Missing Pieces

Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • January 17, 2017

Sally Mitchell Barney is seated lower right.

Unfortunately, and frustratingly, in history we will always have missing pieces. In particular, about daily life, the details of a person’s life, and about the average person who went unnoticed as she/he did her/his work and lived her/his life.


On occasion, we get a better glimpse into daily life when we come across a person’s personal journals and letters, account books, even photographs if it is late enough in time. It still doesn’t tell you every last detail, but it does help.


People think I know everything about Maria Mitchell. I do not not. I know a great deal but not everything and not how she felt about everything. We don’t have details about her life as a child besides the few things that were written as an adult or remembered by others. We certainly have large holes of information about some of her siblings, even her mother, Lydia Coleman Mitchell. And these holes are always something I try and keep filling. I will never fill them all in but little pieces do help to paint a picture.

This fall, I and the Mitchell House, had the good fortune of meeting a couple from New Mexico who were on a New England tour. The wife is from an old New England family – ancestors on the Mayflower (says I, the descendant of late 19 th and early 20 th century immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and Italy) – and ancestors who lived on Nantucket, including her great grandmother, Eliza Gardner Heaton, who was born on Nantucket to Prince and Mary Gorham Gardner in 1816. Eliza was a friend of Sally Mitchell’s (also born in 1816), the oldest sister of Maria Mitchell, and friendly with Maria as well. Even better, Eliza attended William Mitchell’s schools. This couple very kindly provided me with the recollections and notes of Eliza as they reference Sally and William and Maria as well.


I awaited the copies in the mail, and still having to close up Mitchell House for the winter, I was only recently able to begin reading the documents though I have been hankering since they came in the mail (I allowed myself a cursory look then). And they have proved more than useful as they have provided me with information to fill a few holes not just about Sally, but William’s school as well – even a tidbit or two about Maria!


So, a few holes have been filled with many more gigantic ones to slowly fill in. Maybe someday they will get filled to some extent. But for now, I have some more pieces to use to tell the Mitchell story and also to put into our archives for future reference and for others to use to fill other holes!


JNLF

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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • May 4, 2026
May 6, 1878 Between the clouds, Miss Spalding obtained 7 photographs of Mercury on the Sun. It is comfort to me to be able to plan and do a new kind of work. The large telescope worked better than usual, Clark having just been to the Observatory. Clark, as in Alvan Clark, a man who would become the premier telescope maker in America and who built Maria Mitchell’s 5-inch Alvan Clark refractor that she purchased from him (after working with him to build it per her specifications) with money gifted to her from “The Women of America” led by Elizabeth Peabody. More than likely, it is this telescope she is referring to as she did use it in the Vassar College Observatory with her students – and it is also taking center stage in photographs, along with her (first her father’s) Dolland telescope.  Maria had decided she would photograph the Sun on every clear day, and this was one of those results. She would use these images, with her students, to study sun spots and their changes. With her students, Maria would photograph the transit of Mercury as noted above. She would also photograph the transit of Venus a few years later with her students. JNLF

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By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • April 27, 2026
And with it, some of the heirloom daffodils I purchased for the Mitchell House last fall. A place was recommended to me by two longtime friends of the MMA and gardeners extraordinaire. It is called Old House Gardens. I ordered a small amount as we now have a plethora of voles on Vestal Street – I believe I complained about them here last year. They won’t eat daffodils so I got a few of “Butter and Eggs” (1777) and “Conspicuus” (1869) as either of these could have appeared in William Mitchell’s gardens. They were not listed in a letter from John Quincy Adams that I have mentioned before. But, Adams was not here visiting the Mitchell family when the daffodils would have been in bloom. The one pictured here is “Butter and Eggs” not completely unfurled. JNLF

Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • April 13, 2026
April 1878. The conference of Woman’s Congress officers met in Washington. Because we had one member in Washington we were invited to meet in that place. I went on at a great expense of time, money and strength . . . . We were in session at least nine hours. I think that more than half of that was used by Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Sayles. The only motion which I carried through was to pay the Secretary $200 . . . In 1878, that was a long train(s) ride to Washington, DC from Poughkeepsie, NY and Vassar College. If Maria seems perturbed, I am sure she was. As president of the Association for the Advancement of Women, and thus the Congress, she had to be at the meeting. But it appears she did not get much say in the nine hour meeting. This was also a long trip to take when she had another, even longer trip coming up in July of 1878. In that month, she would travel with students and her sister, Phebe, out west to Colorado to view the eclipse and that train and wagon ride I am sure was weighing on her mind – not just the physical trip but making her way for an important eclipse viewing event. JNLF
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