Member-only Event - From Port to Port - a Portsmouth Summer Sojourn

Thursday, August 17, 9am - 3:30 pm,

Explore the connections between Portsmouth and Newburyport - two early American ports linked by family, history, and tragedy.

Join the Museum of Old Newbury for a day-long exploration of the artistic, familial, and maritime links between Newburyport and Portsmouth. Stops will include the Cushing House, a rare, behind-the-scenes visit to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard cemetery and museum, and private tours of the Portsmouth Atheneum, and the 1763 Moffatt-Ladd House & Garden.

$50 per person, Museum of Old Newbury members only. Limit two tickets per member.

The Garden Tour Recap

Thank you to all who came out for the 44th Annual Garden Tour. Over 700 people toured 12 gardens over 2 days. Our biggest fundraiser was a great success, thanks to everyone who took part, whether by buying tickets, designing the booklet (thank you Kathie O'Neil!), taking photos (Bob Watts! Sally Chandler!), or the nearly 100 people who volunteered to sit in a garden.

None of this could have happened without the willingness of individuals to open their gardens to the public. Over the years, over 400 gardens have been on the tour! And so, our deepest thanks this year goes to Melinda Cheston, Kate Carr, Alice Sheridan, Tam & Phil Schwartz, Gaylee Selkirk, Daniel & Jill Sczepanski, Ron & Barbara Guertin, Lori & John Kelley, Andrea Eigerman and the Port Parks Alliance (at Atkinson Common), Paco & Linda Villalobos, and Chris Gray. We are so lucky to be the beneficiaries of your generosity.

The peonies and poppies that were in bloom two weeks ago might be fading today, but thanks to Band of Brushes, a local plein air painting group, we have a record of what the group's artists were able to capture in a brief moment outdoors. Band of Brushes has been painting for over 15 years and we always look forward to seeing their creations.

We hope to see you next year at the 45th Annual Garden Tour - June 8 & 9, 2024. Mark your calendars!

Two views of the Rowley garden. Fountain by Shelley Champion and pathway by Kris Munroe.

Poppies two ways - by Kris Munroe and Mary Ann Varoski.

A Fruit Street scene by Mary Webber and Band of Brushes coordinator, Christine Molitor Johnson, taking a break from painting at the garden on Summit Place.

Upcoming Events

Reading Frederick Douglass Together - Brown Square, Newburyport (rain location: Unitarian Church, 26 Pleasant St.), Sunday, June 25, 2023, 10:00 AM

The Museum of Old Newbury and First Religious Society Unitarian Universalist will host an in-person community reading of Frederick Douglass's impassioned 1852 speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Lend your voice to this powerful participatory event.

We will gather near the Garrison statue in Brown Square, Newburyport.  Seating is limited - please bring a chair or blanket to the reading.  

The reading will be followed by a discussion led by project scholar Doneeca Thurston, Executive Director of Lynn Museum/Lynn Arts.  

This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In case of inclement weather, the reading will happen just down the street at the Unitarian church. Registrants will be notified of any change in location.  

From Port to Port - a Portsmouth Summer Sojourn

Thursday, August 17, 9am - 3:30 pm.

(See top of newsletter)

Women on the MOON

...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

The Fall of Newburyport's Confederate Albert Pike: Part One

On June 19^th, 2020, a group of demonstrators in Washington D.C. marked Juneteenth, a commemoration of the end of slavery in America, by tearing down the only statue of a Confederate general ever erected in the nation’s capital. George Floyd had been killed three weeks before, sparking protests around the nation and across the world. And so, drenching General Albert Pike, all 11 bronze feet of him, with lighter fluid, they set him ablaze. District police watched the crowd from a distance, intervening only to extinguish the flames. An irate President Donald Trump tweeted, “the DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!” The protesters read the tweet into a megaphone and cheered as the spray-painted remains of Newburyport’s own Albert Pike smoldered in pieces on the ground.

Albert Pike’s Washington, D.C. statue was pulled down by protesters on Juneteenth, 2020. Credit: Sky News

There is a reason this is a blog and not the lead story in this newsletter. I cannot, nor would I wish to be, a dispassionate observer in the story of this hate-fueled man. But as much as I may wish otherwise, he was once an integral part of this community and my distant cousin. And so, Albert Pike, Confederate general, accused murderer and thief, author of the Confederate battle lyrics for “Dixie”, and founding member of the Ku Klux Klan, serves as a cautionary tale. He is a reminder that right here in William Lloyd Garrison’s backyard, Newburyport also bred, fed, and funded enslavers and human traffickers.

Albert Pike, c. 1865. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Albert Pike was born in Boston in 1809, the son of Benjamin Pike, a shoemaker, and Sarah (Andrews) Pike, both born and raised, as were generations before them, in Newbury(port). He was descended from dozens of Newbury's English settler families - the Coffins, Littles, Moodys, and yes, the Poores. The family moved back home from Boston when Albert was four, and after attending Newburyport schools, he tested for Harvard at age 14 and passed. This is one of the many moments in Pike’s life that was re-written later by his many admirers. A 1957 article in the Newburyport Daily News said he “entered Harvard but did not complete his course”, while a 1938 article in the News claimed that Pike was “graduated at Harvard as one of the famous class of 1829”.

Nonsense. Pike did not go to Harvard because he could not afford the tuition, which is nothing shameful, but seemed to have stoked some resentment that eventually hastened his departure from New England, and his sense that dark forces were aligned against him.

At 15, Pike became a schoolteacher, first in Gloucester and Rockport and then, in 1826, he returned to Newburyport where he decided to give himself the equivalent of a Harvard education while teaching school in Newburyport and join his class at Harvard as a junior in the fall of 1827. This plan also failed, as Harvard was not interested in admitting a self-taught Albert Pike who would pay for only the last two years of his education. And so, Albert Pike angrily abandoned Harvard and became a teacher, then principal, at the Newburyport Grammar School. He was removed by the trustees in the fall of 1828 for “unbecoming conduct” and went to Fairhaven to teach for a term.

Back in Newburyport in 1829, the year when he did not graduate from Harvard, he had a new venture. “In the course of a month I wish to open a private School in this town—if a sufficient number of Scholars be obtained before that time to warrant the undertaking—for instruction in the studies commonly taught in High Schools and Academies, the price of tuition will be five dollars per term.” 

From the Newburyport Herald, August 28, 1829.



Albert Pike taught on Pleasant Street, on Green Street, boys and girls, day and night. He learned Spanish, likely from Senor Juan de Escobar, who had a school just a few doors down on Pleasant Street. During the day he helped his father mend shoes and wrote romantic poetry. 

The “hall” where Albert Pike offered his school was the Masonic Hall on Green Street (not the present building), which foreshadowed his later leadership in the Freemasons.

Two years later, dissatisfied with the life of a private tutor, Pike decided to seek his fortune out west, travelling first to Nashville and then on to Missouri and New Mexico before settling in Arkansas where he wrote for, and then purchased the local newspaper, taught school, married an heiress, and set himself up as a self-taught lawyer. 

In 1833, before setting up his law practice, Albert Pike offered translation services in Arkansas.



He was a very successful lawyer, despite his lack of college education, and represented several Native American plaintiffs in suits against the government. And, as soon as he had the means to do so, he purchased several enslaved people, one of whom, 22-year-old Rebecca, recently transported from Alabama, ran away in 1840.  

Despite his advocacy for Native Americans, Pike was an early adopter of the unique brand of nativist, racist, anti-Catholic rhetoric that was the Know Nothing Party. He introduced the party to Arkansas, attended the national party convention in 1856, and walked out when they failed to be sufficiently strident in their support of slavery.

In 1858, as the momentum that would take the nation into war was building, Pike was one of twelve men to sign and circulate a demand to expel all free Black people from Arkansas, saying that "evil is the existence among us of a class of free colored persons". Notwithstanding, the following year, he finally got his Harvard degree for his poetry, receiving an honorary Master of Arts.

And then, on May 6 1861, Newburyport’s Albert Pike offered his allegiance and his services to the Secession Convention of Arkansas, offering his knowledge of Native American customs and language as his most valuable skill.

And this is how, that November, Pike joined the Confederate States Army as a brigadier-general, responsible for three cavalry regiments of Native Americans who had been promised their own free state if the Confederacy was victorious.

Stay tuned for Part Two of this story, as Albert Pike is accused of allowing atrocities, stealing money, abandoning his wife, and helping to spread the venomous message of the Ku Klux Klan. 

Come stand with us in Brown Square on Sunday and read the words that Frederick Douglass penned in 1852 about the ways that our nation had not lived up to its ideals. And know that as Douglass was speaking those words, Albert Pike, who had taught school across the street, listed six people, one man, one woman, two teenagers, and two children, on his "slave schedule".

1850 U.S. Federal Census, Slave Schedule. City of Little Rock, Pulaski County, Arkansas. Albert Pike household.

Limoncello Cake

2 1/2 cups flour

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 cup softened butter

1 1/2 cup sugar

3 eggs

1/2 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup limoncello

Zest and juice of 1 lemon

Gather Ingredients. Preheat Oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease and flour two 9-inch round pans and line them with parchment paper, greasing and flouring the parchment paper as well.

Combine flour, baking soda, and salt with a wire whisk and set aside.

Cream butter and sugar together. Add eggs, one at a time, to the batter while mixing thoroughly after each addition. Add buttermilk, limoncello, lemon juice and zest and mix. Fold in dry ingredients. Pour into the prepared pans and bake for 20-25 minutes in the 350 degree oven. Let cool completely before serving. -Claire Blackmore

The recipe comes from the Newbury Community Cooks cookbook - available in our online shop.

Click the image to do the puzzle

A scene from the 2023 garden tour. Painting courtesy of Michele Champion.