As a historian, one gets to play the role of detective. In our last newsletter article, "Romancing Ruth: A Guide to Courting in the Early 20th Century," we discussed one of Ruth’s suitors, Roger Ernst. Upon reading further letters, we realized some of our original assumptions about Roger were wrong. 

While cataloging letters we noticed the initials “R.T.T.” on a letter we thought was from Roger Ernst. We were mistaken! Letters we thought were from Roger Ernst in 1919 and 1920 are actually from a man named Roger Twitchell. They have similar handwriting, although upon closer inspection have differences. Indeed, Ruth had two Rogers in her life!

Read the title story following event announcements!

1922 Valentines card from Roger Ernst to Ruth Graves

Upcoming Museum Events

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

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

Architectural Walking Tours: Newburyport's Fashionable Old Houses

Sundays August 18, September 8, September 22

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

New Acquisitions for Old Newbury: 2024 Member Reception and Annual Meeting

Wednesday, September 11 · 6:30 p.m.to 8p.m.

As a historian, one gets to play the role of detective. In our last newsletter article, "Romancing Ruth: A Guide to Courting in the Early 20th Century," we discussed one of Ruth’s suitors, Roger Ernst. Upon reading further letters, we realized some of our original assumptions about Roger were wrong. 

While cataloging letters we noticed the initials “R.T.T.” on a letter we thought was from Roger Ernst. We were mistaken! Letters we thought were from Roger Ernst in 1919 and 1920 are actually from a man named Roger Twitchell. They have similar handwriting, although upon closer inspection have differences. Indeed, Ruth had two Rogers in her life!

1922 Valentines card from Roger Ernst to Ruth Graves

Today we are excited to bring you another story from the Graves family letter collection. The letters were donated by Tim Kendall, a descendant of the Graves-Pike family of Newburyport, and we have been processing this gift with the help of fellow MOON interns Freddy and Julia and Visitor Services Assistant Ella Suchecki. In our last newsletter article we told the story of Ruth Graves’s numerous suitors. Today we will reveal who Ruth marries in the end! 

Upon discovering that the Roger Ruth writes to in the 1910s is different from her other suitor, Roger Ernst, pieces of this story that had been a mystery to us soon began to make more sense. Coincidentally, as soon as we stumbled across this letter from Roger T., we found a Mountain Membership club letter in Chocorua, NH listing Roger Twitchell as president. Next, we came across a wedding invitation between Roger Twitchell and Lucy Balch. Roger Thayer Twitchell wrote to Ruth from 1918 to 1920. He attended Milton Academy and graduated Harvard in 1916. During WWI, he wrote to her while stationed at Payne Field, outside West Point, MS. He served in the American Ambulance Corps and then after 1917 enlisted in the United States air service. It seems that Ruth had esteem for Roger T. They maintained friendly correspondence with Roger signing as “your sincere friend.” Thus, it is most plausible that Galahad’s letter noting “Roger’s liege lady” is actually referring to Roger Twitchell.

Roger Thayer Twitchell passport application photo

Roger T. and Lucy B. are a part of Ruth’s friendship circle that vacationed together in New Hampshire. In a 1921 letter to Ruth, Phil references Ruth’s Chocorua “gang,” including Lucy Balch. Lucy also attended the Vincent Club, a Boston women’s organization, of which Ruth was also a member. Like Ruth, Lucy also worked for the Red Cross during WWI. The letter Ruth writes with shock that her friend Lucy is marrying Roger must indeed be referring to Twitchell. After Roger T. marries Lucy Balch we have not found any more letters between them.

The mystery that remains is Lucinda K’s letter writing that “he” arrived in Chocorua. The letter is obviously signed by Lucinda K, not Lucinda B, leaving us to assume Lucinda and Lucy are two different people. Who would’ve thought, a friend group with two Rogers and two Lucys! There are still many mysteries to this story and we hope further reading of the collection will help set this story straight. 

Wedding Invitation to Graves family of Lucy Bowditch Balch to Roger Thayer Twitchell

Other male friends of Ruth also write to her to announce their engagements. In 1921 Phil H wrote that he was engaged to be married to Leslie Richardson of Cambridge. He writes that he is “very happy and that she is a wonderful person.” He wishes for Ruth to meet Leslie. Ruth also meets Galahad’s financé, Laurette Potts. We know Ruth gifts her flowers, and receives thank you notes for the kind gesture from both Laurette and Galahad. We do not have any further correspondence between Ruth and the couple. As to Ruth’s numerous other male correspondents: Crosby, Phil H, Minton, Sheppie, we do not yet know what became of their relationship to Ruth.

Of all Ruth’s suitors, Roger Ernst wins her heart. The first note we have from Roger Ernst is a postcard from Banff, Canada dated 1921. Roger attended Harvard University, like many other of Ruth's suitors, and went on to be a lawyer. The two correspond for several years. Roger was certainly both a prolific letter writer, as well as an eloquent one. His letters tended to be long and meticulous, including extremely detailed accounts of events throughout his day. They were also often endearingly romantic.

Roger Ernst at the Harvard Class of 1903 20th Reunion. Courtesy of Harvard University.

In February of 1926 – the year they married – Roger writes Ruth a letter while on vacation, disappointed that they will not be together, as Ruth is not coming along. He begins the letter with an entire page of praises, reiterating how much he is endeared to her: “I’ve never been so head-over-heels in love with you as I am now.” He continues, telling of how much he will miss her while he is away: “Now I shall just be thinking as every nice thing comes along - ‘If only my dearest Ruthie were here to enjoy this with me,’ and I shall be sad beneath my outward pleasure.”

Roger was romantic far beyond the eve of their marriage – in a letter from April of 1932, he similarly extends Ruth his praises. While providing a retelling of an argument he was drawn into by an “overbearing and rude little Englishman” while on a business trip, he writes of his need to negotiate the next day with the said man, and his fears that he might concede something he shouldn’t in an effort to make amends for their argument. Here, he shows his esteem for Ruth’s competence: “Now that’s where you would prove a winner – you would charm him into docility in two jiffies and then doubtless establish your argument. So I’m going to keep you in my mind’s eye.”

1926 letter from Roger Ernst to Ruth Graves

However, their courtship is not entirely rosy. One argument between them can be deduced from numerous apology letters Roger writes. Roger leaves for a business trip in May of 1926 and returns later in June. Before his departure, in a letter dated from March 23, 1926, Roger writes: “Ernst is a German name and means ‘serious’, and I inherited it from my father’s grandfather, who was born in Germany and emigrated to America in Napoleon’s early days of conquest.” Other letters from Ruth during WWI reveal she had a strong anti-German sentiment. We wonder if their misunderstanding could’ve been about Ruth’s opinions. Roger writes to reassure her: “I think my great-grandfather’s only redeeming quality was that he was a Hanoverian and not a Prussian...” Roger is glad Ruth aired out their views before their marriage so that they would not come out in a “divorce court.” It is still unclear exactly the contents of their argument. 

Whatever the strife, the two still marry after Roger’s return from his European trip. Ruth and Roger married in August, 1926 at the Leslie Lindsey Chapel of Emmanuel Church in Boston. An article in The Cambridge Tribune recounts their wedding: “The bride’s gown was of white satin with a long train of old South American Spanish lace and her veil was of tulle. The maid of honor and the bridesmaids were gowned alike in pink taffeta combined with lace and trimmed with blue velvet, and they wore large picture hats having crowns of blue with brims of white horsehair and trimmings of moss roses.” They planned on going abroad to Europe for their honeymoon. 

Ernst-Graves wedding announcement in The Cambridge Tribune, 1926

Ruth and Roger live in Brookline, MA. Roger dies in 1955 of complications from a heart attack. Ruth survives him and dies in 1975. They never have children. Our collection of letters ends in the 1930s so we have no details of their married life together. The Graves collection reveals a personal view on the lives of young women and tales of friendship and courtship.

We still have hundreds of letters to read and scan. Lilly and Annabelle’s summer internship is nearly over at the MOON but we hope whoever takes up this project from us in the future will find more fascinating stories about the Graves family of Newburyport!

The Magnetic Mr. Poyen

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Late 18th century print depicting the healing power of Animal Magnetism. Sufferers hold painful or diseased body parts against iron bars connected to the bacquet, a wooden tank filled with magnetized water. The woman on the left is in a mesmeric trance, having been magnetized by a healer. Image courtesy of Wellcome Images.

Well, my friends, Amazon Prime Day seems to have turned into numerous Amazon Prime Days, and I somehow found myself wandering down that technicolor rabbit-hole a couple of weeks ago. When I came to my senses some minutes (hours?) later, I was staring at an image of a hand pressing a knobby fork into the back of a presumably consenting adult. It promised HOLISTIC HEALTH BENEFITS! I was invited to “Harmonize Body Pathways” and “Release Trapped Emotions”, among other things. The fork thingy, you see, was magnetized, and so assaulting yourself or a friend with it, in a circular motion, could accomplish amazing things. 

This all rings a bell, thought I. I had been in the middle of a bit of research on the crazy story of the escapees/refugees from the islands of Dominica and Guadeloupe who came to Newburyport during the tumultuous years of the French Revolution. It is a wild tale, and one which has been asking for attention recently.

To make a very long, very interesting story a bit shorter, Newburyport and the French West Indies, especially Guadeloupe, had a long and prosperous relationship based on, well, slavery. By which I mean that the sugar, molasses, and rum that were flowing into Newburyport in the late 18th and early 19th century, were produced on French plantations that depended on enslaved labor. Nearly 80% of the population was enslaved. With the French Revolution in 1789 came waves of violence against the royalist plantation owners in Guadeloupe, who fled for their lives, some with the help of their Newburyport friends and business partners. There are stories of planters escaping after members of their families were killed, frantically rowing out to Newburyport ships in the harbor. We know of at least two captains, William Bradbury and Offin Boardman, who brought refugees to Newburyport from the French West Indies.

This headstone in Old Hill Burying Ground memorializes Pierre Poyen, one of the French refugees who came to Newburyport during the French Revolution, dying a few months after his arrival. It reads:

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF

MR. POYEN DE ST SAUVEUR

WHO FOR A LONG TIME WAS

AN INHABITANT & A REPUTABLE

PLANTER ON THE ISLAND

OF GUADULOUPE

DIED OCTOBER 14TH, 1792

AGED 52 YEARS

In my years of researching and writing, I have learned to listen to the people and events that rise up and knock on my metaphorical window – there are stories that want to be told. Often these appear as a series of seemingly unconnected events. I notice a gravestone while looking for another person, or a last name suddenly seems to be coming up all over the place. I’ll visit another museum and there they will be, on an object I had no idea existed or in a book I’ve never read. Or I will wonder why I paused on an Amazon listing for a magnetized fork.

Here's where I take you inside the squirrely warren of my brain. Follow me. I have been researching a sampler made by a Mademoiselle Marie Dumans from our collection, one that we know very little about. With the help of several other researchers, including the intrepid Ellie Bailey, we have determined that the sampler is likely connected to the family of a Charles Joseph Benjamin Cherot Dumaine, who was baptized on April 17, 1801, in Newburyport.

Then, on a trip to Old York, I came to a dead stop in front of a painting of Nathaniel Barrell, who was familiar to me from my days working at the Sayward Wheeler House, owned by my former employer, Historic New England. It was not the subject, but the artist that grabbed my attention.

Newburyport’s Moses Dupre Cole, whose work is also well represented at the Museum of Old Newbury, was born Moise Jacques Dupree Cools de Godefroy, in Bordeaux, France. He fled from St. Lucia with his father in 1795 and landed in Newburyport. Then, at Old Hill Burying Ground, I stumbled on the grave of Jaque and Louis Mestre, who died in 1793 and 1792, age 21 and 17, respectively. And, you may find this a stretch, but Annabelle, who has been working with me since she was 17 years old, and who co-wrote the main story in this newsletter, is headed to France for graduate school next month. And then there’s the Olympics. Suddenly France, and the French West Indies in particular, seems to be everywhere. 

Portrait of Nathaniel Barrell (1732-1831) by Moses Dupre Cole (Moise Jacques Dupree Cools de Godefroy). Courtesy Historic New England.

And what, you may ask, has this to do with the magical magnetic fork? Back into my squirrely brain we go. For many years I have been interested in the social and cultural impact of early photography, particularly of the sort that claimed to capture images of spirits and other supernatural phenomena.

There are adherents of spirit photography today – just visit Salem to have

your aura snapped – but they were big business in the 19th century, when many people’s understanding of the photographic process was rudimentary enough to render them gob smacked at what we would see clearly as a double exposure.

One such practitioner, Edouard Isidore Buguet, who I had studied at length in graduate school, began taking supernatural photographs in 1874, and was a fervent believer in animal magnetism, also known as mesmerism, the belief that the body exerted a magnetic force that could flow between bodies if connectivity was established, generally through some sort of fluid. If this magnetic force was blocked, it could cause a host of problems from depression to infertility and beyond. Sufferers would be “mesmerized” to remove these blocks and promote all the benefits that the amazon.com fork promised me. Buguet routinely had himself and his cameras and equipment mesmerized to remove obstacles to, well, double-exposing plates and then selling them to gullible French people for an exorbitant amount. 

Now, if you haven’t thrown your computer across the room in frustration while screaming, “GET TO THE POINT,” you’re a better person than I am. I had to stare blankly into the middle distance for a long time to figure out what all these things had to do with each other. 

And then it came to me (as in a mesmeric trance). One of the families that had escaped from Guadeloupe was the Poyen family. Their story, like so many others, is a bloody one, with twists and turns that will make your head spin. More on that later. And it was Charles Poyen who brought mesmerism to the United States from France, making it so popular that the word “mesmerized” and the term “animal magnetism” have became part of our common vocabulary. I also “met” Charles Poyen in graduate school. I was briefly obsessed with how animal magnetism became the great obsession of American literature in the 19th century, captivating Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, among others.

The Poyen family coat of arms, as rendered by Sarah Smith Emery in her 1879 book Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian.

How many Poyens are there in France, I asked myself. Must be thousands. I did a quick bit of research on Charles Poyen. Born in Guadeloupe in 1808…that seemed promising, but the Poyen family that escaped to Newburyport had arrived in 1792. Probably not. And then, the smoking gun…

From an April 1960 article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (I cast a wide net) “Poyen sailed in 1833 for a sugar plantation owned by his relatives in the French West Indies…His health had shown little improvement, however, and so he decided to visit the United States to see if another change of climate would benefit him. In late 1834 he landed at Portland, Maine, and proceeded to Haverhill, Massachusetts, where lived a paternal uncle who had immigrated to the United States at the time of the French Revolution.” Haverhill? Had to be the same family. And they are – Mesmerizer Charles Poyen’s father, Mathieu Augustine Poyen, came to Newburyport with his brother in 1792, then went back to Guadeloupe to reclaim their sugar plantations after Napoleon reinstated slavery in 1802.

Portrait miniature of Abigail Rochemont Poyen (1816-1841), Charles Poyen's first cousin (once removed), who married my cousin (but didn't everyone?).

As I have repeatedly claimed, if you spent more than ten days in Newbury(port) during your baby-making years, I am most likely related to you somehow, and this has proven to be true even of Charles Poyen. His first cousin (once removed) Abigail Poyen, married Matthew Whittier, brother of the poet John Greenleaf Whitter, both my second cousins six times removed. So we zip Charles Poyen into my family tree and we are off. 

And now, as with the subject of my last blog series, my dearly beloved John Bartholomew Gough, I have exceeded the word count for this newsletter. Stay tuned as we meet the rest of the Poyen clan, Charles Poyen becomes a clairvoyant management consultant for Lowell factory workers and his distant cousin (by marriage) Elisha Perkins begins the healing silverware tradition.  

Something Is Always Cooking (or Mixing)...

Enjoy this refreshing summer cocktail, made by Meg Groff, to be served as the signature drink at the upcoming event Music Mavens at the MOON, August 18th.

The Maven Muddle

Ingredients:

• 2 oz gin
• 1 oz fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 0.75 oz rosemary pear shrub
• 0.5 oz ginger syrup
• soda water



Directions:

Combine first four ingredients and shake thoroughly. Strain over ice and top with soda water

Rosemary Pear Shrub:

• 1 ripe pear
• 1 sprig of rosemary
• 1 cup of sugar
• 1 cup of apple cider vinegar

Directions: Combine one ripe pear and one sprig of rosemary with one cup of sugar and mash to make a paste. Let this mixture sit in an air tight container for at least one full day, up to two weeks. Shake once or twice a day to ensure full infusion. After this process is complete, add one cup of apple cider vinegar, stir until fully combined, and strain through a cheesecloth. Less apple cider can be added to make a thicker/sweeter shrub.

Ginger Syrup:

• (at least) 3 finely chopped pieces of ginger root
• 2 cups of sugar per cup of ginger juice

Directions: Combine one cup of water with at least three finely chopped pieces of ginger root and blend thoroughly until the ginger becomes a pulp. The more ginger your blender can handle, the better! Strain this ginger juice through a cheesecloth, pressing out as much liquid as possible. For every cup of ginger juice, add two cups of sugar and stir until dissolved.

Puzzle Me This...

Undated postcard from Roger Ernst to Ruth Graves, humerously referring to this as a photograph he took of Ruth when they went skiing.

Click the image to do the puzzle