e-Newsletter | October 14, 2022
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Clipper Heritage Trail, Vol. II is Released
by Kristen Fehlhaber, Assistant Director
Ghlee Woodworth’s Newburyport Clipper Heritage Trail, Volume II is hot off the presses. While Volume I covered downtown, this volume covers the rest of Newburyport, from Plum Island to Maudsley State Park. There will be a book launch party here at the museum on November 9.
The book is generously illustrated, with paintings, photos and maps that leave many in awe. “Where did you find that?” is a question she often hears. She spent countless hours at the Museum of Old Newbury and the Archival Center at the Public Library, as well as drawing on many private collections.
The book is as much an illustrated history as a walking tour – featuring the distant past as well as 20th century people and places like Camp Sea Haven and the Knobbs on Plum Island, bummer’s rock in Joppa, Black activist Melnea Cass, and local connections to Edward Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman. Ghlee took some time to talk with us about her circuitous career path and how she came to work in local history.
Ghlee (Welsh for "glee") was named for a Nova Scotia ancestor, Ghlee Sadie Woodworth. Our Ghlee was “born and bred” in Newburyport, growing up in a house on Prospect St. that her grandparents bought in 1943 - and where she lives today. She attended local schools and then set off to see the world.
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Ghlee's first of many appearances in "The Boston Globe" and her Newburyport High School senior photo. Photos courtesy of newspapers.com and ancestry.com.
She attended Unity College in Maine and went on to get a graduate degree in Outdoor & Physical Education at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. This led to her first career - in school administration at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. She spent six years in the Office of Student Affairs and ultimately was Assistant Dean of Students. Reflecting on this, she said, "One day, I realized that I didn't want to spend my life behind a desk."
At age 30, she applied to the Peace Corps and accepted an assignment to the Comoros Islands, an island republic between Mozambique and Madagascar. She helped train people there in environmental education methods and found that she loved it. When her assignment was over, she began a 10-year stint working for the Peace Corps as a contractor, training national staff and new volunteers in 13 different countries. She’d take a 4 month contract with the Peace Corps and then have 8 months off to travel the world. By 2004, her last year, she had visited 48 different countries.
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Ghlee with a panda at the Woolong Panda Reserve in 1998. Photo courtesy Ghlee Woodworth.
She hung up her Peace Corps hat in 2004 and came back to Newburyport full-time in 2005. Her father, Todd Woodworth, had been giving popular tours of Oak Hill cemetery since 1988 (he was also a funeral director here in town). He came home one day in the fall of 2005 and told Ghlee, “I think that was my last tour.” Without missing a beat, Ghlee said, “Okay, I’ll do ‘em.” And so began her third career, diving in with her characteristic enthusiasm.
Her father gave her two pages of notes, consisting of names. No maps, no written stories – he had kept it all in his head. Ghlee began her research at the library archives and the MOON. She was thrilled to find a video of her dad giving a tour. She studied it, sketching the trees and gravestone shapes so that she might find her way through his tour. Oak Hill Cemetery is 36 acres, and with 12,000 buried there, finding any particular gravestone is no small task.
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One of two pages of Todd Woodworth's notes on his cemetery tour. Photo courtesy of Ghlee Woodworth.
"I loved the research and learning and a lot of people are happy with that. But I didn’t want to stop there." She’d gotten comfortable speaking to large groups of strangers during her Peace Corps days and was excited to share all the facets of Newburyport's rich history. Her first cemetery tour was during Yankee Homecoming in 2006 and since that time, she’s done over 200 presentations and tours and published three books.
Newburyport's Clipper Trail was a history tour created by the Chamber of Commerce in 1970. Ghlee's research moved out of the cemeteries and into the city when she decided to revive the forgotten trail, rebranding it as the "Clipper Heritage Trail." She launched a web site for it in 2012 and began working on a book. In 2019, she was ready to publish but had over 500 photos and 130 stops on the tour. "It was too big. We decided to break it into two volumes."
The key to her writing? “A great editor. I have that with Marlene Switzer. And graphic designer Paige DeRosa-Walsh - she was willing to put images on every page and not just at the end of a chapter, as others wanted to do.” And her favorite part of history books? "The footnotes and the bibliographies. That's where you find all good stuff."
The Museum of Old Newbury will be hosting a book launch party for Ghlee on Wednesday, November 9. All proceeds go to the author. Come get your copy of the book and celebrate this local treasure. (If you can't make the event, the book is for sale in our online shop).
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Trot Trot through the Tombstones - a few tickets left
Sunday, October 16 - an afternoon of horse-drawn wagon tours
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The Kimball Farm draft team will be ready to take you through Oak Hill Cemetery. Photo courtesy of Alison Colby-Campbell.
Grab a warm drink and a cider donut and hop in a horse-drawn wagon for a 40-minute horse-powered ride through the fall beauty of Newburyport’s historic Oak Hill Cemetery. Kimball Farm draft horses will bring us through the 36 acres of ancient trees and winding trails with the guidance of noted author and historian Ghlee Woodworth, a 12th generation Newburyport native.
Wagon rides will take place at 2pm, 3pm, 4pm and 5pm. Tickets for members are $25, non-members $35. Reservations are required.
Oak Hill Cemetery is still an active cemetery, as well as the final resting place of shipwrecked sailors, sea captains and merchants, architects and photographers, writers and poets, silversmiths and newspaper editors, and adventurers who travelled to the Klondike gold rush.
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Nearby -
A Brief History of Old Newbury with Bethany Groff Dorau
Saturday, October 22 at the Georgetown Peabody Library
2 Maple St., Georgetown, MA. 10am business meeting, 10:20 am, presentation. Hosted by the Massachusetts Society of Genealogists, Merrimack Valley Chapter. Free.
Take an illustrated ramble through the 17th century community of Newbury, present-day Newburyport, West Newbury, Newbury, and Byfield. Author, historian, and museum director Bethany Groff Dorau, descendant of 52 of the first European settler families of Old Newbury will use maps, court records, photographs, and other documents to provide a virtual tour of this important early New England town. Bethany's book is available in our online shop.
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Launch of the schooner "Edith H. Symington." Collection of Museum of Old Newbury and included in "Newburyport Clipper Heritage Trail, Vol. II."
Book Launch Party - Newburyport Clipper Heritage Trail, Vol. II -with Ghlee Woodworth
Wednesday, November 9, 6:30 p.m., 98 High St., Newburyport.
Join us as we celebrate the new work of Ghlee Woodworth, author, speaker, local historian, tour guide, and community volunteer extraordinaire. Ghlee will illuminate the stories and images in the second volume of her Newburyport Clipper Heritage Trail series.
Reserve your signed copy of this fascinating historical record and guidebook. Ghlee will take you through the city, visiting shipyards, authors, poets, sea captains, photographers, cemeteries, and Plum Island. See a castle, the sites of old cotton mills, schoolhouses, a distillery, and comb factory, a hotel and lighthouse, and hear about a summer camp for disabled children. You’ll even discover Wonder Woman’s connection to Newburyport!
Reception is free but book purchase is required. Ghlee will present to a general audience at a later date. This event is a reception and book sale for the author.
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Woman on the MOON
...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director
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The Good, the Baud, and the Ugly,
Part III
John Atkinson and the Merry Widow Stickney
This is Part III in a series. For earlier posts, see Part I and Part II.
Picture it – yours truly, rising slowly from her seat on a cold meetinghouse bench, pointing to a robed figure high in a pulpit against the meetinghouse wall. “You are deceived, sir,” I say. “You…are…deceived.” There is death spreading its wings over the room. There is screaming, spitting, lies, courage, and love, all in one moment in time. One moment when things could have gone another way.
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Amesbury's 1785 Rocky Hill Meeting House was aglow for evening performances of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.
This happened last week. I was called upon to speak the parts of both Rebecca Nurse and her husband Francis in The Crucible at the Rocky Hill Meeting House in Amesbury. I would do just about anything for Edward Speck of Theatre in the Open, so when he held out the binder to me festooned with a clip-light and said “surprise”, just before the performance began, I thought, “how hard can it be?” It was crushingly hard.
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Morgan Amelia Fanning as Abigail Williams in Theater in the Open's "The Crucible" at Amesbury's Rocky Hill Meeting House.
I had just spent a good portion of the day preparing for this story, you see. I had teased with a John Atkinson link to murder and witchcraft, and I had spent some time looking at ancient records, death warrants, physical examinations, pleadings. It is wonderfully satisfying to see these words in print, to connect original records to people I know, but sometimes it rends the veil, and an icy finger comes through the page and pokes you in the throat.
This was the document that did it.
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Death Warrant for Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin and Sarah Wildes. From wikitree.com
This is the warrant for the execution of Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Elizabeth Howe, Susanna Martin, and Sarah Wildes. Pause for a moment and consider Susanna Martin, a 70-year-old widow from Salisbury. The testimony against her is excruciating to read, and two of her accusers were John Atkinson and his wife Sarah.
John Atkinson found evidence of witchcraft in the purchase of a cow that behaved badly. “I went to the house of Susanna Martin to receive the cow of…her son. When I came to bring the cow home, notwithstanding the hamstringing of her and haltering her, she was so mad that we could scarce get her along but she broke all the ropes fastened to her…When we came down to the ferry, we were forced to run up to our waists in water, she was so fierce, but after with much ado we got her into the boat, She was as tame as any creature whatsoever.”
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John Atkinson's testimony about his disobedient cow helped to sentence Susannah Martin to death in 1692.
Sarah Atkinson’s testimony was more damning. “Some time in the Spring of the year about Eighteen years Since, Susanna Martin came unto our house at Newbury from Amesbury in an Extraordinary dirty Season when it was not fit for any person to travel. She came on foot...I asked how She could come in this time on foot and bid my children make way for her to come to the fire to dry herself. She replied she was as dry as I was...I could not (see) that the soles of her Shoes were wet. I was startled at it that she should come so dry and told her that I should have been wet up to my knees if I Should have come So far on foot. She replied that She scorned to have a drabbled tail.”
That’s right. Eighteen years before, Susanna Martin failed to get muddy enough on her way from Amesbury to Newbury, and this, and other incidents equally mundane, were enough to have a woman murdered in 1692. It took great courage for Francis Nurse to stand up to the judges and look them in the eye and tell them that they were deceived. It could have cost him his life.
But all this ugliness was still a decade away when John Atkinson and the Widow Stickney duked it out in the Essex County Quarterly Court in 1682, when John Atkinson was found responsible for fathering Mary, the daughter of Widow Stickney. Incidentally, John Atkinson was in court in Ipswich for that session answering a variety of charges, including that he had tried to swindle the impoverished Woollcott family out of a piece of land for which they had paid him in barley, pork, and coin.
But back to the Stickney trial. Mary’s birth was entered into the Newbury town records as Mary Atkinson. After some contentious back-and-forth, John Atkinson landed on a solution. He would take responsibility for the child but find someone else to raise her. The court agreed and ordered that John would be freed from his weekly child support payments once he had found an appropriate family to give her to, but “in no case was he to keep the child at his own house. Should Sarah (Stickney) not deliver the child to the place he provided…she was to maintain the child at her own cost.”
John Atkinson went to Widow Stickney’s house to collect the child. Stickney told him to go pound sand, thereby giving up her right to child support. Atkinson then enacted part two of his plan. Having rid himself of responsibility for paying for Mary, he went after the Newbury town clerk. The court, rather unexpectedly, sided with Atkinson. “(Upon) being informed that the clerk of the writs of Newbery had entered the bastard child of Sarah Stickney of Newbury in the records of births as the child of John Atkinson, upon whom she charged it, although he did not own it, it was declared to be a high irregularity, and the clerk was ordered to appear at the next Ipswich court unless he give satisfaction to said Atkinson before that time.” The clerk was ordered to remove Atkinson’s name from the record, though he seems not to have done so.
The court was clearly ambivalent about the entire situation. They allowed John to petition to remove the “Atkinson” name from the child’s birth record but took a bit longer to relieve him of child support, since he had failed to find another placement for the child. In October, 1682, John’s wife Sarah tried her hand at petitioning the court. “(I have) been sorely troubled and perplexed by reason of the troubles falling upon my husband John Atkinson, which have been very changeable and vexatious by reason of the imperious dealings of Sarah Stickney…threatening and scoffing…so that mine and my children’s lives are wearisome to us, who cannot go up and down quietly, but meet with that which is grievous to us.”
The court extended the payments to Sarah Stickney to April 10, 1683, and if Widow Stickney had not handed over her daughter by then, all support would cease. Despite threats and cajoling and a serious financial motive, Sarah chose to raise her daughter alone, at her own expense.
The Merry Widow Stickney was not alone for long, however, marrying Stephen Ackerman (also spelled Acreman or Akerman) on December 17, 1684. They had two more children together, bringing the Widow Stickney’s kiddo count to at least twelve.
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The Morse/Stickney/Ackerman/Atkinson dinner table, perhaps? Ballad print c. 1670, Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford
As for Mary (probably Atkinson) Stickney? She stayed with her mother until, at age 20, she married Daniel Poore Pettengill. Whatever the controversy of her youth, she honored the father she had known since she was five years old, naming her eldest son Akerman Pettengill.
The last laugh may be reserved for the long-suffering Newbury Town Clerk, in the end. Under Atkinson, we find the following entry into the transcribed Newbury Vital Records.
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Something is Always Cooking at the Museum |
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Swedish Apple Cake
If you love the combination of cardamom and apples like we do, give this Swedish Apple Cake a try. If you only have ground cardamom, 1/4 -1/2 teaspoon should do the trick. Courtesy of Tina Rawson, who led our Swedish folk painting workshop this summer.
For the apple topping:
• 3 medium Granny Smith apples, peeled, cored and cut into ½-inch thick wedges (about 1 pound)
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
For the cake:
• 1 cup all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ½ teaspoon fine salt
• ½ teaspoon cardamom seeds, crushed in a mortar and pestle or a spice grinder
• ¾ cup granulated sugar
• ¼ cup packed light brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 6 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
• ¼ cup sour cream
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
Instructions
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-inch springform pan.
2. Make the Apple Topping: Heat butter in a 12-inch nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add apples and sauté until they are lightly caramelized, about 5-8 minutes. Add brown sugar and cinnamon, and continue to cook, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves and apples are evenly coated, about 1 more minute. Remove apples from the heat and set aside.
3. Make the cake: Whisk flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom together in a medium bowl and set aside. Whisk sugars and eggs together in a large bowl until fully combined. Slowly add melted butter to sugar and egg mixture and continue whisking until uniform in texture. Add sour cream and vanilla and whisk until fully combined. Add flour mixture and whisk until batter just comes together.
4. Scrape batter into prepared pan and even out the top with a small offset spatula. Arrange apples over the top of the batter in two concentric circles. The apples should just touch each other but not overlap. Reserve the butter and sugar mixture that remains in the skillet. Transfer cake to the oven and bake until golden brown and a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean or with just a few moist crumbs attached, about 40-50 minutes.
5. Add a couple of teaspoons of water to the skillet along with the reserved butter and sugar mixture leftover from making the apple topping. Cook over medium heat until warm and syrupy in texture, about 1-2 minutes. Brush syrup over the top of the cake, particularly the apples. Cool cake for at least 20 minutes on a wire rack and serve.
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Click on image above to play the puzzle |
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Fishing boats
Taken at Goodwin's Landing at the foot of Goodwin Avenue in Joppa. Image from the Museum of Old Newbury and included in Clipper Heritage Trail, Volume II. Click on the image to play the puzzle.
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Museum e-Newsletter made possible through the
generosity of our sponsors:
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Museum of Old Newbury
98 High Street
Newburyport, MA 01950
978-462-2681
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