Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • April 6, 2020

Dr. E. P. Miller’s

37, 39 West 26th Street

New York, Ap. 16 {1881}


My dear Matthew {Barney},


I am glad you are getting along decently well.  I am very much better than I was and begin to enjoy life again.  Lydia Dame is with me for a few days.  Anne you probably see; she left Thursday.  I enjoyed her visit very much . . . .


Yesterday (Good Friday) the city was packed and crammed and I suppose it will be on Sunday . . . .


Tomorrow (Sunday) Lydia expects to go to Trinity {Church}; probably she will have to stand.  After Easter has passed, I mean to buy Easter Eggs.  I suspect they will be cheap.  The streets are exceedingly pretty; some of the Easter cards are very pretty and the roses beautiful.  You pass thousands of them on Broadway.


Matthew Barney was the husband of Maria’s older sister, Sally Mitchell Barney, who died in 1876.  By this point, Matthew was remarried.  He is buried on Nantucket with his second wife and her family.  It is nice to see that they still remained close – he was, after all, her brother-in-law for thirty-eight years before Sally died – a death not unexpected as her health had been poorly much of her life.  Lydia Dame, was a daughter of Maria’s youngest sister, Eliza Katherine (Kate) Mitchell Dame and Anne is of course a younger sister of Maria’s.

What I find funny is Maria’s frugal nature coming out in her note about buying Easter candy AFTER Easter.  Such a Maria thing.  She was not poor by any means, leaving a decent estate to her family when she died in 1889.  But her Nantucket and Quaker-self shine through in this comment – as too does the over-crowding.   In this date of COVID-19, it immediately makes me think of “social distancing.”  Maria might find it amazing to see shots of what were once crowded areas of NYC and Boston –  all now empty because of this virus pandemic.


Maria was in NYC for the Easter parade – this was at its beginnings – and went on for decades though it began to fizzle out in the last decade or so.  If you have never seen “Easter Parade” with Fred Astaire and Judy Garland it really is a must no matter what your religious belief – it is not a religious-based movie and it has one of the best dance and song scenes in a musical – “A Couple of Swells” – (says this movie musical nut) and “Stepping Out With My Baby” is  fantastic – can’t go wrong with Irving Berlin!  And if you have never seen Anne Miller tap dance, this one is even more important to watch!


JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • November 2, 2026
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Bang, Clang, Hiss!

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • October 26, 2026
I grew up, quite literally, with hot water radiators in a Colonial Revival from the 1920s.  There was a huge boiler in the basement that chugged and blew hot belching air. It took up one whole area of the basement and I avoided it. I could hang over on the stairs and stare at its flames at the bottom. It scared me. It not only kept the basement very warm but also very dry. While the house had been built in an area that began to slope at our property, between the furnace and the clever drainage system installed by the builders of the house in the 1920s, our basement was always dry. My mother, the queen of rebates (this is the 1970s and 1980s), had her “rebate and coupon table” right in front of this furnace. I remember it always glowed – and I would not doubt that it still had some asbestos around some of its pipes. Maybe another reason I stayed away – perhaps I was warned away at an early age not just because I could burn myself! One of my fondest memories of this house was the clang and hiss of the heaters in the winter. It made me feel instantly cozy, as if I was wrapped in a nice warm quilt. If I was in bed at night and it was snowing, all the more warmth and cozy feeling. It was comforting and a sound and feel I still associate with snow and winter. The street light and the snow falling, spiraling down in that pinkish gold of the light – and the hoped for snow day to come! Forced air systems just don’t do the same thing. And, they suck all the moisture out of the house to boot! They do keep a house quite warm though – but still not the same – and I miss that humidity as do my plants. I reflect back on the hot water radiators – those old cast iron loopy radiators with the valve and perhaps a radiator box to cover them – as it if they kept me super warm. They didn’t. We kept our house at 63F – a lesson I still follow – and it was a big old Colonial-style house so it could be drafty. One reason we had a Franklin stove in our family room and quilts for nighttime television watching! So many times over the course of a winter, I think of that house where I spent about twenty years of my life, and remember the, “Bang, Clang, Hiss!” of the radiators and the coziness they projected. And while, it wasn’t always warm, it was a lot warmer that the Mitchell House would have been in February! JNLF
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