Marblehead's Pygmalion: Finding the Real Agnes Surriage

By F. Marshall Bauer

Agnes Surriage, it turns out, was more Pygmalion than Cinderella. Her role models were the fiercely independent "codfish widows, "? wives of the early Marblehead fishermen who managed home and family seven months a year without their husbands. In Agnes's version of My Fair Lady, she had to act as her own Henry Higgins while making the often painful transformation from "girl of all works"? at the Fountain Inn to the charming and dignified Lady Agnes, wife of Sir Charles Henry Frankland. After deconstructing the legend for twenty-five years, author F. Marshall Bauer has unearthed a story of money, lust and vindication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Dec 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614230748

F. Marshall Bauer

Frederic Marshall Bauer began his creative career as an advertising copywriter in the early 1970s. After a decade and a half performing functions ranging from television producer to creative director, he became a freelance audiovisual screenwriter and creative consultant. From 1977 to 1998, he wrote and produced over two hundred videos and computer-based programs for marketing and training. He was the coauthor, with Dr. Albert Forgione, of Fearless Flying: The Complete Program for Relaxed Air Travel, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1981. An avid eighteenth-century history student and reenactor, he was the drummer for Glover's Marblehead Regiment from 1975 to 1996 and today represents Regimental Surgeon Nathaniel Bond. His home is situated on the site of the Old Fountain Inn, where Charles Henry Frankland discovered Agnes Surriage.

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after.

PART I

Money

CHAPTER 1

Ed Surriage’s Daughter

I began my search with an unscholarly but important question: what did my mystery woman look like?

Her ringlets of raven hair (Nason), full black eyes instinct with passion (Byner) and angel’s shape and air (Holmes) are all remnants of interviews with fourth-generation Hopkinton servants and nineteenth-century Surriage relatives. At best, they consist of romanticized mental images of a stereotypical Cinderella embellished through more than one hundred years of passing from one generation to another.

A portrait of Agnes done when she was in her fifties gave me a little more accurate indication. It shows a double chin and slight under bite. However, she still looks perky right down to the dimple in her chin. There is an unmistakable twinkle in her eye and a dainty button nose. It is not difficult to imagine the tavern maid who caught Charles Henry Frankland’s attention.

On her mother’s side, Agnes came from sturdy English stock. Her great-grandfather, blacksmith John Brown, emigrated from Bristol, England, to Pemaquid in 1622.³ Today, Pemaquid is in Maine, but in the colonial period the territory was considered part of Massachusetts.

John Brown’s daughter Elizabeth married Richard Pierce (I).

Their son, Richard Pierce (II), was the father of Mary Pierce, who married Edward Surriage.

Dame Agnes Frankland, 1783, by John Raphael Smith (1752–1812). Pastel on paper courtesy of Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, UK.

John Brown was probably the first permanent settler of Maine.⁴ Records show that he was a blacksmith living in Pemaquid, now known as Bristol, prior to 1639. He is listed as a fur trader in 1625, when he is said to have bought territory including today’s Damariscotta and Bristol from the Indians. This purchase would become known as the Brown Tract. His landholdings further expanded in 1639 as he and Edward Bateman acquired all lands between the Sagadahoc and Sheepscot Rivers.

During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Agnes’s ancestors were fishermen and Indian traders living in Muscongus near Pemaquid. To the south, a fishing station that would become Marblehead was growing on a peninsula twenty miles north of Boston. The Browns and Pierces frequently shifted between these two locations to escape Indian uprisings. Maine records from 1717 show that her grandfather, Richard Pierce, was a coaster fisherman of Marblehead, age 70. By 1718, he was back in Muscongus.

These erratic peregrinations and the absence of early records made it difficult to determine exactly where and when Mary Pierce was born.

Little is known of Edward Surriage, except that he owned the covenant May 15, 1720 in the Second Congregational Church of Marblehead.⁵ Mary Surriage’s first child, Edward, was baptized July 5, 1719.⁶ Considering the strict fornication laws of the time, and the fact that Mary’s neighbors would have been counting months, it’s safe to assume she was married by then.

On April 17, 1726, Edward Holyoke, minister of Marblehead’s second church, recorded that he baptized "Agnis [sic] Surriage infant of Edward and Mary Surriage."⁷

The Julian calendar in use at the time confirms that it was Sunday. Mary would most likely have attended the baptism alone because Ed was at sea fishing. Carrying the baby wrapped in a blanket, she would have been wearing her heaviest cloak, for the weather was still cold in April. (North America had been in the midst of a mini ice age since 1650.) Like a six-yearold in any time frame, the boy Edward Surriage would have been running and skipping ahead of his mother, while little Mary Surriage, a toddler of four, clung to the hem of her mother’s garment. Uncle John Pierce, baker and church deacon, and his wife could have been included in the family procession as they joined the stream of worshipers flowing in and around the empty stalls of Market Square, passing the gaol and cage⁸ on their way to the dirt road called "The Way to the New Meeting