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Seven Fun Facts About E.E. Cummings

Many school kids have a special affinity for e.e. cummings, who wrote about the circus and got away with funky punctuation, made-up words and no capitalization in his poetry. Young ladies, too, are drawn to his lyrical love poems, some of the best in the English language.

He loved to mangle that language like the cartoon character Krazy Kat. He even wrote an introduction to the first collection of the Krazy Kat comic strips.

E.E. Cummings. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Yet Cummings’ experimental poems weren’t just kid stuff.

When he died in 1962, critics acknowledged him as an important 20^th century poet. “No one else has ever made avant-garde, experimental poems so attractive to the general and the special reader,” wrote critic Randall Jarrell.

E.E. Cummings

He was born into a prosperous, intellectual Unitarian family in Cambridge, Mass. Like another New England poet, Robert Frost, he had a farm in New Hampshire. Throughout his life he found refuge at Joy Farm in Madison, near Mount Chocorua.

He earned a B.A. and an M.A. from Harvard, signed up to drive an ambulance during World War I and then wrote a critically acclaimed novel.

In 1923 his first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys, came out. He wrote more books of poetry in the 20s that established his reputation as an avant-garde poet. Over his lifetime he also wrote 2,900 poems, four plays, two novels and essays. He also painted and drew.

For most of his life he lived in a small apartment at 4 Patchin Place in Greenwich Village. “the topfloorback room at 4 Patchin Place … meant Safety & Peace & the truth of Dreaming & the bliss of Work.”

He had two short marriages as a young man, then fell in love with a model, Marion Morehouse. They lived together for 30 years, until his death.

He died on Sept. 3, 1962 and is buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston.

Here are seven fun facts about e.e. cummings, or E.E. Cummings, if you prefer. He used both.

1. Cambridge Roots

His childhood home in Cambridge at 104 Irving Street was across the street from the house Julia Child would later live in. Cummings’ home was the first in Cambridge to have a telephone (a hand-cranked version, that is).

The E.E. Cummings house in Cambridge

He was born Edward Estlin Cummings, named after his father, on Oct. 14, 1894. Everyone called him Estlin. His loving, well-to-do family encouraged his creativity as a child and supported him financially as an adult. He had a happy childhood, capturing its essence in his most famous poem, [in Just-].

When the world is puddle-wonderful

The little lame baloon-man whistles

Far and wee,

And Betty and Is’bel come dancing…

And the goat-footed baloon-man

Whistles

Far

And

Wee.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, two Fireside poets, had also lived in the city and died within a decade of Cummings’ birth. Before TV and radio, people read poetry for entertainment in family settings – hence “fireside.” – and schoolchildren memorized poems in school.

Poets were celebrities, rock stars even, back then. Estlin Cummings wanted to be one from his early childhood.

2. He had a beloved African-American teacher

He attended the Agassiz School, a public school run by Maria Baldwin, the African American principal and early civil rights leader. The school now bears her name. About Baldwin, he wrote, “From her I marvelingly learned that the truest power is gentleness.” She called him a most loveable little boy.

As a boy, E.E. Cummings wrote a poem every day. His trademark: no space after a comma, began at the age of 14.

His first published poem appeared in 1910 in the Cambridge Review, a monthly magazine by the city’s high school students. The last line, about the retirement of his teacher, read,

“Than that which fits you best–our faithful friend.” But the printer left off ‘you.’ From then on, Cummings had an inordinate distrust of typesetters. “Later in his life he would become the bane of printers, insisting on galley after galley that he would examine with extreme care, correcting the most minute mistakes,” wrote his biographer, Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno.

3. He spent time in a French military prison

E.E. Cummings spent 3-1/2 months in a French military prison. He had joined the French ambulance corps during World War I. A bureaucratic mix-up left him in Paris for five weeks, and he fell in love with a French prostitute.

E.E. Cummings in 1917

Cummings and his friend, William Slater Brown, wrote letters home that included comments opposing the war. The French military arrested him in 1917 and incarcerated him in a large room. His father protested vigorously and got him out of prison.

From that experience he wrote a novel, The Enormous Room, published in 1922, to critical acclaim.

4. He had Daddy issues

His father worked as the pastor of the South Congregational Church and as a lecturer at Harvard. He also served as secretary of the Boston Mayor’s Advisory Committee on Penal Aspects of Drunkenness and a supporter of the Watch and Ward Society.

His father was a large, powerful man, athletic and aggressive. Estlin, on the other hand, was small, uncoordinated and as a teenager had bad acne. His father often said, “I’d never give a penny to a son of mine who drank.” Estlin drank, but he got more than a penny over the years.

His daddy issues caused him to start rebelling against his father while at Harvard. He drank whiskey sours, visited burlesque shows and wrote erotic love poems. Once he parked his father’s car in front of a bordello.

5. Cummings was a Republican

Though he wrote avant-garde poetry and lived a Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, he registered as a Republican and supported the anti-Communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy.

Patchin Place in Greenwich Village

He visited the Soviet Union in 1931, and criticized the poverty and squalor under Stalin. Susan Cheever wrote, “He lost friends, and people crossed the street to avoid him. Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson were horrified at what seemed to them, accurately, to be a sudden veering into right-wing conservatism…” He hated the Kennedys and refused an invitation to the White House from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

6. Estranged from Daughter

His first wife, Elaine Orr, abducted their daughter and he didn’t see her for more than 20 years. Cummings had an affair with Elaine while she was married to Scofield Thayer. She had Cummings’ child, Nancy, in 1919, but her husband was okay with it. Thayer gave Nancy his name and supported her.

Elaine divorced Thayer to marry Cummings in 1924. They stayed together all of two months and divorced after nine.

Elaine told Nancy that Thayer was her father, that he was dead (he wasn’t), that he was crazy (he was).

Elaine shuttled Nancy across the Atlantic and around Europe, putting her in the care of nurses, governesses and boarding schools. Nancy on her own she discovered the poetry of E.E. Cummings. During World War II she worked in Washington, D.C., as a typist and a linguist, and met and married Willard Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson.

Joy Farm n New Hampshire

Nancy’s mother-in-law invited her to stay during the summer at her summer home near Mount Chocorua. Cummings, nearby at Joy Farm, invited her for tea but didn’t disclose their relationship. She agreed to meet him again in Greenwich Village to have her portrait painted, and felt herself falling in love with him. Finally he told her the truth.

7. Dirty Dancing

He admitted his addiction to striptease and burlesque while delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. When living in Greenwich Village he frequented the burlesque show at Minsky’s National Winter Garden to see his favorite stripper, Cleo. As a Harvard undergraduate, he went to the burlesque show at the Old Howard Theater in Boston’s Scollay Square. In Paris, he dated a prostitute named Marie-Louise. He wrote articles for Vanity Fair in 1925 and 1926 defending burlesque as “art which is alive.”

Drawing of a dancer at Minsky’s

We relied on several fine biographies of E.E. Cummings, including E.E. Cummings A Biography By Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno; E.E. Cummings By Catherine Reef; Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E.E. Cummings By Richard S. Kennedy; e.e. cummings: a life by Susan Cheever.

Image: e.e. cummings house in Cambridge By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22922253. This story was updated in 2021.

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A Pants-Free Preacher Starts a Bonfire of the Vanities in New London

In 1743, religious enthusiasts ignited a bonfire of the vanities on the docks of New London, Conn. Their deranged leader, James Davenport, preached them into a frenzy as they threw their prized possessions into the blazing fire.

The next night, they did it again.

Then the bonfire of the vanities turned into a bonfire of indecency when James Davenport threw his pants onto the pyre.

New London, Conn., in 1813

New London

Many New England towns were caught up in religious fervor called the First Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. A cross-eyed English minister named George Whitefield helped start it all with speaking tours of America. He delivered a fiery blast of Biblical rhetoric with personal philosophy, and he rose to power and influence.

James Davenport and others followed in Whitefield’s footsteps. They preached that people could find salvation through spiritual rebirth – a rebirth that started with public weeping, groaning and howling.

The ecstatic revival meetings alarmed many of the Puritan leaders. The disorderly assemblies threatened their control of their communities.

Worse, religious revivals upended the belief that some people were destined for salvation, while the rest were out of luck. The Puritan ruling class also believed in a worldly difference between the saved and the unsaved. The saved had wealth, the unsaved did not. The pants-free preacher undermined that convenient belief with the message that anyone could get to heaven.

James Davenport

James Davenport, ironically, came from an old and distinguished Puritan family. He was born in 1716 in Stamford, Conn., the great-grandson of the John Davenport who settled New Haven. A bright child, he entered Yale to follow his father and grandfather into the Puritan ministry. He graduated at the age of 17 and was ordained at 21 in the Congregational church in Southold, Long Island.

The Rev. John Davenport

While in college, James Davenport caught a bad case of religious revivalism.

He didn’t deliver prepared sermons from the pulpit. Instead, he screamed, he sang, he rambled, he ranted about damnation and hellfire, and he whipped his listeners into frenzies. The Boston Evening Post commented, “Were you to see him in his most violent agitations, you would be apt to think that he was a madman just broke from his chains.”

One day in Southold he opened his Bible and pointed to a random passage. God, he thought, spoke to him through that passage and told him to go and denounce another Congregational minister 50 miles away. So he left his parish, traveled to another town and burst into a church – uninvited – in the middle of a service. He called the minister a blind guide leading his parish straight to hell. Twenty parishioners agreed with him and left the church to start their own.

Frenzies

James Davenport got more and more outrageous. He once ranted from the pulpit for 24 hours, then collapsed. When he recovered, he demanded his parishioners write down their confessions.

He prayed and fasted for a mentally ill woman who couldn’t speak. He predicted she would be ‘delivered and recover her speech’ on a certain date. But on that day, she died. Davenport claimed he did deliver her – to heaven.

He started to roam around Connecticut. For four years he crashed religious services and attacked ministers as hell-bound wolves in sheep’s clothing. He also preached in the open air, the way George Whitefield did. He paraded through the streets, preaching at the top of his lungs with his head thrown back and eyes closed. People followed him, howling and singing hymns.

George Whitefield, by John Russell.

Other itinerant preachers also stirred up trouble in New England. Connecticut’s General Assembly finally tried to do something about it. In 1742, the assembly passed, “An Act for Regulating Abuses and Correcting Disorders in Ecclesiastical Affairs,” which punished uninvited preaching. It only took a month for Davenport to get arrested.

A revival meeting during the Second Great Awakening.

Trial

James Davenport turned in one of his most bizarre performances during his trial before the General Assembly. A local newspaper reported,

At one point everyone there heard him ‘vehemently crying out, That he saw hell-flames slashing in their faces; and that they were now! now! dropping down to hell.’

When the sheriff tried to take him away, he shouted, “Lord! thou knowest somebody’s got hold of my sleeve, strike them! Lord, strike them—”. His followers attacked the sheriff and his deputies as they dropped James Davenport down to jail.

The general assembly declared him insane and banished him from Connecticut. He returned to his old parish on Long Island. But he ignored orders to stay home and just preach to his congregation.

Davenport went to Boston, where he disrupted services, held all-night revival meetings and paraded through the streets. The Boston Post reported that the street processions were, ‘attended with so much Disorder that they look’d more like a company of Bacchanalians after a mad Frolick than sober Christians who had been worshipping God.’

But worse than annoying were his attacks on Puritan ministers – which proved extremely popular among Boston’s lower classes. Officials arrested him and, once again, James Davenport went to court.

A jury in Boston declared him insane.

Bonfire of the Vanities

James Davenport then humiliated himself so thoroughly in New London that people still wrote about it hundreds of years later.

After his trial in Massachusetts, he returned to Connecticut. His health had deteriorated, and he had to lean on an assistant to walk. But people in New London had invited him, and he went.

On March 6, 1743, he exhorted his followers to build a bonfire of the vanities. They couldn’t find salvation, he said, unless they burned their idols. And so they burned their books. For hours, a feverish Davenport preached his followers into a frenzy as they threw their books into the fire and danced around it, shrieking. When it finally died out, Davenport announced he would light another bonfire of the vanities the next day.

Unidentified July 3 bonfire, 20th century. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Evil Spirit

And so again he goaded his followers into a state of hysteria. One after the other they threw onto the pyre such finery as silk dresses, petticoats, fans, shoes with red heels, necklaces, wigs and rings.

James Davenport got so caught up in the moment he took off his pants and threw them in the fire.

A woman snatched the pants back and handed them to Davenport. Suddenly the spell that held him for so many years suddenly broke.

The Boston Weekly Post-Boy reported that the person told Davenport he thought the Devil was in him. Davenport said he thought so too. He said God had left him and an evil spirit possessed him.

The crowd melted away from the second bonfire of the vanities.

The next year, he published Mr. James Davenport’s Confessions & Retractions in which he took it all back. He claimed to have an inner peace he’d never before experienced. He got a parish in New Jersey, where he stayed put.

But his health, never good, failed, and he died at the age of 41.

With thanks to David S. New, Christian Fundamentalism in America, A Cultural History. This story was updated in n2021.

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When Calling Someone a New Englander Was an Insult

In November 1852, newspapers in Pennsylvania gave over 650 words to assailing the flaws of the New Englander. In a wide-ranging screed they attacked the region as full of dis-unionists, atheists and abolitionists.

New England, they wrote, “Began its career by burning and hanging Baptists and Quakers, anyone who differed from its Puritanical notions of Religion.”

1860 political cartoon deriding the New Englander, Dividing the National Map (From the Library of Congress).

And it goes downhill from there. The tirade then recounted Massachusetts’ expulsion of Roger Williams and John Adams’ Alien and Sedition acts. It also attacked the region’s opposition to westward expansion and to the War of 1812.

Latest Outrage

In 1852, the region foisted its latest outrage on the new territory of Kansas. New England abolitionists began settling there to create an anti-slavery voting bloc.

Across the country, the expression “New Englandism” gained popularity. Supporters used the term to describe New England’s can-do attitude, its bustling economy and strict religious beliefs. But detractors used it far more often. They said New Englandism meant the anti-slavery sentiments taking root in the Republican Party.

The New Englander, said critics, sought to deprive the nation of slavery. But New England states had, in fact,”‘grown rich by importing slaves from Africa.” Further, they said, the region lives “now in luxury upon the blood and bones of the human beings it thus trafficked in.”

In July of 1858, the Cincinnati Enquirer supported President James Buchanan. The newspaper attacked New England congressmen and senators for voting against Buchanan. This, the newspaper suggested, represented the latest in a long string of New England bad judgment calls.

The region’s flaws included its failure to give even a single electoral vote to Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson when they first ran for president.

In 1859 abolitionist John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry. Newspapers then denounced New England for providing funds for his attack. One southern newspaper noted: “. . . he went back to New England, traveling through its several villages, and collecting money, which was freely contributed.”

By 1863, newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana lashed out full strength against New England. Through the West and Midwest, newspapers reported, the feeling against New Englandism, “is every day growing more bitter.”

The Entitled New Englander

An Illinois newspaper noted the New Englander from the beginning demanded tribute from the rest of the country. They made others pay homage, “first by commerce, then by protective tariffs, and now, in the abolition of slavery.”

The newspaper then warned New Englanders will try to impose their ‘Unitarianism, Congregationalism, or Independentism,’ as the national religion.

And a newspaper in Indiana applauded the other states considering breaking away from New England. The editors also predicted New England would be left out in the col’ to survive on her “bleak and barren hills.” The region, they said, would be “cast off from the protection and commercial advantages” that it enjoyed from the other U.S. states.

This story about calling someone a New Englander was updated in 2023.

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Dolores Hart, The Connecticut Nun Who Kissed Elvis

Before she became a Connecticut nun, Dolores Hart had been nominated for a Tony, frolicked on a beach with George Hamilton and co-starred in movies with Montgomery Clift, Warren Beatty and Marlon Brando.

She had also kissed Elvis.

Dolores Hart and Elvis Presley

When at 25 she decided to join a monastery in Bethlehem, Conn., she had established herself as a leading lady.

Unsurprisingly, her decision shocked Hollywood.

Dolores Hart

Dolores Hart was born Dolores Hicks on Oct. 20, 1938, in Chicago to Harriet and Bert Hicks, a bit-part movie actor. Her mother was 16. Her father was 17. Their marriage didn’t last, and her grandparents raised her in Chicago.

Her grandparents sent her to St. Gregory parochial school, not because they wanted her to have a religious education. The school was closer to home, and they didn’t want her to get hit by a streetcar. At age 10, though, she converted to Roman Catholicism.

She did visit her father in Hollywood, and in 1947, she played a child in the film Forever Amber.

She prayed for an acting career. “I knew God was on my side,” she later said. At 19, Dolores Hart was studying at Marymount College when she received a telephone call. A man asked her if she’d come to Hollywood for an interview for a film.

She said yes. And then she prayed she’d get the part.

Loving You

The film, Loving You, starred Elvis Presley. She hadn’t kept up with music and hadn’t heard of him. When they met, she said, “I hope we can be friends.”

She played his love interest and people often asked her, “What is it like kissing Elvis?”

“I think the limit for a screen kiss back then was something like 15 seconds,” she said. “That one has lasted 40 years.”

During filming, Elvis asked her out on a date. She declined because they worked together, but she suggested they go out when filming had ended. He never asked her again.

Dolores Hart starred in another film with Elvis, King Creole. She played opposite George Hamilton in the cult classic Where the Boys Are, and she starred as Montgomery Clift’s girlfriend in Lonelyhearts.

But whether she had a job or not, she woke up every day at 6 AM to go to Mass and take communion.

Abbey of Regina Laudis

In 1958, Dolores Hart appeared on Broadway in The Pleasure of His Company. The demands of the stage exhausted her. So a friend suggested she take a few days’ rest at the Abbey of Regina Laudis, a monastery for Benedictine nuns.

Benedictine nuns praying at the Abbey

The abbey was founded in 1947 by Mother Benedict Duss and Mother Mary Aline Trilles de Warren, nuns of the Benedictine Abbey of Notre Dame de Jouarre in France. The nuns bought an old factory complex and established the monastery. A devout Congregationalist, Robert Leather, donated a hill covered with pine trees. He had often prayed on the hill, and he wanted it preserved as a site of contemplation. It became the heart of a 400-acre complex, which included a blacksmith shop built in 1750.

The nuns adhered to a strict Benedictine schedule of work and prayer.

Dolores Hart at first resisted the idea of visiting the nuns. But her friend prevailed.

“I went and I loved it,” she said. “It was peaceful, and I found inner certitude.”

Fleeing

During her visit she met the mother superior. “I was worried it was wrong as a Catholic to be in the movies because you could be sexually aroused by boys and get involved with men. My leading star was Elvis. She said, ‘Well why not? You’re a girl. Chastity doesn’t mean you don’t appreciate what God created. Chastity says use it well’.”

She asked the reverend mother if she had a vocation. “She said ‘go back and do your movie thing.’ I was so happy. I fled.”

Dolores Hart not only did her movie thing, she got engaged to Don Robinson, a California architect. They dated for five years. She broke off the engagement when she decided to become a nun. He never married, and they remained friends until his death in 2011.

Connecticut Nun

Mother Dolores Hart

In 1963, Dolores Hart visited New York City promoting her latest film, Come Fly With Me, starring Hugh O’Brian and Karl Malden.

She developed a close friendship with Malden, often babysitting his children. Shortly after filming started she got engaged to Robinson. She asked the Maldens’ daughters to be her bridesmaids.

After Dolores Hart had gone through several fittings of her wedding dress, she came over to the Maldens’ house with jewelry, purses and dresses and told the daughters to take what they wanted.

Then she took a one-way car trip to Bethlehem to join the order. “An affair of the heart,” she called it.

Dolores Hart, Hollywood star, had a hard time adapting to the convent. She had to get used to singing seven times a day, working in the abbey’s garden and sharing a bathroom with 10 people.

But she took her vows in 1970 and became the abbey’s prioress in 2001. She used her fame to raise funds for expanding the complex.

Regina Laudis

Today the Abbey of Regina Laudis has a robust arts program. Summer theater productions are held at a theater built in 1982 with the help of movie stars Patricia Neal and Paul Newman.

Sister Noella Marcellino, an artisanal cheese maker with a doctorate in microbiology, also lives at the abbey. The PBS documentary The Cheese Nun featured her. The abbey’s subprioress, Mother Maria Immaculata Matarese, is a lawyer who served in the Connecticut House of Representatives.

In 2011, fire and safety hazards threatened the abbey with closure. Mother Dolores did press interviews, went on a speaking tour and wrote an autobiography, Ear of the Heart, to raise money. In November 2016 she spoke at the Fall River Diocese Scholarship dinner.

In 2012, she attended the Academy Awards when a documentary short about her life, God is the Bigger Elvis, was nominated for an Oscar. (Click here to see it.)

The Abbey also raises money by selling handmade items for the Christmas holiday. It has a creche thought to have been given to Victor Amadeus the Second, King of Sardinia, in 1720.

This story about Dolores Hart was updated in 2023.

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Judith Sargent Murray, the Forgotten Revolutionary

In 1984, 20 volumes of 5,000 letters by an 18^th-century feminist were discovered in Natchez, Miss. Judith Sargent Murray wrote them, having copied all her correspondence starting at the age of 23. Historians are still trying to digest them all.

Judith Sargent Murray by John Singleton Copley

Judith Sargent Murray was born into a well-to-do family on May 1, 1751 in Gloucester, Mass. Though smart and curious, her family followed the custom of the day and limited her education because of her sex.

Her lack of educational opportunity troubled her. So she taught herself history and French, and began writing essays under masculine pen names. She advocated women’s equality, education and economic independence while spreading the word about Universalism.

On Nov. 3, 1774, John Murray walked into Winthrop Sargent’s parlor in Gloucester to talk to him about Universalism. The new denomination was just beginning to erode the stern Congregationalism that dominated New England. Murray was a charismatic 33-year-old preacher who had arrived in New Jersey colony only four years earlier, just after his wife and only child had died.

Becoming Judith Sargent Murray

That November day, Murray met Sargent’s 23-year-old daughter Judith. They undoubtedly talked about Universalism, and they were probably attracted to each other. She was smart, beautiful and devoted to Universalism. She was also married.

Nevertheless, Judith hoped they could “surely, and with the strictest propriety, mingle souls upon paper” by writing letters to each other.

They were friends for 14 years and married for 27. Over the course of their friendship and marriage, Judith became the most important female essayist in America and John became the founder of American Universalism.

Five years before that meeting with John Murray, 18-year-old Judith Sargent married John Stevens, a Gloucester sea captain and merchant. She did not love him, but she respected him and tried her best to do her duty by him.

They lived in the largest and most elegant house in Gloucester, but she felt lonely as he often went away to sea.

Corroding Sorrows

She was philosophical about her first marriage as she was about many things: “Self approbation ensures peace, while discord at home is pregnant with most corroding sorrows,” she wrote.

She published some poems. In 1794 Town and Country magazine would print her first essay, which argued for more advanced education for girls. She believed lack of education led to low self-esteem in girls. “I think, to teach young minds to aspire, ought to be the ground work of education,” she wrote.

She and John Stevens did not have children, but they did take in and educate two orphans. His fortunes fell while her writing career blossomed. The American Revolution hurt the maritime industry, his father’s business failed and John mismanaged his own business. In 1786, John fled Gloucester to avoid debtors’ prison and died soon after in St. Eustatius in the West Indies.

She kept up her writing, including her letters to John Murray.

Universalism in Gloucester

John Murray

Universalists differed from the New England Congregationalists, or Puritans, who believed the ‘elect’ were saved and the ‘unregenerate’ weren’t. Universalists believed in universal salvation and religious liberty.

Universalism started during the Reformation in England. It was John Murray who brought it to America. He started preaching in Lacey Township, N.J., and continued in his travels from New Hampshire to Virginia.

The Sargents converted to Universalism as soon as it came to America, as did John Stevens. Gloucester was the only placee in the country where John Murray found people had already converted to Universalism.

The Congregationalists suspended the Sargents from the First Parish Church of Gloucester. Then they invited the Murrays to return, but the Murrays refused. Instead, they went to court and won their case, allowing them to support the church they preferred. They also built the first Universalist meeting house on land donated by Winthrop Sargent and dedicated on Christmas Day 1780.

Hell? No

During the Revolution, John Murray was suspected of being a British spy, but George Washington appointed him chaplain of the Rhode Island Brigade. The other chaplains objected to him because he didn’t believe in hell.

John Murray and Judith Sargent Stevens married on Oct. 6, 1788. It was a love match, a passionate marriage in which both were equal.

She went with him as he preached in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Along the way they met people like Abigail and John Adams, Martha Washington and Benjamin Franklin’s family.

She proselytized on behalf of Universalism as the religion compatible with the ideals of the American Revolution: human liberty and empowerment. Universalism was the first American denomination to ordain women

The Murrays had a son who lived only a few hours. Then at 40, Judith gave birth to her only daughter, Julia, who lived to be 31.

The Gleaner

Judith’s feminist essays had proved popular, and in 1792 she began to write columns for the Massachusetts Magazine as a man She used the nom de plume ‘The Gleaner.’

In 1793 the Murrays moved to Boston, where John served as pastor of the Universalist Society of Boston.

The town had just lifted its ban on the theater, which Judith Sargent Murray strongly supported. She wrote a play, The Medium, probably the first to be produced by an American on stage. Her groundbreaking essay, On the Equality of Women, predated Mary Shelley’s plea for equality of the sexes by two years.

By 1798, the Murrays needed money, and Judith published The Gleaner’s essays and plays in a three-volume set. George Washington, John Adams, Henry Knox and Mercy Otis Warren bought copies.

Her commitment to education for women did not waver. In 1802 she helped her cousin, Judith Saunders, and Clementine Beach open a school for girls in the nearby town of Dorchester.

Sargent House Museum

Final Days

John Murray suffered a stroke in 1809 and Judith spent the next six years caring for him. Their daughter married a wealthy Harvard student, Adam Louis Bingamon, in 1812. After John Murray died in 1815 Judith completed his autobiography and moved to Natchez, Miss., to be with her daughter.

She died in Natchez on June 9, 1820, at the age of 69 and is buried on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. Julia died two years later.

Her home in Gloucester is now a museum where visitors can view paintings by one of her relatives, John Singer Sargent.

With thanks to Mingling Souls Upon Paper: An 18^th Century Love Story by Bonnie Hurd Smith.

Image of Sargent House Museum By Doug Kerr – https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougtone/8394001021/in/photostream, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24003568.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Stratford Knockings Brought Throngs of Spiritualists to Connecticut

In 1850, the Rev. Eliakim Phelps and his family returned to their home one day –the scene of what was known as the Stratford Knockings – to discover their house draped in black funeral crepe. It hung on the door and over the mirrors, traditionally a sign that someone had recently died.

On one of the beds, they discovered Mrs. Phelps’ nightgown laid out with the arms of her garments folded over the chest, as if worn by a body that was laid to rest in a coffin. While many might have taken this as a threatening sign to move along, for Phelps and his family it was just a fairly routine day in their house.

The Phelps mansion, as everyone at the time knew, was haunted. Two kinds of spirits inhabited it. There were evil ones who broke windows, pricked people with pins and committed other threatening acts like knocking people around. Then there were the helpful spirits who communicated with raps and knocking and brought people lost objects.

Welcome to the age of spiritualism. Spiritualism, within Christian circles, exploded in popularity in 1848 in New York when three young women – the Fox sisters – became celebrities claiming they were communicating with a spirit of a dead person in their home. At that point, the dead began to speak up in a number of places.

Stratford Knockings

On March 10, 1850, the phenomenon moved to Stratford, Conn. Eliakim Phelps, a Congregational minister, told of his shock the first time he discovered his house inhabited by spirits. It happened after church one day, when the family returned home to find the house invaded. Someone or something had thrown around clothes, opened drawers and strewn belongings about.

Suspecting burglary, Phelps took a quick inventory. While the family silver was plain to see, along with money and other valuables, nothing was missing. Puzzled, he assumed that perhaps the burglars had fled upon the family’s return, or had simply lost their nerve.

Illustration from an article about the Stratford knockings in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine

Phelps had owned the mansion for two years. Matthias Nicoll built the house for his daughter Elizah and her husband Captain George Dowdall in 1826. Dowdall made his living in the China trade, and the second floor of the house looked like the upper deck of a sailing vessel. Dowdall died in China several years after he built the house. He never used it as he intended — as a retirement home, as he intended.

Phelps acquired it and used it seasonally, also spending time in Philadelphia with his blended family. Both he and his wife had lost their spouses and both brought children to the marriage. They had a three-year-old together.

Potatoes and Books

In the days ahead, more strange things began occurring. Books, fireplace tools, a potato began appearing in odd locations. Things fell from the shelves and objects disappeared from locked containers. Windows were smashed.

Phelps began consulting others, including ministers and spiritual investigators, to figure out what was going on.

The newspapers, meanwhile, heard of the Stratford Knockings and began publishing accounts of the strange happenings. Since everyone loves a good haunting or curse, curious strangers began stopping by, hoping to glimpse an unusual event or witness the Stratford knockings first hand. The events were well documented in popular books about spiritualism, including Modern Spiritualism: Its Facts and Fanaticisms, Its Consistencies and Contradictions, published in 1855. Phelps spent a good deal of time explaining and defending the stories about the house.

Spiritualism, meanwhile, was exploding in popularity, with both defenders and detractors drawing crowds to debate its merits.

Harry Phelps

In the Phelps home, 11-year-old Harry seemed to receive the most visits by the spirits, and people declared him a medium. Séances were held, and the spirits tapped out answers to questions, explaining at one point that they were smashing windows and disrupting the house purely for the fun of it.

In the fall, the family left for Philadelphia. Phelps sent the rest of the family along ahead of him, curious to find out if the “happenings” would continue. They diminished, but he still observed the odd item falling to the floor. Or else he found it in the wrong place.

When the family returned in 1851, the strange occurrences restarted, with objects going missing. Conversations with ghosts via rapping on the table continued. Friendly spirits would help the family locate lost objects. But evil ones set fire to Phelps’ papers.

All the while, newspapers, ministers, spiritualists and skeptics had a field day arguing over the merits of the Stratford Knockings story. The Phelps family left Stratford in 1852 and sold the house to the publisher of the New York Sun, Moses Beach, in 1859. Beach’s paper, like many other publications, made hay with the Phelps story.

Witchcraft?

Over the years, the hauntings were legendary in town. Some speculated that they had a connection to the death of Goody Bassett, a woman hanged near the house in 1651 for witchcraft.

Most, however, believed Phelps’ bored, much-younger wife and his stepchildren created the story to liven up their sleepy lives in Stratford. Given that events largely started and stopped whenever Harry left or rejoined the household, most of the blame has focused on him. It’s unclear if Phelps had joined the conspiracy or if his family duped him.

The house itself has long since been demolished, and the Stratford Knockings haven’t been reported in many years.

This story about the Stratford Knockings was updated in 2022.

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