On Veterans Day and every day, a note of thanks to our veterans, past and present, who have served in every conflict in which this nation was engaged. Thank you from all of us at the Museum of Old Newbury.

This image of Fairfield Winder with a flag is from 1889 and is part of the Museum of Old Newbury's John White Winder Collection.

"A Good and Sufficient Jail

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Note: “Jail” and “Gaol” were used interchangeably during this time period, but for ease of reading, we have employed the modern spelling.

Two hundred and one years ago, two petitions were sent from concerned Newburyport citizens to the Essex County Court of Sessions, which was then being held in the relatively new courthouse, designed by Charles Bullfinch, and presiding grandly over Bartlett Mall. The first, sent on October 7, 1822, was a lament and a demand. 

“The want of a good and sufficient jail, which is required by law to be erected in every town where a court is held, has long been felt…In Newburyport (it) is so great and serious and evil as to render the erection of a new jail indefensibly necessary to the true and orderly administration of justice.”

The existing jail was “much too small to accommodate the prisoners confined in it, who must be crowded together in small and contagious apartments, which do not admit for the very desirable arrangements of separating the prisoners according to their age, sex, and cause of confinement.”

The 1744 Federal Street Jail became a private residence after the construction of the 1824/25 stone jail. This image is from 1980.

It was also made of the wrong stuff, since “being of wood, it has become decayed from age and want of adequate repair. The existing jail is wholly incapable of occupying prisoners in a proper manner, since the material of which it is built and the ruinous condition in which it is, afford the greatest facilities to prisoners to affect their escape.”

The inadequacies of the Newburyport Jail were myriad. It was too “closely surrounded by dwelling houses”, the cost of transporting access prisoners to Salem and Ipswich was a source of “much cost and inconvenience to the prisoners themselves”, and the population of the town had grown to such an extent that “this section of the county must continue to furnish a considerable number of prisoners.”



And then, the demand. “The statute of 1784, chapter 41 enacts that it shall be the duty of your Honors to assess monies, etc. in order to erect and keep in repair a good and sufficient jail…” It was time for the court to “raise such a sum as may be necessary to erect a good and sufficient jail of stone and cause the same to be erected in Newburyport.” 

This c.1840 daguerreotype view of the stone jail and keeper's house by Henry Coit Perkins is one of the oldest landscape views in the country and is in the collection of the Museum of Old Newbury.

Newbury had been locking people up in town since 1673, when it became necessary to hold people accused of crimes until they could be transported to the Essex County Quarterly Court, which met between Salem and Ipswich. In 1706, a jail paid for by the town and the county jointly was erected somewhere near the meetinghouse. In 1744, the town purchased land on what is now Federal Street, and a new jail was built between Prospect and Temple Streets.



It was this jail that was the subject of two letters sent to the courthouse in 1822. The 1744 jail would be described in a report on the condition of Essex County prisons one year later as “two stories with only two rooms on each story . . . no distance can be made between debtors and criminals; the jailer has been obliged to put women and men in the same room.” 

An illustration from Charles Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” shows the condition inside an English debtors prison. In Newburyport, debtors and criminals would have been housed in the same building. Wikimedia Commons image

The second petition, sent the following day, sought to alleviate another shortcoming of the 1744 jail, and opens a window into the life of the town, and specifically of its prisoners, in the years after the dual devastations of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the fire that destroyed much of the downtown area in 1811.

These petitioners were not looking for a new jail, though they would soon have one. They were hoping to “enlarge the prison yard in said Newburyport, as to include within its limits that part of the town which lies between Federal and State streets on the south and north and between Water and High streets on the east and West, including said streets and all the wharves and docks within these limits.”

A prison yard at a time when many prisoners were incarcerated for debt was a wholly different concept than the spiked, walled courtyard we may think of today. In 1822, the Newburyport prison yard was an entire neighborhood, one in which the inmates could work and worship within its bounds. It was the shifting nature of these boundaries, and the calamities that had befallen those within them that was the subject of this petition. “The present limits of the jail yard are narrow and ill-defined (and) the lines which include said yard are so crooked and intricate…including several streets that were devastated by the fire of 1811 and have not since been rebuilt.”



The solution was to carve a large rectangle out of the South End from High Street past Water Street to the end of the furthest wharf and across from Federal to State Streets, to allow deserving prisoners the best chance of paying their jailers and, in the case of debtors, finding a way to pay off their creditors. 

This 1851 map is cropped to show the approximate boundaries of the enlarged prison yard demanded in 1822. Since a new jail was approved the following year, there is no evidence that the boundary change was ever approved. The 1744 jail is identified as the residence of J. Moulton by 1851.

The petitioners understood that debt, unlike most other criminal behaviors, could happen to anyone. “Many of our most worthy and industrious citizens have been reduced, some from affluence…from the means of acquiring a respectable and decent support for themselves and their families, to a state of comparative want. The existence of these unfortunate men, encumbered as they are with debts of long standing, which their constant and unremitting industry hardly affords them the means of paying, is constantly embittered by the apprehension that they may be torn at any moment from their families and their honest employment and ensconced in a prison.” As the petition veers into the territory of arguing for significant legal reform, it returns to the task at hand. “Although it is not your honors power entirely to relieve them, your petitioners humbly conceive the proposed extension of the prison limits would do much to lessen the evils under which they now suffer.”

The county approved plans for the new stone jail on November 4, 1823.

Both of the petitions of 1822 were granted, in a way. 

Two hundred years ago this week, on November 4, 1823, the plans for the new stone jail designed by architect Stuart James Park, the first granite building in the town, were approved by the representatives of the county. 

The old Federal Street jail was not enlarged, but debt reform was soon to come. By 1831, women in Massachusetts were no longer imprisoned for debt, and men with debts under $10 also remained free. Bankruptcy replaced debtor’s prison for many, with the poorhouse standing by for indigent and permanently insolvent. A wooden house in a built-up neighborhood, with prisoners able to work on wharves and in ropewalks and smithies, was replaced with an imposing stone edifice removed from town, with the spiked wall and thick iron bars far more evocative of a prison to our modern sensibilities. 

Detail of a window at the "new" stone jail, courtesy of Charles Griffin.

Over the next few weeks we spend some time with Stuart J Park, the son of Scottish immigrants, who gave us the building known today as the 1825 Old Gaol, the keepers who lived in the house next door, and some of the prisoners who languished there.  

Upcoming MOON Events

Please save the dates:

• December 2 & 3: Holidays at the Cushing House
• December 3: Member Holiday Party - Registration required!
• December 9: Annual Garrison Lecture at Old South Church
• December 21: Solstice in the Cemetery: Night Walk Through Oak Hill

Visit www.newburyhistory.org/calendar for details and to reserve your spots!

Silverware, Sex, and Stirpicults: John Humphrey Noyes and Oneida Community Silver

...by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

Part One

The Noyes family was in ascendancy this summer at the Museum of Old Newbury. This happens periodically. For a month, every visitor to the museum was a Plummer, it seemed. Then images and artifacts from the Morrill family came out of the woodwork - sometimes literally – every day for a while. This summer, visitor after visitor proudly proclaimed their lineage from Nicholas, reported to be first to come ashore on the hallowed shores of Newbury in 1635, and/or his brother James, beloved assistant minister to their cousin Thomas Parker. They recount, their bright eyes shining, how their families had made their way from New England to California, Iowa, New York, or in my case, well, all the way from Byfield to West Newbury. People as different in temperament, age, appearance, and political leaning as you can imagine embraced and hailed their long-lost cousins, examining noses and hairlines for a family resemblance. It gets weird. I love it.  

The James Noyes House, parts of which are believed to date to as early as 1646, is privately owned but visited by many Noyes descendants to Newbury. Image is from our collection

At the beginning of October, I went out to my old stomping grounds of Amherst to visit a former colleague from Historic New England at the Emily Dickinson House. My good friend Doris Noyes was with me, and as we wandered over to visit Emily’s grave, we both scanned the gravestones for familiar names. There were a few – Boardmans and Browns and Perkins, but no Noyeses. Doris mentioned that her husband (she is a Noyes by marriage) had an aunt named Dickinson, and we were off to the races.

The Dickinson family plot in Amherst, Massachusetts. Author photo.

Turns out Newburyport’s own Edmund Greenleaf Noyes married Sarah Stetson Dickinson, who shares an ancestor with Emily. Oh, and Edmund Noyes is the first cousin (once removed) of former Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker. Noyeses, as I predicted, turn up everywhere. Doris went on to tell the story of how her children had given them a weekend getaway to another Noyes family landmark, the Oneida Community Mansion in New York.

“Oneida Community like the silverware?” I said.

“Oneida Community like the free love commune,” she whispered. “And silverware.”

Advertisements for Oneida Community Silver often included attractive women, including this advertisement from 1923.

I staggered back. Anyone with a drawer full of older silverware has some Oneida Community Silver. Oneida and Towle were neck and neck in the mid-20^th century, vying for supremacy in the silver-plate market. And what did this have to do with the Noyes family? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886). Private collection.



John Humphrey Noyes’ family had lived in Newbury since Nicholas, his 3^rd great-grandfather, jumped off the boat in 1635. His father, a one-term Congressman, left the area and moved to Vermont a decade before John was born.



For three days, July 6-8, 1848, John Humphrey Noyes was front page news in the Newburyport Herald. The titillating coverage began, “(T)here was published in the Battle Axe, a Perfectionist paper, a letter dated January 1837 written by Mr. Noyes, of which the following is an extract. “When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage The marriage supper…is a feast at which every dish is free to every man. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarrelling, have no place there, for the same reasons as that which forbid the guests at a Thanksgiving dinner to claim each separate dish and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law than eating and drinking should be and there is as little occasion for shame in one as in the other… I call a certain woman my wife - she is yours; she is Christ’s, and in him she is the bride of all saints. She is dear in the hands of the stranger, and according to my promise to her I rejoice.”

John Humphrey Noyes corresponded with Newburyport's own William Lloyd Garrison in the 1830's, hoping to explain his doctrine of Perfectionism through Garrison's Liberator newspaper.

Noyes was front-page news some decade after the publication of this original letter because of the release of a personal letter, written by John Humphrey Noyes himself, asking a woman to enter into a “novel and curious matrimonial relation”, an arrangement that would exist solely on a spiritual plane and would allow for unfettered sexual relationships between Noyes, the woman, and pretty much everyone else who was among the chosen people in their Godly circle. Of course, he was already legally married and had children with his wife and at least one other woman. Noyes and his merry band of Perfectionists were enjoying “complex marriage” up in Putney, Vermont.

Perfectionism, the belief that mankind, made in the image of a perfect God, could achieve perfection if they increased their spiritual vibration to a heavenly level, was one of many new religious movements sparked by the emotional revivals of the so-called Second Great Awakening in the first half of the 19^th century. It was a turbulent, active, volatile time that also sparked movements like Adventism and Mormonism, as well as increasing interest in Spiritualism, Mesmerism, and the occult. Most Perfectionists were not interested in complex marriage, but Noyes’ assertion that he had surrendered his will to God and therefore could not sin was in line with their beliefs. 



Oh, but the good people of Putney, Vermont were not convinced. John Humphrey Noyes had just been arrested based on the contents of the letter reprinted in the Newburyport Herald, among other assertions, and was facing charges of “adulterous fornication”. It was time for Noyes and his band of self-identified Bible Communists to get out of New England.

John H. Noyes (standing, second row) and his community, shortly after the move to Oneida.

And where did they go? Oneida, New York, naturally, in an area of the country so swept with spiritual fervor, emotional revivals, and the fire of religious awakening, it had become known as the Burned-over District. Perfectionist sympathizers would offer land to build one of the most fascinating utopian communities in American history, and arguably the most successful. 



Stay tuned for Part 2, as John Humphrey Noyes builds a mansion, joins the fur trap trade, and produces an army of genetically engineered children, called Stirpicults, all while working just six hours a day.

Something Is Always Cooking...

Plimoth Patuxet Museum’s Native Sweet Corn Pudding

4 cups Plimoth Grist Mill Grits or coarse ground corn

1 ½ qts water

2 cups sugar

1 tbsp salt

8 beaten eggs

2 qts cream or half and half

2 tsp ground cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1 tsp ground cloves

2 cups dried currants

Bring grits, sugar, salt and water to boil, reduce to low heat, simmer until water is absorbed stirring occasionally to avoid mix sticking to the pan.

Beat together eggs and cream, and add to grits while whisking.

Continue to cook on low until pudding thickens - don't rush it!

Add cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and currants



Recipe and photo courtesy of Plimoth Patuxet Museums

Read more about this recipe and the destination that inspired it at VisitMA.com.

Puzzle Me This...

Click the image to do the puzzle

Do the puzzle and enjoy this 1948 Oneida advertisement - for those in the know, it must have been just a little bit "tongue-in-cheek."