A Happy Accident...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau

As it happens, I assumed my new position as executive director of the Museum of Old Newbury on the same day as two bright-eyed students from Governor’s Academy began their summer internship. Aleah and Olivia have plenty of projects that await their attention, but in the hustle of my first two weeks, I have been rather capricious in my requests of them. I am, after all, brand new, and for the last several days, the interns and I have spent hours together alone. And so these enterprising young women have been hauling books from my car, printing membership letters, and yesterday, we went on a treasure hunt.

Yesterday, I received an email from a woman who has a portrait of Ebenezer Bradbury the First (1793- 1864). Well, that’s how I know him, anyway. Ebenezer Bradbury is the first of four by that name. The last of the four is a sweet-faced boy who died in France in 1918. The records of all four Eben Bradburys returned to me from across the country and the world, and include, at last count, 187 letters, clippings, and other ephemera related to Eben the First, Newburyport silversmith, machinist, and later Massachusetts State Treasurer and Speaker of the House.

The email writer had found me through the connection of her cousin, also a descendant of Eben the First, and there was, apparently a portrait in the collection of the Museum of Old Newbury of Eben’s second wife, Mary Tappan, mother of the last ten of his eighteen children. There was a number in the museum records about this portrait, a brief description, but no location. As you likely know, the museum has undergone a significant amount of work while closed, and some objects are not quite as easy to locate as heretofore. The interns began their hunt.

While they looked for Eben’s bride, I looked at their letters, including a rather saucy courting letter, written in 1832, in which Eben begs for an audience with his beloved, frustrated with her demand that their liaisons appear innocent. “(Our meeting) must be accidental??? I appreciate the motive, but let me suggest that accidents are sometimes committed.” A recent young widower, thirty-eight years old and already the father of eight, he had little time for the shillyshallying that the never-married 32-year-old Mary Tappan seemed to enjoy. “I beg, my dear, you will gratify me...” The longed-for “accident” appears to have occurred expeditiously, as the pair was married just two months later with a baby on the way within the year.

I heard a gasp and a pitter-patter down the hall. Olivia peered around my office door, and said, with a reverent whisper, “I think we found her.” We ran up the stairs to the third floor, and there was Mary, resplendent in her best dress (chocolate brown), matching earrings and broach, a serene look on her face.

The discovery of Mary set off a hunt for other treasures, as we set off to look at spoons that Eben had made in his youth, “met” his great-grandson on the wall of the military history exhibit, and looked over his mail from two centuries ago. I told them about the letter, explained that his wife had just died, but that it was not uncommon to remarry very quickly. It is likely, I said, that he had her in mind, in some sense, before his first wife died, as she was ill for a long time. He hints at an earlier connection. They gasped, shook their heads, a little outraged. “Think about who kept this letter,” I said. “This passed down through the children of his first wife. What does that indicate to you?”

“They thought it was good that he remarried so quickly? Perhaps they had known Mary their whole lives. They never read it and just tossed it in a trunk?” The wheels kept on turning as I threw in little bits of information about their lives together. After Eben died, Mary went to live with her stepsons, rather than her biological children. Why? We may never know the answers to these questions, but if the goal of the study of history is to learn to think critically about evidence and to understand the world by trying to understand other people, we are in good hands with these two.

I cannot wait to introduce Aleah and Olivia to Eben the First. I know that they will appreciate the reunion. The portrait will arrive before they return to school, and I promise that they will never forget Mary and Eben. A happy “accident” indeed.