Aunt Mary in the MACRIS

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

When I was a young teenager living in the Poore House with seven other people (and only one bathroom), I often escaped to another Poore house right down the street. In the 1980’s, there were family homes up and down and just off Garden Street in West Newbury. My grandmother’s brother Ray Poore and his wife Jeanette lived at 48 Garden St, just around the corner from my grandmother’s other brother Howard and his wife Mary. Howard and Mary’s daughter Sue and her husband Gordon lived further down Middle Street, and, of course, my grandmother, Charlotte and her sister Emily Poore lived on Poore’s Lane, where I live today, also off Garden Street. Of the six Poore siblings, four lived within half a mile of each other.

My great-aunt Mary (Anderson) Poore, grandmother Charlotte (Poore) Muzrall, great-grandfather Philip Poore, great-aunt Louise (Poore) Muzrall, great-aunt Emily Poore, and great-uncle Howard Poore in 1955. All but Louise lived on the same street.

I remember Uncle Ray as square-jawed and handsome, not especially friendly to children, but a jokester with his siblings. He owned a large field adjacent to the house where we lived with Aunt Emily and my grandmother, and was a frequent visitor. He stomped into the kitchen smelling of wood smoke and burlap and had my taciturn grandmother laughing about something in short order. I’m not sure he ever spoke directly to me. His wife, my great-aunt Jeanette, was a dragon as well, or so I believed when I was a teenager. Her primary form of communication seemed to be a bit of a growl in my direction, so I steered clear.

Aunt Mary and Uncle Howard with their last dog, Elmer.

But Uncle Howard and Aunt Mary Poore…to me, they were all things wise and wonderful. When I escaped the madding crowd on Poore’s Lane, I often found myself at their house, or, more particularly, in their barn. Aunt Mary had long, snow-white hair, tied back and loose in puffs around her weathered face. She was kind, but in an active, even boisterous sort of way, ready with encouragement or an instruction. Uncle Howard was gentle and quieter. The pair of them offered me sanctuary during some terrible times as I tried to adjust to life in the United States after a childhood spent in the Canadian wilderness, but Aunt Mary and I understood something fundamental about each other. Some girls need a horse, and if one cannot be offered, a barn will do. 

Aunt Mary in the 1920's on her horse, Billy.

The barn at 406 Middle Street was an ancient timber-frame beauty. I believe there was still an elderly cow in it when we first arrived from Canada, but my memory on this is fuzzy. Even in the absence of animals, however, it was the perfect comfort to a lost farm girl. The smells were right – the hay still in the loft, the feed sacks stuffed with bailing twine. Dusty harnesses festooned the walls. An old wagon sat in the corner. The hay hook dangled like a funhouse toy from its track along the roofline. I went into the dark and cool of that barn in the summer, sat on an old bale in a whitewashed stall and read books about tough girls who proved everyone wrong, and it made me feel better. And Aunt Mary, trailed by one of a series of yellow and white dogs named Honey, would lure me out with cookies and lemonade and we would shell peas or dead head the flowers in her garden while we talked. She was a devoted nature lover and rehabbed wild birds. I helped her care for crows, cardinals, and a red-tailed hawk. She sent me home with an injured blue jay once– laughing about how much noise we both made.

I wonder what she made of me. One day I told her how much I loved coming to the barn and she invited me to take anything from there that made me happy. I took part of an old harness that reminded me of the draft horses I had left in Canada. It became a sort of talisman, reminding me of another time. As the years passed, it reminded me of Aunt Mary. 

The blue jay just before its release in 1987

The barn is gone now. After Aunt Mary died in 1988, followed by Uncle Howard in 1996, the barn became a liability, a barrier to the sale of the property, and it was taken down in 2003. The house was sold. Mary’s daughter Sue and her husband also died, and their house was sold, and most recently, in 2018, tough old Aunt Jeanette died. Her house and barn were sold, razed, and four huge houses popped up in their place, seemingly overnight, their gleaming facades turned boldly to the street. No more hayfield. No more old trees. I’m still not quite over it. 

I will admit here that I do not think of Aunt Mary as often as I should. Since the collapse of the Artichoke bridge on Middle Street, closing the section between Garden and Hale Streets, I do not ever drive past her house, once a spur to memory. But last week, as I looked up some information about a West Newbury house in MACRIS, there she was.

Let me back up. MACRIS is short for Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System. This database links to the Massachusetts Historical Commission database of historic properties – a goldmine for researchers. Better still, the inventory sheets for individual properties, some filled out fifty years ago, are included with the listing. Aunt Mary, clipboard and inventory form in hand, roamed all over West Newbury in the 70’s and early 80’s recording the built environment. I looked up the house and barn at 409 Middle Street. She had filled out the form for her own house in March, 1973, though she filled out the owner as Howard S. Poore. Some of the other bolder women listed houses under the names of the husbands AND wives – even if only the husband was on the deed – a feminist revolution indeed! Though she did not take ownership of her house, Mary Anderson Poore did sign the sheet with her own name, while many of the other women in town signed their names as “Mrs. John Smith”, etc. So, still her own woman. She first takes issue with the name of her street and lists all possibilities. The street is Middle Road or Middle Street, or Plummer Spring Road, or The South Way, or City Lane. Is it open to the public? Rather cheekily, she answers, “Not really.” To know her is to understand that if you asked, she would show you around the place. Scrupulously honest, she admits that her dating of the house as 1750 is based on an old deed and “some conjecture”, and she lists the condition of the house as “fair”, while most of her peers who inventoried their own homes tended to be a good bit more generous in their assessment. 

The MACRIS form filled out in 1973 by Aunt Mary

Still, the entire form is filled with her singular personality, and with such fondness for her farm that it makes my heart ache. She notes the “secret room on the 1st floor”, the scuttle near the ridgepole of the roof. She measures the center chimney at 9x12 feet in the cellar, on 2 arches. She lists her “Christian door with 2 small lights in it,” accompanied by a pencil sketch, and the “simple, plain, upright boards” of the exterior. The barn and garage are “old”, while the “henpen, outhouse, cornhouse, baler shed, tool shed and manure shed” are newer. The landscape features are “old farm fields, pastures, orchard, white picket fence behind two large horse chestnut trees.”

There is much I could add here, like how the crocuses and daffodils and irises spilled down the hill by the front door, how the watery light came through the wavy glass of the front room windows, and how she opened every trunk in the attic for me. The MACRIS database is not where I expected a visit from Aunt Mary, but I am so grateful to be reminded of her. This morning there were a dozen blue jays, two cardinals, and a crow outside my window. “Birds can live for a very long time,” she said to me thirty-six years ago, when the blue jay she had trusted to me was recovered and released. “Don’t be surprised when they come back.”

The blue jay just before its release in 1987.