You Are a Rock!

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • October 3, 2016

I have to say, I did tell this rock you see here, “you are a rock!” the other day. That was, after I had gone back over to the Mitchell House and I was alone of course.


For maybe eighty or so years, this rock was doing a serious job. It was a big support. I am not kidding you. The other day, I was handed this rock by the mason – Wayne Morris and his mason tender, his daughter Andrea – while I stopped in to check on the work in the basement of our soon to be Research Center. Andrea pulled the rock out of a bucket. Wayne said, “You know where that was?” Turns out this rock was filling a void between a support beam and a concrete block – basically acting as a filler to hold it all in place.


Now, before we all exclaim, “What?!” we have to think about when and how this was done. It was done in the 1920s, so the gentleman who did this was likely born in at least the 1870s. That – and his growing up and beginnings of work life – being a time when he would have learned from and been trained by carpenters and others who worked in the mid-nineteenth century. So this rock, while something we would not do today, was a perfectly acceptable building material in the 1920s still.

I have seen this before – not just in our historic MMA buildings but all around Nantucket and even off-island. I sit on the board of a very old organization here on the island and recently when we had work done to a building we found boulders and large rocks being used to hold up building and landscaping components from the nineteenth century. Heck, there are still many foundations on island that are rubble or even one rock holding up a long expanse of a sill. It works, still does, may very likely to continue to work even when we are all dead and gone. They knew how to build then – with limited building technologies compared to today.


Despite all this, the rock is not going back. But it will live on as a testament to the builders of our past!


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

At Long Last!

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • June 9, 2025
After several yes’s and then several no’s, not going to have time, we have indeed received the final layer of asphalt on Vestal Street. This goes back to last March and April when we finally had our sewer and waterlines replaced. While I am all about preservation, 1903 piping is a bit old and tired and filled with tree roots to make the passage of sewer sludge quick and easy. While we still await some fixes to curbing – we have our original concrete curbs from 1946/1947 when Vestal Street was first paved – it was dirt until then! – some of them have been buried by time and just need some suavity to pull them up and get them back where they go. Thank you to the Town, N&M, and Victor Braden for completing the work thus far. But, with the paving completed, we may possible begin the replacement of some of our picket fencing and we have permission to restore our fences to what originally existed along the street in the 1920s and earlier – the rail was a rolled, thick top – and we are excited to use some grant funding to make that happen. Stay tuned! JNLF

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