Bostonians in Miniature

B ostonians

in

m iniature

Portraits and Lives, 1810 - 1835

B ostonians

in

m iniature

Portraits and Lives, 1810-1835

D av i D m . H u m m o n guest curator and volunteer Professor emeritus, Holy cross college

wo r c e s t e r a rt mu s eu m worcester, massachusetts w w w . wo r c e s t e r a rt . o r g

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wo r c e s t e r a rt mu s eu m 55 salisbury street / worcester, ma 01609 w w w.w o r c e s t e r a r t. o r g

isBn 978-0-936042-02-2

© 2013 wo r c e s t e r a rt mu s eu m

cover: View from the South Boston Bridge (detail), 1828-1829, (fig. 3).

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AC K N OW L E D G E M E N T S I wish to thank the Gale Free Library, Holden, Massachusetts (Nancy Richards, Local History Librarian; Susan Scott, Library Director) for making the Fleming miniatures available for display at the Worcester Art Museum. The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (Lauren B. Hewes, Curator of Graphic Arts; Jaclyn Penny, Graphic Arts Assistant) has graciously provided digitized images of several primary documents. The R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana (Jerry Bloomer, Secretary-Treasurer and Public Relations Director) has also kindly shared a digitized image of Sarah Goodridge’s Self-Portrait. In Boston, Robert Johnson-Lally, Archivist for the Archdiocese of Boston, and Anne E. Bentley, Curator of Art, Massachusetts Historical Society, shared collection materials with me. In Holden and Fitchburg, Massachusetts, Ross Beales, Freda Chabot, Marcia Ladd, Jane Neale, and Chuck Skillings provided valuable information on local history. All have contributed to this miniature rotation and catalog.

At the Worcester Art Museum, Kate Dalton (Curatorial Assistant) deserves special acknowledgement. Ms. Dalton welcomed me as curatorial volunteer, introduced me to various facets of the museum, and helped to bring this project to fruition. I am also grateful Sue Baker (Curatorial Volunteer), Kim Noonan (Graphic Design and Publications Manager), and to other staff, who in various ways contributed their expertise and good will to make this work possible.

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CONTENTS

I N T R O D U C T IO N

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M I N IAT U R E S A N D B O S T O N M I N IAT U R I S T S

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L I V E S I N M I N IAT U R E : B O S T O N IA N S

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E S TA B L I S H E D M E R C HA N T F A M I L I E S Sarah Salisbury Tappan and John Tappan

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George Washington Sturgis and Mary Anna Channing Sturgis

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M A K I N G O N E ’ S WAY Otis Norcross and Mary Cunningham Homer Norcross

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Betsey Olivey Lane Jackson and Deacon Ward Jackson

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Otis Turner and Sarah Loring House Turner

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I M M IG R A N T S , A RT I S A N S ,

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A S P I R AT I O N S

William Fleming and Eleanor Boland Elwood Fleming L I ST O F M I N IAT U R E S A N D R E L AT E D I M AG E S

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ENDNOTES 44

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I N T R O DU C T IO N WHEN FIRST VIEWED, MINIATURE PORTRAITS OFTEN ELICIT A SENSE OF WONDER AND CURIOSITY. These feelings are surely engendered in part by the surprising scale of these diminutive works.

How, one wonders, did artists capture a likeness in these tiny paintings, creating eyes that sparkle, radiant skin tones, and clothing and personal adornment fit for a Lilliputian world? Why were portraits taken “in little,” as their creators would have said—why jewel-like, intimate works to be held in the palm of one’s hand rather than a traditional oil, hung prominently on a parlor wall? At the same time, a deeper sense of wonder may be evoked by the sitters themselves, whose everyday, often earnest faces, gaze out to the viewer, speaking faintly of their lives, hopes, and sorrows. Just who were these people who not only sat for their portraits but also held them in their hands, treasured these works, and now, after nearly two centuries, have the power to enchant?

This catalog, accompanying “Bostonians in Miniature,” will address these questions, placing special emphasis on the last of these queries—who were the Bostonians who made miniatures a part of their lives? I focus on six couples who lived in Boston and who are portrayed in nine miniature portraits painted between 1810 and 1835. In three cases, miniatures exist of both husband and wife; in three, a miniature of only one spouse survives, though it is possible that a miniature once existed of the other. In recounting the stories of these Bostonians, I will explore the identities of these sitters and the place of these portraits in their lives. These accounts, I hasten to add, will be partial at best: records from the period are themselves fragmentary, especially for women and for those from more modest backgrounds. Nevertheless, by describing these Bostonians in terms of their origins and families, their social class, the places they lived, worked, and worshiped, and by recovering something of the trajectory of their lives, I hope to deepen our understanding of and sense of wonder for these miniatures and the people they portray.

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1. Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853), Self-Portrait, about 1845, watercolor on ivory, Courtesy of the R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana

M I N IAT U R E S A N D B O ST O N M I N IAT U R I ST S BEFORE TURNING TO OUR BOSTON COUPLES ,

it will be useful to frame this inquiry within the broader context of miniature painting and the painters of Federal Boston. By the opening decades of the nineteenth century, portrait miniatures were a popular form of art, commissioned by well-to-do and middle-class Bostonians to celebrate and commemorate the private worlds of domestic life. Miniatures, as a form, originated some three centuries earlier in the aristocratic courts of England and France, where tiny portraits, painted on vellum and mounted in lockets, were first exchanged among royalty and worn as forms of personal adornment.1 By the eighteenth century, English miniatures were painted with watercolor on thin slices of ivory, making use of the lustrous ground and transparent color to create luminous faces, a practice that would define miniatures in the colonies and the United States.2 Following British fashion in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, American miniatures would evolve in style and presentation, becoming bolder in color, somewhat larger, and presented not only in lockets but also small rectangular leather cases, wooden frames, and black lacquered papier-mâchÊ mounts.3 American miniatures flourished in the late eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth century for a variety of social and cultural reasons. Though artists still struggled to define and claim their place in American society, growing numbers of painters, both native and immigrant, self-taught and more professionally schooled, gathered in coastal cities, seeking training, materials, association with other artists, and most importantly, patrons. For most artists, portraiture remained the primary source of work and income, whether accomplished through an easel painting or a portrait in little.4 Not all portrait artists painted miniatures; of those that did, very few were sufficiently skilled and well known to work exclusively as miniaturists. Nevertheless, in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, sufficient numbers of miniaturists offered their services to sustain a flowering of miniature portraiture unfeasible a half century earlier.

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Though it is impossible to know how many artists in Boston were painting miniatures between 1810 and 1835 (the majority of miniatures, themselves, are unsigned), upwards of twenty-two painters did so at some point.5 Some miniaturists spent all or substantial portions of their career working in Boston: William M. S. Doyle (1769-1828), Henry Williams (1787-1830), Sarah Goodrich (1788-1853), William Lewis (1788-after 1838), and Thomas Edwards (about 1792-after 1866), and toward the end of our period, Mrs. Caroline Schetky Richardson (1790-1852), George Harvey (1800-1844), Pamelia Hill (1803-1860), Clarissa Peters Russell (1809-1854), and Moses Russell (about 1810-1884). The majority of miniaturists in Boston were more transitory, working anywhere from a few weeks to several years before moving on to other cities or towns, or simply disappearing from the historical record altogether.

For instance, in 1821 the noted miniaturist Anna Claypoole Peale (1791-1878) of Philadelphia, the daughter of the artist and miniaturist, James Peale, “being on a short visit to this place,” offered in a newspaper advertisement to take miniatures at “Miss Campbell’s, Pearl Street,” while that same year Joseph Partridge, a virtually unknown miniaturist and drawing teacher from Halifax, Nova Scotia, took up residence on School Street for part of the year.6 Significantly, in the almost exclusively male world of American painting, a small but notable number of miniaturists in Boston were women. This phenomenon reflected the ties of miniature portraiture both to intimacy and domesticity and to the technique’s use of watercolor, a medium used by middle-class women as a leisure pastime.7 The relative popularity of the miniature in the United States during this period was also enhanced by social and cultural changes in family, domestic relations, and the growing consumption of consumer goods, especially within middle class and professional families. As Robin Frank has perceptively argued, growing interest in the miniature may well have been fueled on the one hand by its particular suitability for the expression of personal sentiment and on the other by the emergence of more companionate, sentimental relations between wives and husbands.8 Unlike the larger, more formal, public portrait in oil, the miniature was a more private and intimate form of artistic expression, often commissioned to celebrate engagements and weddings or to commemorate other domestic passages, including the birth and death of children and loved ones. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, oval miniatures were typically encased in a locket as jewelry and sometimes combined with a truss of the loved-one’s hair on the reverse. In such cases, owners might literally wear the miniature of their beloved as a token of affection. As miniatures became somewhat larger and rectangular in format in the nineteenth century, young couples, like the Norcrosses, Turners, and Flemings, could display matching portraits in similar frames in their homes as a symbol of marital affection. Miniature portraits of children were also expressive of this affinity of artistic form and substance. During the opening decades of the nineteenth century, children were increasingly seen, valued, and portrayed as objects of affection within the domestic world of middle-class sentiment.9 Finally, the popularity of miniatures may well have been enhanced by rising expectations for material display and status within middle class and professional families during this period. As we shall see, miniature portraits were certainly the special domain of elite families in Boston, like the Salisburys and Sturgises, whose resources and family traditions included family portraits as a matter of course. Yet, it is also clear that miniatures in their more modest forms were becoming more accessible to and desired by middle-class families in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Whether displayed as achieved markers of respectability or as symbols of aspiration for a better life, miniatures, by the 1820s, might also play a somewhat more public role in enacting and legitimating claims to a proper life.

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Whatever the deeper causes for the flowering of miniature portraiture, Boston painters and patrons came together to create portraits in little. Wealthy sitters in all likelihood selected a miniaturist through personal knowledge of painters and the recommendation of family and friends. The Salisburys, Tappans, and Sturgises, who commissioned formal portraits from Gilbert Stuart, also had miniature portraits taken by Sarah Goodridge, Boston’s most accomplished miniaturist and informal protégé of Stuart. Middle-class Bostonians, whose shops, stores, and other places of work were located in the center of town along side the studios and homes of miniaturists, may well have been acquainted with a miniaturist as a neighbor.

Boston miniaturists, moreover, could and did appeal to prospective sitters through The Boston Directory, newspaper advertisements, and broadsides. William M.S. Doyle, who began his career as an artisan paper stainer and was apparently painting miniatures by 1803, published a broadside in 1808 promoting his varied services as a portrait artist (fig. 2).10 Emphasizing his ability to produce a likeness in the latest fashion, he offered to take inexpensive silhouettes at two for twenty-five cents “in correct style, [with] perfect shadows, and elegantly dressed.” For more affluent patrons, Doyle proposed to paint miniatures from six to twenty dollars, and portraits for fifteen to twenty dollars, appealing to the privileges of rank by noting that “the painting chamber is large and pleasant, unconnected with the profile room, where ladies or gentleman are waited on without mixing with other company.”11 Doyle also offered to take masks of recently deceased loved ones, from which silhouettes, miniatures, or portraits could be produced. As a businessman, artisan, and painter, Doyle warranted satisfaction with his product.12 Though Bostonians provide no written record of the experience of having one’s likeness taken in miniature, Boston miniaturists provide clues to what the process involved. Late in her career, Sarah Goodridge completed a self-portrait, depicting herself intently at work on a miniature, sitting at a table, with a small, raised desk easel, and glass of water for her watercolor (fig. 1).13 Sarah’s sister, Eliza, reported that Sarah could complete two miniatures in a week, suggesting that a likeness could be taken in a relatively small number of sittings.14 Boston miniaturist Henry Williams provides a hint as to what such a sitting might entail. In a manual written for beginning painters in 1814, he briefly advised prospective miniaturists on how to arrange the sitter: For painting miniatures or small portraits, provide yourself with a desk so proportioned as to bring your picture opposite to your face, which will prevent the disagreeable and unhealthy practice of stooping over your work; place your ivory or paper on your desk, having by you a black lead pencil, and India rubber to obliterate in case of mistake; place your subject at the distance of one yard and an half from you, suffering but one light to enter the room, which should be as high as the window will admit, by darkening the lower part with a green or black curtain, in order to throw the light in such a direction as to give pleasing shadows on the face.

The person must set still till the artist has got a correct drawing of the contour and features.15 If this advice was followed in practice, sitting—and sitting still—was a rather brief and intimate matter, positioned close to the artist with dramatic and pleasing shadows modeling the face.

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2. William M. S. Doyle (1769-1828), “Miniatures and Portraits,� broadside advertisement, 1808, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

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3. Jacques G. Milbert, View of Boston from the South Boston Bridge, lithograph, from Itineraire pittoresque du fluve Hudson, et des parties laterales de l'Amerique du Nord, 1828-1829, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

L I V E S I N M I N IAT U R E : B O ST O N IA N S I N 1820 B OSTONIANS NUMBERED SOME 43,000 SOULS . The community had grown substantially in the previous two decades, officially adding 18,361 inhabitants, largely migrants from the villages, towns, and countryside of New England. In the next two decades, Bostonians would more than double their numbers to 93,383, as Irish immigrants joined New England natives seeking opportunities in the growing city.16 Socially, Bostonians reflected the town’s primary economic role as a mercantile center of trade and commerce, built on its early mastery of shipping and other maritime ventures. Leading merchants, whose trade with Europe and the Far East brought substantial wealth to their families, formed the community’s elite, along with a coterie of prominent ministers, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. Most Bostonian families were of a middling sort, headed by breadwinners whose occupations sustained a life that could range from comfortable to simply adequate. Local tradesmen, shopkeepers, and ship chandlers lined the streets and docks of the town’s center, along with innkeepers, barbers, and others offering personal services. A wide variety of artisans—from house wrights, masons, smiths, coopers, and cabinetmakers to tailors, cobblers, hatters, printers, painters, and stone carvers— made livings by supplying the community’s day-to-day material needs and helping to build Federal Boston. At the community’s lower margins, day laborers, dock workers, itinerant seamen, and an increasing number of indigent poor—the elderly, young widows with children, the chronically ill— eked out livings that were precarious at best and often inadequate.17

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Bostonians remained overwhelmingly Protestant in 1820, attending the churches whose towering steeples, along with the masts of ships and State House on Beacon Hill, dominated the skyline of the community (fig. 3). Congregationalists were still most numerous, reflecting the town’s Calvinist origins and the formal establishment of Congregationalism in Massachusetts until 1833, though Unitarianism, which provided a more humanistic, inclusive, and optimistic vision of the Christian faith, was also popular with Boston’s progressive elites.18 Episcopalian Churches, descendants of the pre-revolutionary Anglican Church, also ministered to the Boston faithful, and Baptists, with seventeenth-century roots in Boston, also played a significant role in the religious life of Boston.

Joining with Unitarians and Congregationalists, Baptists were notable in the creation of interdenominational religious and civic groups designed to minister to the poor, the sick, the insane, the imprisoned, and others needing help.19 By 1820 Catholicism was the one exception to Protestant religious and cultural hegemony. From the end of the American Revolution—when Catholics for the first time could worship openly in Boston—to 1820, Boston Catholics grew in numbers from a handful of worshipers to an estimated 2,120 members, a small (4.9%) but notable presence among Boston’s population. That significant growth had been accompanied by the construction the Church of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street in 1803, designed by Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), and situated between the towering Federal Street Unitarian Church and Bulfinch’s crescent of fashionable townhouses. By 1835, Boston Catholics would increase nearly tenfold to 20,900, constituting nearly one fourth of the city’s population.20 Bostonians lived, worked, and worshiped within a townscape of neighborhoods, at once the product of nearly two centuries of habitation of the peninsula and of active development by town officials, merchants, builders, and land speculators (fig. 4).21 By 1820, the original settlement had become the locus of civic and mercantile life, where businesses gathered along State Street, Merchant’s Row, and Washington Street, adjacent to Long Wharf and Faneuil Hall on the one hand and the Court House, churches, and burying grounds on the other. Reflecting these changes, Joseph Quincy, Boston’s second mayor, would redevelop the town dock area in 1824, filling the bay to create space for a new, grand market and warehouses. Within easy walking distance of this center, Bostonians lived in neighborhoods, each, too, in the process of growth and change. The oldest, The North End, was the site of houses, small shops, warehouses, and wharves, along with Boston’s oldest Baptist churches and Copp’s Hill Burying Ground. The more open South End contained fashionable houses and gardens, as well as more modest homes, the theater, churches, and, along the bay, ropewalks, warehouses, and wharves. In the opening decades of the century, Bostonians were also moving into Boston’s newest neighborhood, the West End, occupying substantial homes in the fashionable streets adjacent to the State House on Beacon Hill and more modest residences further west. Within these neighborhoods, clusters of groups and families gathered into smaller enclaves, most notably, a growing Irish-Catholic community near the wharves along Broad Street and Fort Hill.

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4. Plan of the City of Boston, published with The Boston Directory, Hunt and Stimpson, 1828, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts 17

N E IG H B O R HO O D S : HOM E S , C H U R C H E S , A N D WO R K P L AC E S This map (The Boston Directory, 1828) documents where couples lived, worshiped, and worked at the time their miniature portraits were painted.

Sarah and John Tappan resided in the South End in 1830 in a substantial home on Summer Street (1), and Sarah attended the Essex Street Congregational Church <2>, where her memorial service would be held. John’s importing business was located in the town center on State Street [3].

George Washington Sturgis, on a visit home from China in 1821, may well have been living with his father, Russell Sturgis, on Pearl Street (4) in the South End, while courting his future bride, Mary Anna Channing, who lived with her parents on fashionable Chestnut Street near Beacon Hill (5). They were married in 1824 at the Federal Street Unitarian Church <6> by Mary Anna’s cousin, William Ellery Channing.

Otis and Mary Norcross married in the North End in 1809 at Christ Church (Old North, Episcopalian) in the North End <7>. In 1810, the newlyweds lived on Prince Street (8), where Mary had grown up.

John’s new crockery importing business was located nearby on the Fish Street (Ann’s Street), along the docks [9].

Betsy Olivey Lane lived in the West End on Hancock Street in the late 1820s and early 1830s (10) and attended church at the riverside Charles Street Baptist Church <11>, where she would be married in 1835. Her shop selling fancy goods was located in the town center on Washington Street [12]. Her future husband, Ward Jackson, lived on South Allen (McLean) Street (13), walked to his lumber business on North Grove [14], and worshiped with Betsey at the Charles Street Church <11>.

Otis and Sarah Turner were married in the North End at the Second Church (Hanover Street, Unitarian) <15> by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1832, and they took up residence on Salem Street (16).

Otis walked to the town center, where he worked as a bookkeeper at the Hamilton Bank at 53 State Street [17].

William and Eleanor Fleming married in 1824 at the Church of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street <18>. Eleanor grew up along the docks on Wharf and Broad Streets (19); as newlyweds in 1825, they resided on Bath Street (20). William worked around the corner as a tailor on Congress Street [21].

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5. Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853), Sarah Salisbury Tappan, about 1830, watercolor on ivory, Gift of Mr. Ernest Salisbury Tappan, 1959.13

E STA B L I SH E D M E R C HA N T FA M I L I E S Sarah Salisbury Tappan and John Tappan Sarah Salisbury Tappan (1782-1839) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the eighth of ten children of Samuel Salisbury (1739-1818) and Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury (1750-1789).22 Her parents, Boston natives, were married on September 1, 1768 at Old South Church, where both families had been members.23 A well-to-do Boston merchant and importer of dry goods and hardware, Samuel had temporarily moved his firm and family to Worcester at the beginning of the Revolution, where his younger brother Stephen managed their Worcester business.24 In 1784, Samuel returned to Boston, taking up residence at his parents’ home on Washington Street, Boston’s main north-south street, near Old South Church.25 Sadly, Sarah’s mother, Elizabeth, died five years later when Sarah was not yet seven, and Sarah and her nine brothers and sisters would be raised by their widowed father (fig. 6).26 That same year (1789), Samuel apparently moved his family to a house on Summer Street in the South End, where Sarah would grow up and live until her marriage. Years later, Edward E. Salisbury, Sarah’s nephew, recalled the old Salisbury family home on Summer Street he had visited as child:

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6. American, Elizabeth Sewell Salisbury, about 1787-1789, watercolor on ivory, Gift of Mr. Edward Kenway, 1941.15

[The house] was an ample, gambrel-roofed wooden house, with dormer windows; built up to the street-sidewalk, from which the principal outer door opened directly; but having on the east a spacious paved, hollow-square courtyard, bounded by stable and coach-house with one end to the street, by an old-fashioned garden shaded with ancient mulberry trees, and an old English walnut tree, and on the third side by the southern extension of the house itself—the whole front on Summer street measuring about ninety-three feet.27 On September 5, 1805, Sarah Salisbury, then twenty-two, married John Tappan (1781-1871) at Old South Church (Rev. Joseph Eckley), the congregation in which she had been raised and become a member two years earlier.28 John had been born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the sixth of eleven children of Benjamin Tappan (1747-1831) and Sarah Homes Tappan (1748-1826).29 The son of a storeowner, John came to Boston in 1799 to apprentice and clerk in the service of Samuel Salisbury. The following year, Samuel purchased a new store on 16 Merchants Row for his son, Samuel Junior, creating the firm of Salisbury and Sewall. In 1803, John was taken as a partner in this firm, and two years later he married Sarah, the daughter and sister of his business associates.30 John’s career as a Boston merchant was long and highly successful, and at his death, the eighty-nine year old was eulogized as “one of Boston’s oldest and most honored merchants.” A philanthropist, religious advocate, and reformer, John served as president of the American Tract Society and of the Massachusetts Temperance Union, sponsored the Foreign Missionary Society, helped to create Mt. Auburn Cemetery, and like his more well-known brothers, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, supported abolition in the years leading up to the Civil War.31

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Sarah gave birth to twelve children during the first two decades of her marriage. In the years immediately following their marriage, the Tappans lived on Belknap Street in the West End and Avon Street in the South End for five years; then, in 1810 they took up more permanent residence on Milk Street, a few blocks from John’s business at 16 Merchant’s Row. In 1821, John moved his business to State Street, rented a house on Summer Street in the South End, and built a new country estate in Brookline, which Sarah and John first occupied in July of 1822. This move was not unusual for a wealthy merchants of the 1820s and 1830s, who increasingly sought pastoral retreats on the rural fringes of Boston. In John and Sarah’s case, their second residence also involved family ties. John’s brother, Lewis (1788-1873), built a new Brookline mansion at the same time, and John’s sister, Lucy (1777-1858), lived in Brookline, the wife of the village’s long-serving Unitarian pastor, Dr. John Pierce.32 Their stay in Brookline was relatively brief, however, and marked by tragedy. Between 1822 and 1825, Sarah gave birth two sons, Henry Edwards and Henry Martin, who died of colic and whopping cough as infants and were buried in Brookline.33 Selling the mansion, Sarah and John returned to Summer Street, where they would reside for the remainder of their lives (fig. 4).34 It is likely that Sarah’s miniature portrait by Sarah Goodrich (1788-1853) was painted after the Tappan’s permanent return to Boston around 1830, when Sarah was in her later forties or early fifties (fig. 5). There is no known specific reason for the miniature to have been painted at this time, though it may well have been done for John or perhaps as a gift to one of her children.

Portraits, certainly, were part of the life of well-to-do families in Boston like the Tappans. Sarah apparently inherited and owned the miniature portrait of her mother, and she would have known the Gilbert Stuart portrait of her elderly father, Stephen, (about 1810-11) and probably Stuart’s portraits of John’s parents, Benjamin and Sarah Tappan, completed in 1814.35 It is quite possible that Sarah owned a miniature of her husband painted as a young man, taken by Edward Malbone (1777-1807) in 1804-05.36 She would also have her portrait painted by the fashionable Francis Alexander in 1836, and later in life, John, would have an oil portrait taken by the Boston painter, George P. A. Healy (1813-1894).37 Whatever the immediate cause, Goodrich’s highly individualized portrait presents Sarah as a fashionable, affluent lady of the period, dressed in an elegant black gown, finely gathered across the bodice, layered with black decorative tabs across the neckline and sleeves. Her white lace turban covers her hair with the exception of tight pendant curls that frame her forehead and blue eyes, and her neck and shoulders are modestly covered with a double layer of fine white lace. She wears small gold and red earrings with a matching collar pin, colors that are repeated in her belt buckle, bracelet, and red shawl. Most striking, however, is the expression conveyed by her face. Though her cheeks are touched with rouge, its mature contours and soft eyes suggest a quiet, melancholy gaze.

If Sarah Tappan’s life and miniature suggest possible clues to her character, her sudden and unexpected death a decade later, like that of her mother, elicited several public responses that add to this portrait.

In the summer of 1839, Sarah and John took their eighteen-year-old daughter, Lucy Pierce, to New York City in hopes of obtaining improved treatment for a serious medical condition. Though their quest first seemed promising, Lucy Pierce died on August 15th. Thirteen days later, a disconsolate Sarah also sickened and died, apparently of dysentery, though Sarah’s pastor, in his sermon on the deaths of

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Lucy and Sarah at The Essex Street Congregational Church in Boston, suggested, “the sickness and death of her daughter had predisposed the mother to an attack of an illness.”38 Shortly after Sarah’s death, a memorial poem, “A Lament for a Mother,” was published in the New Haven Record, with the inscription, “Suggested by the Recent Death of Mrs. John Tappan of Boston.” The poem, also republished as a broadside, appears to be a composite of two different works, one in blank verse, the other with rhymed stanzas. The latter is sentimental and mourns the death of one’s “sainted mother,” adding Christian reassurance that we “Part now on earth, but we’ll meet thee in heaven, / And love thee far better than we loved thee below.” The former also assumes the point of view of a child grieving the loss of a mother; yet, in suggesting the depth of such a loss, it may also allude to the possibility that Sarah’s loss of her daughter may have furthered her own death: “Tis a sad, sad loss, and makes us wish we, too, might die.”39 At some point after Sarah’s death, her daughter, Rebecca Waldo Tappan Davies wrote a tribute to her mother, which though garlanded in the language of a eulogy, provides a final glimpse into the life and character of Sarah and her relation to John and her children.40 With allusions to butterflies and the “soft white roses that bloom in our summer garden,” Rebecca, with a touch of humor, described her mother as gentle, tender, and kind: It seems almost like brushing the soft down from a butterfly’s wing to analyze in cold words a nature so refined and tender as my dear mother’s. You remember her erect, graceful figure, her light footstep, the soft tones of her voice, and the warm smile with which she welcomed all who sought her hospitality, especially her own kindred. She never used a harsh word, or an ungentle expression, and was already with an excuse for those who were in the fault. When we children, with hard criticism of youth upon its fellows, would denounce an acquaintance as totally plain and uninteresting, she would say: ‘Oh, she is a very sensible girl.’ I used to laugh and say, ‘Mother, I hope you will never call me sensible, for then I shall be sure nothing else can be said of me.’

Rebecca recalled that her mother’s “deep religious feeling pervaded her whole life and daily thought,” but that she centered her life in her home and her relation to her husband and children.

Sarah, she reported, “often said she desired no other society than that of her own home, yet she adorned with ease and grace every circle she was call to meet.” She was so devoted to her husband, and apparently, he to her, that the children remarked on the attention she gave John: Her own home was her little world, and the center of her happiness. She was so devoted [to] our father, so thought of his slightest wish, that, in reading that verse in the Bible which says: “And Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord,” we children use to say: “This is just like Mama.” He fully appreciated her, and the romance of their youthful love was never dispelled.

John buried Sarah at Mount Auburn in Cambridge, the cemetery he had helped to found, using the symbols of early nineteenth-century romanticism to convey the sentiment of loss. The granite monument, dedicated to Sarah and their children, is toped by a truncated column in ruins, garlanded with flowers; the entablature depicts a rose bush with two branches, one thriving, the other broken.41

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7. American, George Washington Sturgis, about 1825, watercolor on ivory, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.252

George Washington and Mary Anna Channing Sturgis George Washington Sturgis (1793-1826) was the son of Russell Sturgis (1750-1826) and Elizabeth Perkins (1756-1843). His parents were married in Boston in 1773, and they had sixteen children by 1800, seven of which died in the first two years of life. By George’s birth in 1793, Russell was well established as a “hatter and furrier” on Merchants Row and lived in a substantial home on Atkinson Street in the South End.42 In 1795, Russell joined in business with his brothers-in-law, the merchants James Perkins (1761-1822) and Thomas Handasyd Perkins (1785-1854), who were active in the emerging Northwest Coast-China trade, and by the early nineteenth century Russell was invested in the lucrative, if risky, trade with Canton.43 In an age of family capitalism, George, like four of his brothers, served his father in the China trade and various business ventures.44 At the age of sixteen, George was sent around Cape Horn, joining his nineteen-year-old brother James (1791-1851) as Russell’s agent in Canton in January of 1810. In a letter written on arrival to his younger sister, Ann (Nancy) Cushing Sturgis (1797-1892), George briefly recounted witnessing the festivities of a Catholic Sunday in Coquimbo, Chile on his voyage out—“music, fireworks, cocks fighting, dancing Gandangoes, etc, etc, all of which tended to amaze a raw yankee lad like myself.” At the same time the young, reluctant, and seemingly homesick George chided his sister for recounting to him the pleasures of daily life in Boston in her letter: without once reflecting that I am probably to be immured in this foreign prison some four or five years, or if I return home that I am as poor as Job’s cat and shall be obliged to decamp again immediately, then to crown all and climax your sisterly affection, you wish that the person whom you imagine I am most attracted to may marry another, ghastly consolation truly!45

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George’s fears of long separation were well founded, and he apparently did not return to Boston for a short visit until some five years later. Returning to Canton in January 1816, he again wrote a brief note, which if cheerful overall in tone, at once lamented that he was “doomed to remain as ‘Siah says amongst the heathens, ‘man is born to trouble as the sparks’, and also wistfully asked his sister to “pray find out who it is that plays so divinely on the flute down by the bottom of the commons near the greenhouse.”46 Six months later, he wrote again, responding to her “wish to know how we live, or more properly, how we exist, as ‘tis impossible a person can live in Canton.” George mentions his “blessed abode which looks well enough [in a picture]” but serves as a “prison house,” “the mosquitoes [that] bite like the ——,” the lack of a “fare face of a woman,” and the limited company of his brother Jim (“an odd fellow”), other merchants, and occasional visitors off ships (fig. 8). Most telling, he described his appearance—he was apparently suffering from hepatitis or other liver ailment—with verbal hyperbole but matter-of-fact acceptance: Now comes your humble servant. In person, a very shread paper, skinnier than fifty weasels, with as many striking points about him as there are joints in his body; one might study anatomy (with his body for the subject) without recourse to the dissecting knife, and withal a turmerick colourd personage, bearing strongly resemblance to a dried cheroot.47 And, to characterize his identity and his financial prospects, he drew upon the common sixpence: Now to be serious, you may be assured I shall return to you the same old sixpense, a little blacker, I grant, but with as strong impassions [sic] as when we parted, and what may seem rather singular have acquired no polish by use and currency. A sixpense I am, and a sixpense I expect to remain for a long time at least. My transactions in the mercantile way thus far bring to mind the anecdote related in the Vicar of Wakefield of Moses’ speculation in green spectacles with shagreen cases and silver rims; and my affairs have been very productive in shagreen cases (bad).

[H]owever thou’ the fates seem to oppose thus far; yet I am never the less merry on that score as I hold it a good rule “to drive dull care away” and never know a croaker to get along in the crowd fast than those who are inclined to take things as they rise and view them 8. American, James P. Sturgis, early 19th century, oil on canvas, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.256 in the most favourable light.

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Nine days later, in a postscript to his letter, an optimistic and happier George added: The wind has changed, the Ophelia has arrived, and I shall soon bid adieu to the land of queues, my next letter will probably be dated either in France or Italy. I cannot at present say how soon we meet, as it is uncertain if I return to the U. States, or go elsewhere.

In 1818, George, James, and his brother, Henry (1790-1819), who had also relocated to Canton, formed their own partnership, James P. Sturgis and Company, under the sponsorship and guidance of their cousin, John P. Cushing, the leading Boston merchant of Canton’s most successful firm, Perkins and Co.48 Though apparently successful in the import-export business of tea, silk, and illegal opium, the association was relatively short-lived. The following year, Henry became seriously ill, most likely of dysentery, hepatitis, cholera, or tuberculosis.49 Treated by his doctor with mercury, Henry died in Macao on April 11, 1819, longing to return to home to Boston: [It is] “absolutely necessary that I should leave this country. I feel disposed to commence the voyage immediately” [but Dr. Livingston says I should remain to complete the course of medicine], “swallowing mercury night and morning & rubbing in for 20 days or a month longer at least.”50 Two years later, George set sail for Boston, shipping from Canton with Captain Bancroft on the ship Sachem of Boston. One hundred days from Canton, while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, the ship “lost her rudder in a tremendous gale,” and in distress, was helped by Captain Curtis of the Cyrus, also of Boston and returning from Sumatra with a shipment of pepper. In the exchange between ships, Captain Curtis noted on the 20th of June, he “was boarded from her, furnished a few articles, and received George W. Sturgis, Esq., passenger,” before proceeding to Boston, arriving on August 29th.51 George’s stay in Boston was again relatively short, lasting at most six to nine months, and it was during this time that George apparently met his future wife. Mary Anna Channing (1803unknown) was the daughter of Walter Channing (1757-1827) of Newport, Rhode Island, a merchant and financier, who with his partner George Gibbs, had amassed a substantial fortune.52 Single until the age of 41, Walter married Hannah Smith (about 1771-1832) in 1798 of South Carolina and Norfolk, England. They had three children, Catharine Smith (1799), Mary Anna (1803), and Anna Elizabeth (1809), and in 1814 they moved to Boston, where they took up residence on 13 Chestnut Street in the fashionable Beacon Hill neighborhood (fig. 4).53 It is most likely that George had his miniature portrait painted at this time, perhaps as a gift to the eighteen-year-old Mary Anna Channing whom he was courting, or perhaps for a family member (fig. 7).54 The painting is unsigned, as was often the case with miniatures, though Susan Strickler suggests that Henry Williams may have taken the likeness.55 George is presented as a fashionable young man, dressed in a high collared coat, black waistcoat, and white stock with tie. If anything, he appears younger than his late twenties, though his thinning hair may hint that he is no longer the youth who left for China nearly a dozen years earlier. Though perhaps idealized and softened as a token of affection, the portrait still depicts an earnest young man who observes the beholder with a faint smile.

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By early summer of 1822, George shipped to China, again taking up residence at James’s office and warehouse in Canton for the fall and winter of the trading season. Writing to his father on Pearl Street, he reviewed his “safe arrival in this place” and “the welfare of my brother James, Miss Cushing, Forbes, and other of my friends in this quarter, and he recounted with pleasure the welcome reception received by Gilbert Stuart’s 1822 portrait of Russell that George had brought temporarily to Canton (fig. 9). George also noted his plan to return to Boston on a ship leaving early in January of 1823 and asked his father to “oblige me by sending the enclosed letter to Chestnut Street,” presumably to Mary Anna.56

9. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), Russell Sturgis, 1822, oil on canvas, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.254

George arrived in New York City on The Huntress on May 7, 1823.57 In a letter to his sister, Eliza Sturgis (1788-1873), George reported that he had been detained in New York a week by bad weather and a “slight fever and severe cold” but that he had enjoyed seeing various friends and relatives who were in New York, including Mrs. Channing and Mary Anna, who had apparently come to greet him: Mrs. Channing and suite reached this on Wednesday last in the morning. I tell m a that I hardly expected the honour done me. You know I arrived but 3 h before her. and in an aside later in the letter, advocated the virtues of his future wife to his sister: “Don’t you think my sweetheart is a nice girl and improves upon acquaintance?”58 In the year following his return, George took steps to settle in Boston. In August of 1823, he formally dissolved his partnership with his brother James in Canton and created a new partnership with his cousin, John Sturgis, with offices at 25 Central Wharf.59 One year after arriving in New York, he married Mary Anna at the fashionable Federal Street (Arlington) Unitarian Church, where the celebrated William Ellery Channing, Mary Anna’s elder cousin, presided.60 That summer he served as an honorary Marshall, along with other young notables, at the parade for the visiting General Lafayette to Boston.61 By 1825, George also served as a Director of the Columbian Insurance Company, and he apparently commissioned Francis Alexander, recently arrived to Boston, to paint his portrait.62 George and Mary Anna took a house on the fashionable Sumner Street in the West End, close to Mary Anna’s family home, and they had their first child, Anna Elisabeth.63 However successful George was in establishing himself in the economic and social world of Boston, he tragically was also suffering from a serious illness, perhaps that contracted in Canton a decade earlier, perhaps tuberculosis. A lithograph (fig. 10) by Francis Alexander depicts a considerably aged George, perhaps reflecting the effects of his illness.

By April of 1826 Frederick William Paine, the husband of his now married sister Ann (Nancy), writing from London, wrote that he had heard that the Sturgis’s were doing poorly, and that his wife hoped to ride to Boston soon to see her brother:

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10. John Pendleton (1798-1866), after Francis Alexander (1800-1881), Portrait of George Washington Sturgis, 19th century, lithograph on cream wove paper, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.374

The Sturgis family from the Col.’s account are in a melancholy state. Poor George must tarry and die at home as he is too feeble to be removed. Both Mr. and Mrs. S are failing very fast—Nancy has seen her mother but once since her confinement. She is so well herself as to already think of riding out to see George.64 On 17 June 1826, George made out his will, bequeathing his estate to Mary Anna, with several codicils, one giving Anna Elisabeth “the portrait of my father Russell Sturgis painted by Stuart in 1822,” another granting “Doctor Edward Reynolds my set of Rees Encyclopedia as a testimony of my respect and affection for him.”65 By early September, George was apparently very ill, and he and Mary Anna shipped out of New York on the brig Ocean, “on which he had embarked in the hope of improving his heath, but died after being out two days.”66 However expected, George’s death marked a sad passage for the Sturgis family and Mary Anna.

Russell Sturgis, George’s father, had also died in Boston the previous week, and Mary Anna lost her father, Walter Channing, that winter (2 February, 1827). That year, Mary Anna moved to New York with Anna Elisabeth and married Ferris Pell of New York at St. John’s Church on 6 November 1827 (Episcopal, Right Reverend Bishop Hobart, 1775-1830).67 The following year (9 April 1828), Anna Elisabeth, George and Mary Anna’s only child, died in New York.68

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M A K I N G O N Eâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; S WAY: R I SI N G FA M I L I E S Otis Norcross and Mary Cunningham Homer Norcross Otis Norcross (1785-1827) was born April 20, 1785 in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, the eighth of nine children of Daniel Norcross (1743-1805) and Abigail Chapin Norcross (1747-1810).69 Some time during the opening decade of the century, Otis moved from the rural village of Hopkinton to Cambridgeport, the small riverside village in Cambridge directly across the Charles from Boston via the West Boston (Longfellow) Bridge.70 On January 8, 1809, he married Mary Cunningham Homer (1790-1869) at Christ Church (Old North Church) in the North End (Episcopalian, Rev. Asa Eaton).71 Mary, eighteen years of age, had grown up in the North End on Prince Street, the daughter of Eleazer Homer (1761-1847) and Mary Bartlett (1770-1844).72 From 1798 to 1810, Eleazer rented a brick house on Prince Street and worked as a surveyor of lumber. By 1810, while working on Lewis Wharf, he had moved to Fleet Street, and soon after, in 1813, he resettled on Hanover Street, in a modest house he owned by 1821.73 Otis and Mary began their married life together in the North End on Proctor Street and Prince Street, near where Mary had grown up (fig. 4).74 It was at this time that Otis and Mary had their matching portraits taken, in all likelihood as tokens of their affection and recent marriage. They commissioned the young Henry Williams (1787-1830), also in his early twenties, who in 1810 was associated with the more established William M.S. Doyle (1769-1828), a miniaturist and the owner of the Columbian Museum on Tremont Street (Common Street) near School Street in the town center.75 Williams first appears in The Boston Directory in 1806, described as a limner and artist, working on the north side of Market Street. In 1807 he apparently began his association with Doyle, and Henry, then twenty, married Cecilia Lemercier at the newly organized Methodist Church on Bromfield Street (Rev. Samuel Merwin), around the corner from the Museum.76 Williams carefully composed his miniatures to present Otis and Mary as a couple, placing their faces in identical oval formats and turning their torsos slightly at complementary angles, insuring they would face each other when hung, side by side, on their pendants (figs. 11 and 12). Both are presented in stylish dress, and Mary, in particular, is painted with a delicate, sensitive touch.

Portrayed in a soft, sheer white dress with a matching bonnet, adorned with matching earrings, collar, and bonnet pins, she gazes directly at the viewer, with her crystal blue eyes radiating a calm assurance of a charming young bride.

Between 1809 and 1826, Mary and Otis had nine children, and with a growing family and apparent prosperity, they moved from the North End to the West End. Though Otis began his business importing and selling crockery, earthenware, glasses, and porcelain in 1809-1810 on Fish Street (Ann Street near Lewis Wharf) in the North End, he relocated his business in 1816 to 15 Exchange Street in the center of town and a short walk from his new residence on Derne Street. By 1821, he and his household of 11 were living on Hancock Street in the West End, where he rented a home valued at $2,500, and paid taxes on his business on Exchange Street, valued at $5,000.77 He apparently joined the newly organized Twelfth Congregational Church in 1823-24, created to meet the need for an expanding population in the West End.78 With his business and family established, Otis died suddenly in 1827 of a â&#x20AC;&#x153;disease of the heartâ&#x20AC;? at the age of 42, leaving Mary, then thirtyseven, with some $4,300 in personal assets and their nine children, aged one to eighteen.79

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11. Henry Williams (1787-1830), Otis Norcross, about 1810, watercolor on ivory, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.42.2

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12. Henry Williams (1787-1830), Mary C. Norcross, about 1810, watercolor on ivory, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.43

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13. American, Otis Norcross, Jr., about 1848, watercolor on ivory, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.4481

In the years immediately following Otisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s death, Mary continued to live on Hancock Street, while her eldest son, Otis, Junior (1811-1882), who had begun an apprenticeship of in the family firm at fourteen, assumed an increasingly important role in the family business. Otis, Jr., eventually becoming a highly successful businessman and mayor of Boston in 1866, and in all likelihood provided resources for his mother (fig. 13).80 During the 1830s Mary moved to the suburban Jamaica Plain section of West Roxbury, living in a house on South Street. Sadly, during a six-year period when she was in her forties, Mary lost three of her children: Laura (aged 9 in 1834) and Samuel (21 in 1839) and Jane (17 in 1840).82 She lived the reminder of her life at her home on South Street, attended in later life by two Irish servants, Catherine Denlevery and Bridget Denlevery, and dying on 6 January 1869 at 79 years of age.

She was buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery with Otis and four of her deceased children.83

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14. American, Betsey Olivey Lane, about 1825-1830, watercolor on ivory, Bequest of Mrs. Albert W. Rice, 1978.33

Betsey Olivey Lane and Ward Jackson Betsey Olivey Lane (1784-1851) was the daughter of John Merrifield Lane (1752-1807) and Mary Homer Lane (1752-1820).84 John lived and worked as a barber and hairdresser at the heart of Boston at 76 State Street, the corner of State and Exchange.85 After losing his first wife, Sarah Homer Lane (1758- about 1781), John remarried Sarah’s older sister, Mary Homer (1752-1820) on May 6th, 1782 at the West Church in Boston (Rev. Simeon Howard).86 The fifth of John’s thirteen children, Betsey was born in 1784 and baptized at the New North Church (Congregational).87 Though little else is known of Betsey’s father, he entered the public record when, standing in the front door of his shop at State and Exchange in 1806, he witnessed the famous murder of Charles Austin by Thomas O. Selfridge and subsequently served as a key witness in the highly publicized trial.88 For much of her adult life, Betsey Lane remained single. It is possible that she resided with her widowed mother, Mary, who lived on Middlecot Street (now Bowdoin) in the West End from 1813 until her mother’s death in 1820. We know that Miss Lane was living at Miss Dunn’s boarding house on Hancock Street in 1823, and that in the previous decade she had become highly involved in a variety of newly-created women’s benevolent and reform organizations.89 Like numbers of middle-class women in New England who were drawn to the religious revival movement of the

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early nineteenth century, Miss Lane sought opportunities for charitable work to the poor. She was an early member of The Boston Female Society for Missionary Purposes, composed of Congregational and Baptist women, and she was a leader in The Fragment Society, created in 1812 “to assist in clothing the destitute, more especially destitute children, and to loan bedding and infants’ garments to such mothers as are not able to procure things necessary for their comfort during the period of their confinement.” She helped to found the Fatherless and Widows Society of Boston in 1817, and she taught at the Sunday School of the Charles Street Baptist Church, where she had apparently become a member.90 By 1825, Miss Lane supported herself as a shopkeeper selling “fancy goods and toy makings,” first in the West End on Leveret Street and then on Washington Street (fig. 4). In 1830, Betsey created somewhat of a scandal in Boston by accusing two wealthy, young women, Miss Hannah Marshall and Harriet Harding, of shoplifting in her store. The police report first described the incident with some condescension and levity: Yesterday two young women were examined on a charge of shoplifting in the store of Mrs. E. O. Lane, Washington Street. They appeared to have taken a particular fancy to some fancy Ribbons of about twelve dollars in value. They were recognized in the sum of $100 each….”91 The accused failed to show for their trial, forfeiting their bail, and apparently much pressure was placed on Miss Lane to drop the charges. In a popular account written some thirty years later, Miss Lane is reported to have stood firm: [Miss Lane] kept a shop for ladies’ millinery, haberdashery and dress goods in Washington Street, and she accused a fashionable lady residing in Colonnade Row of shoplifting— kleptomania is the term now when committed in high life. The family and friends of the accused were outrageous [sic] at the charge; they threatened a lawsuit, damages, etc., if the accusation was not withdrawn. . . . They were wealthy, and the accused lady was above all want, but the resolute Miss Betsey had a high temper of her own, and she was as determined . . . and backed firmly by her family and friends, she refused all retraction. The affair, which made immense and universal talk in Boston at the time, affording a whole world of gossip, [then] tumbled into oblivion.92 In 1835, Miss Lane, still living on Hancock Street in the West End and tending her store on Washington Street, married Deacon Ward Jackson (1768-1845) at the Charles Street Baptist Church (April 4, 1835; Revered Daniel Sharpe).93 She was approaching fifty-one; Jackson, a widower, was nearly sixty-seven.94 Born in Scituate, Massachusetts, where he married his first wife, Lucy Nash on August 12th, 1792, Ward Jackson came to Boston by 1796, where he began work modestly as a “house wright.” By 1810, however, he was working as a lumber merchant on the Boston docks (a “wharfinger”), and by the 1820s, he was a successful lumber merchant with a good living, a business on North Grove in the West End, and house nearby on North Russell Street.95 Active in the Baptist community of Boston, he helped found the Charles Street Baptist Church in 1806-07, where he was a member, Deacon, and church leader for forty years. He promoted his church’s involvement in the Foreign Missionary Society (1813), donated money to create the first Baptist theological seminary in Newton, Massachusetts (1825), was active in the Boston Prison Reform Society (1826), and contributed to the Baptist Education Society of Young Men of Boston

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(1832), an organization providing scholarships for poor Boston youth seeking further education.96 Losing his first wife, Lucy, in 1830, Ward Jackson married Miss Lane, whom he apparently known as a church member and friend for two decades.97 Betsey Lane’s portrait in little was probably painted sometime between 1825 and 1830, though it is possible that it was completed in the early 1830s (fig. 14). The artist is unknown, though portraits remarkably similar in style were also taken in Boston of Deacon and Mrs. Stillman Lathrop around 1830, who were also members of the Baptist community in Boston and probably known to Betsey.98 These works reflect the hand of a self-taught artist, relatively unskilled in proportions and modeling, yet attentive to shape, decorative pattern, and linear detail. Miss Lane is portrayed in a fitted red dress of heavy red cloth, white collar and bonnet with simple embroidered orange flowers and tie strings, and a small blue and gold collar pin. Like the painting as a whole, her demeanor and expression are well-ordered, dignified, and determined.

In their decade together, Mr. and Mrs. Ward Jackson lived on McLean Street in the West End where Ward and Lucy Jackson had moved in 1825.99 Their household in 1840 remained large, with 11 persons. At his death in early 1845, the seventy-five year old Jackson was eulogized for his integrity, religious commitments, and involvement with Boston’s youth: Through his [Ward Jackson’s] industrious, useful life, he secured the respect and love of all observers, by an unassuming, high-minded course. In his business he was characterized by the strictest integrity, and ever manifested a disposition to aid those in need of assistance. Many young men of this city, by his fostering hand, owe to him their success, and will ever remember his with the liveliest gratitude. A firm, uncomplaining, cheerful resignation with which he supported trials, and his readiness to lighten others’ sorrows, happily illustrated his reliance on Heaven, and his aim to be of the Savior’s disciples.100 Privately, Jackson provided for his “beloved wife” in his will with the propriety and respect of a Baptist merchant, returning the “nine hundred dollars which she brought me with interest on the same at six percent together with all the furniture which formerly belonged to her.” In addition he granted her a “further some [sic] of Five hundred dollars,” the use of his house on Bridge Street for her natural life, and “such books as she may select from my library.”101 During most of the remaining six years of her life, Mrs. Jackson apparently remained active in the civic and religious work she valued, including the Boston Society for Missionary Purposes and the Children’s Friend Society, founded in 1833: “The last sixteen years of her life she [Mrs. Jackson] was persevering as one of the Board of the Children’s Friend Society. In the abodes of the poor, and at the bedsides of the sick and dying, she was a frequent and welcome visitor.”102 She remained in Boston until 1851, when she moved briefly to Newton, Massachusetts, where she died of consumption, and was buried in the North End in the Copps Hill Burying Ground.103 She left no will, and her younger brother, William Homer Lane (1785-1865) served as the administrator of her modest estate of $1,388.66, not including two notes for $500 and $400 that she apparently never collected from the estate of her deceased husband, Ward Jackson.104

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15. Attributed to Pamelia E. Hill (1803-1860), Sarah Loring House Turner, about 1832-1835, watercolor on ivory, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.260

16. Attributed to Pamelia E. Hill (1803-1860), Otis Turner, about 1832-1835, watercolor on ivory, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.261

Otis and Sarah Loring House Turner Otis Turner (1796-1855) was born in the South End of Boston and baptized on November 6 at Trinity Episcopal Church on Summer Street.105 His father, also named Otis Turner (1771-1827), was born in Pembroke, Massachusetts, and he apparently relocated to Boston as a young man, where he married Margaret Bender (1772-1844) at the Hollis Street Congregational Church on March 30, 1794 (Rev. Samuel West).106 The elder Otis was a carpenter who lived with his wife and four children in the South End for the remainder of his life, first on Newberry Street and Frog Lane and later in modest house valued at $500 that he owned on Lowell Place.107 Otis gradually made his way from his father’s artisan world to the world of business. Remaining single until the age of thirty-five, he apparently lived with his parents and widowed mother at Lowell Place until the 1830s. In 1820, he first appears as a purveyor of “English good’s” on Court Street in business with Samuel A. Allen, and in 1821, Otis, then twenty-five, was assessed a modest tax on personal property of $500.108 His business relationship with Allen would apparently continue until 1828, when Otis assumed the position of teller and cashier at the newly chartered Hamilton Bank, a position he would keep until his death in 1855. In 1828, Otis was also elected for two years to the new Boston Common Council, one of four councilmen representing the 11th Ward, where he resided on Lowell Place.109 On April 19, 1832, Otis married Sarah Loring House (1815-1835) at the Second Church on Hanover Street (Unitarian) in the North End, where the young Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) officiated at their service.110 Sarah’s parents, Mr. Timothy House and Sarah Loring, had married at the Second Baptist Church in the North End in 1813 (Rev. Thomas Baldwin), and Sarah was raised on Snow Hill 35

Street near the docks at the northern tip of the peninsula.111 Her father, who worked as a mariner and was sometimes given the title, Captain, earned only a modest living, renting a house in 1821 valued at $400 and having personal property of $400.112 According to the 1820 Federal Census, the Houses apparently had three children, one boy under ten, and two girls under ten, including Sarah.

It is not clear how Otis, thirty-five at his marriage, met Sarah, seventeen in April of 1832, as their ages, neighborhoods, and religious backgrounds suggest somewhat different social worlds. The miniatures, attributed to Pamelia E. Hill (1803-1860), were probably completed to celebrate their engagement or marriage; their faces are portrayed at complementary angles, so when the miniatures were displayed, the couple would face each other (figs. 15 and 16).113 And yet, their portraits reflect their differences as much their new life together as a couple. Otis, the middle-aged banker, is the epitome of formality, propriety, and reserve: groomed with his beard and hair immaculately trimmed; dressed in a formal black coat with fashionable high collar, black waist coat and tie, white shirt with stiff, flared collar.

Sarah, the young daughter of a Baptist mariner, is an image of simplicity, modesty, and almost childlike youth: her hair gathered plainly in a bun without a fashionable comb; no earrings or other jewelry, and her blue cotton dress adorned only with a simple garland of white lace.

Following their marriage in 1832, Otis and Sarah lived at 93 Salem Street in the North End (fig. 4).

The following year, Sarah gave birth to their first child on November 5, Sarah Loring Turner (18331906).114 In June of 1835, Sarah gave birth to her second child, Otis Edward, but Sarah would die in “child bed” on June 20th, followed by her son, Otis, on October 6th. Both were buried in the Hull Street (Copp’s Hill) Cemetery in the North End, adjacent to Sarah’s childhood home on Snow Hill Street.115 In the years following Sarah’s passing, Otis would move to 19 Somerset Street in the West End (1838) and remarry on May 19, 1841. He and his young second wife, Cordelia Munroe (1824-after 1897), had three children in the 1840s, and in 1845 the family moved to a more substantial home at 66 Charles Street at the edge of the West End.116 Through his ongoing work at the Hamilton Bank and some limited investments in real estate, Otis apparently solidified his financial position, and by 1850, Otis, Cordelia, and their children were joined by Cynthia Turner, his cousin, and Henretta McLaughflin (age 35, from Ireland), in all likelihood a housekeeper.117 In 1855 (21 July), Otis died “of a disease on the brain” at age 59 at his home on Charles Street. In a contemporary account, “Otis Turner, Esquire, Cashier of the Hamilton Bank” was eulogized for his propriety, intelligence, and “exemplary character”: Correct, prompt and energetic in the performance of its arduous duties, and that he was faithful to his trusts no one can gainsay……Handsome in features, erect in personal appearance, above the medium height, reserved in deportment, exemplary in character, precise in all business affairs, possessed of no ordinary intelligence, endowed with much general information, quite a genius for mechanics, which he employed in his leisure moments for his amusement; and by strict economy leaves his family with an ample competence.118 He was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, the new rural cemetery that had been created in Roxbury in 1848. The following November of 1855, Sarah, now twenty-two, the Turner’s first daughter, had her deceased mother and infant brother, Sarah and Otis, removed from Hull Street Cemetery in Boston and reburied at Forest Hills with her father, under a monument, inscribed, “My Father and My Mother”).119 36

17. American, Eleanor Boland Elwood Fleming, about 1824, watercolor on ivory, Courtesy of the Local History Room Collection, Gale Free Library, Holden, Massachusetts

18. American, William Fleming, about 1824, watercolor on ivory, Courtesy of the Local History Room Collection, Gale Free Library, Holden, Massachusetts

I M M IG R A N T S , A RT I S A N S , A N D A SP I R AT IO N S William Fleming and Eleanor Boland Elwood Fleming William Fleming (1801-1880) was born in Ireland at the beginning of the nineteenth century and apparently immigrated to the United States as a young man, arriving Boston by 1821. A tailor by trade, William took up residence on Bath Street, a small side street in the town center, and by mid decade, he appears in The Boston Directory, working as a tailor, first on Oliver Street, then, at various establishments on Congress Street.120 Eleanor Elwood Fleming (1803-1894) was born in Frankfort, Maine, a small village on the Penobscot River between Bucksport and Bangor.121 Like her future husband, her father, James Elwood, was an Irish immigrant, probably born in Northern Ireland in 1782. Eleanor’s mother, Mary Boland, was a native of Massachusetts, who died when Eleanor was an infant or a young child. James remarried on the last day of 1811 when Eleanor was eight, taking seventeen-year-old, Massachusetts-born Lucy A. Haynes as his second wife.122 Sometime in 1812 or 1813, James, Lucy, Eleanor, and perhaps an infant son, David, moved to Boston, where James would reside until his death in 1837 at age 55.123 James was a laborer, and he and his growing family lived in various locations in Boston where Irish immigrants gathered, beginning near the docks on Wharf Street in 1813, residing on Broad Street and its alleyways between 1818 and 1828, and moving to the North End in the 1830s. He was buried at St. Augustine’s, Boston’s first Roman Catholic cemetery.

Though we shall never know how William and Eleanor met, their shared neighborhood may well have played a role in the small-scale, walking city of the 1820s. Broad Street, where the Elwoods lived, was just a few short blocks from William’s residence on Bath Street, and William’s first known

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19. John H. Bufford, Church of the Holy Cross (interior), lithograph, published by Pendleton's Lithography, Boston, about 1830-1835, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

place of work was even closer. It is also possible that matters of work may have provided an introduction. Eleanor, the daughter of a laborer, may have worked as a seamstress, doing piecework at home for the emerging clothing trades.124 Most likely, shared membership in the growing Catholic community, centered at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Franklin Street, brought them together (fig. 4). The Elwoods appear in the sacramental records of the Cathedral, where Bishop de Cheverus baptized James and Lucy’s daughter Almira in 1815, and where Father William Taylor, Boston’s first Irish-Catholic priest, baptized two more daughters, Julia, in 1823 and Mary Anna in 1825. At Julia’s baptism, Eleanor, then a young woman of twenty, served as the godmother for her infant half-sister.

The following year, Father Taylor married William and Eleanor at the Cathedral, on 23 May (fig 19).125 It is likely that William and Eleanor commissioned their portraits around 1824, either before or after their wedding. Their desire and ability to do so speaks in complex ways to the widening popularity of the miniature across social classes. As a skilled artisan, William was far from poor; yet, a pair of miniatures might well have cost him three weeks’ wages.126 Such a purchase likely involved real sacrifice, testifying not only to the Fleming’s commitment to each other and but also to their economic aspirations for the future.

It is not clear whom the Flemings selected to paint their unsigned portraits, nor, for that matter, can we be certain they were painted at the same time or by the same hand. The fact that the Flemings are not presented as a matched pair, in fact, suggests that one portrait—more likely

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William’s—might have been painted before the other. William is portrayed directly, though with some subtlety and invention (fig. 18). His body and head are turned somewhat to the left, at once facilitating a three-dimensional rendering and also emphasizing William’s direct gaze and striking blue eyes. By placing William against the edge of a conventional red velvet curtain, the diagonal of the fabric directs the eye to William’s face, and the varied shades of the material enhance the color of his skin. William is pictured as young man: if anything, his smooth skin and delicate complexion suggest a man younger than his mid twenties. His clothes are well crafted and fashionable, the garments of a man—and a tailor—that knows and appreciates fine work. In an age when the fit of the clothes was de rigueur in men’s style, his double-breasted coat and waistcoat are well cut and contoured to his body. The coat’s design, with its double notch lapel, is finely worked, and his cravat is fashionable in the 1820s.127 If, as one might expect, the garments are William’s own work, they indicate that he knew his trade well.

Like William, Eleanor is positioned to emphasize her gaze and eyes, and the similarity in the painting of the eyes, nose, and small mouth to that of William suggests the same hand (fig. 17).

However, Eleanor’s placement on a porch, with classic Doric column and distant landscape of trees, water and shoreline, low hills and clouds, is not only remarkably different from William’s but also highly unusual for a miniature of the period. Few miniatures at this time incorporated landscape, and those that did, like Sarah Goodridge’s portrait of Reverend Ware, used the urban landscape to illustrate the accomplishments of professional men.128 Although the porch and landscape may simply be a fictive place used for compositional framing, the detail with which it is executed and its rarity raise the possibility that it may suggest an actual view.

Eleanor is depicted as a respectable and fashionably dressed young woman. Her prim, black empire dress, with its Greek-key motif ribbon around the bodice, was popular in the 1820s, and with the addition of the white lace collar, modestly appropriate in covering and color to have possibly served as her wedding dress.129 Her hair was fashionably curled, and her tortoise shell comb, which she may have purchased at nearby Alfred Willard’s store on Washington Street, was much in vogue.130 Eleanor’s pendent earrings and looping gold-colored chains, complete her presentation as a young woman of style and propriety.131 Her gold cross, however, is as singular as it is striking against the black of the dress. Rarely found in portraits of the period, the cross is an emblem of Eleanor’s Catholic faith in Protestant Boston. More privately, it may also commemorate her marriage to William at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

In the years immediately following their wedding, the Flemings had no children, nor would they in later years. Eleanor may well have been involved in the care of her step-sister and godchild, Julia, and grieved with her father and step-mother at the loss of two new step-siblings, Mary Anna (Hannah), who died at age two in 1827, and William, perhaps named for her husband, who died in infancy in 1829.132 In 1828, the Flemings moved from Bath Street to a new residence on Federal Street, placing them closer to the Church of the Holy Cross; then in 1831, the Flemings moved again to Essex Street in the South End. The following year, however, the couple disappear from the historical record in Boston, suggesting that they left the city in 1832 or shortly thereafter. Their decision to leave Boston is less remarkable than it may first seem. As scholars of American life have documented for this period, Americans, and especially young and less well-off individuals, were “astoundingly” mobile, as they moved in search of economic opportunities and a better life.133 Of

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those like the Flemings who called Boston home in 1830, nearly one in six would leave by 1831, one in three by 1835, and over half by 1839.134 It is also possible that increasing anti-Catholic sentiment and violence in the late 1820s and 1830s influenced the Fleming’s decision to leave.135 Such tensions may well have contributed to higher rates of out-migration from Boston among foreign-born residents during the 1830s: of natives, approximately one third (36%) left the city; among immigrants like William, six-out of ten (59.1%) are thought to have left Boston.136 Sometime during the later 1830s, the Flemings took up residence in Holden, Massachusetts, a small rural community of 1800 inhabitants in central Massachusetts, located north of the growing town of Worcester.137 Neither Eleanor nor William had any family connections to the community, and they were apparently the first Irish-Catholic residents of Holden.138 This anomalous situation would change dramatically over the course of their lives, with the arrival of Irish-Catholic famine immigrants after 1845, the gathering of an informal worshiping community by 1850, and the construction of the first Catholic Church in 1868.139 For the next forty years, however, Eleanor and William would apparently center their day-to-day lives within the Protestant community of the village, at first out of necessity, later, through some mixture of custom and choice.

In 1841, Eleanor began what was to become a long-term association with the Protestant women of the village, joining The Female Benevolent Society of Holden, a group founded and led by Sarah Mack Paine, the wife of the Congregational minister.140 Inspired by the Congregational Church’s active involvement in evangelism, foreign mission work, and benevolence, this group of church women pledged in the Society’s hand-written, 1834 constitution “to aid in the benevolent operations of the day and contribute our mite [sic] to carry to the destitute the blessings we enjoy.”141 The women met at least once a month in different homes to pray, share news, read, and sew for mission projects, providing clothing for those in need in Holden and for missionaries in the western United States, Hawaii, the Middle East, and South Africa. In the fall of 1841, the minutes of the Benevolent Society record that Eleanor invited the group to meet at her home, and, at the following meeting, the notes provide a rare, brief glimpse into Eleanor’s world: Oct. 27. With [much] pleasure this Society assembled at Mrs. Flemmings. [A?] very pleasant and large company collected. Our meeting was opened by Mrs. Jonathan Crosby.

Our work was as at the last. Our reading consisted of letters. One from Mrs. Eells and one also from Mrs. Baily. The constitution of the society was read, after which several gave their names as members of this society. . . .142 The work of Eleanor and the group that day—“as at the last”—was sewing for the western missions, where Mrs. Ells, a Holden native and the wife of Reverend Cushing Ells, ministered to the Spokane Indians in the Northwest Territory. The letter from Mrs. Bailey, shared at the group, had arrived from the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), where Caroline (Hubbard) Bailey (1814-1894), and husband Edward Bailey (1814-1903) also served as missionaries.143 If Eleanor appears to have established herself successfully among the women of the village, William’s place in the local community may have been more marginal, both socially and economically. Not a citizen, William’s name never occurs on the town’s voting lists, nor in the membership lists of any of the community’s civic organizations. As a tailor, he apparently practiced his trade from one of the several apartments the Flemings rented along Main Street in the village

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center, and he never made enough money to buy any real estate.144 When the Federal Censuses of 1860 and 1870 recorded personal property for the first time, the Flemings lacked sufficient holdings to be noted. For whatever reasons—personal failings or health, a small and declining market for the services of a tailor, his status as an Irish immigrant, lack of family connections— William apparently managed only a modest living during his decades in Holden.145 By the mid 1870s, the elderly Flemings had become desperately poor. With no family to care for them and no assets, William, in his mid seventies, was declared a town pauper, entitled to support by the community, and he was admitted to the Town Poor Farm on January 2, 1876. Leaving Eleanor in the village center, William moved two and a third miles to the Poor Farm, located on a country road leading to Worcester, thus ending 52 years of life together as a married couple.146 After four years at the farm, William Fleming died of pneumonia in April of 1880 at the age of seventy-nine.147 If William’s death was unremarkable, the process by which he was laid to rest—his funeral, burial, and his grave marker—was in several ways unusual for a resident of the poor farm.

Of the ten other residents who died at the Farm between 1875 and April of 1880, only William was buried in a marked grave that survived into the early twentieth century.148 In April of 1880, the town and members of the community came together to insure that William would have a proper, if modest, burial. This action may have been a tribute to William, himself, or, perhaps, it occurred because Eleanor, his wife, was still an active and respected member of the community, a circumstance unusual for a poor farm resident. In either case, a gravesite was procured in the seldom-used, second town cemetery near the village center, and the Town paid for William’s burial, reimbursing William H. Drury, the town undertaker, $2.00 for “going with the hearse,” $2.50 for opening and closing the grave, 50 cents for use of a new ice box, and apparently $5.25, either for the plot itself or perhaps procuring a gravestone.149 In an uncommon gesture, the Town also paid $5.00 to Henry Roger, the Congregational minister, for “officiating at William Fleming’s funeral.”150 Presumably, with Eleanor in attendance, William was buried in the Park Avenue Burying Ground, some 300 yards down Main Street from where William and Eleanor had lived much of their adult lives. His gravestone was simple and modest, larger than that typically used for an infant or young child, smaller than that of most adults. Designed with two arching halves, it contained two inscriptions. On the left, it read, “Wm Fleming, Died Apr 14, 1880, AE 79”; on the right, frugally anticipating his wife’s future demise, “Eleanor E, His Wife Died . . .”

Eleanor’s life, however, was not yet over. In 1880, she lived with Eunice C. Hubbard, the eighty-four year old widow of a former Deacon of the Congregational Church, in an apartment overlooking the Old Burying Ground at the town center. 151 In 1885, however, the Town declared Eleanor a Town Pauper and provided $36 for her expenses “outside the Almshouse.” The following year, in 1886, six years after her husband’s death, the Town granted her $4.00 in aid, perhaps to help her move to her final residence, the newly-opened Home for Old Ladies, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, some twenty miles north of Holden.152 Created by Protestant woman from five churches in Fitchburg, the Home was organized to provide a private, more humane, and dignified alternative to the public almshouse. Eleanor was one of the first residents, though it remains a mystery how she was admitted to the Home, which formally required Fitchburg residence and an admission fee. In all likelihood, Holden women with ties to

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Fitchburg, out of respect and good will, gained her admittance.153 At her death in 1894, the institution’s secretary and guiding spirit, Miss Martha Tolman, briefly eulogized Eleanor in the Annual Report, providing a final glimpse of the young woman with gold chains and a cross, painted in miniature some seventy years earlier in Boston: But one death has occurred during the past year: that of Mrs. Eleanor Flemming at the age of 91 years, the oldest member of the Home. Gentle and dignified, quaint and kindly, she was greatly beloved not only by the matron and inmates of the Home but by many friends of early and later years.

She has borne much suffering with great fortitude, often alluding to the comforts which the home afford her with gratitude. It is pleasant to linger over the memory of one whose lovely disposition and kindness of heart will always render her place in the Home a sacred one. Her death seemed to be the stepping over to a reunion with friends whom she confidently expected to meet. Among floral tributes from other friends, a beautiful wreath of ivy, the emblem of friendship, was most appropriately placed upon her casket by Mrs. Liversage, the constant friend of the old ladies. Rev. Mr. Rector officiated at the funeral.

Mrs. C.S.L Bagley and Miss Dora Streeter sang “Rock of Ages” and “Some Sweet Day.” Her remains were taken to Holden for burial beside her husband.154 Without family and resources, no one paid to have the inscription on her gravestone completed to match William’s (fig. 20). Lacking the date and her age at death, her half of the monument remained, “Eleanor E / His Wife / Died.”155

20. David M. Hummon, Gravestone of William and Eleanor Fleming, digital photograph, Park Avenue Cemetery, Holden, Massachusetts

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M I N IAT U R E S A N D R E L AT E D I M AG E S 1. Sarah Goodridge, American, 1788-1853, Self-Portrait, miniature, about 1845, watercolor on ivory, Courtesy of the R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana 2. William M.S. Doyle, American, 1769-1828, “Miniatures and Portraits,” broadside advertisement, 1808, Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts 3. Jacques G. Milbert, View of Boston from the South Boston Bridge, lithograph, 1828-1829, from Itineraire pittoresque du fluve Hudson, et des parties laterales de l’Amerique du Nord, 1828-1829, Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts 4. Plan of the City of Boston, published with The Boston Directory, Hunt and Stimpson, 1828, Courtesy of The American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts 5. Sarah Goodridge, American, 1788-1853, Sarah Salisbury Tappan, about 1830, watercolor on ivory, 3 7⁄16 x 2 11⁄16 inches, Gift of Mr. Ernest Salisbury Tappan, 1959.13 6. American, Elizabeth Sewell Salisbury, about 1787-1789, watercolor on ivory, 1 1⁄2 x 1 inches, Gift of Mr. Edward Kenway, 1941.15 7. American, George Washington Sturgis, about 1825, watercolor on ivory, 3 x 2 3⁄8 inches, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.252 8. American, James P. Sturgis, early 19th century, oil on canvas, 10 9⁄16 x 8 3⁄4 inches, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.256 9. Gilbert Stuart, American, 1755-1828, Russell Sturgis, 1822, oil on canvas, 30 x 24 15⁄16 inches, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.254 10. John Pendleton, American, 1798-1866, after Francis Alexander, American, 1800-1881, Portrait of George Washington Sturgis, 19th century, lithograph on cream wove paper, 6 3⁄4 x 6 1⁄4 inches (image), Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.374 11. Henry Williams, American, 1787-1830, Otis Norcross, about 1810, watercolor on ivory, 3 1⁄8 x 2 1⁄2 inches, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.42.2 12. Henry Williams, American, 1787-1830, Mary C. Norcross, about 1810, watercolor on ivory, 3 1⁄4 x 2 1⁄2 inches, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.43 13. American, Otis Norcross, Jr., about 1848, watercolor on ivory, 2 3⁄4 x 2 1⁄4 inches, Bequest of Grenville H. Norcross, 1937.44 14. American, Betsey Olivey Lane, about 1825-1830, watercolor on ivory, 3 x 2 3⁄8 inches, Bequest of Mrs. Albert W. Rice, 1978.33 15. Attributed to Pamelia E. Hill, American, 1803-1860, Sarah Loring House Turner, about 1832-1835, watercolor on ivory, 2 9⁄16 x 2 1⁄4 inches, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.260 16. Attributed to Pamelia E. Hill, American, 1803-1860, Otis Turner, about 1832-1835, watercolor on ivory, 3 7⁄16 x 2 3⁄8 inches, Gift of the Paine Charitable Trust, 1965.261 17. American, Eleanor Boland Elwood Fleming, about 1824, watercolor on ivory, 3 1⁄2 x 3 inches, Courtesy of the Local History Room Collection, Gale Free Library, Holden, Massachusetts 18. American, William Fleming, about 1824, watercolor on ivory, 3 1⁄2 x 3 inches, Courtesy of the Local History Room Collection, Gale Free Library, Holden, Massachusetts 19. John H. Bufford, Church of the Holy Cross (interior), lithograph, published by Pendleton's Lithography, Boston, about 1830-1835, Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts 20. David M. Hummon, Gravestone of William and Eleanor Fleming, digital photograph, Park Avenue Cemetery, Holden, Massachusetts

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ENDNOTES 1

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10 11

12

13

14

15

16

17 18

Stephen Lloyd, “Perfect Likeness”: An Introduction to the Portrait Miniature.” In Julie Aronson and Marjorie Wieseman, Perfect Likeness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 18-20.

Dale T. Johnson, American Portrait Miniatures in the Manney Collection (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 15.

On technique, see Carol Aiken, “Materials and Techniques of the American Portrait Miniaturist,” ibid., 27-30.

Ibid., 31-33.

Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative years, 17901860 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 56-61, 65-66.

This conservative estimate comes from an examination of The Boston Directory, various years, 1810-1835; newspaper advertisements; and Athenaeum exhibition listings, 1827-1835; as well as standard biographical indexes. See: Robert Perkins, Jr., William Gavin III, Mary M. Shaughnessy, The Boston Athenaeum Art Exhibition Index, 18271874 (Boston: The Library of the Boston Athenaeum, distributed by MIT Press, 1980); George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, The New York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 1564-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Theodore Bolton, The Early American Portrait Painters in Miniature (New York: F. F. Sherman, 1921). In addition to those noted in the text, some painters apparently spent a number of years in Boston: the itinerant Thomas Badger (c.

1793-1868); John S. Porter; Eliza Goodridge, after 1830; Washington Blanchard, by 1831; the noted Benjamin Trott (c. 1770 to 1843), after 1833; and M. C. (Manasseh Cutler) Torrey (1807-1837), in the early 1830s. Others, about whom little or nothing is known, include C. J. Westmore, C. F. Westmore, A. M. Sherman, James S. Newton, John S. Rhodes, James H. Gillespie, Ruben Rowley, Mary E. LaLanne (Mrs. Horace Kimball), J. B. Schoener, and John Ruben Smith.

For Peale, see the Boston Repertory, May 1, 1821, 1; for Partridge, see The Boston Directory, 1821, and Bolton, Early American Portrait Painters in Miniature, 119.

In addition to Sarah Goodridge, other women miniaturists included Pamelia Hill, Caroline Schetky (Mrs S. C. Richardson), Miss Margaret Byron Dole (Mrs. John Chorley), Mary E. LaLanne, and by 1835, Mrs. Clarissa P. Russell. Schetky, who was born in Scotland, migrated to Philadelphia by 1818, and settled in Boston by 1825, apparently received some attention from Gilbert Stuart (see Bolton, Early American, 140-41). Margaret Doyle was the daughter of William M. S. Doyle and like Hill, Schetkey, and Russell, exhibited her work at the Athenaeum. Sarah Goodridge’s younger sister, Eliza (1798-1882), also painted miniatures and was apparently in Boston by the early 1830s.

Susan E. Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures: The Worcester Art Museum (The Worcester Art Museum, 1989), 63.

Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 3-7.

Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75-93.

Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 52-53.

Broadside, William M. S. Doyle, 1808, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Doyle’s entrepreneurial spirit and his emphasis on a correct likeness are expressive of the artisan portrait artist of the early nineteenth century (see, Harris, The Artist in American Society, 56-61, 65-66).

Aronson and Wieseman, Perfect Likeness, 197. Sarah Goodridge, Self Portrait, miniature, about 1845. (Courtesy of the R.W. Norton Art Gallery, Shreveport, Louisiana). Charles Wilson Peale also painted an oil of his brother, James, at work on a miniature, with desk easel, ivory on card, diminutive palette, glass, paints, and brush in hand. See Frank, Love and Loss, 6.

Susan E. Strickler, “Goodridge, Sarah,” American National Biography OnLine Feb. 2000. http://www.anb.org/articles/17/17-00336.html.

Henry Williams, Elements of Drawing (Boston: published by H. Williams, School-Street, 1814), 6.

Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, Revised and Enlarged Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 12, 239.

Ibid., 1-24, 250-51, 300.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-2005 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 61; also Thomas H. O’Connor, The Athens of America, Boston: 1825-1845 (Amherst and Boston: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 10-11.

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28 29

30

31

32

The Boston Directory officially listed 25 churches in Boston in 1820, of which eleven were designated Congregational, four Episcopalian and Baptist, two Universalist; and one each of Unitarian, Friends, and Roman Catholic. This list certainly underestimates the number of Unitarian congregations that remained Congregational in name only, including William Ellery Channing’s leading Federal Street Church.

On changing church membership in New England, see Finke and Stark, The Churching of America, 55-68. On religious and civic movements in Boston addressing issues of class inequality and later slavery, see O’Connor, The Athens of America.

Robert Lord, John Sexton, and Edward Harrington, History of the Archdiocese of Boston (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1944), Volume II, 123-27; Ronald D. Patkus, A Community in Transition: Boston Catholics, 1815-1845. (Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of History, Boston College, 1997, UMI Reprint: 9818637), 42-43, 96-99, 103; Thomas H. O’Connor, Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).

See Annie H. Thwing, The Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of Boston, 1630-1822 (Boston: Marshall Jones Company, 1920); Alex Krieger and David Cobb, with Amy Turner (editors), Mapping Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).

Worcester Vital Records to 1850, Vol. 1, 228. See also Edward E. Salisbury, Family Memorials or Genealogical and Biographical Notes on The Families of Salisbury . . . (New Haven: Privately printed, 1884), Vol. 1, 53, 65-67.

Worcester Art Museum, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel Salisbury, Discussion, http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/Artists/stuar t/samuel/painting-discussion.html. See also Salisbury, Family Memorials, 37- 53.

By the end of his life, Samuel had amassed a substantial fortune, with a personal estate probated at $400,674. Ibid., 53.

Worcester Art Museum, Samuel Salisbury, for a discussion of his parents’ home on Marlborough Street, the section of Washington Street between School Street and Summer Street. A Record of the Streets, Alleys, Places, Etc. in the City of Boston (Boston, 1910), 299.

The Worcester Art Museum also owns a related oil, probably painted posthumously from the miniature by Christian Gullager about 1789 (1901.24).

Salisbury, Family Memorials, 47. Edward Salisbury, born 6 April 1814, was the son of he son of Josiah Salisbury (1781-1826) and Abigail “Abby” Breese. He would have apparently visited the family home in the 1820s. The Boston Directory does not report the Salisbury’s as living on Summer Street until 1795, somewhat later than E. Salisbury’s report of the 1789 of purchase of this home. Samuel continued to use the 41 Marlborough (Washington) Street home for business purposes, at least until 1800.

Boston, MA, Marriages, 1700-1809, Vol. 2, 276.

Daniel L. Tappan, Tappan-Toppan Genealogy (Arlington, Massachusetts, privately printed, 1915), 24-25.

It is difficult to determine the exact ownership and origin of the firm of Sewall and Salisbury (later Sewall, Salisbury, & Co), in part because contemporary sources do not distinguish clearly between the elder and younger Samuel Salisbury. In 1800, when the firm was created, Samuel senior was 61; his son, 31; and John was 19. See “Death of John Tappan,” The Boston Journal, Saturday Evening, March 25, 1871; also, Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (N.Y,: Hurd and Houghton, Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1870), 33-35. Arthur Tappan, John’s younger brother, also apprenticed at Sewall and Salisbury, beginning in 1801, and Lewis’s account of this experience includes information on John’s association with the firm. In 1803, it notes that John owned a pew in the newly fashionable Federal Street church of W.E. Channing, where John and Arthur worshiped.

“Death of John Tappan,” The Boston Journal, Saturday Evening, March 25, 1871; Tappan, Tappan-Toppan Genealogy, 31. John Tappan’s estate was valued at $48,200 in 1831 (Tax List of Boston, 1831, NEHGS) and $350,000 in the Federal Census of 1870. On Mount Auburn, see Blanche M. G. Linden, Silent City on a Hill (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 134-6.

Lewis Tappan apparently lived in Brookline from 1816-1830. John’s business partner, Joseph Sewall, also built a large home on an adjoining estate in 1823. Other affluent merchants had been building estates in Brookline from the beginning of the century, including Thomas and Samuel Perkins, Stephen Higginson, George Cabot, and Captain Nathaniel Ingersoll. Nina Fletcher Little, Some Old Brookline Houses (The Brookline Historical Society, 1949),14, 127-30; see also, “Presidential Address,” Proceedings of the Brookline Historical Society,

44

33

34 35

36

37 38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48 49

50

45

January 19, 1910. On line: http://www.brooklinehistoricalsociety.org/ history/proceedings/1910/1910_Address.html.

Brookline Vital Records, Deaths, 231; Tappan-Toppan Genealogy, 31.

Salisbury, Family Memorials, does not record these two sons, born between Lucy Peirce (1821) and Josiah Salisbury (1826).

The Boston Directory, 1821, 1829, 1830, 1850.

Worcester Museum of Art: Samuel Salisbury (1901.28); National Gallery of Art: Benjamin Tappan (1970.34.2 ) and Sarah Homes Tappan (1970.34.3).

In 1949, Louise Dresser, Curator, Worcester Art Museum, noted in museum records that Mr. Kenway owned a photograph of a missing miniature attributed to Malbone and thought to be the young John Tappan. This is certainly possible, as Malbone was in Boston in 18041805, when John was working and courting Sarah. (See Bolton, Early American Portrait Painters, 100.)

Salisbury, Family Memorials, 67.

The Commercial Advertiser, New York, August 29, 1839, 2 lists Sarah’s death by dysentery. Nehemiah Adams, “A Sermon, preached to the Essex Street Congregation, Boston, September 1, 1839, on occasion of the death of Lucy Pierce Tappan, and of her Mother, Mrs. Sarah Tappan, Wife of John Tappan, Esq.” (Boston: Printed by Perkins & Marvin, 1839), 17-18, 20, 22. Adams was apparently well acquainted with the family, as he traveled to New York and visited Julia on the day before she died.

“Lament for a Mother, Suggested by the Recent Death of Mrs. John Tappan of Boston,” Broadside, from The New Haven Record, author unknown (C.R., initials). Brown University Library. Center for Digital Initiatives.

Salisbury, Family Memorials, 65-67. Rebecca Waldo, Sarah’s fourth child, was born November 5, 1812; she married Judge Henry E. Davies of New York in 1835. Tappan, Toppan-Tappen Genealogy, 31.

Nathaniel Dearborn, A Concise History of, and Guide Through Mount Auburn (Boston: Printed and published by Nathaniel Dearborn, 1843), 61-62.

Russell Sturgis, “Discussion,” portrait by Gilbert Stuart, Worcester Art Museum 1965.254): http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/Artists/stuar t/russell/painting-discussion.html). For a genealogical account, see Roger F. Sturgis, Edward Sturgis of Yarmouth, Massachusetts (16131695) and his Descendants (Boston: Stanhope Press, 1914), 35-37.

Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 17831860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961), pgs. 52-78; Carl Seaburg and Stanley Paterson, Merchant Prince of Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 58, 90, 149-50, 155-56.

James Perkins (1774-1790), Russell’s first son, was sent to sea at sixteen and lost. Nathaniel Russell (1779-1856) had a long and successful career as a merchant and banker, and James Perkins (17911851) spent most of his career in Canton. Henry (1791-1819), as noted below, died in Canton. Francis Shaw Sturgis, compiler, The Descendants of Nath’l Russell Sturgis (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis Co.: 1900; revised 1925), iv. On family alliances and business interests among the Sturgises, Perkins, and Paines, see Jacques M. Downs, The Golden Ghetto: The American Commercial Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1874-1844 (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1997), 367-69.

Letter, From G.W. Sturgis to Ann (Nancy) C. Sturgis, Canton, January 9, 1810. The Paine Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Box 2, Folder 5. George closed his letter by quoting the eight-line second stanza of a poem from Thomas Moore’s (1779-1852) Irish Melodies, in which the poet, imagining the pleasures of festivities and revels far away, hopes that a kind voice back home will murmur, “I wish he were here.”

George W. Sturgis to Miss Ann (Nancy) Cushing Sturgis, Boston; Canton, January 20th, 1816. Paine Family Papers, Box 2, Folder 5.

George W. Sturgis to Ann (Nancy) Cushing Sturgis [Mrs. F. W. Paine]. Canton, August 8, 1816; postscript, August 17, 1816. Paine Family Papers, Box 2, Folder 5.

See Downs, The Golden Ghetto, 150-7.

No mention is made of the specific disease in Henry, James, or George’s letters. Illness was common in Canton, due to poor sanitation and the transmission of infectious diseases. Ibid., 25 and 60.

Henry’s last days are documented in five tragic letters exchanged between Henry in Macao and George and James in Canton over the last four months of his life. Dr. Livingston’s treatment are in a letter from Henry to James, written in Macao, March 9th, 1819. James last letter to Henry (Canton, 8 April 1819) notes that he has arranged for

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Captain Alhorn to take Henry to Boston on his return voyage, doing “everything in his power to make you comfortable,” but Henry dies three days later before the voyage is undertaken. Paine Family Papers, Box 3, Folder 1, 1817-1819.

“Shipping News,” Port of Boston, Repertory, August 30, 1821, Vol. 27, #127, 2.

Mary Anna’s name is spelled multiple ways in various documents. In probate records relating to George’s death (the “wife’s consent form”), she signed her name, “Mary Annah Sturgis.”

Edward Tyrrel Channing, Notes Concerning the Channing Family, August 10, 1836 (Boston: Albert Hallett, Printer, 1895), 4, 11. See The Boston Directory, 1816, 1818, 1821, 1823, 1825, 1826. In 1821 he rented a $6,000 house at 13 Chestnut Street, and his personal estate was valued at $30,000. Boston Taxpayers in 1821 (Reprint. Camden, Maine: Picton Press, 1988).

Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 130 suggests the painting was completed about 1825 on the basis of style and the fact that she was not able to place George in Boston before 1824. This is certainly also possible, though a comparison of the miniature with the 1825-26 lithograph of George suggests an earlier date.

Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 130-31.

Letter from George W. Sturgis, Canton, to Russell Sturgis, Boston, October 18, 1822. Paine Family Papers, Box 3, Folder Three, Correspondence, 1822-1829.

U.S. State Department, New York, New York, 1823, 245.

George Washington Sturgis to Eliza Sturgis, New York, May 14, 1823.

Paine Family Papers, Box 3, Folder Three, Correspondence, 18221829.

Boston Daily Advertiser, (August 21, 1823), Vol. 35, Issue 45, 3.

Columbia Centinel, May 15, 1824. Channing had previously married Mary Anna’s older sister, Catharine in 1821 at the Church.

Columbian Centinel, (August 21, 1824), Issue 4212, 2.

Francis Alexander (1800-1881) first worked in Boston from 1825-31.

Pendleton’s Lithography was also founded in 1825.

For business, see The Boston Directory and The Boston Advertiser, 1824 and 1825; a separate residence first appears in 1826 on Sumner Street in the West End. Frederick reports the family news he has received from his business associate and superior, Col. H. Perkins, who arrived in London “last night by the Milo,” having left Boston on April 14th. Frederick William Paine to Miss Mary L. Pickard, of Rochester, London, May 6, 1826.

Paine Family Papers, Box 3, Folder Three, Correspondence, 18221829.

Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Probate Records, Vol. 124 (part 2).

Will, 17 June 1826, 299-300. Dr. Edward Reynolds (1793-1881), a contemporary of George’s, was educated at Harvard (1811) and became a noted Boston physician. George also bequeathed a ring of his deceased brother, Henry, to James in Canton.

Boston Commercial Gazette, (September 14, 1826), Vol. 71, Issue 26, 2.

That George went to sea suggests he was dying of tuberculosis. Sea voyages were commonly prescribed for young men suffering from the disease. See Sheila Rothman Living in the Shadow of Death (New York, Basic Books, 1994), 18-22.

Boston, MA: Dexter’s Memoranda of the Town of Boston. (Online database. AmericanAncestors.org. NEHGS, 2008.) Also, New York, Marriage Newspaper Extracts, 1801-1880, Barber Collection; Ancestry.com.

New York, Death Newspaper Extracts, 1801-1890 (Barber Collection), 25; Ancestry.com.

In Memorium. Otis Norcross, Born in Boston November 2, 1811, Died in Boston September 5, 1882 (Boston: Privately Printed. 1883), 6- 7; See also Fitts, Lane Genealogies, Vol. II, 239-40. Otis’s parents married in 1765, when Daniel Norcross was 22 and Abigail was 18. In 1775 Daniel served as a private in the Revolution; he died of consumption at the age of 66 on 23 June, 1805 and was buried in the Bare Hill Cemetery, Hopkinton. Hopkinton Vital Records, 1911, 439.

On Cambridgeport, see http://www2.cambridgema.gov/historic/cambridgehistory.html.

Marriages, Columbian Centinel, 1784-1840, 1867.

Eleazer (25) and Mary Bartlett (16) married 12 November 1786 in Boston. Massachusetts, Town Vital Collections, 1620-1988, Image 8507; Ancestry.com.

Massachusetts and Maine Direct Tax, 1798, Transcription, Vol. 7, 535.

Boston Taxpayers in 1821, 87.

The Boston Directory, 1809 and 1810.

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Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 114-16, for a discussion of the attribution of the portrait to the younger Williams on the basis of style. The miniatures are signed by Williams, but the backing paper and reverse of the ivory record that the likenesses were taken by Doyle in 1810. In 1813, their on-and off partnership apparently ended with Doyle’s announcement in the Boston Daily Advertiser (March 24, 1813, Volume 1, Issue 19, 4) that his business with Williams had “been dissolved by mutual consent.”

Boston Marriages, 1700-1809 Vol. 2, p. 214. Almost nothing is known about Williams, except for the one, contemptuous remark by William Dunlap in 1834 describing him as “a small, short, self-sufficient man; very dirty, and very forward and patronizing in his manner.” A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. A New Edition, Illustrated, Edited, and with additions by Frank W. Bayley and Charles E. Goodspeed. In Three Volumes. Boston: C. E Goodspeed & Co., 1918. Vol. 3, 30. He died on 21 Oct 1830 at 43 of a “disease of the liver” and was buried at the Granary Burial Ground (Massachusetts, Town Vital Collections, 1620-1988, Image 16,937; Ancestry.com). His probate records suggest that he left Cecelia in a difficult place, with outstanding expenses for this funeral, medical care, and his death, as well as claims against him by over thirty people, that exceeded his personal estate of $530.99. Suffolk County, MA, Probate Records (Docket, #29402); Vol. 128, (1830-31), 630-32.

Boston Taxpayers in 1821, 129.

In Memorium, 11.

Boston, Deaths and Internments in Boston (Massachusetts, Town and Vital Collections, 1620-1988, Image 16757; Ancestry.com). Otis died intestate, and his probate records (Docket # 28439) indicate that Mary was appointed guardian of her children’s assets. The house contents were inventoried at $2,334.99, with some $2000 of equity in ownership of his $8000 home. (“Inventory,” Vol. 127, 632-34).

The Boston Directory, 1829 and 1830. See also John Connelly, A Century-Old Concern. Business of Jones, McDuffee & Stratton Co. Founded by Otis Norcross, The Elder in 1810 (Boston: Geo. Ellis Co., printers, [1910]), 11, 13-14, and 16; New England Historical and Genealogical Register, Vol. 79 (Jan. 1925), 93-94.

The Worcester Art Museum also owns a miniature of the wife and son of Otis Norcross, Junior, painted in 1839 by Moses B. Russell, 1937.45.

See Stickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 103, 144.

Monument Inscription, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The U.S. Federal Census, 1840 and 1860; Brookline City Directory for 1850 and 1868; See also Mass. Vital Records, 1841-1910 (NEHGS), Vol. 221, 287 for death. Otis was originally buried at the Park Street Church Cemetery in Boston but was subsequently moved to the family plot at Mt. Auburn.

Fitts, Lane Genealogies, Vol. II., 234.

Ibid.; also The Boston Directory, 1800, 1806.

Boston Marriages, 1761-1807, Vol. 12A, Transcript, image 65; Ancestry.com.

New North Church, Baptismal Records, NEHGS Collection. These records also note four of her siblings: John-Homer, Sally, and Polly in 1780 and Hannah Williams in 1783.

Trial of Thomas O. Selfridge, Counselor at Law, Before the Hon. Isaac Parker, Esquire, for Killing Charles Austin, on the Public Exchange, in Boston, August 4th, 1806. Second Edition. Taken in Short Hand by T. Lloyd, Esq. (Published by Russell and Cutler, Belcher and Armstrong, and Oliver and Munroe, 1806), 35.

Catalogue of the Names and Places of Residence of the Members of the Third Baptist Church in Boston (Boston: Printed by Lincoln and Edmands, 1823), 8.

Albert Lenox Vail, Mary Webb and the Mother Society (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1914), 87-88, 97-98; Fragment Society, Thirty-First Annual Report, 1843, where she is listed as Mrs. Ward Jackson.

Columbian Centinel, #4860, Saturday, November 6, 1830, 1.

Reminiscences of Old Boston: or, The Old Exchange Coffee House, Scrapbook (1872), 27-28. The scrapbook, owned by the Boston Public Library, contains clippings from The Boston Commercial Bulletin.

Digitized on line at: http://archive.org/details/reminiscencesofo01attw. See also, Weekly Messenger, December 16, 1830, Vol. II, Issue 28, 2 (“Municipal Court”).

Charles Street Baptist Church, Marriage Records, New England Historic Genealogical Society Register, Vol. 88 (Oct), 336.

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Scituate Vital Records, Vol. 1, 191 and Vol. 2, 158.

The Boston Directory, 1796 to 1842 (various years). His rising economic status can be roughly gauged by comparing the 1798 Massachusetts Direct Tax ($1700 Real Estate) with the Boston Tax List of 1831 (Real Estate, $15,900), NEHGS. Services at the Fortieth Anniversary of the Installation of the Rev. Daniel Sharp, D.D., Pastor of the Charles Street Baptist Church and Society (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), 29-30, 32, 47; The American Baptist Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 1, (Jan. 1832), 27-29; “Reports of the Prison Discipline Society,” (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), Vol. 1, 398.

Miss Lane’s and Ward Jackson’s lives first crossed paths as early as 1806, when she was twenty-two, though it is not clear they actually made acquaintance at that time. Ward Jackson served as a juror at the famous trial at which her father served as a key witness.

Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 136-7. The Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, owns the Lathrop family portraits.

The Boston Directory, 1825. South Allen Street is renamed McLean Street by 1829.

Emancipator and Republican, May 14, 1845, Volume X, Issue, 3, 11.

Suffolk County Probate Records, Ward Jackson, 1845, Probate #34358, Will, Vol. 143, 331-333.

Vail, Mary Webb, 88. On Children’s Friends Society, see also The Boston Almanac, 1838.

Boston: Births, Marriages, Deaths, (Elizabeth O. Jackson) #40485; Ancestry.com.

Suffolk County Probate Records, Docket # 37490. See “Inventory,” Nov. 24, 1851, Vol. 288, 328; “First Account,” Jan. 3, 1853, Vol. 151, 11.

Trinity Church Records, 115, New England Historical Genealogical Society. Jacob Turner, The Genealogy of the Descendants of Humphrey Turner, with Family Records, in Two Parts (Boston: Published by David Turner, Jr., 1852), 45.

Pembroke Vital Records, Vol. 1, 213. For marriage, Hollis Street Church Records, 32, New England Historic Genealogical Society; Boston Marriages (1700-1809), Vol. 2, 154.

The Boston Directory for Newberry Street (1796), Frog Lane (1800, 1803, 1805, 1807), and Lowell Place (1813, 1818, 1821). Boston Taxpayers in 1821, 181.

On business, The Boston Directory, 1820, 1821, 1823, 1825, 1827-1829, with a location of Court Street, 10 Market Row, and 154 Washington Street. Boston Taxpayers in 1821, 175.

Boston Directory, 1828; see also A Catalogue of the City Councils of Boston (1822-1908), Roxbury, and Charleston (Boston: City of Boston, 1909), 218-219.

Columbian Centinel, Marriage index, 1784-1840, 3721. Emerson resigned from his post and left the ministry a few months after marrying Sarah and Otis, in part for theological reasons, in part because he was disconsolate for having lost his young wife, Ellen Tucker (1811-1831), to tuberculosis. Lawrence Buell, Emerson.

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 14-16.

Marriage: NEH&G Register, Vol. 125 (1971), 290. The Boston Directory, 1818, 1820-23, 1825-27, 1829-30.

Boston Taxpayers in 1821, 82.

Pamelia E. Hill was born and died in Framingham, Massachusetts, but lived and worked in Boston and Worcester between 1828 and 1847.

Strickler, American Portrait Miniatures, 71; Groce and Wallace, The New York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in America, 15641860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 316.

Turner, The Genealogy of the Descendants of Humphrey Turner, 45.

Boston, Index of Deaths, 1810-1848, P-Z, 127; Ancestry.com. See also, Columbian Centinel, Obituary Index, items 4592 and 4593.

Marriage: Ancestry Vital, 1620-1988; Turner Genealogy gives 1842 for their marriage, but this appears incorrect. Otis’s home on Charles Street from 1845 to 1855 was valued at $10,000 in the inventory of Otis’s probate records (Docket 39967; “Inventory,” September 17, 1855, Vol. 292, 314.

United States Census, 1850, Boston, Ward 6, Family number 1630.

Cynthia Turner was the daughter of Forbes Turner, Otis senior’s brother. Turner, Genealogy, 43-44. Suffolk County Probate Records, Otis Turner, #39967. See “Inventory,” Sept. 9, 1855, Vol. 292, 314, for a summation of assets of $2700 in personal property and $15,000 in real estate.

The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 1855, Volume IX (Boston: Samuel G. Drake, Publisher, 1855), 375-376.

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The Forest Hills Cemetery, Card Record for Lot 937, Fountain Avenue. Cordelia H. Turner, Otis’s second wife, apparently moved to Trowbridge Street, Cambridge, some time after Otis’s death and did not remarry. Cambridge Directory, 1879 and 1897. She was not buried at Forest Hills with her husband.

The Town of Holden, Registry of Deaths, 1859-1899, manuscript, Town Clerk’s Office; Taxpayers in Boston, 1821.

Vital records from Frankfort, Maine, then part of Massachusetts, no longer exist. See, Holden, Town Report, 1909, “Antiquarian Department of the Damon Memorial”; Holden: Park Avenue Cemetery, Gravestone Transcriptions by Helen C. Johnson, 1906 (Samuel W. Armington, Town Clerk), handwritten note, Gale Free Library. The Federal Censuses of 1860, 1870, and 1880 also note her Maine origins.

Bangor Historical Magazine, 1885, Vol. 1, No 46, 82. Lucy outlived her husband, dying at the age of 66 in Boston on February 24, 1863 (Massachusetts Vital Records, 1841-1910, Volume 167, 25).

“Death Notices,” Columbian Centinel, Saturday, February 18, 1837. See also Deaths and Burials, Boston, 1630 to 1849. Holbrook: Vol. 27, Microfiche #436.

Low-wage piecework by women and children would become the bedrock of the mass production of ready-made men’s clothing in the decades before the civil war. Eleanor’s half-sister, Julia, for instance, is listed as a “tailoress” in the 1860 Federal Census. See Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 134-46.

Archdiocese of Boston, Archives. Cathedral of the Holy Cross.

Marriage and Baptism Records, provided by Robert Johnson-Lally, Archivist.

Carroll D. Wright’s monumental survey of wages in Massachusetts, Historical Review of Wages and Prices: 1752-1860 (Boston: Wright & Potter printing Co. State Printers, 1885), 97-99.

Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 82-3, for a discussion of the importance of fit in men’s fashion and tailoring. My reading and evaluation of the stylishness of William and Eleanor’s clothes has been aided by correspondence with Molly Sorkin, Associate Curator, Costume Collection, The Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, during 2009.

Sarah Goodridge, “Rev. Henry Ware,” miniature, Boston Museum of Fine Art, 64.708. One notable miniature of a woman with a landscape is an early, rectangular work by painted by Edward Malbone in 1803 of Lydia S. Allen. Significantly, Malbone undertook an identical portait in oil, though the later work was never finished. Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence.

On wedding apparel, see Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840 (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers,1988), 64; also Linda Otto Lipsett, To Love and to Cherish: Brides Remembered. San Francisco: The Quilt Digest Press, 1989), 44-59.

For contemporary advertisements, selling combs, see, The Columbian Centinel, Wednesday, April 14, 1824, Thomas A Davis, and The Boston Advertiser, in Stimpson’s City Directory, 1827, Alfred Willard, merchant.

Aronson and Wiesman, Perfect Likeness, 139-7.

Archdiocese of Boston, Archives, typed transcript, St. Augustine Cemetery, 1819-1850.

Robert Doherty, Society and Power: Five New England Towns, 18001860 (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 3-5, 30-45.

Peter R. Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 56-58.

By 1825, anti-Catholic violence erupted on Broad Street and other Catholic neighborhoods, and by the 1830s, such rioting included the burning of the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown in 1834 and the Broad Street riot of 1837. Patkus, A Community in Transition, 142-3; O’Connor, Boston Catholics, 54-57 62-67.

Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 63.

Worcester, with a growing economy and small Irish-Catholic community, may well have been an intermediate stop between Boston and Holden in the early 1830s. See Kenneth Moynihan, A History of Worcester, (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2007), 125-28, 137; Vincent Powers, “Invisible Immigrants”: The Pioneer Irish of Worcester, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. (Ph.D. Dissertation, Clark University, 1976).

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William Paine, the Congregational Minister, wrote that when he arrived in Holden in 1834, “There was not then a foreigner in town.”

William P. Paine, Memorial Discourse (Worcester, Office of the Daily Press, E. R. Fiske & Co., 1874), 11.

David Foster Estes, The History of Holden, Massachusetts: 1684-1894 (Published by the Town of Holden, Worcester, Massachusetts: Press of C. F. Lawrence, 1894), 123-24.

The hand-written minutes of the group suggest her involvement for at least two decades, recording her formal payment of dues five times between 1841 and 1861. Congregational Church Records, Octavo Volume 13, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Congregational Church, Holden, Massachusetts, Octavo Volume 12, “Ladies Benevolent Society of Holden, from 1834 to 1844.” American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

Ibid., entries for October 14 and 27, 1841. The Fleming’s home may well have been that of Thaddeus Chenery (1769-1856), the elderly town doctor, who lived next to the Congregational Church, and with whom the Flemings resided in 1850 (Federal Census).

Jane Neale, God Willed It: Stories of the 19th Century Missionaries from the First Religious Society of Holden, Massachusetts (Rockland, ME: Penobscot Press, 1996).

Town of Holden, Selectmen’s Records, Town, County, State, and Highway Tax and Valuation for the Town of Holden, Massachusetts (Poll Tax), 1866, 1867, and 1868.

William’s lack of material success over the course of his life was not as unusual as might be imagined. Despite images of opportunity and relative economic equality in antebellum New England, much wealth was in fact concentrated in the hands of relatively few property owners. In four of the five Massachusetts towns studied by Doherty (Society and Power, 47), the top 10% of residents owned 69% to 87% of the town’s wealth, and in three of five towns, the majority of men owned no real estate. This was the case in Holden in 1850, where my analysis of the 1850 Federal Census indicated that two-out-of-three adult men age fifteen years and older (65.4%) owned no property at all.

Annual Report for the Overseers of the Poor, Town of Holden (Year ending March 1, 1876.).

U.S. Federal Mortality Schedules, 1850-1885, Town of Holden, 1880.

Though records for pauper’s burials do not exist for any cemeteries in Holden for this period, other deceased residents could not be found through an examination of the records of individual cemeteries, Town of Holden Death Records, and summaries of gravesites and burials for Park Avenue and Grove Street, produced by the Holden Historical Society and the Gale Free Library.

Town of Holden, Selectmen’s Records, manuscript, May 3, 1880 and May 6, 1880.

Reports of the Town Officers of the Town of Holden, ending March 1, 1876, 20.

U. S. Census, 1880, Town of Holden. Emma C. Hubbard, widow, was the second wife of Silas M (Moore) Hubbard (1788-1865), life-long Holden resident and Deacon of the Congregational Church for several decades (Estes, A History of Holden, 278-280).

Annual Report of the Overseers of the Poor, the Town of Holden, for the years ending March 1, 1886 and March 1, 1887.

Report of the Fitchburg Home for Old Lades, (Fitchburg, Sentinel Printing Company, 1887), 4, 11, 14-15, 31. The Home’s bye-laws provided for admission exceptions with the approval of a two-third’s vote of its Board of Managers.

Fitchburg Sentinel, December 7, 1894, 1 & 6.

See, Holden: Park Avenue Cemetery, Gravestone Transcriptions by Helen C. Johnson, 1906 (Samuel W. Armington, Town Clerk), Gale Free Library.

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