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.
