BANK NOTES

No Ordinary Woman (continued from page 19) and the youngest, who “All lived as one family, pleasantly with each other,” according to Sarah Hawes, who “never knew my father or mother to strike one of the children; a mild reproof was the only punishment.”

NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED

Determined to further John’s education even as his father’s family deprived her of the means to do so nancially, Susan “immediately applied to Mr. [Calvin] S[tockbridge],” one of the owners of the paper mill her husband managed, “to accept the guardianship, which he did...and he remained his rm and faithful friend,” underwriting John’s studies at Hebron Academy until it burnt down in 1819—which, John wrote to a friend, “I consider as the judgement of Heaven for their treatment of the few independent souls who resided with them during this past year.”

Perhaps sensing her stepson needed to stretch his wings in a wider sphere, Susan anticipated his future destiny and “advised him at that time to go to Liberia, but he rmly declined doing so until he had taken his degree,” teaching in Black schools in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to pay his way. By 1824 he’d earned the means to enroll at Bowdoin College as a 25-yearold junior alongside fellow intellectuals and literary greats Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, initially making the grueling 19-mile commute by stagecoach from his home in North Yarmouth, where four more new stepsiblings had by now arrived.

John B. Russwurm house at 238 Ocean Avenue, Portland

WHERE THE HEART IS With instantaneous communication at our ngertips today, it’s hard to grasp the oce-

anic gulf between Russwurm and his family in Maine a er he eventually emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia in 1829 to serve as superintendent of schools and colonial secretary, re-launching the Liberia Herald, West Africa’s rst Black newspaper, along the way. While he was getting married and having his rst child at 35, he likely had no idea his stepmother was having her eleventh and last at 47. “It is so long since I have heard from North Yarmouth that I know not but half the town may be dead,” he wrote to his half-brother, Francis Edward Russwurm, in 1834. “ e departure of the Brig Anne...for Bath, a ords me an opportunity of dropping you a few lines...Remember me to all the family; and I should feel particularly honored by a letter from Mr. or Mrs. Hawes.”

A year later, he’s still nudging his brother for news: “I have written so o en of late without receiving any answers that I begin to despair of hearing from you again...I felt con dent that you would receive my letters by the Brig Anne...If received, why have you all been silent so long...I promise myself, blow high or low... to cross the Atlantic again...I live in Africa but my friends in America can never be forgotten.”

As governor of Maryland in Liberia, Russwurm was unable to return to Maine for a family reunion until 1848. As overjoyed as he was to be reunited with his stepmother, he was dismayed at how much she was depended upon. “We are staying at...my old home: all appear glad to see us, not only in the family— but all my old acquaintances,” he wrote to James Hall. “Very unfortunately, her eldest daughter has been, & is still quite unwell: it grieves me much to see the old lady have so much to do in her old age...after having raised so many.”

Although Russwurm himself had become so accustomed to equatorial weather that he found Maine in August “very cold, so that we have slept under 2 and 3 blankets,” this did not deter him from educating his own children there. An extraordinary woman’s work is never done, and as the saying goes, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. “A er some years, two of his sons, George and Frank, were sent to Yarmouth and attended school...boarding in mother’s family,” his stepsister Sarah Hawes noted. Where else? n

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