John 'Ben' Pickard: A House Becomes a Home: The Women of the Amesbury Whittier House (2007)

John 'Ben' Pickard, the author of this booklet, is the great-grand-nephew of John Greenleaf Whittier. The background on the cover is a photo of the wallpaper from the east attic of the Amesbury Whittier house.

Written for a talk which took place five years before the publication of Whittier and His Elizabeths and also published in the same year (2007) by the Whittier Home Association, this booklet (along with the other) is interesting in that it approaches John Greenleaf Whittier's life from a feminist point of view, foregrounding the women behind the poet rather than the poet himself. It is also appropriate in that Whittier himself was a feminist, although perhaps more in theory than in practice.

Whittier (then aged 29) moved with his family to Amesbury, Massachusetts in 1836, leaving the home of his birth at the farm in East Haverill (pronounced 'HAY-vrill') which is about eight miles away and had been in the family since it was built in 1688: after the death of their father and uncle who had kept the farm, neither Whittier nor his brother Franklin wanted to be farmers, and the women of the household were not suited to the work.

These women were the mother Abigail Hussey Whittier, the single aunt Mercy Hussey, and the younger sister, Elizabeth Hussey Whittier. Pickard describes the first two women as 'domestic caretakers' doing the cooking, cleaning, and making the clothes for the male of the family, the man who would never marry and would remain at the house until 1876, when he joined his Johnson cousins in Danvers, Massachusetts.

Mercy died in 1846. Elizabeth Hussey Whittier was a companion to the poet for many years, although her health suffered a great deal in the 1850s, and it was also a huge loss to him when his mother died in 1857.

The following year Franklin's 13-year-old daughter — also named Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, but generally referred to as Lizzie — joined the household initially as a schoolgirl, although her aunt's ailing condition in the early 1860s meant that Lizzie increasingly took on the household tasks, also becoming companion and secretary to Whittier. Elizabeth died in 1864, and Lizzie's marriage to Samuel Thomas Pickard (later Whittier's biographer) in 1876 necessitated Whittier's move to Danvers. He died in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire in 1892 at the age of 85, leaving much of his estate — including the house — to Elizabeth 'Lizzie' Hussey Pickard, who had been with him for several of his final weeks.

Although Ben Pickard's booklet stresses the vital importance of women in the Whittier household (and indeed by extension in many other 19th century households) it is also the story of the physical evolution of the house, the alterations it underwent through the decades, and the story of late 19th century political disagreements between the Whittier Home Association and the Elizabeth Whittier Club.

Edna St Vincent Millay in Ring's Island, Salisbury, Massachusetts: Literary New England #18

A brief childhood home of Edna St Vincent Millay (1892—1950) at the Jonathan Dole House (built 1680), 5 Third Street, Ring's Island, Salisbury, which is on the northern shore of the Merrimack River facing Newburyport, Massachusetts.

Millay (Edna St Vincent), Salisbury (MA), Amesbury, Ring's Island, Massachusetts, Newburyport.

My other Edna St Vincent Millay posts:
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Edna St Vincent Millay, Austerlitz, NY
Nancy Milford: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

John Marquand in Newburyport, Massachusetts: Literary New England #5

In the tiny ancient Sawyer Hill Burying Ground - usually called 'the little cemetery' by locals - lies a notable author.

John Phillips Marquand, Sr, (1893-1960) grew up as his once very prosperous family was discovering how to live through the stock market crash that ruined them, and learned about poorer classes through schooling in Newburyport. The prominent statue of William Lloyd Garrison in the town too gave the message that not all are born wealthy.

Marquand gained a scholarship to Harvard, a stronghold of Ivy League privilege, where he just didn't have the name to give sufficient kudos to be accepted as one of the privileged. So he wrote satiral works about high society that were perhaps a little too subtle for all the Boston Brahmins to understand.

In 1938, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his Boston Brahmin satire The Late George Apley.

Harriet Prescott Spofford in Newburyport, Massachusetts: Literary New England #4

 Harriet Prescott Spofford (1835-1921)

 

Spofford's grave in Oak Hill Cemetery gives her name as Harriet Elizabeth Prescott. She was born in Calais, Maine, and her family moved to Newburyport, and she became known as a short story writer, impressing such major authors as Emily Dickinson and James Russell Lowell.

Her gravestone is difficult to read, but contains lines from Dryden's ode 'To the Pious Memory of the accomplished young lady, Mrs. Anne Killigrew, excellent in the two sister arts of Poesy and Painting:

'Thy brother-angels at thy birth

Strung each his lyre, and tuned it high,
That all the people of the sky
Might know a poetess was born on Earth.'

Next to her grave is that of her husband Richard: she married him when she was aged thirty and they went to live on Deer Island on the Merrimack River between Amesbury and Newburyport. Their former residence is now the only structure on the island.

Ethel Parton (with a long footnote on her father Q. K. Philander Doesticks) in Newburyport, Massachusetts: Literary New England #3

Ethel Parton was a writer born on 1 December 1862 in New York. Her father was Mortimer Thomson, who wrote bizarre works under the pseudonym Q. K. Philander Doesticks.* Her grandmother was Sara Payson Willis Parton, who didn't write bizarre material, although she sometimes wrote very controversial stuff under the pseudonym Fanny Fern. On the death of Ethel's mother Ethel lived with Fanny and her third husband, the biographer and editor James Parton (1822—91). Fanny died in 1872, James unofficially adopted Ethel and four years later married Ellen Willis Eldrege, Fanny's daughter by her first marriage, which was to Charles Eldrege.

Ethel later changed her name to Parton. She went on to publish poems and stories, and at the age of seventy wrote a series of historical children's books known as the 'Newburyport Chronicles', which were set in the 19th century. She died on 27 February 1944, and is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Newburyport.

* Two examples of his work are the novels linked here: The Witches of New York (1859), and (along with, er, Knight Russ Ockside (Edward Fitch Underhill)), The History and Records of the Elephant Club (1857). The entire Preface of the latter book reads: 'This book has been written by the Authors, and printed by the Publishers, in the hope that it may be purchased by the Public. If it proves to be a failure, the responsibility must rest with the People who don't buy it.' Below I paste the opening paragraph of that novel:

'There were no two horses to be seen winding along the base of a precipitous hill; and there were no dark-looking riders on those horses which were not to be seen; and it wasn't at the close of a dusky autumn evening; and the setting sun didn't gild, with his departing rays, the steep summit of the mountain tops; and the gloomy cry of the owl was not to be heard from the depths of a neighboring forest — first, because there wasn't any neighboring forest, and, second, because the owl was in better business, having, some hours before, gone to bed, it now being broad daylight. The mountain tops, the lofty summits, the inaccessible precipices, the precipitous descents, the descending inaccessibilities, and the usual quantity of insurmountable landscape, which forms the stereotyped opening to popular romances, is here omitted by particular request.'

William Lloyd Garrison in Newburyport, Massachusetts

'IN THIS HOUSE WAS BORN

DECEMBER 10, 1805

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
---------------------------------------------

THIS TABLET ERECTED BY

THE CITY IMPROVEMENT SOCIETY

OF NEWBURYPORT

DECEMBER 10, 1905'

'HISTORIC SITE IN JOURNALISM

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON

BORN HERE IN 1805, FOUNDED THE LIBERATOR, ANTISLAVERY JOURNAL, JANUARY 1, 1831, AND DECLARED: "I AM IN EARNEST. I WILL NOT EQUIVOCATE. I WILL NOT EXCUSE. I WILL NOT RETREAT A SINGLE INCH. AND I WILL BE HEARD."

MARKED THIS 24TH DAY OF JUNE 1980 BY
THE SOCIETY OF

PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS

SIGMA DELTA CHI'

The imposing statue of William Lloyd Garrison stands in Brown Square.

There are two information panels to the rear, of which the one to the left of the statue reads:

'William Lloyd Garrison was born in 1805 on School Street in Newburyport. His family experienced deep poverty after his sailor father, Abijah Garrison, deserted them in 1808, At age five, Garrison sold candy on the streets and begged for food at the houses of the wealthy, and then worked making shoes and cabinets as a boy. Garrison's mother, Fanny, moved to Lynn and other cities looking for work, while Garrison grew up in Newburyport living with friends. She died in 1823 when he was 17. At age 12 Garrison became an apprentice at The Newburyport Herald. He was almost entirely self-taught, learning reading and writing plus the business of printing and journalism, and was soon promoted to foreman. At 20, he established his own newspaper called Newburyport Free Press. His zeal for reform antagonized his fellow citizens and the newspaper failed. Five year later, he established his long-running anti-slavery newpaper The Liberator in Boston.

'In 1830 Garrison returned to Newburyport to make an abolitionist speech at the Congregational Church on Brown Square. Many strongly disapproved, and the congregation refused to allow him back for his next scheduled address. In 1836, the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society tried in 1837 to hold an anti-slavery convention in a garden off of Brown Square, a mob broke up the meeting, beating tin pans, blowing horns, cutting the buttons off the coat of one of speakers [sic], and throwing rotten eggs and sticks.

'Although several residents participated in the Undergound Railroad, much of Newburyport was conservative and not supportive of Garrison or the Abolitionists during the pre-war period. In 1859, Representative Spofford of Newburyport spoke out against abolitionists' 'constant and useless agitation of the slavery question'. After the Civil War, however, Garrison was generally hailed as a prophet in the North. In 1893, fourteen years after his death in 1879, Newburyport erected a bronze statue honoring him here in Brown Square.'

The information panel on the righthand side of the statue states:

'William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879) was a prominent spokesman for the American Abolition Movement, forcefully advocating for the unconditional eradication of slavery. Garrison also strongly supported women's equality and suffrage (a position which split him from many fellow Abolitionists), and denounced discrimination, alcohol, and New England churches for not taking a strong stand against slavery.

'Garrison's national reputation as a radical began in 1829, when he publicly challenged the wealthy Newburyport merchant Francis Todd as a "highway robber and murderer", and wrote that his captain Nicholas Brown should be "sentenced to solitary confinement for life" for shipping about 80 slaves chained below deck. Garrison was charged with libel and jailed for 44 days.

'In 1831, Garrison founded the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator. Although he barely made a living, he published the paper for more than three decades, and founded the New England, Massachusetts, and American Anti-Slavery Societies. Harsh, brilliant, militant, and articulate, Garrison thrived on controversy over one of the most crucial moral issues in American history. He characterized the American Constitution as a "covenant with death" and an "agreement with hell" for its partial embrace of slavery, and publicly burned a copy in 1854. Far ahead of most white Americans, Garrison rode in segregated rail cars with his African American associates. He also helped to launch the career of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1841, although he later split with Douglass.

'Garrison eventually embraced the Civil War, although it shattered his utopian principles of pacifism, non-violence, and opposition to voting, as well as his previous advocacy of separatism from the southern states. Today, Garrison is recognized as a prophetic American hero who was central to the transformation of public opinion that ultimately lead [sic] to the freeing of the slaves in the United States.'