It's a Gorgeous Garden Party!

It's a Fabulous Fundraiser!

It's Music Mavens at the Museum!

Sunday, August 18 from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Support the Museum Intern Program while enjoying a lovely evening of music and elegant refreshments in the Cushing House Garden

Every year at the Museum of Old Newbury, we are joined by talented, hard-working young people, some for several years at a time. We receive partial funding for two interns. This year, we have six amazing students, from high-schoolers to graduate students, bringing energy and fun and baked goods to our busy office. Please consider purchasing a ticket and making a donation to support the interns at the Museum of Old Newbury, so we can keep these learning opportunities accessible to all.

Enjoy an evening of music in the Cushing House Garden with two members of the Museum of Old Newbury family, who also happen to be extraordinarily talented vocalists.

Meg Groff, best known for her sultry jazz vocals, is the daughter of executive director Bethany Groff Dorau.

Ella Suchecki , a celebrated singer/songwriter, is also the visitor services assistant at the Museum. These two rising stars will fill the evening with song, with the support of the superb Chuck Walker Trio, for one night only before Ella leaves to complete her studies at Salve Regina University.

This event is a fundraiser for the intern program at the Museum of Old Newbury. Your ticket includes delicious appetizers and desserts, one token for a signature event cocktail, wine, or fresh, local Ipswich Ale (additional beverages available), and first-floor walk-through evening tours of the 1808 National Historic Landmark Cushing House.

Early access tickets are available for members of the Museum of Old Newbury. Public tickets go on sale on August 1.

Museum of Old Newbury members: $50, non-members: $75

Rain or shine – limited seating – feel free to bring a chair.

Not able to attend but would like to make a donation? Select the donation option on the ticket page, call us at 978-462-2681, or visit our website here.

Our 2024 Museum of Old Newbury interns: Top to Bottom, Left to Right

Annabelle, Freddy, Julia, Lilly and Freddy, Sam and Noah, Lilly. What a crew!

Upcoming Museum Events

Ablaze! A Fiery Walking History of Newburyport's Famous Conflagrations

Saturday, August 3, 2024 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

Tories, Terrors, and Taverns: An Old Newbury to Old York Sojourn

Thursday, August 15, 2024, 9:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Music Mavens at the Museum: A Garden Party Fundraiser in support of the Museum Internship Program

Sunday August 18, 2024, 4:00.p.m. - 7:00 p.m.

Conference on Newburyport and the China Trade, 1844-2024

Monday, October 28, 2024 8:30- 4 p.m.

Museum of Old Newbury Guided Tours are in Full Swing!

Thursday - Sunday, 11:00am - 4:00 pm on the hour

Architectural Walking Tours: Newburyport's Fashionable Old Houses

Sundays July 21, August 11, August 18, September 8, September 22

10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.

The Mysterious Disappearance of John B. Gough: A Temperance Blog, Part IV

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

John Bartholomew Gough, from his 1880 memoir, Sunlight and Shadow or Gleanings from My Life Work, Comprising Personal Experiences and Opinions.

If you missed it, read John B. Gough Part I here and Part II here and Part III here.

Well, dear reader, over the past months, I have spent a great deal of time with the fascinating personage of Mr. John Bartholomew Gough. I have wandered down the dark alleys of Newburyport, Boston, and beyond with him, read his speeches and his memoirs, galloped up and down his family tree, perused his newspaper ads and his court records. It seems impossible that I had never heard of the man until Scott Nason dropped him into my lap a few months ago.

But, I wager none of you had heard of John B. Gough.

In his time, however, he was as famous as Charles Dickens. He was known as the Prince of the Lyceum. He amassed an international following and a fortune. When he died in 1886, the New York Times wrote that he "was probably better known in this country and in Great Britain than any other public speaker." 



Just after his death, Gough was impersonated by the famous actress Helen Potter - from the waist up, at least. Potter avoided censure by hiding her skirted lower body behind a table until the end of the show. Her other famous subjects? Abraham Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony. I'll bet you've heard of them. But John B. Gough? Fame is fickle, friends.

But for now, let us pause our musings on the vicissitudes of fame, and return to a younger John B. Gough, a rising star on the temperance stage, who has just exited Newburyport. It is May, 1845, and Gough has just managed to extort fifty bucks from young Jacob I. Danforth, who served him a drink (or two, or three) at his family's Washington Street restaurant after Gough delivered a stirring public lecture on the evils of drink, and then blabbed about it.

THAT John B. Gough looked like this...

Above - This etching, from the 1845 Autobiography, was made just before he bellied up to the Danforth bar (or didn't, depending on who you believe) in Newburyport.

Below - newspaper advertisement for Gough's first Autobiography, May 12, 1845.



Despite the kerfuffle in Newburyport, 1845 was a banner year for John B. Gough . He had just published the first of several autobiographies, this one with the catchy title An Autobiography by John B. Gough, and book sales were brisk, with ads placed in newspapers from Vermont to Georgia. After his return to Newburyport in May, Gough continued his frenetic pace on the temperance lecture circuit, with summer engagements from the top of Vermont to southern Connecticut. By mid-June, he had made 120 speeches, nearly one a night, quite a feat at a time when travel by rail was still in its infancy. A Gough Temperance Society sprang up in Baltimore, Maryland. He headlined the Rhode Island Temperance Convention. Everything was coming up roses.

Newspapers across the country carried the votes of temperance associations to secure funds for a Gough appearance. On June 10, 1845, the Milledgeville, Georgia Southern Recorder was already planning a Georgia trip for Gough in the fall of 1846.

And then, on September 6, John B. Gough vanished.  

Above - John Bartholomew Gough, engraved by D.J. Pound from a photograph, from The Drawing-Room of Eminent Personages, Volume 2

Below - This notice from the New York Express was republished in the Newburyport Herald and offers a wonderful description of John B. Gough in 1845. He has "long, straight black hair, dark complexion, sharp features...," and was heavily accessorized in gold and carrying a small fortune in cash and gold. 

Gough had been missing for a week when, on September 11, placards went up around Manhattan offering a reward for his return. The following day, all the New York newspapers carried the announcement. On September 13, with a certain amount of glee, the Newburyport Herald, which had ultimately come out in favor of Danforth in the May controversy, carried the news.

The Herald was not alone. Gough's disappearance was reported across the country, and almost immediately, opposing rumors began to circulate. Supporters of Gough suspected foul play driven by the "rum merchants" whose business was threatened by temperance. Critics began to hint that Gough had fallen off the wagon before, though few would say so outright for fear of a slander charge.

Above - The steamer New York brought John B. Gough from New Haven to Manhattan, arriving on September 6. Courtesy of the Mariners Museum.

Below - The Five Points neighborhood in New York where Gough was found was notorious for vice and squalor in the 1840's. Courtesy of the New York Library.

And this, dear reader, is where things get interesting. It seems that Gough had taken the steamer from New Haven, arriving in Manhattan on the morning of Saturday, September 6. It was supposed to be a quick trip back to the city of his youth. After a weekend of meetings in the city, Gough was scheduled to hop a train to Albany to meet his wife (he had remarried in 1843) and head to Montreal for a series of lectures.

Gough checked into room 63 of the Croton Temperance Hotel at 142 Broadway, dropped his bags, changed his clothes, had some tea, and went back out. He stopped in at the bookstore of Saxton & Miles, and then...nothing.

By the time news of Gough's disappearance reached Newburyport, he had been found, on September 12, by two reporters from the Police Gazette, in "a back building up an alley", in "the garret of a house of ill fame" on Walker Street. He was brought to the house of a friend in Brooklyn. This friend and temperance supporter, George Hurlbut, despite finding Gough in a "state of delirium", managed to cobble together a narrative, complete with quotes, to explain where Gough had been. It strains credulity now, and certainly did then as well, though Gough stuck to the broad outlines of the story for the rest of his life.

"On Friday evening, he left the Croton Hotel to take a walk, preparatory to retiring for the night, went into Saxton and Miles bookstore, and afterwards stopped to look at the prints in Coleman‘s shop window, where a young man accosted him as an old acquaintance. Mr. Gough did not at first recognize him, but afterwards remembered that he worked with him several years ago in the Methodist book concern. “This is a fine new business you are engaged in”, said the man. “It is new to me," replied Gough, "but much happier and more congenial to my feelings than my old acquaintances, and I hope that you too are on the side of temperance”. "No", said the young man, "I can’t do that. I take a glass once in a while when I want it."

Does this sound like the incoherent ramblings of a man who was at death's door after a week-long bender to you? Me either. It seems more likely that his team was in full damage control and significantly embellished (or invented) the reason for his disappearance.

To make a very long, very convoluted story shorter, the young man in question, whose name Gough later remembered as Jonathan Williams (he also said Williamson), finally prevailed upon Gough to have a soda water with him in a little place on Chatham Street. Gough had his water with raspberry syrup. Shortly after, Gough "very soon became giddy", bellied up to a Bowery bar, ordered a brandy, and that was pretty much all he remembered until a week later when Mr. Camp and Wilkes of the Police Gazette poked him with their canes.

Here's Wilkes. "There we found him - John B. Gough, the mere shadow of a man, pacing the floor with tottering and uncertain steps. He was pale as ashes; (his eyes glared with a preternatural luster), his limbs trembled, and his fitful and wandering stare evinced his mind was as much shattered as his body. The pompous horror had dissolved from its huge proportions, and shrunk into a very vulgar and revolting commonplace. The man was drunk. That was all that was the matter with him — the man was drunk (and apparently did not carry his liquor well)." Ouch.

The location of the Croton Hotel is marked in red on this 1845 map, with the house where Gough was found is in blue.

What is certainly true is that when Gough was found, he was full to the brim with liquor. He was also "relived of a considerable quantity of laudanum (opium tincture)". There was only one possible explanation, he said. The raspberry soda was drugged by haters of temperance.

The temperance community, by and large, rallied behind Gough's version of events. Others were not so kind. Gough's story had several glaring holes. First, no one could identify a Jonathan Williams (or Williamson) who worked with Gough. Second, there were no soda shops in Chatham Street. Third, he had been seen walking quite willingly along the pier in the company of a woman. Stranger still, he had not been robbed. Gough was found still in possession of his gold watch, his gold ring, and a quantity of cash, though at some point he had switched shirts with someone and lost his gold buttons.

Most damning of all, this was not the first time Gough had hauled down to New York for a bit on the side, according to Wilkes.

"One day, about six or seven weeks previous to the 6th of September, the period of Gough's last arrival in New York, he accosted a certain tall, good-looking woman dressed in black and with dark hair and eyes while in the Broadway stage. This was between the hours of nine and ten o'clock in the evening. In the conversation which ensued, he said he had been out riding on horseback, that he was very much fatigued, and that he wanted to accompany her home. To this she replied that she could not take him to her home, but would take him somewhere else. The arrangements being thus concluded, she conveyed him to the same house in Walker street which he afterward rendered so memorable."

Gough effectively went into hiding through the rest of September, as newspapers across the country continued to publish scintillating details of his misadventure. Gough's camp released news items that he was terribly ill, that he was unable to speak, that he would make a full confession when he was well. So great was the public demand for an update that several fake confessions made the rounds.

On Saturday, October 4, the Newburyport Daily Herald published Gough's full confession on the front page. It seemed that, as one newspaper put it, "the lost star of temperance went down ingloriously between Venus and Alcohol." the Police Gazette was less polite.

"Notwithstanding his solemn vows and pledges before the altar of his God, and his sacred pledges before man, (he) returns back to his vomit, and seeks solace for his forced abstemiousness in the secret orgies and caresses of drunken prostitutes."

In the end, however, John Bartholomew Gough must have known that Americans love a comeback. Now more famous than ever, forgiven by his church, his movement, and his wife, Gough rolled the drugged soda water/brothel story into his stirring temperance tale and took it back on the stage. Audiences laughed, they cried. Maybe they thought he was a loveable rogue. Whatever the attraction, over the next four decades, John B. Gough performed steadily on the temperance stage in the United States, Canada, and Europe. He would often say that he wished to die in the harness, and it was on the lecture stage in Frankfort, Pennsylvania that he met his end, age 68, felled by a stroke. He had delivered over 9600 lectures to some 9 million people.

Though I could say much more on the subject of John Bartholomew Gough, I will leave the last word to the man himself, with Helen Potter's help. Potter heard Gough speak many times and made careful notes of his delivery. This is from a speech given in the late 1870's and annotated by Potter. He's pretty dang funny. I won't toast you, Gough, but I will miss our time together.

Something Is Always Cooking...

A recipe inspired by my great-grandmother's "pflaumenkuchen"! - Annabelle

Plum Cake

INGREDIENTS

1 1/2 cups flour

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/8 teaspoon cardamom (mace or allspice works too!)

8 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 cup milk

1 pound plums, pitted and quartered (4-6 plums)

2 tablespoons sugar (for dusting)

INSTRUCTIONS

• Preheat the oven to 350°. Grease a 9-inch springform or pie pan.
• In a bowl combine the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, and salt.
• In an electric mixer with paddle attachments cream the butter and 1 cup of sugar together until pale and creamy. Add the egg and vanilla and beat on low speed until combined. Slowly add the flour and milk and beat until smooth. The batter should be thick.
• Transfer the batter to the pan and arrange the sliced plums on top, skin facing up, . Sprinkle the 2 tablespoons of sugar on top.
• Bake for 60 to 70 minutes until cake is golden brown.

ENJOY!

Puzzle Me This...

What is more fun than a garden party in the summer?

Come celebrate the summer and support the efforts of our hard working and wonderful interns on August 18th and socialize with your fellow Members at the Museum of Old Newbury's Garden Party fundraiser!

Click the image to do the puzzle