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.