Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • March 21, 2017

March 31. {1857} We are at length in New Orleans, and up three flights of stairs at the St. Charles, in a dark room, at the pretty price of three dollars a day . . . . The peculiarities of the city dawn upon me very slowly. I first noticed the showy dress of the children, white waists and fancy skirts – then the turbaned heads of the black women in the streets, and next the bouquet-selling boys with their French phrases.


This was Maria Mitchell’s southern trip in the spring of 1857, before she and Prudence Swift (her charge) headed to Europe. What you need to keep in mind is that Maria Mitchell was coming from a heavily Quaker influenced island home so to see the “showy dress” of the children and the turbaned women, as well as the dazzling bouquets of flowers, added to the cacophony of color that Maria Mitchell was not used to seeing in such an extreme. It must have been an assault to her eyes though a beautifully happy one. When you think of New Orleans, besides the obvious of the Vieux Carré and jazz music, what always comes to me is the thick humid air, the lush of the plant life, and the fantastic explosion of color, as well as the warm, beautiful faces of New Orleanians and the drawl that only says New Orleans native. (Can you tell I lived there for about three years? Riverbend.)


JNLF

Recent Posts

The Evil Four Inches

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 5, 2025
I have posted this during Women’s History Month before but because it is March and Women’s History Month, I think it’s worth repeating. It’s clever and helps to tell an important story in women’s history while giving it a bit of a 21 st century twist. It comes via the National Women’s History Project .  JNLF

Keep Calm and Bird On: May 2025

May 1, 2025
“If you don’t look, you don’t see. You have to go and look.” -Edith Andrews

Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • April 28, 2025
Lynn, Ap. 25 1869  My dear President, I am not sure I told you how long I must be away from the College. If I took only the Sunday’s rest, it would be possible for me to reach the Obs. By Tuesday, but I feel the need of more than one day of quiet, before I enter upon the new and incomprehensible life before me . . . William Mitchell died on April 19, 1869 and for the first time, Maria Mitchell was alone. Save for her trip to the southern United States and Europe in 1857 and 1858, her father was always by her side. She did not know much of a day in her life without him nearby and she knows that. It was difficult for her – and her siblings worried about her and this new world she was now in. She had been – expect for that trip – the caregiver for both of her parents. Her mother, Lydia Coleman Mitchell, died in 1861 on Nantucket and Maria had cared for her as well. She was the child who became the caregiver of the family – both in her youth as her siblings sought her out for care, humor, love, and adventures while their mother was busy with younger children and household duties – and then her parents as the only child who did not marry and remained by their sides. JNLF
Show More