It's gone all quiet in the office at 98 High Street. Last week we were filled to bursting with the snorts, giggles, quips, rejoinders, energy, and general levity of a robust compliment of young people. And then they were off...

Read the title story following event announcements!

F.E. Bushee Interns Lilly and Annabelle watch (and listen) to former intern Ella perform at the Music Mavens Garden Party on Sunday, August 18. 

Future Leaders Interns Sam and Noah Clewley share some gems of the militaria collection at the 3rd Annual Summer Sojourn before heading to York, Maine, with the group.

Upcoming Museum Events

7 more weeks of Museum of Old Newbury Guided Tours!

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

Last regular open day is Sunday, October 13, 2024.

Architectural Walking Tours: Newburyport's Fashionable Old Houses

Sundays 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 8 p.m.

Conference on Newburyport and the China Trade, 1844-2024

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

It's gone quiet in the office at 98 High Street. Last week we were filled to bursting with the snorts, giggles, quips, rejoinders, energy, and general levity of a robust compliment of young people. And then they were off.

Well, to be fair, half of them were off. Annabelle, Ella, and Lilly are off to school in Paris, Newport, and Worcester, respectively. We have Sam and Noah and Julia for a little longer, Freddy when his schedule allows. We have been incredibly lucky that this group of bright, hard-working young people have found us, and we are already looking forward to their return.

The amount of work that our interns accomplish in a season is staggering. They have read, labelled, and scanned hundreds of letters and images, researched families and houses and objects for our members, written newsletter articles, carried countless tables and chairs, pulled weeds, painted steel beams and scrubbed bathrooms, and given dozens of museum tours. And last week, they handled weapons and threw their own going-away party (of sorts).

Sam and "Long Tom", a very long (over 9 feet) musket with a very interesting story.

This April, 1861 article from the Newburyport Herald offers one view of the fanciful lore of intern favorite, Long Tom, then in use as a flagpole.

On Thursday, August 15, 28 intrepid museum members and staff set off on the 2024 Summer Sojourn, the third annual outing of its kind. I have always loved a good field trip, and many years working with other organizations in New England have brought home how much we can inspire and support each other. So once a summer, we take a trip to a place within reasonable driving distance, and since Newbury(port) is the center of the universe, we go in search of connections to familiar families, events, and themes. This year's sojourn was to York, Maine.

We met at the Cushing House and began the day with interns Noah and Sam, who had pulled some of their favorite military artifacts from their months-long investigation and cataloguing of our military collection, much of it formerly uncatalogued.

Sam and Noah with Revolutionary War (and earlier) artifacts from our collection, including a French officer's sword, an adz used in our own "tea party", Long Tom, and Richard Dole's powder horn.

We loaded into our cars and set out for Old York Historical Society, where we were treated to special tours by executive director Joel Lefever and research center manager Peggy Wishart. Sam and Noah were part of the adventure, as was Annabelle.

Noah and Sam examine a powder horn at Old York, once carried by John Bradbury. The Bradbury family has numerous ties to Newbury, as do many other early English families that settled in York.

Our sojourn ended with the fascinating c.1718 Sayward-Wheeler House, owned by Historic New England. Intern Annabelle (center), who was part of the adventure, was having a better time than it looks in the picture below!

And then, three days after our York summer adventure, we threw a garden party. The Music Mavens in the Garden event was the result of a serendipitous meeting between my daughter, Meg Groff, and intern/visitor services assistant Ella Suchecki. Both of these young women are well-known, super-talented singers, Meg as part of the jazz band Busy Signal with Chuck Walker, and Ella as a soloist who also plays keyboard and guitar.

The plan was hatched then and there to have an event featuring Ella and Meg, and it only made sense that these hard-working young women would use their talent to raise money for the internship program.

The call went out to board members, volunteers, and friends. Amazing food, delicious drinks, and time were donated to the cause, and you, our members and friends, came out in force as well.

Despite threatened (and actual) rain, nearly one hundred people enjoyed a leisurely afternoon in the back garden. Tucked away behind the carriage barn, the space is lush and beautiful, and surprisingly spacious.

Annabelle spoke about the importance of the real-world experience she has gained in her years as an intern at the Museum of Old Newbury.

Interns were involved in every stage of the planning, set-up and management of this event. Thanks to a generous donor, they even had a lesson in fundraising, each given the task of identifying future supporters of the museum and bringing them to the event.

In the end, we raised enough money to pay two college interns next summer. One long-time supporter and friend stepped up to underwrite an internship in honor of her sister. We will apply for grants to fund two more. We hope that some of this summer's superstars will return, and they deserve to be paid as they learn.

The Magnetic Mr. Poyen, Part II

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

We're back with another scintillating edition of How to Magnetize Friends and Influence People! In case you missed our last episode, which offered a peek into my bouncing brain, once described as "squirrels locked in a small room", it is linked here.

We met Charles Poyen, a member of the Poyen family who landed in Newburyport along with other refugees from the French West Indies, learned a little bit about Animal Magnetism, and discovered that healing with magnets is still very much a thing.

This episode begins a generation before, in the 1790's back in Guadeloupe, with a murder or two. We are told by the nonagenarian Sarah Smith that the French Revolution "reached the French West Indian colonies with even more intense cruelties than in the mother country." This beggars belief somewhat, as the mother country was cruel as can be, but let's just say there was plenty of violence to go around. The rather more cool-headed John J. Currier said simply that there were "scenes of anarchy and confusion" in the French West Indies.

Sarah Smith was closer to the mark. The French Revolution came to Guadeloupe like a wrecking ball. The wealthy planters were tied by blood and money to the aristocracy of France, and the revolutionaries hated them equally. To further stoke the flames, the revolutionaries abolished slavery, upon which the West Indian economy was based, and the planters invited the hated British to invade in order to preserve the institution of slavery in 1794.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Two years earlier, the Poyen family, wealthy sugarcane planters from the village of Habitation Piton near Saint-Rose, Guadeloupe, were attacked. The oldest and youngest sons, Robert de Poyen and Saint Sauveur de Poyen were "killed by the brutal mob of republicans", according to Smith. 51-year-old Pierre Robert de Saint Sauveur Poyen fled with his three surviving sons, two daughters, and a step-nephew, Count Francis de Vipart (François Félix Hector de Vipart Morainvilliers). They managed to get aboard a Newburyport brig, one of many sent to bring molasses and sugar back to the distilleries that dotted the waterfront. The family arrived in Newburyport in March 1792.

I'll get back to Charles Poyen, I promise, but first, I must tell you about the Poyen step-nephew,  Count Francis de Vipart. Well, more to the point, I must tell you about Mary Balch Ingalls, distant relative of Pa and Ma and Laura Ingalls, and my 4th cousin. Apparently after some time in Newburyport, the Count made his way up river, and in 1805 he wooed and married Mary Balch Ingalls, just 18 (he was 27 or 28). She died three years later and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Haverhill. The bereaved Count returned to France and eventually to Guadeloupe.

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose brother married the Count's cousin, Abigail Poyen, wrote a romantic poem about the grave of the young Countess. The poem inspired such paroxysms of grief that her grave became a pilgrimage site of sorts, and then people started chipping off bits of it as souvenirs. The family erected a cage around the stone to protect it, which did the trick for many years, but the stone is now gone - some say hidden away for safekeeping.

The rest of the Poyen crew settled in Newburyport, at least for a few years after their arrival in 1792. Pierre, called "Peter" in his probate record, and entirely without a first name in the Newburyport death record, didn't last the year, dying of "loss of home, change of climate, grief and anxiety", according to Smith.

Pierre's son Joseph stuck around as other family members found their way back to Guadeloupe. And what does a young French aristocrat do for cash in late 18th century Newburyport? Open up a dancing school, naturally. Four years later Joseph, now styling himself as "Poyen Rochmond", placed this ad in the Newburyport Impartial Herald.

Two years after that, in 1798, he was also teaching "the useful and necessary art of self-defense" by broad sword. He also apparently played the violin, which he put to good use as a fiddler for country dances later in his life.

Joseph Poyen married a local gal, Sally Elliot, in 1805, and their nine children and their descendants spread across Haverhill, Amesbury, and Merrimac, where they can still be found today.

The Poyen Sampler, wrought c. 1819, likely by Elizabeth Josephine Poyen, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So many people to meet! But, I have promised you a story about Charles Poyen, nephew of Joseph the dancing, fiddling self-defense instructor. Charles Poyen was the son of Mathieu Augustine Poyen, Joseph's younger brother.

Many of the French refugees returned to Guadeloupe once it was safe to do so, and, of course, once Napoleon had reinstated slavery in 1802, making the sugar plantations economically attractive once again. Charles Poyen was born in Guadeloupe around 1806, where his father had returned to re-claim the family plantation.

When Mathieu Augustine Poyen died in 1827, he left a large, profitable plantation, enslaving some 90 people. Charles inherited this wealth along with his mother and siblings, and seems to have set off to France to study medicine. Sometime in 1832, he developed a painful and complicated "nervous disease" that effected his stomach and right side. He was treated by a doctor who employed a clairvoyant named Madame Villetard. Poyen was healed, he began reading voraciously about animal magnetism, and he returned to Guadeloupe to try it out on the people his family and others enslaved. Thus convinced that "the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties", in other words, anyone could be mesmerized.

Determined to spread the word of healing through animal magnetism to America, Charles Poyen sailed for New England and descended upon his uncle Joseph Poyen, who was then living in Rocks Village, in 1834. He stayed for five months before moving on to Lowell, where he set up shop as a French and art teacher.

Charles Poyen appeared in the Lowell directory in 1836. It is not known, though it is likely, that the Louis Poyen staying at the same place is a relative.

Charles Poyen claimed that he never mentioned animal magnetism for six months when he was first living in Lowell, until he found himself in conversation with the mayor, Elisha Bartlett who seems to have convinced him that there was a market for his passionate advocacy of mesmerism. Poyen, thus encouraged, set out to find a publisher for an existing treatise on the subject.

When no publisher bit, Poyen decided a round of lectures and demonstrations of the mesmeric trance that was the cornerstone of the practice of magnetism would help him build an audience. January 1836 found him lecturing in Boston. In February, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published an essay, then his translation of the Report on the magnetical experiments made by the Commission of the Royal Academy of Medicine, of Paris was published in June.

Though his star was certainly on the rise, in the fall of 1836, he sent home to Guadeloupe for money to continue his lecturing, as it was not yet profitable. It was not until he took his lecture tour to the mill town of Pawtucket and met Miss Cynthia Ann Gleason that he became a real celebrity.

Well, friends, here we go again. I'm out of space with so much more to tell. Stay tuned for the next newsletter, in which I promise to wrap it up already as Charles Poyen uses magnetism to get the factory gals to work on time, launches the career of Miss Cynthia Gleason, and inspires generations of magnetizers here in Newburyport.

Something Is Always Cooking...

In honor of our France-bound intern Annabelle, here is a great way to use up some of that summer bounty pouring out of the vegetable garden at this time of year. My mom's ratatouille is a rustic and satisfying dish. - Shelley S.

Ratatouille

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 5 or 6 cloves garlic, minced (use more or less to your taste)
• 1 eggplant, cut into ½-inch cubes (for a rustic dish) or sliced in 1/4-inch slices

if you want it to be fancier

• 2 teaspoons chopped parsley
• salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
• 1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
• 2 zucchini or summer squash, sliced
• 2 large tomatoes, chopped
• 2 cups sliced fresh mushrooms
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 1 red (yellow, orange or green are great too) bell pepper, sliced
• 1 small can of tomato paste

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Coat the bottom and sides of a large casserole dish with 1 tablespoon olive oil and add the tomato paste.
2. Heat remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Cook and stir garlic until fragrant and golden brown. Add eggplant and parsley; cook and stir until eggplant is tender and soft, about 10 minutes. Season with salt and fresh ground pepper to taste.
3. Spread eggplant mixture evenly across the bottom of the prepared casserole dish; sprinkle with a few tablespoons of Parmesan cheese. Spread zucchini in an even layer over top. Lightly salt and sprinkle with a little more cheese. Continue layering in this fashion, with tomatoes, mushrooms, onion, and bell pepper, covering each layer with a sprinkling of salt, pepper and cheese.
4. Bake in preheated oven until vegetables are tender, about 45 minutes.

This dish is great as a side or put it on pasta or rice for a filling vegetarian entree.

Puzzle Me This...

Mesmerism: The Operator Inducing a Hypnotic Trance, engraving after Dodd, 1794. Plate from Ebenezer Sibly's book, A Key to Physic, 1794.

Click the image to do the puzzle

Mesmerism: The Operator Inducing a Hypnotic Trance, engraving after Dodd, 1794. Plate from Ebenezer Sibly's book, A Key to Physic, 1794.

Click the image to do the puzzle