August 6, 2021

The Holy Fingerbone of Old Newbury...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

This is how rumors get started.

The scene: Screen porch, summer night, (mostly) empty bottle of pink wine. Four women around a metal table, one holding forth.

That would be me, of course, gesticulating wildly, trying to explain to my friends why I love the Museum of Old Newbury like I do. “We have hard tack from the Civil War!” I said. “Hair! Death masks! Fingerbones!”

Ah, yes. That last one is a lie. I have found that since I am one of those people to whom unbelievable things seem to happen, I must stick quite closely to the truth or risk never being believed again. But my hard tack revelation had fallen flat, and I was determined to make my point. Kelly pushed back in her chair with a squeal. “Fingerbones?” Her jaw dropped open. “Like, in a drawer? That’s CRAZY!” The others were equally charmed by the one item on that list that, so far as I can tell is not in the collections of the Museum of Old Newbury.

Fingerbones are actually a thing, though, as any good museum-goer from Kansas City will tell you. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in that great city, houses, among other things, the venerated finger of St. John the Baptist, purchased from the collection of the Brunswick Cathedral in Germany.

Alleged bits of John the Baptist reside in all corners of the world – his hand in Montenegro; his head in France; and an assortment of knuckles, teeth and other bones in Bulgaria. A friend told me just this morning that until 1969, every Catholic church was required to place a holy relic, generally a bone, a piece of skin, or a lock of hair, under their sacramental altar. Relics are not always body parts. They can be a piece of clothing, or a bit of a walking stick, things so familiar to a saint that they became extensions of the physical body.

It's not just Christians, either. The Famen Temple in Shaanxi Province, China housed the fingerbone of the Buddha. And we can all get behind the fingerbone of Santa Claus, given to Battle Abbey in Sussex, England, nine hundred years ago. There is no holy finger in the Islamic catalog of relics, but the beard and teeth of the Islamic prophet Muhammad are kept in Turkey’s Topkapı Palace.

As most parents will tell you, the physical intimacy of caring for children often bleeds into the realm of holy relics. How many of us have our children’s baby teeth or a first pigtail, or braid, in a box somewhere for our horrified descendants to find? Just me? Don’t lie. It’s not a fingerbone, you may retort. Ah, yes, and Jed and Meg’s teeth don’t cure the sick, but they are sacred to me, evidence of the existence of another kind of miracle.

Though we have no actual fingerbones (yet), the Museum of Old Newbury has an important collection of a kind of relic that lived a much more public life than a private memento.

Hair jewelry was ubiquitous in the nineteenth century, though it had been around for centuries. The distribution of jewelry made with locks of the hair of the executed King Charles I in the 17th century seems to have kicked off this trend.

By the 19th century, hair was everywhere. People were painting with it, weaving it into ropey tubes, making faux flower arrangements out of it, all to remember the family and friends who had contributed the strands. Hairwork was considered a highly appropriate creative expression for women with time on their hands.

On October 1, 1860, Mrs. E.M. Brown of Newburyport won fifty cents for her human hair art at the Amesbury and Salisbury Horticultural and Agricultural Fair, which seems to have cast a wide net, also awarding prizes for the best wax dolls and work in moss.

Of course, not everyone had the time and patience to weave intricate patterns from dear departed Aunt Bessie’s locks.

The solution in 1856? Get thee down to the Merchants Bank Building, now 59-61 State Street to the shop of Robert E. Mosely, ARTIST IN HUMAN HAIR (emphasis is his), where “ladies having tresses of hair which they cherish as memorials of the absent or lost, may have them fabricated into ornaments of great beauty and durability.”

Nearly twenty years later, patrons were encouraged to visit the shop of William P. Jones, whose shop at 11 Middle Street advertised “hair jewelry and ornaments made to order.”

Our Mosely may have done the hairwork himself, but it is much more likely that he sent it out to one of the many factories employed in hairwork, utilizing the labor of women with no time on their hands, often immigrants who were encouraged to contribute their own hair to a stockpile of color-sorted tresses. The sentimental ladies of Newburyport were none the wiser, until competing manufacturers began accusing each other of substituting pre-made jewelry from the hair of strangers, leading to a boom in DIY kits and patterns advertised in such publications as Godey’s Lady’s Book.

Two friends visited me at the museum this morning, and I took them up the stairs to see two framed landscapes made of human hair. Leana’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Yuck,” she said. “I’m not into that at all.” She paused in front of the fireplace, tilting her head. “Although, come to think of it, I would love to have something made of Grouper’s hair.”

Grouper is a celebrity, a large, lovely grey cat who Leana (and I) adore. “Aha!” I exclaimed, triumphantly. “Okay, okay, I get it,” she said.

Don’t tell Leana, but sometime before Christmas I will corner Grouper with a pair of scissors and make that dream come true. Turns out she is not alone, and the website Etsy boasts over a dozen artisans who will craft your loved one’s hair into a ring, a locket, or just send you a custom pendant that you can fill yourself.

It’s not a holy fingerbone, but it will have to do.