e-Newsletter | January 7, 2022
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Reminder: The "98 High" e-Newsletter will now be distributed every two weeks. Look for the next edition on Friday, January, 21, 2022. |
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Museum of Old Newbury's Executive Director Bethany Groff Dorau with the Angel Gabriel. |
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Angel Gabriel Weathervane Comes Home
In December, some of you likely watched with interest as the Angel Gabriel weathervane from the People's United Methodist Church on Purchase Street went up for bid at the John McInnis Americana Auction in Amesbury.
This vane is a reproduction, made in 1983 by Newbury coppersmith Gene Palumbo, to replace the original made in 1840, now at the Smithsonian. This earlier vane was the model for a painting by Lucille Chabot that became the 5-cent stamp in 1965. The reproduction graced the church for more than 30 years and was consigned directly from the church.
The Museum of Old Newbury did not bid on this item, but we watched it with interest. It sold for more than twice its estimate. Imagine our surprise when the buyer called to say that he would like to return it to the community by giving it to the care of the Museum of Old Newbury!
We have finalized a long-term agreement, and the Angel Gabriel is here awaiting evaluation and placement. It has already become a staff favorite.
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A courtesy image from the Boston Globe of Lucille Chabot with the Angel Gabriel painting and a close-up of the image. |
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The story of the stamp and its artist is interesting in itself.
Lucille Chabot, the artist, was born in Lawrence in 1908 to Louie and Minnie (Duford) Chabot, French Canadian immigrants to Massachusetts. She attended the Worcester Art Museum School of Art in 1931 and also studied at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.
During the Depression, Lucille worked for $35 a week for the Index of American Design, a part of the Federal Arts Project and funded by the Works Progress Administration. It sought to record American folk art and industrial design from the 1700s to 1900. A number of her illustrations can be seen in the National Gallery of Art. The photo-realistic watercolor and pencil drawings done for the Index were meant to record the objects in a way that captured their “essential character.”
Chabot painted the weathervane in the late 1930s, possibly in 1936 when the newspaper reports it being repaired. Fast forward to 1965 and, unbeknownst to the artist, the US Post Office selected her painting as the model for its Christmas stamp. Chabot was working in the art department at Raytheon when a co-worker read about the stamp and alerted her. Controversy about the stamp’s depiction of the angel ensued.
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1965 Holiday Stamp issued by the U.S. Post Office using Chabot's Angel Gabriel. (Courtesy image.) |
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Perhaps you have never considered the gender of angels, dear reader. According to Catholic.com, angels have no gender, because they have no physical body, therefore they cannot be accurately represented in any physical form. So, you may think that it would not matter that Chabot’s rendering of the Angel Gabriel seemed to the viewing public to lean towards the feminine. You would be wrong. The ensuing kerfuffle earned the Angel Gabriel stamp its place amongst the 11 Most Controversial Stamps in U.S. History (according to the History Channel), who noted wryly that the post office “didn’t reckon on critics who’d attack the stamp for portraying a bosomy angel, even though Gabriel was male.”
Newspapers had a field day, with headlines such as, “Post Office Says Stamps No Bust, But Gabriel Has One” and “Yule Stamp Throws Curve at P.O.” One article chortled, “A postal inspection shows that it will be Gabrielle — not Gabriel — who will be blowing the trumpet on this year’s Christmas postage stamps.”
So scandalous was the curvature of the angel that angry letters were written to the Postmaster General, who sent an investigator to Newburyport with binoculars. The investigator’s report noted dryly that “it can be observed that the questioned section of the design has a very definite protrusion.” In other words, Chabot had faithfully recreated the image of the original weathervane. When interviewed about the issue, the artist was amused. “I just sat tight and chuckled to myself,” she said in an interview with The Boston Globe. “I thought it would be fun to wait the controversy out.”
In the end, theologians saved the day, with the Phoenix Arizona Republic reporting, “A biblical expert at the Catholic University of America, the Rev. Louis Hartman, explained the bulge this way: Theologians tend to use anthropomorphism in describing God and the angels. In other words, they refer to these figures in masculine terms. But it has been traditional for religious artists to picture the angel with an effeminate and female aura, substance or form, although no one knows why.”
Lucille Chabot died in 2005, and even after four decades, her Boston Globe obituary commented on the controversy, noting that there was “some comment about the angel’s feminine anatomy.”
“Never fear,” said the National Gallery of Art, in a press release. “Theologians were able to reassure those concerned that angels are genderless, and as such, could be depicted as masculine or feminine at the artist’s discretion.”
Another bit of history surfaced in our research on this piece. The original Angel Gabriel was not even a Methodist. According to a 1932 letter to the Newburyport News by Susan Pike of 47 Purchase Street, the angel originally “graced the spire of the Universalist Church on Middle Street.” After the church closed, the angel came into the possession of one Moses Jackman, whose widow gave it to the Methodist Church. Pike asks the readers to remember its original home, since she had attended the Universalist Church, and the weathervane, visible from her windows, ‘brings me many memories of that happy past.’”
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PS: Several days ago, the museum also received an envelope containing six of the original Angel Gabriel stamps, but with no return address. Angels are everywhere, and we thank you kindly! Please let us know who you are if you are so inclined.
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Woman on the MOON
Reminiscences of Two Nonagenarians...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
I tore my house apart yesterday looking for a book written by my grandmother’s sister Louise, since it is the only place I know that verifies a story I heard about a Noyes uncle being struck by lightning (he wasn’t). Silas Noyes’ hay wagon was hit by lightning and caught on fire, frightening the horses, who bolted and threw him off the wagon, killing him.
There was a lot of that sort of thing happening in those days.
The book was not shelved with my non-fiction, though it is, in a way, a history book. It was not with memoirs, though it is filled with memories. It was not with fiction, though there are some flights of fancy. Not architecture, not farming. I clearly need a better library organization system.
In the end, with stacks of excavated books teetering dangerously all over the house, I found the book, lined up neatly with cookbooks. Sometimes I try to figure out what I was thinking, and I despair.
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Aunt Louise Curtis (Poore) Muzrall, circa 1931. |
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The book is a richly illustrated 131-page spiral-bound masterpiece in some terrible mid-90s font. It is entitled Memoirs of Louise Curtis (Poore) Muzrall, Fall 2009 (note to self: shelve with memoirs, you dolt). Aunt Louise, born in 1918, was 91 when she wrote it, so don’t tell me you can’t write a book.
Aunt Louise was one of the ones who got away (from West Newbury). She married her brother-in-law, Arthur Muzrall, in 1942, and they moved to Norwell, where she lived for the rest of her very long life. I remember her as a veiled threat when I was a very young child living in Canada reluctantly writing thank-you cards. Aunt Louise had been a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, I was told. Your printing had better be magnificent. Later, when she would come back to the house in West Newbury to visit her sisters, she was joyful and kind, always laughing with Aunt Emily, her best friend and little sister.
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Perhaps it was because she went away that the house in West Newbury, and her early life there, took on such importance to Aunt Louise. She spent much of her retirement working on our family genealogy with her niece, Sue Follansbee, and then, in her 90s, as her siblings passed away one by one, she sat down with Aunt Emily and Cousin Sue and wrote down everything she remembered from what she calls “way back when.” |
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Published in 1879, this book has become a staple for understanding domestic life in New England. It is a compendium of family memories from Sarah (Smith) Emery, and other relatives, collected by Sarah Anna Emery. Read the book here.
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In Newburyport, Sarah (Smith) Emery was also in her 90s when she told her stories of “Ye Olden Time” to her daughter, Sarah Anna Emery, who collected them as Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian. She died in 1879, age 92, the same year the book was published.
Louise Curtis Poore and Sarah (Smith) Emery were born 131 years and less than four miles apart. Emery was born on Crane Neck Street in West Newbury in a cluster of houses owned by the Smith and Little families.
Aunt Louise was born on Garden Street in a cluster of houses owned by the Poore family.
Aunt Louise and Sarah (Smith) Emery are first cousins, thrice removed. Both women were moved to tell stories of a world they knew was dying.
Think of it – pull the thread that thrums between these two women and you are zipped right back to just after the American Revolution. Except, of course, many of you have read Emery, but none of you, I wager, have read Aunt Louise.
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It is remarkable to me how many things remain unchanged, over a century apart, in the memories of these West Newbury women.
From Aunt Louise, “When it was dry, (my father) used the hay rake to gather the hay into windrows. He and my brothers hitched up both horses to the big hay wagon. One would stay in the wagon and spread the hay that the others would pitch up…this was hot and sweaty work. If it looked like rain, the hay was pitched into haycocks. Once in a while, Emily and I would fill a tin pail in which we added cream of tartar and sugar. This we took to the hay workers.”
From Emery: “The last load pitched in the hay mow and the last haycock turned up, my father and the hired man joined us in the cool back room where bowls of milk and bread were ready for those who wished the refreshment.”
Emery: “Dinner was on the table punctually at twelve o’clock. In the hot weather we usually had boiled salted meat and vegetables…and a custard or pudding.”
Aunt Louise: “Our main meal was always at noontime. We called this meal dinner, usually potatoes and some vegetables…sometimes chicken. We usually had dessert though.”
Aunt Louise: “Each fall my father banked the house. He piled dirt all around the base of the house to keep as much cold out as possible.”
Emery: “The house was banked up; everything without and within made tight and trim to defy as much as possible the approach of old Boreas.”
They both had measles, not unusual in the days before vaccines, both gathered eggs and drank water from a dipper in a pail and rode in a sleigh to church on Sunday. Both recalled with great fondness their relationships with relatives who connected them even further back in time.
There is something about re-reading these memoirs that made me feel a bit melancholy here at the start of this new year. Something about how the world of Aunt Louise’s childhood had changed so little for so long, but we have accelerated the pace of change to the point where it seems impossible to keep up.
No, that’s not it, or that’s not the heart of it, anyway. I’m struck by how, over the last two years, we have made decades of increasing ageism a point of national pride. We have shrugged off pandemic deaths when they happen to older people, as if those lives are expendable, as if vulnerable people are less worthy of care, not more. We have written miles of copy about young victims and consigned the richness of a long life to a statistic.
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The author's great-aunt Emily Noyes Poore and her big sister Louise share a secret in 2002. |
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Aunt Louise lived to 99, dying in 2017. Aunt Emily died at 96. They connect us to nearly two centuries of history and experience. |
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Sarah Anna Emery, just by listening to her older relatives and writing down what they remembered, connects us to the 18th century and before. The world, or at least this corner of it, is an infinitely richer place because of them. It’s not all butter-churning and halcyon summer days, either. Louise lost her mother when she was fifteen, and so her memories are tinged with grief. But she ends her book with an exhortation that I hereby pass on to you in this new year.
“Thus ends this account of my memories…mistakes and all.
Now go and make notes for your book.”
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View of the Poore Farm from the top of the barn, taken when Aunt Louise was a teenager. Note the outhouse, in use until the 1950s (indoor plumbing arrived in 1951). |
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Calendars 20% Off!
Help us find homes for the last of the 2022 "It Could Be Worse" calendars!
Just $14 for members, $16 for non members.
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Annual Fund 2021 invites you to take a peek inside the museum.
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Something is Always Cooking at the Museum
Said to have been used by Martha Washington, we dive deep into our records with Daughters of the American Revolution's Mrs. S.C. Barnes' circa 1912 recipe.
Famous Mincemeat
2 pounds beef
2 pounds currants
2 pounds raisins
1 pound citron
2 pounds beef suet
1 1/2 pounds candied lemon peel
4 pounds apples
2 pounds Sultana raisins
2 pounds sugar
2 nutmegs, grated
4 ounces cloves
2 ounces cinnamon
4 ounces mace
1 teaspoon salt
2 lemons, 2 oranges and the juice and rind of both
Simmer meat until tender. When cold, chop fine. Stone the raisins, shred the citron, pare and chop the apples and chop the suet into fine mix, then add the juices and rinds of lemons and oranges. Add all other ingredients and pack in a stone jar. Cover tight and keep cool.
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Learn about upcoming programs, register, find Zoom links and catch up on previous presentations here. All of our virtual programs are free, however donations are gratefully accepted to help defray speaker fees.
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Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
Online Zoom Event
In this program, featuring Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk with Me: A Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer, she will delve deep into the issues with which civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer wrestled—discrimination, poverty and disenfranchisement. She will share how Fannie's mission and life's work lives on in voting rights and registration campaigns, anti- racism and Black Lives Matter marches, the #MeToo movement, anti-poverty activism and justice reform.
This is a virtual event. Zoom link will be sent the day before.
Please click here to register.
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Secure the Shadow: Victorian Spirit & Post Mortem Photography
Tuesday, January 18, 2022 | 7:00 p.m.
CHANGED: Online Zoom Event | Click here to join.
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Early photography had a magical quality, even for those who understood the science behind it. For many in the 19th century, the relationship between science and the supernatural was unclear.
Sympathetic photographers and charlatans set up a brisk business “securing the shadow,” memorializing deceased loved ones, and, for the right price, revealing their ethereal presence still hovering around the living.
Local historian and Executive Director of the Museum of Old Newbury, Bethany Groff Dorau, takes attendees on an illustrated exploration of Victorian photography from beyond the grave.
Presented in partnership with the Newburyport Public Library. As of January 7, 2022 this is an online Zoom event. Click here to join.
No registration required.
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Have you played the December Quiz for "Yeat Yeat, Don't Tell Me!" Yet?
This month's "Yeat Yeat, Don't Tell Me!" quiz is now available. Skip right to the questions by typing joinmyquiz.com/pro into your browser, then enter the code 15316873 to join.
NOTE: this is a timed quiz, so read the questions and get your choice made as quickly as possible.
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Puzzle Me This...
Milestone 35 is located on Orchard Street and was carved by stone carver John Mullicken, circa 1735. Mullicken was one of a family of stone carvers from Bradford who learned their craft from John Hartshorn. They became the primary stone carvers in the Merrimack Valley.
The rosettes in each corner of the milestone are typical of the Mullickens' work. “B 35” represents Boston thirty-five miles.
(Photo credit: Dan Fionte.)
Click on image to begin.
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Correction
The following paragraph concerning Elizabeth Gerrish's donation of the Center Congregational Church Clock dedicated it to her parents was inadvertently deleted from last week's "Once Upon a Time" story by guest contributor, Jack Santos.
That clock, to this date, is referred to as “Old Betsy.” It is said that besides memorializing her parents, Elizabeth wanted to be able to see the clock and hear it chime from her bedroom in Rings Island – true to this day.
To read the article in its entirety, click here.
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During this difficult period of COVID-19, we rely on your support more than ever. We continue to develop new, online programs for you to enjoy and keep us connected and look forward to in-person events as protocols for safety loosen. We hope, if you are able, that you will consider a donation to the museum. Thank you for your continued support.
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Museum of Old Newbury
98 High Street
Newburyport, MA 01950
978-462-2681
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