e-Newsletter | April 1, 2022
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April Events - Click on title to register |
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Thursday, April 7, 2022, 7:00 PM - In-person at The Governor's Academy, Byfield
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Thursday, April 28, 2022, 7:00 PM - In person at the Museum of Old Newbury
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Are you passionate about local history? And comfortable speaking to small groups? We are looking for additional docents to give tours at the museum once the doors open on June 2. We'll be meeting early next week and in the coming months. Please contact the office to find out more - call Kristen at 978-462-2681 or email kristen@newburyhistory.org.
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Black Barbers of Newburyport |
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Annabelle Svahn conducted this research as an independent project during her school’s January term. She is from Newbury and is currently a sophomore majoring in history at Williams College. This project was driven by her desire to improve her historical research skills, learn more local history, and unearth new stories about the past. She’s deeply passionate about the importance of studying history and hopes to continue to work on projects like this in the future.
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On April 22nd, 1889, an obituary for John C. H. Young appeared on the last page of the Newburyport Daily News alongside discussions of prohibitionists and costs of the Massachusetts militia. Young’s obituary, easy to have been missed among the local news, revealed he played an important role in the community. He was described as “a man who had many friends and always kept them.” Young was a Black barber born in Newburyport in 1820. He lived in the city all his life, kept a small shop, and had a large family. The records of Young’s life stand out from other barbers in town and his importance can be seen in the details of his life, his trade, and the kind of community he built.
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John C. H. Young’s newspaper advertisement. |
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The history of Black barbers reflects the larger complexities of African American history. This January I interned with Bethany Dorau at the MOON to research Black barbers in Newburyport. The idea came about after Bethany had spoken to Eric Eramo at Banter Barber & Clothier, a new barber shop in town.
To learn more about barbers I interviewed Eric as well as Will Nelson, another barber at Banter. The interview enabled me to sense the atmosphere of barber shops today and how that atmosphere compares to earlier shops. Eric stated the goal of his shop was to create a “communal” atmosphere and a “trusting community.” Listening to Eric’s dedication to creating such a welcoming space made me wonder if past barbers had also tried to create this comradeship.
Will discussed the unique relationship barbers have with their clients and how much he has learned talking to people with many different life experiences. He grew up going with his father to barbershops every Saturday where he observed that the experience was about more than hair. It was also about just “being in the barbershop.” Will also discussed his experience as a Black barber. Before coming to Newburyport, he had apprehension about his barber skills. There was an “invisible wall” where he feared he would be perceived as not being able to cut a variety of hair types. However, he hasn’t felt that “wall” and enjoys being able to connect with others through an action so simple as a haircut. He believes his personal conversations allow for people to learn from one another and deconstruct their previous misconceptions in a comforting environment.
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Will Nelson at work today at Banter Barber & Clothier on State Street, Newburyport. Photo courtesy of Mark Spooner Photography. |
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Modern barbering is as important to the community as it was historically. Since the early 19th century, local newspapers frequently advertised barber shops and hair products. Barbering was one of the few skilled professions that was open to Black men in the 19th century. The profession had a rich community and good barbers were in high demand. During the 19th century seven Black barbers lived and worked in Newburyport: John C. H. Young, Andrew Raymond, Abel Cummings, John Osborn, James S. S. Ambush, James E. Ambush, and Castor Bean.
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Details on some of the Black barbers identified as living in Newburyport. |
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The only information found about these barbers exists in archival records. With the help of Sharon Spieldenner, Newburyport Public Library archivist, I was able to search through a variety of town records to reconstruct their families, residences, and sometimes their work addresses. John C. H. Young, the inspiration for this project, was born in Newburyport in 1820. In 1849, he lived at Elbow Lane (Elbow Alley). Today, the street would be between Plum Island Coffee Roasters (formerly Soufflés) and the parking lot of the Daily News of Newburyport. Then, it was a small but busy center of the Black community. Young died in 1889 at an almshouse and was buried in Old Hill Burying Ground. Despite the unfortunate end to his life, his tombstone reads that it was erected by his friends, a testament to his character and place within the community. While more details about Young’s life remain unknown, his story can be contextualized with the history of Black barbers in 19th century American society.
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Photo of the location of John C. H. Young’s barber shop; notice the barber poles on the building on the left side of the street. "Merrimac St. foot of Unicorn St." Photograph. [ca. 1840–1987]. Museum of Old Newbury Snow Collection.
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Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist, once asked, “To shave half a dozen faces in the morning and sleep or play the guitar in the afternoon–all this may be easy, but it is noble, is it manly, and does it elevate us?” Historically, the answer to this question has been twofold. The profession had longstanding symbolic links to power and servitude. In enslavement, barbering was just one of many skilled jobs forced to be learned. For free Black men, many of whom had learned the trade while enslaved, being a barber offered economic mobility. Their economic freedom came at the bequest of continuing to serve white men. Black barbers subverted yet were controlled by the strict racial relations of their world.
The difficulties Black barbers in Newburyport faced cannot always be found in census records or city directories. Parsing through newspaper advertisements and local history revealed that they lived in a city with conflicting views on slavery and emancipation. An ad for Osborn’s shop appeared beside an ad for Charles Sumner’s “Barbarism of Slavery” Pamphlet. These ads reveal what Newburyport’s complicated relationship with slavery looked like in everyday life.
Despite the anti-slavery sentiments in town, anti-abolitionism also populated the Newburyport political sphere. Samuel F. B. Morse, a notable wealthy anti-abolitionist, founded two societies in 1861 to “uphold the right and justice of slaveholding.” While Newburyport was a northern city, and generally viewed pro-abolitionist, that view cannot be completely assumed nor entirely praised. Newburyport’s complicated relationship with slavery must be understood to picture the life of free-Black barbers. They lived in a community that both debated the legitimacy of their citizenship and supported the founding ideals of liberty and freedom.
Black barbers operated in a unique place in 19th century American society. As a profession rooted in servitude it became symbolic and emblematic of US race relations. Though difficult to generalize about their lives, their individual stories reveal a forgotten part of Newburyport’s history. Many of the locations of former barber shops exist no more, but they once provided important services to the community. They were communal social spaces where friendships were made, and gossip exchanged. The barbers lived and worked in this divided community, in a profession that continued to subvert and yet exploit the preconceived notions of Black servitude.
Although Newburyport looks far different than it did during the time of John Young, Eric and Will have shown me that barbers still hold the same values and desire for community while aspiring to be inclusive and accepting. Reflecting on this part of Newburyport’s history enables us to be more aware of the diverse community we live in.
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In Memory of Ruth Yesair (1931-2022) |
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On behalf of the museum, we want to extend our sympathy to the family and friends of long-time member and supporter Ruth Yesair. Ruth was a former board member and a stalwart member of the Collections Committee. In addition, she volunteered in a number of capacities over the years including events and projects ranging from the garden tour and the Cushing House Cooks to fundraising events for the collections. In 1985, Ruth was responsible for a book of text and photographs, Images from the Past, celebrating Newbury's 350th anniversary. In 2018, the museum dedicated its book, Images of America, Newbury, to Ruth in recognition of her contributions to local history.
One of our board members who also served on the board with Ruth recalls, "Ruth was wonderful and helped wherever she could. She was warm and welcoming and put her whole effort into everything she did." Her obituary can be read at the Daily News.
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Woman on the Moon
...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
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Chasing Duncan
I was having lunch at the Grog recently, when my companion pointed to the portrait of a sea captain that hangs over the fireplace. “Who do you think that is?” she said, taking in the white beard, the nautical cap, the sparkling eyes. “That be Duncan Chase,” I said in my best fake pirate voice. “Ooh,” she said, trailing off…” Captain Chase.”
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Duncan Chase, painting by Jim Mickelson, courtesy of The Grog restaurant. |
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Well sort of, though he answered to Colonel. I told her what I knew of the man – he was drunk all the time, and he was tall and loud. He told people he spent the winter in Cal-E-Fornia. He was a panhandler, meowing loudly at tourists and friends alike, usually wearing a jaunty scarf around his neck. After he died, he was given a plot and a headstone at Old Hill by kind Newburyporters.
My friend had questions. Was he born in Newburyport? Was he from the old Newbury Chase family? Where did he sleep? Why did he drink? Was he a veteran?
History, or historians at least, abhor a vacuum, and so I began to fill in the gaps. Maybe he was once in the Navy, I said. Seems the right age for World War II or Korea. He was probably the black sheep of an old Newbury family, returning from the war with a legacy of trauma and…hold the phone. I reeled it in. I had veered dangerously away from facts, or even rumor or memory. “I’ll see what I can find,” I said, and then forgot all about it until a few days later, when I ran into his headstone while looking for someone else. That’s two Duncan Chase sightings. And then I was looking up Chase & Shawmut online and up popped this picture of Duncan. That’s three. I can take a hint.
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Duncan Chase, photo by Robert Atwater, mybigphatphotographs.com |
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I know right away that this was a picture of Duncan Chase passed out in a doorway, a bottle of whiskey in a paper bag next to him. I even thought I knew which doorway. I remember him there. I remember his signature call to passers-by, “I’m a cool, cool cat from NEW YORK CITY”. I contacted the photographer to ask permission to use the image. He kindly agreed.
And then it started to bother me – not the image, which was an accurate portrait of the man, but my lack of concern about it, my willingness to share it without context. To me, Duncan Chase was not a man worthy of my professional due diligence, but a caricature, a symbol of the town drunk, some charming relic of bygone old Newburyport who had become, in memory, one-dimensional.
And then I did the math. Duncan Chase and I never met. He died in 1980, when I was six years old and living in Canada. I knew him only from the stories I had been told. Maybe his ghost was in that doorway when I was hanging out at Inn Street, but the flesh and blood was long gone.
So I began at the end and worked my way back. I found his death record, then his birth record, then his parents’, then, voila, his paternal great-grandmother, Jane Merrill, already in my family tree. With a satisfying click, I added Duncan to my tree, watched his ancestors and mine match up and dance around. He settles in as my sixth cousin, once removed – one more piece of information that is about me, not him, really, but it gives me a place to start.
Duncan Howard Chase was born on Chestnut Street in Groveland on October 19, 1919, the youngest of four children born to Raymond Chase and Charlotte (Buxton) Chase. Duncan’s parents met in Haverhill and married young – Charlotte was just 16, Raymond was 22, and though both could read and write, neither had a high school education. Duncan’s father Raymond worked at a Haverhill shoe findings shop. At some point between 1930 and 1935, Charlotte Chase left her husband and moved to Newburyport with teenage Duncan, who had left school after 5th grade. They lived in a small apartment on Washington Street, then another apartment on Fair Street. She is listed as a sewer, working for the WPA, then a dressmaker, later a “practical nurse”, or uncertified health aide. It is possible she chose to come to Newburyport because her brother Myron Buxton was already here, listed in the 1931 directory as living on Kent Street with their mother. By 1937, Duncan Chase’s mother, uncle Myron and grandmother, Lenora, were living at 2 Orange Street, and it was this address that Duncan gave the police when, in 1939, he was apprehended in Florida for forgery, check larceny, and stealing a car from a Newburyport shoe factory foreman. He spent two months in jail, got out, worked as a laborer for Oscar Traister for about a year while stealing more checks, and then took off with another car.
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Newburyport Daily News, Thursday, December 14th, 1939 |
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This was the end of the line for Duncan’s family. His mother informed the newspaper in October 1941 that Duncan Chase was no longer at 2 Orange Street. When he went before a Salem judge in 1942, he promised to join the army “if he can be accepted.” He had nowhere else to go. The judge was encouraging. “You might make a record for yourself in the army. You might get the Distinguished Service Cross.”
Duncan Chase never entered the army. Two years later, he was sentenced to two years in prison for grabbing a woman’s purse on Bartlett Mall. In 1946, when Chase was 27 years old, he was arrested for breaking into his mother’s house on Orange Street and stealing his brother’s knife and shoes. It was the first time the record cited alcohol as a contributing factor.
In 1949, Duncan Chase and Hilda Olsen Carpenter were married in New London, New Hampshire. She gave her occupation as waitress, his as handyman. It was his first marriage, her second, and was over within a year. The next two decades were a slow slide into homelessness and addiction, and Duncan was repeatedly arrested for drunkenness and petty theft, unable to make bail, and veering between prison, locked hospital wards, and the streets of Newburyport and Haverhill.
By the time I was born in 1974, Duncan Chase had become one of the notable “characters” of Newburyport. In a nostalgic Boston Globe article, Jeremiah Murphy opined that “Old Newburyport is my kind of city,” while “Duncan Chase is still hanging around Market Square, except for an occasional vacation at the expense of the county. Almost every town has a Duncan Chase.”
Recently, the number of people living on the streets in American cities has sparked a heated, and recurring, debate. Some argue that unhoused people with addictions and mental and physical challenges should be placed in guardianships, effectively ending their rights to self-determination and legal adulthood. It is a thorny issue, with civil rights advocates arguing that the right to live on the fringes of society, to be weird, and make mistakes, and yes, even to drink too much and sleep on the ground if one chooses, should be protected. It is a slippery slope, they say, and once a person is placed in guardianship, it is extremely difficult to get back out. For others, the human rights issue is that those who most need help are least able to get it, and so someone else must advocate for them.
I do not have the answer. I could convincingly argue both sides of this issue. As for Duncan Chase. I do not know why he drank – he may not have known himself. Most people who met him have a story, and most of these stories are about how funny and charming and interesting he was. But there are others. He was frightening when he was angry. He would destroy things – break store windows and throw bottles to get locked up so he could have a place to sleep. Sometimes when the weight of his life settled in on him, he sobbed inconsolably. Some wish that there had been more intervention in his case. Others feel that he lived exactly as he chose and find nobility in that.
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Duncan Chase is buried at Old Hill Burying Ground, the plot and stone paid for by his friends. |
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What I believe is that everyone, living or dead, deserves to have the truth told about them, so far as we are able, and that Duncan Chase, like all of us, is a complicated person, not just a picturesque symbol of old Newburyport, but not just a figure of pity either. The next time I look at a picture of him, all blue eyes and white beard, over the fireplace at The Grog, I will tell a truer version of his story, including the truth of the untrue parts. He was not from New York. He did not spend the winters in California. But he was a cool, cool cat.
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Mementos of War: Civil War Captain William White Dorr Remembered
Thursday, April 7, 2022, 7:00 PM - In-person at The Governor's Academy, Byfield
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An intriguing cache of letters and other memorabilia associated with a Union soldier in the American Civil War was discovered 25 years ago in an archival storage room at The Governor's Academy. They and other Civil War-era artifacts will be publicly displayed for the first time in an in-person program co-sponsored by the Museum of Old Newbury and The Governor's Academy.
The collection includes personal and military keepsakes, battlefield sketches, botanical mementos, letters, images, and more. Speakers will include Charles E. Dorr and Everett "Brownie Carson, two descendents of Captain Dorr's siblings; Bill Quigley, historian, teacher and author of a book on Captain Dorr; and Sharon Slater, archivist at The Governor's Academy. A light reception will follow. Free to the public, registration required. In person at the Governor's Academy.
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The Romance of Fine Linen - a Fashion Night Out with Lois Valeo
Thursday, April 28, 2022, 7:00 PM - In person at the Museum of Old Newbury
Save the date for another in the popular series by fashion historian Lois Valeo. She'll be presenting a richly illustrated talk on linens and showing you some of the museum's extensive collection.
The appeal of soft-spoken fabrics has more to do with the soul than with use or style....if linens speak to you on a very personal level and you live your life surrounded with the quiet elegance of fine fabrics….you will enjoy this illustrated lecture accompanied by many unique museum pieces of early linen aprons, handkerchiefs, bedding, towels, pockets, collars, cuffs, caps and more!
Lois Valeo is a retired Adjunct Professor of Fashion History and a member of the Museum of Old Newbury Board of Directors; at the museum, she cares for the its extensive dress and accessory collection. This is her eighth Fashion Night Out Talk.
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Something is Always Cooking at the Museum |
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Easy Appetizer
Editor's note: This recipe comes from the Cushing House Cookbook, contributed by Ruth Yesair . My aunt Jeanne used to make this in San Francisco in the 1970s (always serving it on soft dark pumpernickel). I also once read that it was a favorite in the Nixon White House. Enjoy!
8 oz. softened cream cheese
1 tablespoon capers
Sliced smoked salmon
Pumpernickel (optional)
Mix cream cheese and capers. Form into log. Wrap slices of smoked salmon around log and chill. Cut to desired thickness. Serve with toothpicks. - Ruth Yesair
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Click on image above to play the puzzle |
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"First Congregational Church, West Newbury, 1924"
Watercolor on paper
Cornelia Perrin Stone (1855-1940)
Museum of Old Newbury collections
Cornelia Stone painted numerous local scenes in Old Newbury. She was the youngest of three daughters born to Eben and Harriet Perrin Stone. A well known watercolor artist, she exhibited frequently at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts for the Philadelphia Watercolor Club during the early part of the 20th century. She is buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Click here to do the puzzle.
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Museum e-Newsletter made possible through the
generosity of our sponsors:
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Museum of Old Newbury
98 High Street
Newburyport, MA 01950
978-462-2681
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