A Young Irish Earl's Rough Start

Birr Castle, Ireland, in August, 2010

Laurence Parsons had a bit of a challenging start in his tenure as the Fourth Earl of Rosse.

He was only 26 years old when news of his revered father's death in Dublin reached Birr Castle, the family home in the Irish midlands, in the Fall of 1867. Both his father and his grandfather had not acceded to the position until they were in their forties, but youth alone was probably not the most daunting aspect of his succession. His father, William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse, was a multi-talented man of great accomplishment and high reputation. While primarily remembered today as the designer and maker of a revolutionary huge telescope, the Third Earl was also much admired in the midlands for his family's work to alleviate the effects in King's County (now County Offaly) of the 1840s' Great Hunger and among the Irish people for his clear-headed approach to governmental duties. While not entitled to a seat in the House of Lords by birth alone, he was elected as an Irish Representative Peer in 1845, thus gaining his place in London's halls of power through accomplishment rather than DNA.

The Third Earl of Rosse and his Countess, Mary, in May of 1850. They are shown looking over drawings of a galaxy whose spiral form was first seen by Lord Rosse using his "Leviathan of Parsonstown" during the prior decade. This drawing is by Charles Piazzi-Smyth, a renowned astronomer (and, some would say, crackpot as concerns the pyramids of Egypt), one of many luminaries of science who frequented Birr Castle in the mid-1800s. Illustration from and courtesy of the Birr Castle Archives.

Young Laurence Parsons clearly had big hessians to fill. As though that weren't enough, though, fate dealt him a pair of odd and disquieting incidents in his first two years on the job.

The Policemen Would Listen to No Explanation

Just a little more than a year after his father's death, in the late Fall of 1868, Lord Rosse and a party of friends went hunting north of Parsonstown (now Birr) in the general direction of Banagher on the River Shannon. Included in the party were the Earl's 20-year-old brother Randal and two teenaged brothers, Clere and Charles. As the party rode southward toward home in the gathering twilight, they were accosted -- not by outlaws, but by the law. A yellowing newspaper clipping in the Birr Castle Archives recounts the incident thusly:

A Lord Taken Prisoner by Drunken Policemen Under Menace of a Loaded Rifle.
(From Our Correspondent)
Parsonstown, Tuesday.
An incident among the strangest in the history of the police force, and one which is affording considerable local gossip, has just happened in this neighbourhood. The Earl of Rosse, accompanied by his brothers and some friends, were returning along the Banagher road from shooting on Saturday evening, and within a mile of the Castle they were met by some Constabulary of the Annah Station, who peremptorily ordered the young nobleman to halt, one of the policemen giving proof that the command was no joke by deliberately loading his rifle and making the most convincing gestures. His lordship and party had the presence of mind to forego a long parleying, simply contenting themselves by stating who they were. But the policemen would listen to no statement or explanation, and his lordship and his party had no alternative but to save themselves from the indignity of the handcuffs, or, probably, a personal encounter, by going with the policemen into town, where the tables were soon turned, as the Sub-Inspector, on hearing the strange narrative, forthwith had the whole of his Lordship's late escort taken into custody. The Constabulary escapade is to form the subject of an investigation, and very likely will lead to unpleasant results to the policemen, two of whom at least were intoxicated, and all were in charge of the Constable of the Station.

The escapade did, in fact, lead to unpleasant results for the police involved. Also in the castle archives is this groveling letter from the island's top cop of the time, the Chief Constable of Ireland in Dublin:

Constabulary Office, Dublin Castle
8 Dec. 1868
My Lord,
I have received, and read with pain, the report of the misconduct of the party of Constabulary towards your Lordship and your friends on the evening of the 28th.
I am glad to think that conduct like that in question towards any individual is, on the part of the Constabulary of very rare occurrence. But that such an outrageous and uncalled for interference with a person of your Lordship's position, and in your own immediate neighbourhood should have taken place, is I believe without precedent.
My duty calls upon me to recommend the dismissal of Constable Burke and Sub-Constable Coyle.
As regards the former, I may mention that he has served 30 years without ever having been, until now, reported for drunkenness, - and that he is married and has a large family.
Should you think fit for these reasons to interfere in his behalf, I shall consider the discipline of the Force...

... and, unfortunately, the last page of the letter is missing. There is also no record of a response from the young Earl, so the fate of Constable Burke and his ability to continue to feed his large family is not now known. A curt scrawl at the top of the letter in the Fourth Earl's handwriting gives us a clue, though: "Constabulary defence of annoyance to our Party." Burke probably didn't fare well.

Less than a year later, an unprecedented and much darker event not of his making shook Laurence Parsons's family.

You Killed Her, You Bury Her

St. Brendan's Church of Ireland, Birr, on a gloomy January day, 2011. Photograph courtesy of and copyright by Stephen Callaghan. (Mr. Callaghan is very skilled and talented with a camera; I urge you to come back later and click on his name to see what I mean.)

Mary King was born near Ferbane, a village about ten miles north of Birr Castle along the road from Parsonstown (now Birr) to Athlone. Her mother, Harriette, was Laurence Parsons's great-aunt, and the King family were frequent visitors to Birr Castle during his father's heyday. In her teens, Mary became acquainted with many of the prestigious scientists who visited Birr Castle and its great telescope and other engineering marvels -- and began her own lifelong fascination with science in general and optical devices in particular. Girls of the time in Ireland were not afforded formal education, but Mary's inquisitiveness, intelligence, and moxie propelled her to eventual scientific prominence anyway. Among other distinctions she gathered as an adult, in the 1860s she was one of only three women entitled to receive the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society -- the other two being Mary Sommerville (after whom Sommerville College of Oxford University is named) and Queen Victoria.

Mary King Ward (probable identification based on hairstyle) in a detail from one of Piazzi-Smyth's drawings. Her likeness is more commonly seen in a photograph by Countess Mary Rosse, wife of the Third Earl of Rosse, herself a pioneering woman in science and technology. Illustration from and courtesy of the Birr Castle Archives.

In addition to a keen scientific mind, Mary was intensely enthusiastic about bringing the excitement of science to young people. She wrote several very successful books for youngsters, published as were all of her writings under her married name, Mary Ward. She drew the illustrations for her books herself, and they embody even today her lighthearted earnestness. Of her books for children she said that she wanted them to be "an agreeable bait by means of which unwary youth may find themselves caught in the meshes of science while seeking only amusement."

Bug fun: "The Insect Maypole" by Mary Ward as reproduced in Whatever Shines Should Be Observed by Susan M. P. McKenna-Lawlor (see recommended reading at the end of this post.)

Mary's personal life was not very easy. When she was 27 she married Henry Ward, a striking military man who had served in the Crimea and who was a son of Viscount Bangor of County Down in the Northeast of Ireland. A year after their marriage, Henry made a disastrous career choice: he chose not to have one. He resigned his commission as Captain and devoted the rest of his life to social activities and sports, thus burdening his family with aristocratic activities without aristocratic income. It fell to Mary to provide for the family -- and to bear his eleven children -- but there is no evidence that she ever expressed anything but good cheer and optimism. They moved from home to home, each more austere than the previous one, until they finally wound up in a simple, unfurnished Dublin rental house in 1868.

The following year, in August of 1869, she and Henry made the trip halfway across Ireland to visit Birr Castle and, presumably, to check on how young Laurence was doing as Lord Rosse. On Tuesday afternoon, August 31st, one of the Parsons engineering marvels was brought out for a romp: a self-propelled steam carriage of the Third Earl's design which could reach speeds up to seven miles per hour on a good road. The family tutor (home schooling is a long tradition in the Parsons family), Richard Biggs, is said to have been steering the contraption, the younger two boys, Clere and Charles, were feeding fuel to the boiler, and Mary and Henry were perched on the passengers' bench. The auto steamed out of the gates of the Castle demesne and up Oxmantown Mall toward St. Brendan's Church of Ireland at its junction with the road to Tullamore. Randal was walking along behind; the only brother not present was the young Earl himself.

Birr Castle Demesne gates in August, 2006.

At the church, Mr. Biggs steered the steamer right, toward the center of Parsonstown and into disaster.

There are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened -- Biggs may or may not have run over a curbstone, the vehicle may or may not have overturned -- but somehow Mary was thrown from the bench to the ground and was crushed by one of the vehicle's massive iron wheels. She was taken to a nearby physician's home where she died within minutes of her grievous injuries, "a broken neck, her jaw was greatly fractured, and she was bleeding from the ears" according to the doctor's statement.

Mary Ward, noted scientist, educator, and pioneer in women's rightful ability to contribute to science, had become the world's first automobile fatality.

In grief and anger, the young Lord Rosse had the steam carriage destroyed, and no photograph or drawing or plan of it exists. Her husband Henry was obviously unable to provide for a fitting funeral and burial, so Lord Rosse sent a telegram to Mary's brother John about the issue. His response was, "You killed her, you bury her." Mary Ward remains the sole "non-lineal" member of the extended family to be entombed in the Parsons vault in Birr.

Coda

Mary Ward's spirit lives on in a very strange yet delightful way. One of her great-granddaughters is Lalla Ward, a former actress perhaps most well-known for her role as Princess Astra and the second incarnation of Romana in the great television series "Doctor Who." Lalla, born Sarah Ward, retired from acting in 1992 after marrying biologist and author Richard Dawkins.

She now draws illustrations for her husband's science books. Great-grandma would be proud.

Lalla Ward in character as Romana. Source unknown.

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Strongly recommended reading:

The chapter on Mary Ward in Whatever Shines Should Be Observed by Susan M. P. McKenna-Lawlor, volume 292 in the Astrophysics and Space Science Library

Section 1 of Chapter 6, "Teenagers without their father", in From Galaxies to Turbines: Science, Technology and the Parsons Family by W. Garrett Scaife

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Steam-powered carriages can still be seen in County Offaly -- at least once a year, in the Birr Heritage Week parade. Below is a video clip of one such that Diane and I took in August, 2006. Part of the south wall of Birr Castle is in the background. A much higher-resolution version can be seen here.

Astronomer Visits Impressive, But Not Famous, Park in a Foreign Land

The Muniment Room of the Birr Castle Archives, August, 2010. This was my "office" while researching connections between the 19th Century Parsons family and America. (90-degree panorama of several handheld vertical frames -- should be clicked on and viewed large.)

The astronomer of this post's title isn't me, who traveled from Santa Cruz County, California, to County Offaly in Ireland in 2010. The astronomer in question is one who traveled exactly the other way, from County Offaly, Ireland, to Santa Cruz County, California, in 1891.

Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, as a Young Man (photo from the Birr Castle Archives)

The Fourth Earl of Rosse

Had he not been surrounded by superluminous immediate family members, Laurence Parsons, the Fourth Earl of Rosse, probably would be considered among the top tier of Irish scientists and engineers of the 19th Century. He directed the great astronomical observatory in Parsonstown (now Birr) Ireland, including the largest telescope in the world, for more than 30 years. He pioneered the use of infrared sensing techniques to measure the temperature of the surface of the Moon. He was an officer of the Royal Society (and delivered its supremely prestigious Bakerian Lecture on Physical Science in 1873) and was Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, for more than two decades.

The Fourth Earl inspects a 36-inch telescope at his observatory, late 1800s. This particular telescope no longer exists, but the walls in the background -- support structure for the giant "Leviathan of Parsonstown" -- still do. Between them now is a reconstruction of that revolutionary instrument, designed and built by the Fourth Earl's father. (Photo from Ireland's Historic Science Centre, Birr Castle Demesne.)

And yet, in his own living room, he was overshadowed from a number of directions: his father, William, the Third Earl, essentially invented the single most important tool of extragalactic astronomy (the giant reflecting telescope) before we even knew there was such a thing as "extragalactic astronomy." His mother, Mary, was a pioneer in the infant technology of photography. His youngest brother, Charles, was a prolific inventor who revolutionized transportation technology by inventing the steam turbine -- and demonstrated it in daring fashion to the British Admiralty by bringing his turbine-powered yacht, the Turbinia, uninvited, to Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897 and outrunning the finest ships of the Queen's Navy that tried to catch the gate crasher. (There is a great action photo of the Turbinia running the Royal Navy silly here.) His cousin, Mary, was a pioneering microscopist, and one of only three women on the mailing list of the Royal Astronomical Society at the time. The other two were Mary Somerville (after whom Somerville College at Oxford University is named) and Queen Victoria herself.

One of the Fourth Earl's travel diaries in the Birr Castle Archives, 2010.

Unlike his revered father and mother, though, Laurence became a world traveler (presaging the globetrotting ways of his grandson and great-grandson in their pursuit of botanical specimens and, in the case of the current Earl, service to humanity through the United Nations). His two long tours of North America, one in 1884 and the other in 1891, are the first instances I can find of his family's venturing into the Western Hemisphere.

Sherwood peruses the archives, Birr Castle, 2010. The white cotton gloves are to protect the old paper from skin oils and acids.

I came across his handwritten travel diaries for those two trips in the Birr Castle Archives in August, 2010. His notes on his second trip, the one in 1891, contained one thing that made the hairs on my forearms stand up in eerie astonishment, and another that is deeply puzzling. Both concern events in places less than 50 miles from my home in Boulder Creek, California -- one of them very, very much less than 50 miles -- almost half way 'round the world from his home in the Irish midlands.

A pair of pages from the Fourth Earl of Rosse's travel diary, 1891.

An Astonishing Personal Co-Incidence

A new generation of research astronomical observatories had barely begun in 1891, incorporating a revolution in location rather than technology. Lick Observatory of the University of California was the first mountaintop research observatory in the world, having gone into operation only three years before in 1888. (Before then, the benefits of good "seeing" afforded by certain mountains' steady airflow, diminishing the wavering scintillation or "twinkling" of starlight, had not been widely recognized.) Lick is located atop Mt. Hamilton, just East of San Jose, California, and is a place dear to my heart. It is also only about an hour's drive from my office at DeAnza College.

Lick Observatory at the summit of Mt. Hamilton, California, September 2008. The great 36" refractor still occupies the big dome; the Ft. Harrington pickup truck squats near the entrance.

Clearly, Lick Observatory would be a necessary stop for the Director of the famous Leviathan of Parsonstown on his tour of North America in 1891, and it was. Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, arrived in Northern California (by train via Mexico and Los Angeles) in March, 1891. His diary entries concerning his trip to the mountaintop are full of technical detail, but short on context -- and short on something else that I'll get into later. The real immediate surprise to me was about something closer to home. Literally, closer to home.

Shortly after his visit to the top of Mt. Hamilton, he wrote these entries in his diary concerning an excursion to another Northern California attraction:

Sunday (Easter) [March 29, 1891]
Sorry I was taken out by 10-30 train to Mr. Doyles (Menlo Park, a residential spot on the way to Sn Jose) so I missed Church. Holden [Edward Singleton Holden, first Director of Lick Observatory, founder of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, and all-around hard guy to get along with --SH] & I lunched & dined with the Ds (Mr & Mrs two daughters & 2 sons) & between drove to the new "Stanford University" which as yet consists of buildings only, unfinished, in imitation of the old Spanish Mexican style. Went on to San Jose and stayed night at the new hotel.

Monday Mar. 30
Started at about 10 for "Big Trees" station on the narrow guage line. The "big trees" are close to the station. They are said to be not far short of 300 ft high but only half the girth of the Yosemite groves. I found it took 7 of my stretches to reach round one say 7 x 5 3/5 feet, 40 1/4 feet = say 12 3/4 diam at 4 feet from ground. [I love the way he "talks" himself through the arithmetic! --SH] In the inside of a hollow one my outstretched arms could not reach across the cavity. The branches are short & poor. The whole forest has contained many similar trees but they furnish the "red wood" which is used for all building construction in these parts (Sequoia Sempervirens: bot name). The wood is soft & not resinous yet very durable. Among other things it is used instead of stone or brick in the linings of the railway tunnels.

From there we drove on to Santa Cruz, a sea side resort with hotel & thence by rail to Monterey also on the sea coast...

Wow.

It is clear that on March 30, 1891, the Fourth Earl of Rosse visited the San Lorenzo Valley, the short notch in the Santa Cruz Mountains in which Boulder Creek and Ft. Harrington are located. The "Big Trees" and the narrow-guage railroad are the first clues -- the private park he refers to still exists as the "Big Trees and Roaring Camp Railroad" complex just outside the little town of Felton, California, just down the valley from Ft. Harrington, and directly adjacent to Henry Cowell State Park.

"Big Trees and Roaring Camp Railroad," 2005. My late son, Doug Harrington, holds his daughter, Grace, on his shoulder in front of a narrow-guage locomotive that may well have been operating when Laurence Parsons, Fourth Earl of Rosse, visited this place in 1891.

Henry Cowell State Park is where I walk my dog. It's Kelsey's favorite place in the whole world.

Kelsey in heaven. Or Henry Cowell State Park. To him, there's no difference.

After discovering this, and having talked to Lady Rosse about the great co-incidence, she searched through the family's photo albums and found one that included the Fourth Earl's visual souvenirs of his second trip to America. In those photos was this one:

In what is now Henry Cowell State Park, California, 1891.

... a place in Henry Cowell State Park that I walk Kelsey past every time we go, near the park's headquarters. The tilted trunk isn't there any more, nor are the people in their formal dress, but the grove is there. It wouldn't be so astonishing if this were a photo of a major tourist attraction, like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon -- but this is a little local park, a dog-walking place, that somehow is shared across the thousands of miles and the century between, and that thrills me. Maybe that's silly. I don't think so.

Sherwood photographing a photograph album from a trip by an astronomer of bygone days to his own present home. The multiple layers of self-referencing in this image make me dizzy.

A Deeply Puzzling Four Blank Pages

In addition to my astonishment on finding that the Fourth Earl of Rosse, all the way from the middle of Ireland, had visited my dog's park, I was intrigued by a curious set of four completely blank pages in his diary, between his arrival at Lick Observatory and his departure. Wasting paper like that was utterly unlike the Fourth Earl (not a single line of paper is blank elsewhere in his diary, and often he wrote things in the margins or gutter), but here were four empty vessels at the most crucial point in his tour (from an astronomer's perspective.)

The mystery will be the topic of a future post here in SherWords, once I have researched the matter in more depth -- which I can do, since the Lick Observatory Archives and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific both have their headquarters just a few miles away!

Stay tuned.

Chenango Darkness: the Prequel

June 7th, 1879, in the New York Times:

In the previous entry in this blog, writer Frederick Busch drew a parallel between his almost-murder in Nigger Hollow, Chenango County, NY, to a completed one in the previous century in the same place. He wrote of the murderer, "He used his rifle, this man who is a small notation in history, and he shot through an open window, and he killed the man whose chickens scratched among the onions and the beans."

Busch got it backwards.

The killer in question killed because the damn' neighbor had killed two of his pet chickens, intentionally, and had lured them to their demise to boot. That's a shooting that I, a chicken-keeper, can understand.

And, besides, a thoroughly unpleasant person played a key role in the chicken-entrapment:



The whole story is recounted in this anonymous article from the New York Times of June 7th, 1879, and is at least as good reading as is Busch's tale from almost a century later. (Beware: the PDF file linked from that page is a little odd: you have to scroll halfway down the image to get to the start of the article in the left column.)


(So, I guess I have to thank my quarrelsome neighbors here in Creepy Hollow, California, for keeping the neighborhood from stagnating. Whoda thunk it.)

A plus in this well-written and engaging article from 131 years ago is that it doesn't take a gratuitous swipe at its then-current Presidential administration, something that caused consternation in comments about Busch's article linked in the previous blogpost. I'm happy to reassure the politically squeamish that the NYT did no such thing to the Hayes administration in this article (although there are some striking similarities between that administration and some controversies about the second Bush administration.) Dann, you can read the original article linked in this post without fear that your delicate sensitivities will be trod upon.

As a more serious side-note, the murderer -- who comes across very sympathetically in the article -- has a couple of interesting connections to "SherWords" and its readers: he was an immigrant from County Monaghan to County Chenango, and he was almost stony deaf. The latter makes some of the later parts of the article even more poignant, given the significant percentage of readers of this blog who are intimately familiar with that condition.

(One little correction: the reporter says that Chenango County is North of Utica; it is actually South of Utica, and by somewhat more than 11 miles.)

Sugar is a Ft. Harrington chicken. Mess with her at your own risk. Significant risk.

Once again, here's where to go for the original 1879 New York Times article about the hanging of Felix McCann. Happy reading!

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Chenango Darkness: Disturbing Tales from Close to Home

I take this brief break from my break to pass along a find from an old Harper's Magazine that just riveted me to my computer monitor from start to finish. It's an article by Frederick Busch, who was a prof at Colgate during the time of the incident he recounts. He and his wife then lived only four miles due north of the little house where I grew up just a few years before, so I am very familiar with the territory in which the story unfolds... and with the pace of life there and then and with its flavor.

Like Busch's house, ours was very isolated (like him, we couldn't see smoke from any neighbor's chimney) on a small tributary on the East side of the Chenango River in upstate New York. Our hollow was called the "Thompson Creek Valley;" his was called, with great nonchalance, "Nigger Hollow." On maps it was called "Negro Hollow" before around 1950, "Pleasant Valley" thereafter, but the locals always called it "Nigger Hollow." As a kid, that struck me as odd, because the only people who lived there were white, and you had to look very hard to find anybody in the entire county who wasn't. Nobody seemed to know where the name came from; even my Dad, who was a great local history buff, didn't know.

Now I know.

Pleasant Valley/Nigger Hollow
(Photo by Lynn Harrington, October, 1964)

The article I'm about to link for you contains true stories of murder, pathetic KKK meetings, heroic dogs, a neighbor across the way who was said to be a pretty decent fellow when he was on his medications, and much more in a riveting ten to fifteen pages.  Busch (who passed away four years ago) weaves a stream of prose that I find enchanting.

Here it is: Standoff in Columbus: Guns, dogs and the language of totality. Enjoy.

And now I'm going back to my break, finishing the quarter and preparing for what will come right after the frenzy of a short summer session. See you in September!

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"The Shutesbury School of Philosophy"

This is a followup to the previous post, "Love and the Observatory."

This old photo from the summer of 1882 played a big part in the latter portion of that article:

I now know a lot more about the photo than I did two days ago, thanks to A Summer of Hummingbirds by Christopher Benfey (2008, Penguin). For starters, "The Shutesbury School..." is the title of the photograph, not the group, though the group named the photo. It's an homage to Raphael's "The School of Athens":

Raphael's "School of Athens." Click on the image for a much larger image, which is a delight to peruse.

The photo was taken immediately after the group of friends had enjoyed a picnic outing to the small town of Shutesbury in the hills near Amherst. It was taken in the Main Street studio of John Lovell, who was a prominent photographer of that time and place. I was evidently wrong about identifying the young lady with the revolver as Susan Dickinson; Mrs. Dickinson, instead, is the woman near the center holding a child on her lap. Benfey identifies most of the eleven this way:

"Five women pose behind five seated men. Mabel [Todd], dressed in white with a large feathered hat, presides. Seated next to her is Susan Dickinson, entirely maternal, with her younger son, Gib, in her lap. The studio backdrop features a light-filled French window opening to the left and a contrasting dark fireplace to the right. A young woman stands in the window, with a Colt revolver in her hand, pointed playfully at Mabel. David Todd sits hunched in front of the fireplace, as though he has just crawled out of it. In front of him Ned Dickinson lies propped on the floor, mimicking Raphael's Diogenes, his tennis racket in front of him. Another Amherst student, William Clark, sits guarding the large picnic basket, slightly open like Pandora's box."

If that quote sounds like something an art critic would write, there's good reason for that. In addition to being a Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and a book reviewer for several prestigious publications, Benfey "serves as a regular art critic for the online magazine Slate," according to his book's dust jacket. Being a book reviewer for the New York Times didn't prevent his book from being pretty well savaged there, though -- unless a book's substance being compared to cotton candy and its import to that of a carnival ride is now considered to be positive.

So who is the woman with the gun? The Yale archives list five women, so the three others must be "Miss Mattie Dickinson," "Miss Allie Mather," and "Miss Bessie Marvin." Since Mabel and Susan are listed as "Mrs," about all I can say about revolver-gal is that she's a Miss.

Benfey also implies that Mabel Todd's "affair" with Austin and Susan Dickinson's son -- Ned, the one with the tennis racket in the photo -- was not one of active sexuality, as other sources imply it was (and I did in the previous post.) Instead, young Ned became very infatuated with Mabel, and this infatuation wasn't discouraged at all by either family. "It was felt," writes Benfey, "by both Ned's parents and the Todds that such a sentimental attachment to a mature woman was good for the young man and harmless for Mabel herself. It was an apprenticeship of sorts. 'He likes Ned,' Mabel wrote of her husband, 'and he thinks it a good thing for him to be under my influence.'" That "apprenticeship of sorts," to me, would be like putting training wheels on a Harley-Davidson and calling it a "practice bicycle."

And Mabel's soon-to-start affair with Austin was of course entirely different.

I posted a copy of "The Shutesbury School..." picture on my Flickr account. One of my favorite photographers on Flickr, a woman whose handle there is "chocolatepoint," immediately recognized the strong similarity it bears to a mural on a wall in Amherst facing the graveyard which contains the Dickinson plot, which you can see in the comments here.

Chocolatepoint did some quick research on the mural and found its brochure available online. While the brochure didn't provide much more information about the photograph than we already had, chocolatepoint also found a great treasure available at the Amherst Historical Commission website: a downloadable file containing full text and pictures from the 1894 Handbook of Amherst, Massachusetts, published by Frederick Hitchcock.

Amherst College's Morgan Hall, 1890's, probably by John Lovell, as it appears in the 1894 edition of The Handbook of Amherst, Massachusetts. A library at the time the photo was taken, Morgan Hall is now the home of the College's Bassett Planetarium, the first room in which I ever took a college astronomy course.

After having read a good deal of it -- and loving every word and picture, as an old geezer who has a very, very soft spot for Amherst would love -- it's clear why the Handbook was "published by" Hitchcock instead of simply "by" him: there's a chapter in it that he didn't write.

The chapter is called "The Connecticut Valley," about the natural history and human history of the larger part of Massachusetts of which Amherst, Northampton, and the surrounding towns are part.

It was written by Mabel Loomis Todd, and it surprised me.

I don't know what I was expecting, but the writing is tight without being terse, romantic without being flowery, informative without the scent of pedantry, and not strange. It holds up very well twelve decades later, better than Hitchcock's does, at any rate. I would really like to see a modern assessment of the "natural history" of the Valley that she presents so confidently, though.

Finally, just for Demitria McDuff because I promised it to her, a photo of Mabel Loomis Todd later in life. She was always a knockout:

Mabel Loomis Todd in 1930, age 73 or 74, about two years before her death. (Copyright holder unknown; from the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.)

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Love and the Observatory

He fumbles at your spirit
As players at the keys
Before they drop full music on;
He stuns you by degrees,

Prepares your brittle substance
For the ethereal blow,
By fainter hammers, further heard,
Then nearer, then so slow

Your breath has time to straighten,
Your brain to bubble cool,—
Deals one imperial thunderbolt
That scalps your naked soul.

-- by Emily Dickinson. More likely than not, that is. Most of it.

This fortieth summer after Woodstock has been a time for nostalgic tales involving youthful love by many of us boomers. By far the best of these that I have seen thus far is this one by Mike Peterson; below is my contribution to the genre.

During the summer of 1968, I worked closely with one I would fall deeply in love with, and whom I would ultimately lose in a terrible accident, but not before having forsaken her for another. I was a callow cad, and she was 120 years old.

She was a telescope.

Approach to the major dome, Amherst College Observatory ("Wilder Observatory"), August 1968.

But she wasn't just any telescope; she was the 7 1/4 inch refractor of the Amherst College Observatory. In the summer of '68, between my junior and senior years at the College, I was preparing for my Senior honors' thesis work. My first plan was to refurbish the old telescope -- unused for many many years -- and to use it to further some research it had been used for earlier in that century, the determination of asteroids' rotation periods by monitoring periodic fluctuations in their brightnesses.

7 1/4 inch telescope, Amherst College Observatory, August 1968. It was 120 years old when this photo was taken.

The old telescope had a very, very high-class pedigree. It was one of the first instruments manufactured for sale by the legendary firm of Alvan Clark and Sons, acquired by Amherst in 1848 for installation in its first observatory. The instrument had already been used by the Clarks to discover the binary nature of several stars, and was sold to the College for the staggering sum of $1800. With its 7 1/4 inch aperture and more than 100-inch focal length, it was considered to be a large telescope for its time. The Clark firm would eventually produce the largest working refractors ever built, even to this day: the 36" telescope of Lick Observatory (1888) and Yerkes Observatory's 40" instrument in 1897. (A vastly larger telescope of a radically different design also went into operation in 1848, though: Lord Rosse's 72" Leviathan of Parsonstown.)

The first Amherst College Observatory with the original tower built for the 7 1/4 inch Clark refractor. Called "The Octagon," this building is still a fixture of Amherst's historic campus, but no longer as an observatory or geology museum ("cabinet").
Photo from the Amherst College library's online archive, credited thusly: "Photo by Lovell, Amherst -- from Wood 1884 Class Album".

By the time I arrived at Amherst for my freshman year in 1965, Amherst had acquired another, much larger telescope from the Clark firm, and both had been installed in the "new" observatory (Wilder Observatory) on a hill south of campus in 1903.

The College, by 1965, had also pretty much lost interest in both of them. There was no astronomer on the faculty then (one was hired by my sophomore year), the offices and workshops of the observatory had been vacant for several years, and the larger telescope was used only once in a great while for simple star- and planet-gazing. The smaller one, the 7 1/4 inch, had not been used in so long that the axles in its mounting structure had welded themselves into immobility by corrosion.

The 7 1/4 inch's "new" home: its dome at the East end of the Wilder Observatory, constructed in 1903. I took this photo in August, 1968.

But its optics apprared to be in fine shape, at least by visual inspection of the lenses themselves (it couldn't be pointed at anything to test them directly), as did the optics in the wonderful box riding piggyback on it:

The 7 1/4 inch and its symbiont, the Ross Camera, August 1968.

That box is a "Ross Camera," the lens-type predecessor to the later and and better-known Schmidt cameras. These cameras were used to record large areas of the sky for surveys, rather than to zero in on intimate details. When in operation, the elegant old main telescope would be used as a guide telescope while the Ross Camera recorded its wide view on a large glass photographic plate at its rear.

During the spring of 1968, I talked with Dr. William Plummer, a young, savvy member of the Astronomy faculty at the University of Massachusetts (the big U at the other end of town from little Amherst College, another of the "colleges" in the Five College Astronomy Department of the time) about whether the old telescope mount could be renovated.

It could, and we did.

At each step along the way, as we carefully disassembled the telescope's mount, sometimes using power drills to dislodge corrosion's welds, I carefully recorded the various pieces' relationships to one another by photos like these:

I mug in the "studio" Tom set up for the parts photos, August 1968.

That documentation was done with expert help, too. My friend Tom, the only other honors-track Astronomy major in my time at Amherst, was one year behind me, and was a highly-accomplished professional photographer before he entered college. He taught me just about everything I ever learned about black-and-white photographic processing. Above is a photo of me with our "parts studio;" below Tom is letting me know that the current batch of prints has only about one minute left in the wash cycle.

Tom is now over 60, a longtime highly-respected faculty member in astronomy at a major American state university. I'm not giving his last name here because I don't want any of his students to stumble across this photo of him by way of a search engine!

The resulting parts photos, along with diagrams and a long narrative, were bound in several copies of a manuscript against the time when something like that project would have to be done again.

The project was a great success by mid-summer; the mount worked smoothly and the telescope could once again be pointed in any direction with ease. However, once we could look through the telescope, it was obvious that the optics needed cleaning and perhaps anti-reflection coating as well. We would have proceeded with that had not something else happened: a remarkable piece of equipment became available that might be adapted to the bigger, 18" telescope in the observatory in time for use in a completely different thesis project.

I switched topics and telescopes in mid-stream then, abandoning the ancient instrument for another that was merely old. Exactly what the new project was is beside the point here; the point is that we didn't clean the 7 1/4 inch lenses.

Somebody else tried to do that a few years later, though. And dropped the lens assembly. And shattered the 125-year-old glass.

Without its heart, the telescope was useless. Without the telescope, the dome was useless. Both were removed; this image from the current Google Earth database shows only a square roof at the East end of the observatory building, looking like a healed-over amputation stump to me; it saddens my heart deeply:

Current Google Earth image of Amherst College's Wilder Observatory. There is no dome on the right.

That wasn't the first time an instrument was removed from the Wilder Observatory, though. The old photo below, not credited in my source, Wolfgang Steinicke's webpages, shows two characteristic roof-slots for "transit telescopes" between the two domes. Transit telescopes, which monitor a site's meridian, are used to calibrate time and position with great precision, and historically were used to regulate clocks and measure wobbles of Earth's axis of rotation. By the time I arrived at Amherst, no trace of these transit instruments remained.

Wilder Observatory, probably circa 1910. Between the two domes, on the roof, are two sets of what look like walkway railings. They are actually supports for hinged parts of the roof between each pair of railings; those hinged parts of the roof would open for use of the two transit telescopes.

But looking for pictures of them led me to this remarkable snapshot from 1910 in Yale University's online archives:

Eben Jenks Loomis visits the observatory with his daughter and son-in-law in 1911, the year before his death. (Eben was born in Upstate New York close in time and space to where the notorious outlaw family "the Loomis Gang" held sway in Nine Mile Swamp. I have not been able to establish any connection, but that's never kept a blog from innuendo-mongering, has it?)

The white-haired gentleman at left is Eben Jenks Loomis, a longtime astronomer of little note with the United States Naval Observatory in Washington DC. The other two are his daughter, Mabel, and Mabel's husband, David Peck Todd. Todd was Amherst's astronomer from 1881 until his retirement in 1917, and was something of an astronomical celebrity from the 1890's onward.

David was lured back to Amherst, his undergraduate alma mater, for a faculty position by the College's Treasurer, W. Austin Dickinson. Dickinson's family was a prominent one in the town of Amherst, and his father had served as a U.S. Congressman. (The older of Dickinson's two younger sisters, Emily, was a reclusive eccentric who lived in their parents' home.)

[NOTE ADDED TWO DAYS AFTER THIS WAS FIRST POSTED: some of the information below is incomplete. Please make sure to read this update.]

Before coming back to Amherst and his new faculty position, Todd worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, and fell in love with and married Eben Loomis's daughter in 1875, when she was only 18 (and he was all of 20.) When they arrived in Amherst, her beauty was luminous and her style was unmistakably modern.

David and Mabel's engagement portrait by Bowdoin's Gallery, Washington DC, 1878. Public domain photo from the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University.

1883 portrait of Mabel taken by the Lovell Studio, Amherst. Todd-Bingham Picture Collection Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University. Copyright unknown.

Along with great beauty, Mabel had great... well... enthusiasm. Within a year of arrival in Amherst, she was having an affair with the son of her husband's sponsor, Austin Dickinson, an affair which she quickly ended in favor of one with Austin himself. That affair continued, almost flagrantly, until Austin died in 1895. Her behavior at Austin's funeral is reported to have been scandalous, and the rift in Amherst society between her supporters and Austin's widow, Susan's, was deep and lasting.

Meanwhile, Austin's reclusive sister, Emily, passed away in 1886, leaving behind her famous hundreds of poems written on scraps of paper and bundled into "fascicles" in her room. Emily's sister, Lavinia, invited Mabel Todd to help her sort through them, and Mabel (along with Atlantic Monthly editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson) edited the poems to a point they deemed publishable.

Whether they actually improved Emily's work or not will never be known, since the full extent of editing is not known. Mabel fancied herself to be an author and poet, too (her novel, Footprints, had been published in 1883), she said matter-of-factly that she "corrected" some of what she found, and it is said that she did much of her editing with scissors. So, when you read a poem by Emily Dickinson, there is a chance that part of what you're reading is actually Mabel Loomis Todd's work.

The whole era of love, lust, romance, and poetry is nicely encapsulated for me by this photograph from the Yale University Archives:

"The Shutesbury School of Philosophy," 1882, public domain photograph, Todd-Bingham Picture Collection Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University. Shutesbury is a very small town in the western Massachusetts hills near Amherst. I don't know why this gang called themselves by that name.

Taken in 1882, it is titled "Shutesbury School of Philosophy," and shows ten young adults in the prime of their energy and vigor. The central figure, dressed in white, is without doubt Mabel Loomis Todd, dominating the tableau as her personality would demand. The archive photo description notes that the people in the picture include "Mrs. William Austin Dickinson [Susan], Mrs. David Peck Todd [Mabel Todd], David Peck Todd, Edward Dickinson, Bradford Hitchcock, Miss Mattie Dickinson, Miss Allie Mather, Mr. Will Mather, Miss Bessie Marvin, William B. Clark, and Gilbert Dickinson." Notice that W. Austin Dickinson is not among those mentioned; it is possible that he took the picture, although it's pretty clearly a studio shot.

While it's not clear from the archives' description which one is Susan, I'm pretty sure it's the young lady at upper-left. Not only is she the first one mentioned (which might imply that position), but, when you look closely at her...

Susan and Mabel.

... she's got a revolver pointed at Mabel.

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Anyone who uses this article as the basis for any part of a term paper or the like is a complete idiot.
Serious references available upon serious request.
Uncredited photos by S. Harrington.
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"Satchel" Is Online

Dad working on his Model T, circa 1935.

A Satchel of Ordinary Treasure is now online with its first post. A second entry will appear tomorrow morning, and the plan is to roll out a new post or two each weekend. We'll see.

Coming Soon: A Satchel of Ordinary Treasure

Left to right: Jim Harrington, Bonzo, Lynn Harrington
circa 1935

My long-promised new adjunct blog is about ready to roll out for public display. It will feature short excerpts from reminiscences of the first half of the 20th Century, primarily but not exclusively from my Dad, Lynn Harrington (1915 - 1999), and will concentrate on what life was like for a working-class family in the Syracuse area of Upstate New York during that time of rapid change in the routines of daily life.

I plan to have most of the posts for the next year be a serialization of Dad's Remembrances of a Childhood.

(Please click on the images to be taken to legible versions.)

After he retired (and even for about 15 years before), Dad wrote voluminously about his memories, and one little piece of his work has appeared in this blog, wonderfully illustrated by Brian Fies. Like that piece, the episodes in his Remembrances of a Childhood don't dwell as much on family events or extraordinary occurrences as they do on what ordinary daily life was like and his own recollections of its affect on him. This ordinariness -- and its differences from what is considered ordinary today -- makes it more likely to be of interest to people outside the family, but my main goal in "Satchel" will be to digitize Dad's work and thus preserve it for family in the future.

Please click to view larger.

Some of you know that I've been doing a similar thing with his photography: digitizing many of his slides and backing them up (with some commentary) on Flickr. Those slides are from a later time than the stories in "Satchel" will be. Slides can only be taken with a camera, and a camera would have been an unimaginable luxury in the time period from 1918 to 1930 for the working-class Harrington family. I'll try to come up with the occasional illustration -- especially when Dad describes some device or process that is unfamiliar to us now -- but "Satchel" will probably be significantly less graphics-heavy than what I've become accustomed to producing lately. Graphics may be in short supply, but images won't be: Dad was very good at using words as pixels to produce clear pictures in the mind's eye.

The title of the new blog comes from an episode early in Remembrances, and I'm not going to explain it on "Satchel" itself -- I'll leave it as an in-joke for my loyal readers over here:

The transition from horse power to internal combustion engines in the work of transportation, earth moving, and construction did not occur overnight. In my early childhood, up to about 1922 or 1923, horses and wagons made up a considerable share of the traffic on city streets.

We lived a little more nearly in the state of nature then than we do now. When a horse felt a call of nature, he stopped and answered it, no matter where he might be. It was a common occurrence in the city, and we took it quite for granted. We noticed, but thought nothing in particular about, the performance of a little man who walked past our house on his way to and from the street car line which carried him to and from work each day. He carried a brown leather satchel as he walked during the spring and summer months. On his homeward way in the evening, he commonly went out into the street in two or three places, opened his satchel, took out a small scoop, transferred some horse manure from street to satchel, replaced the scoop, closed the satchel, and continued on his homeward way. When I asked Mama why he did that, she said he probably had a nice garden, and used the manure to fertilize it.

"Satchel" will be online sometime on the weekend of June 6th and 7th. A link will be posted here when it's ready.

Updates: Fine Crystal and Astronomical Murder

UPDATE: Waterford Crystal Factory Still Shut Down
The venerable Waterford Crystal glass factory in Ireland is still shut down, despite its sale to an American firm. According to the most recent story in the Irish Times, the rights to the "Waterford" name will be used by the purchaser, American firm KPS Capital, but whether the goods that name will be attached to will be ones actually manufactured in Waterford is still up in the air. If, years from now, you splurge on a fine bit of glass from "Waterford," you might do well to Czech the box to see where it was really made.

UPDATE: Kepler Exonerated! Tycho Done In by Contract Hit!
About a year ago, this blog laid out a series of bits of evidence that legendary Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was murdered, and that a prime suspect in his murder was none other than Johannes Kepler. Recent evidence seems to exonerate Kepler, but swivels the finger of suspicion at a more famous figure of the time, Danish King Christian IV. Christian IV evidently paid off a Brahe family member to off Tycho, based on some sordid family issues. There is now even some speculation that Shakespeare's famous line in Hamlet that "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" may have been an allusion to the affair, since that work and Tycho's murder were pretty much contemporaneous.

"I'm Calling a Meeting. Bring Your Gas Mask."

Greg Germani is an Atlantan with a deep love for his city and its history. He came across some of my Dad's old photos of Atlanta from the 1950's and 60's that I had posted to Flickr, and was kind enough to post them to his remarkable website, the Atlanta Time Machine. (My mother was born in Atlanta, and we visited there frequently from New York State when I was growing up.)

Some time after Greg incorporated those photos into his website, I received an e-mail from Carey Waldrip, who graduated in 1956 from the Atlanta High School that was named after my maternal grandfather, J. C. Murphy. He had some very nice things to say about my grandfather, and noted that "[his] father ... sold WW II War Bonds with [my] grandfather, JC Murphy, during the war. JC was a fine citizen and city Alderman and deserved the high school to be named in his honor."

Carey later sent me this electronic copy of a form letter that J. C. Murphy had sent out in his capacity as Director of the East Atlanta District of Civilian Defense to all Wardens in his district (please click on the image to see a legible version):


Homeland Security, indeed. The fears were real; the steps were earnest, even in a place that today we envision as having been far from danger in that particular war.

And I love the afterthought. About the only thing that any meetings I've attended in academia have in common with the one my granddaddy called is the desirability of having a gas mask thereat.