, and this straightforward characterization. “Pike was not just another soldier poet. He was a supreme grand commander, chief justice and cofounder of the KKK, according to published histories of the Klan." Though Pike’s leadership in the Klan is disputed, the Post left no doubt as to his statue’s inappropriateness in a place called Judiciary Square, quoting Pike, “with negroes for witnesses and jurors, the administration of justice becomes a blasphemous mockery…"

A protest gathered at the memorial in August, 2017 in the wake of violence in Charlottesville. Photo credit Ted Eytan, DCIst.

As the far right became more visible following the 2016 election, there were protests and counter-protests at the feet of Albert Pike. The mayor and the majority of City Councilors called for its removal. The Freemasons, besieged, offered that they would not oppose the removal of the statue to private property. The Ward 2 Councilor hired a crane, but the statue could not come down without Congressional approval. In 2017 and 2019, Washington D.C.’s Congressional delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced bills to that end, but no action was taken. 

And then, on Juneteenth, 2020, armed with ropes and chains, protesters were done waiting and pulled down Albert Pike themselves.

The toppling of Albert Pike, June 19, 2020. Courtesy images.

Washington D.C. Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, who fought for years to remove the Pike statue, has the last word before we pull the curtain on Albert Pike...for now.

"Adding to the dishonor of taking up arms against the United States, Pike dishonored even his Confederate military service. He certainly has no claim to be memorialized in the nation's capital. Even those who do not want Confederate statues removed would have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.." 

Newburyport's Albert Pike Toppled, Part Two

To read more about Albert Pike’s early life in Newburyport, click here

It’s almost too easy. Albert Pike, former Newburyport school teacher, enslaver, racist, secessionist, is not a complicated research subject. My feelings about him are equally uncomplicated. At every turn, when he had a chance to express his support of slavery, spew racist hatred, or feed his baser appetites, he did so publicly, and with gusto. The frightening thing about Albert Pike, to me, is how many people excused away the ugliness that came from his own mouth, and his pen.

In 1891, as Pike lay dying in Washington, D.C., the Newburyport Daily News called him “a venerable author and statesman”. Later contributors to the Daily News would describe him as a kindly enslaver (check that with the people who ran away from bondage in his Arkansas home), and a lukewarm secessionist who only joined the Confederacy to protect his property.

“HEY”, I find myself yelling at my computer screen. “This guy LITERALLY WROTE THE CONFEDERATE WAR SONG.” That’s right. Albert Pike wrote the lyrics to Dixie. Specifically, he wrote these stirring lines:

Southrons, hear your country call you! 

Up, lest worse than death befall you!  

To arms! To arms! To arms, in Dixie!

Apparently, the preservation of the Union and the eventual end of slavery was…worse than death. Not very ambiguous.

And, lest you think this version of the popular minstrel song fell into obscurity after the war, it was Albert Pike’s lyrics that became a hit once again 100 years later when Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded Dixie for Capitol Records in 1961. Oh, and also in 1961, Albert Pike was reimagined as the “Reluctant General” for a children’s book. 

Let’s just say, Albert Pike could have written the best-selling pamphlet, “Why I Love Slavery and the Confederacy and the KKK”, and thousands of people would still say, essentially, “there’s no way to know what he was REALLY like.” But I digress. Back to the narrative.

On November 22, 1861, former Byfield resident and Newburyport schoolteacher Albert Pike joined the Confederate Army as a brigadier general. He had already been working hard for the Confederate government, however, as his previous experience with Native American legal issues had resulted in his role as Confederate Commissioner to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, who had been promised their own free state at the successful end of the war. They had also been promised that they would only be called on to fight in the defense of Indian Territory. And so, after much negotiation – the Cherokee in particular were understandably skeptical about the arrangement – Pike was placed in charge of training three regiments of cavalry. He led two of these regiments into the disastrous Battle of Pea Ridge on March 7, 1862 near Fayetteville, Arkansas, a violation of the defense-only agreement in their treaty, which, to his credit, he protested. Once on the battlefield, well, I’ll let an eyewitness take it from here.

“On the morning of the 7th of March I was on the battlefield of Pea Ridge. While my command was engaging the enemy near Leetown, I saw in the rebel army a large number of Indians, estimated by me at one thousand. After the battle I attended in person to the burial of the dead of my command. Of twenty-five men killed on the field of my regiment, eight were scalped, and the bodies of others were horribly mutilated, being fired into with musket balls and pierced through the body and neck with long knives. These atrocities I believe to have been committed by Indians belonging to the rebel army. "

 - Cyrus Bussey, Colonel, 3rd Iowa Cavalry

This flag, the only known example of a Confederate American Indian regimental flag, is owned by the National Park Service and is associated with one of the regiments at Pea Ridge. 

How involved Albert Pike was with the atrocities committed at Pea Ridge is a matter of considerable debate. Suffice it to say, it made Pike one of the most hated men in the North and a pariah in the Confederacy as well. Later, Pike denied that he had any role in the behavior of the troops under his command, claiming that he was “angry and disgusted” with the whole affair. His hometown newspaper tells a different story entirely. In May, two months after Pea Ridge, and after widespread reporting on the atrocities, the front page of the Newburyport Daily Herald noted that Pike praised his troops for “gallantry”. It does rather upend his case for plausible deniability. 

The Boston Evening Transcript wrote a scathing article about the episode, concluding that “renegades are always loathsome creatures, and it is not to be presumed that a more venomous reptile than Albert Pike ever crawled upon the face of the earth…there is no pit of infamy too deep for him to fill”.

While Pike was being excoriated in the Northern press, his relationship with his fellow Confederates deteriorated as well. Pike was ordered by Gen. Thomas C. Hindman to turn over funds. Pike refused and issued angry missives against his commanding officers before hiding out in the hills of Arkansas. He was charged with stealing money and material and arrested for insubordination and treason. He was released from a Texas prison in 1863, having resigned from his command. Col. Douglas Cooper remarked to President Jefferson Davis that Pike was "either insane or untrue to the South."

Pike rode out the war in Arkansas, eventually becoming an associate justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court as the Confederacy disintegrated. Pike, considered a traitor in the South and a butcher (and also a traitor) in the North, saw his property confiscated and fled first to New York and then to Canada where he petitioned, and received, a pardon from Andrew Johnson in 1866. Upon his return to Arkansas, however, he was charged with treason, though the charges didn’t stick. He fled again, this time to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to Washington, D.C. His wife, Mary Ann, remained in Little Rock, and Pike began a very public affair with the ambitious 19-year-old sculptor Vinnie Ream, forty years his junior.

Albert Pike Klan chapters sprang up in Illinois, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Virginia, and New Jersey in the early 20th century.

But let’s go back to Tennessee. There is ample evidence that Albert Pike was instrumental in forming the Ku Klux Klan, established in 1865 in Tennessee and organized in 1867 under the leadership of former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Though early Klan membership remains largely secret, Pike published editorials essentially arguing for an expansion of the Klan. "If it were in our power, if it could be effected, we would unite every white man in the South, who is opposed to negro suffrage, into one great Order of Southern Brotherhood, with an organization complete, active, vigorous, in which a few should execute the concentrated will of all, and whose very existence should be concealed from all but its members.” Early, laudatory Klan histories published in the early 20th century praised Pike’s role as a high-ranking founding officer, appointed by Forrest himself as the Klan’s “chief judicial officer”, and a “grand dragon”. A cursory newspaper search turns up Albert Pike Klan chapters across the country by the 1920’s. 

In a 1905 history of the Ku Klux Klan, Susan Lawrence Davis, daughter of a founding member, reprints a portrait of Pike that she uses with permission of Pike’s son. It seems unlikely that such permission would have been granted unless the family fully embraced his Klan leadership.

Much has been written about Albert Pike’s Masonic leadership, enough, in fact, that I will give it short shrift here. Pike had been involved in Freemasonry since the 1840’s, becoming Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite's Southern Jurisdiction in 1859. He spent much of his later life working on the rituals of the Scottish Rite, publishing Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry in 1871.

Albert Pike died of esophageal cancer on April 2, 1891, at the Scottish Rite Temple in Washington DC. His remains were interred there in 1944, long after the ugly, bloody work of Albert Pike had been sanitized, excused, and explained away by generations of apologists. Still, today, his name is everywhere. North of Langley, Arkansas, the Albert Pike recreation area boasts “picnic tables, toilets, drinking water, and parking”. 

A 1922 traveler on the Albert Pike Highway could stop at the Albert Pike Café. The highway wound through the Ozarks from Hot Springs, Arkansas to Colorado Springs, Co.

A 1922 traveler on the Albert Pike Highway could stop at the Albert Pike Café. The highway wound through the Ozarks from Hot Springs, Arkansas to Colorado Springs, Co.

Readers of the first installment of this series (we love your emails!) found Albert Pike Road, Albert Pike Apartments, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Albert Pike Memorial Temple, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

At the close of Albert Pike’s memorial service, its details printed in the Evening Star, Washington D.C. edition, the following words were read:

“Who will be man’s accuser?” 

“His conscience.”

“Who his defender?” 

“No one.”

“Who will give testimony against him?” 

“No one.”

 

We beg to differ.

Join us for Part III of Albert Pike Toppled, where we explore the curious transformation of Albert Pike from Confederate traitor to peace-loving hero and revered son of Newburyport (and Byfield).  

The Fall of Newburyport's Confederate Albert Pike: Part One

a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

On June 19th, 2020, a group of demonstrators in Washington D.C. marked Juneteenth, a commemoration of the end of slavery in America, by tearing down the only statue of a Confederate general ever erected in the nation’s capital. George Floyd had been killed three weeks before, sparking protests around the nation and across the world. And so, drenching General Albert Pike, all 11 bronze feet of him, with lighter fluid, they set him ablaze. District police watched the crowd from a distance, intervening only to extinguish the flames. An irate President Donald Trump tweeted, “the DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!” The protesters read the tweet into a megaphone and cheered as the spray-painted remains of Newburyport’s own Albert Pike smoldered in pieces on the ground.

Albert Pike’s Washington, D.C. statue was pulled down by protesters on Juneteenth, 2020. Credit: Sky News

There is a reason this is a blog and not the lead story in this newsletter. I cannot, nor would I wish to be, a dispassionate observer in the story of this hate-fueled man. But as much as I may wish otherwise, he was once an integral part of this community and my distant cousin. And so, Albert Pike, Confederate general, accused murderer and thief, author of the Confederate battle lyrics for “Dixie”, and founding member of the Ku Klux Klan, serves as a cautionary tale. He is a reminder that right here in William Lloyd Garrison’s backyard, Newburyport also bred, fed, and funded enslavers and human traffickers.

Albert Pike, c. 1865. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Albert Pike was born in Boston in 1809, the son of Benjamin Pike, a shoemaker, and Sarah (Andrews) Pike, both born and raised, as were generations before them, in Newbury(port). He was descended from dozens of Newbury's English settler families - the Coffins, Littles, Moodys, and yes, the Poores. The family moved back home from Boston when Albert was four, and after attending Newburyport schools, he tested for Harvard at age 14 and passed. This is one of the many moments in Pike’s life that was re-written later by his many admirers. A 1957 article in the Newburyport Daily News said he “entered Harvard but did not complete his course”, while a 1938 article in the News claimed that Pike was “graduated at Harvard as one of the famous class of 1829”.

Nonsense. Pike did not go to Harvard because he could not afford the tuition, which is nothing shameful, but seemed to have stoked some resentment that eventually hastened his departure from New England, and his sense that dark forces were aligned against him.

At 15, Pike became a schoolteacher, first in Gloucester and Rockport and then, in 1826, he returned to Newburyport where he decided to give himself the equivalent of a Harvard education while teaching school in Newburyport and join his class at Harvard as a junior in the fall of 1827. This plan also failed, as Harvard was not interested in admitting a self-taught Albert Pike who would pay for only the last two years of his education. And so, Albert Pike angrily abandoned Harvard and became a teacher, then principal, at the Newburyport Grammar School. He was removed by the trustees in the fall of 1828 for “unbecoming conduct” and went to Fairhaven to teach for a term.

Back in Newburyport in 1829, the year when he did not graduate from Harvard, he had a new venture. “In the course of a month I wish to open a private School in this town—if a sufficient number of Scholars be obtained before that time to warrant the undertaking—for instruction in the studies commonly taught in High Schools and Academies, the price of tuition will be five dollars per term.” 

From the Newburyport Herald, August 28, 1829.

Albert Pike taught on Pleasant Street, on Green Street, boys and girls, day and night. He learned Spanish, likely from Senor Juan de Escobar, who had a school just a few doors down on Pleasant Street. During the day he helped his father mend shoes and wrote romantic poetry. 

The “hall” where Albert Pike offered his school was the Masonic Hall on Green Street (not the present building), which foreshadowed his later leadership in the Freemasons.

Two years later, dissatisfied with the life of a private tutor, Pike decided to seek his fortune out west, travelling first to Nashville and then on to Missouri and New Mexico before settling in Arkansas where he wrote for, and then purchased the local newspaper, taught school, married an heiress, and set himself up as a self-taught lawyer. 

In 1833, before setting up his law practice, Albert Pike offered translation services in Arkansas.

He was a very successful lawyer, despite his lack of college education, and represented several Native American plaintiffs in suits against the government. And, as soon as he had the means to do so, he purchased several enslaved people, one of whom, 22-year-old Rebecca, recently transported from Alabama, ran away in 1840.

Despite his advocacy for Native Americans, Pike was an early adopter of the unique brand of nativist, racist, anti-Catholic rhetoric that was the Know Nothing Party. He introduced the party to Arkansas, attended the national party convention in 1856, and walked out when they failed to be sufficiently strident in their support of slavery.

In 1858, as the momentum that would take the nation into war was building, Pike was one of twelve men to sign and circulate a demand to expel all free Black people from Arkansas, saying that "evil is the existence among us of a class of free colored persons". Notwithstanding, the following year, he finally got his Harvard degree for his poetry, receiving an honorary Master of Arts.

And then, on May 6 1861, Newburyport’s Albert Pike offered his allegiance and his services to the Secession Convention of Arkansas, offering his knowledge of Native American customs and language as his most valuable skill.

And this is how, that November, Pike joined the Confederate States Army as a brigadier-general, responsible for three cavalry regiments of Native Americans who had been promised their own free state if the Confederacy was victorious.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this story, as Albert Pike is accused of allowing atrocities, stealing money, abandoning his wife, and helping to spread the venomous message of the Ku Klux Klan.

Come stand with us in Brown Square on Sunday and read the words that Frederick Douglass penned in 1852 about the ways that our nation had not lived up to its ideals. And know that as Douglass was speaking those words, Albert Pike, who had taught school across the street, listed six people, one man, one woman, two teenagers, and two children, on his "slave schedule".

1850 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedule. City of Little Rock, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Albert Pike household.

True Tour Confessions: Sleeping on the Job

...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

In 1998, I got married, and the trajectory of my life changed. Of course, the marriage itself had a lot to do with that, and the two children that followed, but a special wedding gift had an outsized impact. You see, friends and former dorm-mates from Butterfield at UMass gave me a membership to Historic New England (then SPNEA). My husband, Adam and I were history graduate students. Though we married in Newburyport, we went quickly back to Amherst. I wondered when on earth I would find a minute to go on a house tour. 

Hanging out the Butterfield window at UMass with my friend Kathleen in those carefree Amherst days.

The membership was a thoughtful gift, though. I was in love with history, dipping my toes into “public history,” UMass’s certificate program for practitioners. Still, I thought I would write and teach, not work in museums. Up to that point in my life, the transformational experiences I had in historic spaces had been disconnected from the mechanics of historic sites. I had failed to see all the ways that I had been guided through those experiences, whether by a human or printed guide (oh, the days of wandering about with a book in my hand), or by the scaffolding of signage, landscape wayfinding and text panels. I think, like so many must, that a historic place exudes some sort of special magic, and I was drawn to that. Until I worked in museums, I failed to understand what it takes to bring these places to life. 

Yours truly with a rare moment of quiet with newborn Jed in 1999. Do I look tired? I certainly was.

At any rate, my son was born in 1999, and for all the confidence I had that women can do anything, (which I still believe to be true), it was an exhausting and humbling experience. Jed was an intense baby – wanting to be held, then put down, then held again, squirming and always on the move. I was still in graduate school and, for a brief time, the acting co-director of two dormitories with 700 residents. It was a whole lot, and I made it through in part because I had a committed co-parent, though we both struggled. I took an additional year to complete my graduate studies, declined my offers for PhD programs, and in the spring of 2000, while Adam remained in Amherst, I moved back home to West Newbury, to the warm lap of patience and help that was my mom and Aunt Emily. And for the first time in years, I slept. Oh, boy did I sleep. 

My first view of the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm was down this bucolic lane, widened somewhat since then. 

When I finally pulled myself together a bit, I decided to put my wedding gift to use, though it had expired a year earlier. I called the nearest Historic New England site. I was a newly-minted history grad, I said. Did they need any help? I offered to live at a property, clean the house, anything. It just had to be flexible as I had a baby at home. I had no idea how it all worked. Maggie, the manager of the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm at the time, asked me to come in. I remember driving up Little’s Lane to meet her and Tracy, the regional manager. It was, and is, breathtaking.

While I worked, Aunt Emily tried to convince toddler Jed to put his pants on.

I was hired as a seasonal lead guide, and handed a pile of materials, including a tour outline and a heap of background information. I had never given a tour of anything in my life. Though I had worked at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, we were more like guards than guides, always able to answer questions but mostly trying to make sure nobody spat their gum off the Golden Gallery at the top of the dome. I met other tour guides from around New England, had a couple of training sessions, and that was that. I was now responsible for telling the story of a National Historic Landmark – accountable to hundreds of people who had lived their lives in that place, and especially beholden to the family that had given the property to be preserved in perpetuity.  

A rare glimpse of an SPL tour in action.

It was nerve-wracking trying to quickly get to a place where I could lead a group through nearly four centuries of history in 50 minutes, but with practice, I learned how to move smoothly through the house, using visual cues, objects, even sounds, to connect with visitors. Most importantly, I learned how to say that I did not know the answer, but I would find out.

At that time, I was the only tour guide on most days, entirely alone on weekends. I opened the door on the hour, welcomed whoever was there, locked it behind me, spent 50 minutes walking through the house, returned to the front door, said goodbye, and took the next group in on the hour. Some days there were no tours and I cleaned and puttered and read my packets of information. I had not been alone in years, and I was still just so exhausted.

One summer day, with no visitors and thunderstorms blowing through, I sat on the floor of the brick porch where tours began and fell into a deep sleep. I was awakened by the sound of visitors outside, and I realized that I had five minutes to pull myself together before the next tour began. I was about to be spotted, slumped over and disheveled, through the porch window. I army-crawled into the house, splashed some water on my face, took a deep breath, and threw open the door. 

“Welcome to the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm! What brings you here today?...”

I remember that day so clearly – my thoughts still gummy from sleep, the porch full of happy, chatty people, descendants of the Little family, excited to see their distant cousins’ house. I remember the surly teenager who had no interest in being there, and who therefore became my inspiration to give the best tour ever, the rain outside the wavy windows, the woman who asked, with no prompting, how old the baby was, and gave me such a smile...

On my last day at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm, I took this picture of the porch where I had fallen asleep waiting for visitors two decades before.

As my career unfolded, I moved into increasingly managerial and administrative positions, and I rarely lead tours these days. Still, when I can throw the doors open to a group of expectant faces, talk with them about some essential part of the human experience, represent my community in the most inclusive and nuanced way I am able while still keeping everyone engaged, I am brought back to those early days alone at the farm.

Tour guides serve as a conduit between the living and the dead, the present and the past. We help people place themselves in time and space. It is honorable, important work.