Connectedness

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • February 22, 2021

 In December, I was in the Prospect Hill Cemetery visiting as I am wont to do. I stopped by the Mitchell family plot for a visit and a check.


As I stood behind the plot, I realized that the shadow of the “new fencing” (we restored it in 2018, with Community Preservation Act funding, from a photographic image) may basically be the shadow that was cast on the stones in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fence is on the original stone piers. It is interesting how the shadow “connects” the back stones – the break only being where there are no stones. Those stones belong to Andrew Mitchell (Maria’s oldest brother and the eldest Mitchell sibling), their aunt (whom Maria is named for and who was Lydia Coleman Mitchell’s sister) Maria Coleman, and Sally Mitchell Barney (the Mitchell’s second child and thus, Maria’s oldest sister). I like thinking about this “connectedness.”


I continued my ambling through the stones, visiting other Mitchell family members, checking on stones that I have cleaned, and visiting those who have left us, many of them friends and mentors. It gets a bit sad but then I know they are still with me. Each one of them gave me something from themselves to make me who I am today. And for that, I am always grateful.


I encourage you to walk Prospect Hill and learn and look. It’s a beautiful site with so many interesting stone monuments. Some see cemeteries as upsetting or scary or maudlin. They are not – they are quiet, peaceful, and beautiful places that serve as part of our history and our being.



JNLF

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I have always wanted to find a piece of a clay pipe. I know – weird – but if you have ever read any of my blogs here for the MMA then you know I have a thing for pottery shards. I sort of figured I would not find a piece of a clay pipe – not even a piece of a stem. But the other day, walking in a place where I have found quite a few shards, I found a piece of clay pipe! Now, I’m not talking about water pipes – I am talking about tobacco pipes. And I know very little about clay pipes. Yes, I am a curator of a historic house museum, but this family did not smoke. They were Quaker and among the many things they abstained from, tobacco was one of them. Therefore, I am not up on clay pipes so I am doing a bit more research.  For one, age can be determined by the width of the hole inside the pipe. So based on this one, I would say it’s fairly late. Since they were so fragile, and those holes pretty small, if it got filled with tobacco, the person just broke off the stem creating a shorter pipe and one that was not clogged with tobacco. Apparently, stems could be recycled – in fact, 15,000 broken stem pieces were uncovered at a historic walkway at Colonial Williamsburg – they were used as fill! And pipes were made into the early twentieth century – falling out of favor around World War One. It makes sense – they were cheap, easy to make, and affordable. Typically, one could last a few years – unless you dropped it of course. An,d pipes were used by men, women, and (eh, em) yes, children. I can see that Nantucket may not have had a lot of tobacco smoking residents – not just that some were Quaker – but because of the Quaker influence. I t does not mean people here do not smoke – I just think there may have been fewer smokers on the island in the nineteenth century and earlier. JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • August 17, 2026
August 19 {1857}. There are four great men whose haunts I mean to seek, and on whose footsteps I mean to stand: Newton, Shakespeare, Milton, and Johnson. To-day I told the driver to take me to St. Martin’s, where the guide-book says that Newton lived. He put me down at the Newton Hotel, but I looked in vain to its top to see anything like an observatory. I went into a wine-shop near, and asked a girl, who was pouring out a dram, in which house Newton lived. She pointed, not to the hotel, but to the house next to a church, and said, “that’s it – don’t you see a place on the top? That’s where he used to study nights.” It is a little, oblong-shaped observatory, built apparently of wood, and blackened by age . . . .” Blackened no doubt by the wood ash and soot found in the air throughout over-crowded nineteenth century London. We always think about London being very foggy in the nineteenth century but frankly a lot of it was wood and coal ash as the nineteenth century grew older, particularly as factories developed and belched all of that into the air – think Sherlock Holmes in the 1880s. But Maria Mitchell, while starting in Europe as a young woman’s chaperone, also knew that this tour of Europe was a great learning experience – the equivalent of a college education she could not have. Doors were thrown open to her around Europe – in particular at all of the observatories that dotted the continent. She was not just well-known – she was famous. JNLF
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