At Rest

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 4, 2019

Under a blanket of cold.


When the ground freezes and seems like stone or metal, I am always reminded of Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter – a poem later turned into a hymn that is most commonly sung during the Advent season. It was one of my Father’s favorites but he found it very sad. I once saw it making him cry when I was a child. The line in particular: “Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” I was again reminded of this today (January 30, 2019) as I was the other day, and many cold winter days. The line pops into my head often in this season.


Today, as I took my lunchtime walk, I went past Old North Cemetery. Everything was peaceful – everyone asleep under the blanket of a cold, iron-like earth. Windswept, quiet, grey. Grey clouds moving along the horizon with peeks of blue.

The cemetery is sometimes referred to as the Gardner Burial Site – some of the earliest who were interred there were from the Gardner family and originally the site was a private family burial site for the family. Appropriate, since West Chester Street is just a few steps away and the Gardner clan as half-shares (in the early settlement of Nantucket by Europeans) lived along West Chester as they lived farther afield from the full-shares who lived closer to Washing Pond in Sherburne. The road is basically the oldest on Nantucket – leading from the original settlement at Sherburne into Town and the later settlement at Wesco – which is basically Town and which provided a better harbor.



Maria was, of course, related to people on both sides of the aisle so-to-speak.


JNLF

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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • June 16, 2025
June 1851 My Dear Sister . . . . Mrs. Dassel has painted me kneeling at my telescope. It looks like Adeline Coffin and is of course not handsome. If thee was here thee would have Mitchell’s {William Mitchell Barney, son of Sally and Matthew Barney} painted at once. She has a head of a child N. P. Willis that is very lovely. She has taken a room at the Atheneum and put up about a dozen pictures – very beautiful – Isabel is lovely. She has not tried to make a portrait, but a very pretty picture . . . . She is now engaged on Abra’m Quary – he is much flattered by it and it will be a fine portrait. I think we shall buy it or a copy for the Atheneum . . . . She will paint father also for herself – having made a pencil sketch . . . .We like her very much . . . . The above is from a letter sent by Maria Mitchell to her eldest sister, Sally Mitchell Barney. In it, Maria details what everyone in the Mitchell family is up to. She includes some details about Herminia B. Dassel, an artist who came to Nantucket to paint the last Native Americans and also took an interest in the famous Mitchell family. This was of course four years after Maria’s discovery of the comet. At the time of this letter, Maria was still the librarian for the Atheneum and the portrait of Quary that she mentions possibly buying for the Atheneum, she did buy as it hangs in the Atheneum by the front door today. Another Dassel portrait of Quary is in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association and the portrait of Isabel Draper is currently on display at the NHA’s Whaling Museum – on loan from a museum in Rhode Island. The portrait Maria states she posed for at the start of the letter is in the collection of the MMA. It was given to us in the early 1990s by Sally’s great granddaughter – the granddaughter of Mitchell whom she mentions above as well. Maria and Dassel would become good friends – Maria was named the godmother of Dassel’s daughter. And the sketch of William made by Dassel that Maria states would become a portrait? It likely did come to fruition. It made its way down a side of the family but was unfortunately lost, likely sold as part of a family estate though we do have a photograph of it and one can tell it is the brush work of Dassel. JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • June 9, 2025
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