Mary Stearns and the Marble Witness: Brown, Brackett, and a Bust That Went Missing

A broken marble bust in a Tufts University crawl space turned out to be Edward Brackett's tribute to John Brown. A Tufts curator tells the story of how it was found, restored, and what it reveals about the woman who helped fund John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.

This video clip comes from a John Brown: America250 Roundtable discussion with art historian Eleanor Heartney and Laura McDonald, Collections manager and Registrar at Tufts University calledJohn Brown or BUST!, hosted by John Brown biographer Louis A. DeCaro Jr., Ph.D.

In this clip, Ms. McDonald explores the relationships between John Brown and many Black abolitionist women.

TRANSCRIPT:

To start, I have a slide, Dan. It's the landscape, so everyone can orient themselves. I thought this captured it. The couple involved here: in the beginning, when I first started learning about this story, I was absolutely enamored of the bearded George Stearns because I thought he was amazing. But I will say that now I have transferred a 1% more to his wife Mary. Together they were unstoppable.

The picture you see here is a painting that's also in the university collection. You can see that Tufts University is the university on the hill. They used to call it the light on the hill. There's a little tower up there: that's the chapel. To the right of the tower is a building where you can see the roof. That roofed building is still the main administrative building at Tufts. The house in the foreground is George Stearns house. You can see the proximity, how all of these things come together, how this came to be connected with Tufts. You'll also see, between the house and the campus, the train running across from left to right, and that plays an important part in this too.

George Stearns was a Medford guy. He was dabbling in various business enterprises including ship building, shopkeeping, tutoring, and teaching. Eventually he started making lead pipes for plumbing. He was very much a catch in those days, I would say.

He met Mary Stearns, whose name was Mary Preston. She was from Maine and would come down to visit her aunt, who lived, if you can imagine her living somewhere on this map, pretty much on the right-hand side of the frame, just over a little bit to the right.

Mary had been raised by a super progressive family. Her aunt had written a book; she was a virulent opposer of slavery. The book was called An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Her aunt was an abolitionist, a women's rights activist, a Native American rights activist, a novelist, a journalist, an opponent of American expansionism and male dominance. She was so far ahead of her time it was amazing.

She had an influence on her niece. She had no children of her own, so I think she was very connected to Mary, and they shared similar views. In Mary, I think George found someone he could really connect with on the cause of ending slavery, which was so important to him.

Iron to the magnet: meeting John Brown (3:57)

At the time, George Stearns was living in this little house and had been introduced to John Brown by Franklin Sanborn, an abolitionist who had been working with George on the Massachusetts Kansas Committee. They were supporting John Brown, even in the beginning, to bring Kansas in as a free state. George Stearns and John Brown struck up a relationship that the Stearns's son recalled was like iron to the magnet.

Stearns was very interested in funding activities but didn't seem to have a lot of stomach for action, whereas John Brown had some stomach for action. The two of them were very much a pair and complemented each other in this way.

Underground Railroad at the Stearns home (5:07)

After the conversation Eleanor had about the bust, about Brackett going to this house and standing on the front porch and knocking on the door and requesting money for the bust, I think by that point Mary Stearns could not have denied that. They had established their house as a stop on the Underground Railroad. They had freedom seekers living under the floorboards in their living room after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1853. They were doing everything they could to help people who came to them, either in Montreal or in Cambridge or in other places in Boston, to give them a start in life.

By the time the bust was unveiled at this house in 1862, or was it 1861, Eleanor? Either way, they had a party. They invited all kinds of amazing people and they celebrated this work of art.

What Mary did was, as Eleanor said, she was committed to making copies of the bust she could give to other people. She was going a little bit social media about this. Not only was she making busts, she was also making photographs of the busts. Photography was a new thing. It was a way she could cheaply get images of this object into the conversation by having people keep it in their cabinets. She was disseminating the idea that the bust translates into a rallying cry. She made multiple cards of this bust. These are the copies of the bust I know of.

Finding the lost bust at Tufts (7:23)

At Tufts, our bust wound up in the building with the roof I showed you up on the hill, the main administrative building. What we do know is that I came across it because I had a student working for me, which I do almost all the time. She was sifting through old documents managed by our facilities department, because those are the people who used to hang art on campus. I think it was because they're the people who had hammers.

I had sent her up to scan the facilities files and bring back anything related to art. At the end, she had distributed everything into the files, but she had one letter left. It was a letter from the president of Tufts to a conservator in Cambridge. The president wrote: I am hoping you might be able to make a cement nose for the broken bust of John Brown.

The student said, "Do you know what that is?" And I said, "No, I don't. But I do know we have a bust with no nose." As soon as I Googled Edward Brackett, of course, the bust came up. I pretty much immediately got in my car and drove over to the storage facility so I could climb up onto the warehouse shelf and see if it was the same as the cards I had just shown. And it was.

Two busts on one pallet (9:20)

The busts had been put into art storage, unnamed: a bust of John Brown and a bust of George Stearns. They were both strapped to the same pallet because they were bound together in life and bound together as busts. They had lost their identification along the way. We don't know when it happened.

We do know the Stearns left the house to the university, and the university at some point in the 20s tore it down to make room for veterans coming back who needed family housing for wives and kids. At that point the bust was moved into a library on campus. Then something happened and it was put into a crawl space in that administrative building. As soon as that happened, the bust's nose was broken.

Four busts and a question of restoration (10:38)

I had found another bust at the Boston Athenaeum that was intact. We started talking about whether we should restore ours. Sometimes when objects or sculptures are damaged, that becomes part of the history of the piece and it's not fixed. In this case, we knew exactly what the nose was supposed to look like. It wouldn't have been guesswork. It was more a matter of scanning one of these other busts so we could figure out what nose needed to be on our bust.

I've included this slide. These are four busts of John Brown. All plaster. The one on the left is at the Kansas Historical Society. The one in the center was given to Thomas Higginson, one of the Secret Six, a group of men who worked with George Stearns to fund John Brown's activities. The last bust on the right is one Mary Stearns gave to Booker T. Washington.

Washington was coming to Boston to be at the State House to give a speech about her husband. It must have been 1898 or 1900, long after George had died. They were putting a plaque up in the Massachusetts State House that celebrated the work of George Stearns, who is also super well known for mustering the 54th and 55th regiments of soldiers into service. The brown bust was painted brown by students at Tuskegee University.

Scanning and 3D-printing the missing nose (12:44)

Here's a picture of when we were scanning the nose of the intact bust on the left, owned by the Boston Athenaeum, so we could make the missing part. We scanned all of the left-side bust. Then we scanned the face of our bust so we could see what was missing. It came up with a 3D model of what was missing between the two. We thought it was just the bust, but we learned it was the bust and most of the eyebrow on the right-hand side.

Here you see how the face looked when we found it. You can also see that on his chest he has a brown stain, which is rust from where it was pushed up against the pipes in the crawl space. Here you can see how the bust has the blue nose and the blue eyebrow. That is the 3D-printed nose. Once they figured out what the missing parts were, they printed those using a 3D printer. So it went onto the nose at a granular level. You could just stick it on and it stayed on. It fit so tightly because it had been scanned exactly based on the topography of the missing nose.

A new nose, a new eyebrow, sparkling marble (14:32)

Once we finished this part, the conservator made a plaster cast of the nose and the eyebrow in white. This is him with his new nose and his new eyebrow. As you can see, it is perfect. The conservator did such an interesting job on it. Not only did the nose fit perfectly at a granular level, but the plaster was a little flatter than marble, which has translucent crystals and a little variation in color. After she attached it and blended all of the color so it would be the same color as the marble, she put flecks of mica on it that were microscopic, just to give it a little reflection so it looks as translucent and sparkly as the individual crystals in the bust. It's absolutely amazing technology.

For me, the story stopped there as soon as the bust had come to Tufts. But recently, as part of my interest in this project, people reach out to me every now and then when they find a bust. One of the busts I showed you in the group of three also stayed in Boston. That bust is at a place called the League of Women for Community Service in the South End of Boston. It's in a home that used to be owned by Thomas Higginson, one of the Secret Six, who was in collaboration with George Stearns.

It has been a Black women's club since almost the turn of the century. They provided nursing for recovering World War I and World War II soldiers. They served as a dorm for young Black women coming to take classes in Boston who could not stay in the dorms.

They called me one day and said, "We have a bust and it looks just like your bust." I was thinking, "No, they can't have a bust that looks like this." Sure enough, I went there and they had the bust.

Mary Stearns and the Pauline Hopkins book (17:25)

Through that, I became tangentially involved with the organization because they needed a little help thinking about how their collection was functioning. They were in this old house. The house was about to be renovated. They didn't really know what to do with the collection. I was there in an advisory capacity to talk to them about ideas.

One day I opened a book that had been sitting on a shelf for a hundred years. The book had been funded by Mary Stearns. I thought, well, now that's interesting. I have to open it now.

It turns out that Mary Stearns, even after her husband George had died, continued this battle. In addition to the busts and the cabinet cards, she went on and hired a writer. At the time, 1890, the Grand Army of the Republic was a thing. Since George Stearns had mustered the 54th and 55th units of Black soldiers from Massachusetts, the Grand Army of the Republic was providing books in which a person could record the stories of the people who served in those units. It took a person to go around and interview everybody who had been part of those units.

A young Black novelist as scribe (19:10)

Mary Stearns funded the book to be made for the 54th and 55th soldiers, and she hired a young Black woman, a novelist, to go and interview all of these men. She was herself the daughter of an Army veteran, and she was uniquely positioned to be the scribe.

The Grand Army of the Republic provided, tucked into the book, a list of questions interviewers could ask the people they were interviewing about their service. The questions were: What's your name? Why did you enlist? Who were your friends while you were serving? Where did you go? What battles were you in? What are the things you remember the most?

My mother, who's on this somewhere right now listening, and I, after I took pictures of the first 10 pages, said, "I think this is a really interesting book and we need to find some way to get some interest in it." We transcribed the first 10 pages of script. The stories are heartbreaking. They're men who are at Fort Sumter and picking up shells on the beach, and all of a sudden they realize someone's shooting at them. Or waking up in a field with a dead person on their left and a dead person on their right, and realizing they are on the wrong side of the enemy lines. All of these amazing stories. She collected them by hiring this young woman, Pauline Hopkins, who was a Black woman novelist in 1890 in Boston, to write these stories.

She was an advocate. Mary Stearns her whole life was an advocate, while her husband was alive and after his death. I think John Brown was a magnet to the iron, and the iron was in both of them. It was a couple.

Music by Ysanne Marshall, Johnny Davis, Mick Connolly… “Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on.”