"I Had a Great Love for Vessels, Wharves and Water..."

The Joppa Boyhood of Andrew Lunt

by Bethany Groff Dorau

...His recollections, scrawled in the spare pages of a business ledger, bring to life a whole cast of Dickensian characters - the wall-eyed "pious sharper" who swindled young privateers, the wild girl tied to her rocking chair, the seducing Scotsman, the bone-crushing captain downstairs, the kindly schoolmaster who filled the dark tenement wall with chalked letters so this boy could learn to write, and one day reach through two centuries and keep me up into the wee hours, transported.

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It's nearly Race Time!

Come cheer on your favorite museum at the races! (Bed Race that is!)

Thursday July 31st at 6:00pm along Federal Street

It all happens quick. So, break out those "We're #1" foam fingers, stadium clackers, megaphones or just plain holler a historic "Huzzah!!!" at the top of your lungs to speed our Bed along! Don't forget to get there early for a good spot!

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Funded, in part, by the Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism

"I Had a Great Love for Vessels, Wharves and Water..."

The Joppa Boyhood of Andrew Lunt

by Bethany Groff Dorau

Well, friends, it is very late at night, and I am having a hard time leaving a little boy with whom I have spent a great deal of time over the last few days. This boy, an imaginative, sensitive, adventurous child, or so he was recalled by the man he became, was born a decade after the end of the American Revolution. He spent his earliest years in a warren of tumble-down houses in Newburyport's Joppa neighborhood, to a family with a tragic, romantic past and a hardscrabble, transient present. His recollections, scrawled in the spare pages of a business ledger, bring to life a whole cast of Dickensian characters - the wall-eyed "pious sharper" who swindled young privateers, the wild girl tied to her rocking chair, the seducing Scotsman, the bone-crushing captain downstairs, the kindly schoolmaster who filled the dark tenement wall with chalked letters so this boy could learn to write, and one day reach through two centuries and keep me up into the wee hours, transported.

The surprising keeper of these delicious stories is a rather ordinary (if quite attractive) business ledger from Malden, beginning in 1855. These ledgers are wonderful records of how communities functioned, but for the most part, they can be a bit...dry.

So when Scott Nason, whose stories of growing up in Joppa at a time when Newburyporters identified first with their neighborhood, came to visit and handed this to me, I knew there was more to the story.

Scott, who I now know to be warm and funny, can be a bit taciturn as well, but on this occasion he was downright enthusiastic. This, he told me, was the only early record he had ever found of a Joppa childhood from the early 19th century. In fact, the boy whose life is recorded here was born in 1797. He flipped past the pages recording the sale of butter, onions, and potatoes.

And there, on page 35 began the record that has been with me, night and day, for the past week.

The structure of this memoir is unique and original, and even if the author had only delivered his promise to describe the houses of his childhood, it would have been a remarkable record. Andrew Lunt, who made this record in 1869, age 72, had been largely absent from Newburyport since his early teens, and so his memories are painted in the vivid colors of childhood, largely unsullied by later experience. In fact, he proved rather difficult to research, not only because of a mystery around his name, but because when Lunt hits the public record, he is recorded as "of Danvers", where he lived for decades.

What constitutes "Joppa", the neighborhood, in Newburyport history is a contested question. Greater Joppa is often bounded from Lime Street to Marlboro, and from High Street to the Merrimack River. For Andrew Lunt, two centuries ago, it was a smaller circle, focused on the lower end of Marlboro Street and running along Water Street. When his family briefly moved to Hancock Street, it was far enough away from his neighborhood that he "knew few boys and few neighbors in this section".

The boyhood memories of Andrew Lunt cover 98 pages of the book, and with the exception of several long-winded asides about his favorite topics - New England history, turnpikes, and solar eclipses, they paint a picture of a tight community of hard-working people living close to the bone, whose lives and fortunes were bound to the water.



And because so many of the men who lived in Joppa were gone to sea for much of the year, Andrew Lunt's memoir is especially rich with details about the everyday lives of Joppa women, whose experience was generally unrecorded, in the first decade of the 19th century.

Andrew Lunt's is the first birth of the year recorded in Newbury (Marlboro Street was in Newbury at the time), on March 5, 1797. His father, also Andrew, was 25, and his mother, Betsey (also recorded as Betty and Betsy) Colby was 18. The pair had married when Betsey was just sixteen. His parents were cousins - young Betsey Colby's mother was born Betty Lunt, and was Andrew's favored grandmother, who he called Mumma.

It is Andrew's young mother, Betsey, who occupied the central place in his early memories. He describes her with the sweetness and poignancy of an older man who left his mother as a teenager, and rarely saw her again before her death at 48 in 1826. But because he labored to provide an accurate record for posterity, he also recorded his mother's work, her dress, even her delivery of a stillborn child. His father, often at sea, was a bit of a celebrity to young Andrew, returning from long voyages with small but exotic gifts and then departing, leaving Betsey to move house with her brood once again, often with another child on the way.

The details of this memoir are worthy of a close study, and I have only just read it through and constructed the basic scaffolding of the lives of Andrew Lunt's family, made easier through my own meandering family history - the young mother remembered in these pages is my 4th cousin, 6 times removed. As time allows, a great deal more will be shared with you all. For now, here is one of my favorite tales herein.

The Hidden House

"I have always remembered this old house as my home for a very considerable period of my early childhood. Before he moved here, I was only a mere fixture about the house, always within indoors or within sight from the door, never away from my mother. When she went abroad, and I remember she used to go occasionally, at such times you would find me by her side.

And now, looking back through all the varying periods of life, perhaps I might regard the point where I now stood, I may regard the years of a child’s life between the fourth and the eighth year as the period when his confidence in, and his reliance upon his mother reach their very acme – and are sufficient, in his judgment, to protect him against all mortal ills. Nor would I have believed at that time that there was any power on earth or in heaven even that could harm me if I was beside my mother.

One little fact, bearing in this direction, occurs to me, which took place at this time, while living in the Hidden house - it was in the summer of either 1804 or 1805, I’m not certain which, but should inclined to think the latter. My father was engaged with Captain Pulcifer, running a packet from Newburyport to Boston, making perhaps a couple of trips a month. Occasionally, when the weather was pleasant, father would take us up with him to spend an hour or two on board. Or perhaps we might take ourselves up without his assistance for I was seven or eight years old and (younger brother) John a year and a half less.

I had a great love for vessels, wharves, and water – in the distance to Johnson’s wharf, where this vessel always lay, was but about half a mile from home. On one of these excursions, the affair I alluded to took place. We were swinging upon a rope which came down from the masthead, so far aloft is to give us a swing of some twenty or thirty feet. I remember that our starting point was from the windlass, upon leaving which, with the aid of a push, we would go coursing aloft perhaps thirty or more feet, not exactly fore and aft, but in an oblique direction, so that when furthest from the windlass, we should have passed the vessel side and be suspended over part of the wharf.

The sport was fine, but then, owing to some little omission – some little thing left undone, which should’ve been done - more than half the calamities of human life owe their origin to some obvious blunder, easy enough to be seen afterward – owing to some delinquency somewhere – I found myself parting with the rope, just as I was passing the fissure gaping between the vessel and the wharf. I found myself falling, and the impression made upon my mind by the events of the next two or three minutes, never to this day, has been in the least obscured.

As I was falling down the opening between the vessel and the wharf, John, who had just given me the fatal push, who was six or seven years old, and seeing my hopeless condition, instinctively called aloud for my assistance – his father was within a few yards of him, while his mother was more than half a mile off, yet I heard him scream as I passed into the water, MARM! MARM! MARM!

I was precipitated with a force which carried me, I suppose, nearly to the bottom. I fell directly into the water, coming in contact with nothing - my passage was in no way disabled – and immediately began an effort to help myself out. I found myself ascending in the water by taking a hold of the timber ends, of which the wharf had been built, and which were projecting sufficiently beyond the timbers, laid lengthwise the wharf, to enable to get hold and climb up.

I remember that I had the misfortune to slip off, and fall back. I repeated the effort and never yet have forgotten the great black frightful looking bottom of the vessel, which I saw over my head as I was attempting to rise. Never had yet have I forgotten the rapid gurgling, bubbling sound at my ears, as though the bottle was nearly filled, and as I looked up through the water to the vessel bottom, the thought occurred to me that this water resembled gin. I was feeling my way up the second time and was nearly up. I had the dreadful and overwhelming misfortune to find myself resisted by something and falling back again. My mind was fully alive to my situation. I knew where I was, and what I had been attempting to do and that I had failed. I felt perfectly resigned, and, as it were, threw myself back, as though I would lie down at ease and make no further effort. I felt no pain, and had felt none, and in that perfectly comfortable state lost all consciousness – and do not believe, had I’ve been permitted to remain there, that I should’ve felt or known more in this life.

But as it turned, I did know more, and did feel more, whether for good or otherwise I cannot say, but I have no doubt for good. Whether a half hour or a whole one passed before I found myself again, I know not, but my next recollection I was in the Sukey's cabin, dressed in some of my father‘s clothing, and around me were some strangers I had not seen before, who seemed to manifest great interest in me.

I related this incident in part because it was one of the events pertaining to the Hidden house, and in part, it illustrated my position that the mother, in the estimation of her child, up to the age of eight at least, is the ever-present and omniscient protector and helper – the guardian angel, to be invoked in every time of trouble, whether at hand or far off.

And for all I know, John’s crying out so imploringly for his mother in this case, might have been instrumental in saving my life. It is true my father was somewhere on board, but I do not think he witnessed the accident, and very likely was called to the rescue by the startling outcries of MARM! MARM! MARM!"

Stay tuned for more tales from Andrew Lunt's Joppa boyhood in the next few newsletters...

Something Is Always Cooking...

Pesto!

In my book, as soon as the basil, kale, swiss chard, arugula, spinach or pea shoots start taking over the garden it's pesto time! I love pesto on pasta, pesto on pizza, pesto focaccia, pesto on toast with fresh tomato. Heck, I've been known to eat a spoonful right out of the jar. Part of the charm is that it also freezes well; so come fall & winter, you can thaw that rugged green loveliness and enjoy a taste of your summer bounty all over again.

Ingredients:

3 cups fresh basil (or the greens of your choice, mix them up!) washed and patted dry

1/2 cup pine nuts* (walnuts, sunflower seeds or pepitas work too)

1/2 cup grated or shredded parmesan or asiago cheese

4 or 5 cloves garlic (fresh or roasted) (adjust as you like garlic - clearly I'm hooked!)

1/2 cup olive oil (adjust more or less as needed for good consistency)

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

1 good pinch of salt

fresh ground black pepper, to taste

If freezing: put in small well sealed containers with plastic wrap or wax paper touching the top pf the pesto to seal it against browning. thaw at room temperature when ready to use.

Enjoy!

Puzzle Me This...

Click the image to do the puzzle

This iconic view of Joppa is from a century after Andrew Lunt's boyhood, and is from a postcard in our collection.