De Hirsh Margules, Mother Ann Lighthouse, Eastern Point, Gloucester, 1946. Gouache on paper. Gift of Jean M. Horblit, 2002. [Acc. #2002.004.002]
The Boston Globe: Trailblazing Gloucester woman honored for keeping lighthouses ablaze during 1864 storm
By Jeremy C. Fox, November 15, 2024
Winds whipped her skirts and snowflakes pelted her bonnet as Maria Herrick Bray trudged 300 yards through knee-high snowdrifts between the twin lighthouses of Thacher Island, pausing at the bottom to peer up at the 156 stairs to the lantern room.
For three days and nights in 1864, from her wedding anniversary to Christmas Eve, the 36-year-old West Gloucester native willed herself up each wrought-iron staircase every four hours to fill the tanks of whale oil, trim the wicks, and keep the lanterns burning as the snowstorm enveloped the 54-acre rocky outcropping just off the Rockport coast.
Her husband, the head lighthouse keeper, had taken a boat to the mainland with a feverish assistant keeper seeking medical care. They didn’t know the storm was bearing down on Cape Ann, blocking his return and leaving his formidable wife to tend both lamps with only her 14-year-old nephew, Sidney Haskell, for help.
It’s a story that has inspired countless tributes to a woman who led a rich life as an activist, educator, and community leader, including a ceremony Friday morning at Herrick Bray’s graveside in Gloucester honoring her heroism.
And it’s more or less true.
As with many 160-year-old events, published accounts vary. In some, Sidney is 12. In others, the wives of assistant lighthouse keepers help out. In a gripping, apocryphal account published in 1945, Herrick Bray is accompanied by her young son and daughter, though historical documents show she had no children.
“It’s impossible to know 100 percent what happened,” said Jeremy D’Entremont, a historian for the US Lighthouse Society. “[When] anybody [is] dealing with history, and maybe especially local history, newspaper accounts vary.”
Some details aside, a long trail of reports confirm Herrick Bray performed heroically during that bitter December late in the Civil War and remained industrious and civic-minded until her death 57 years later.
She was honored Friday morning with a graveside ceremony at the Beechbrook Cemetery in Gloucester, organized by the Thacher & Straitsmouth Islands Association and the US Coast Guard, which named a 175-foot Keeper-class buoy tender the USCGC Maria Bray after her in 1999. The service included the laying of a wreath and placement of a bronze grave marker from the US Lighthouse Service, a division of the Coast Guard.
Paul St. Germain, president emeritus of the Thacher & Straitsmouth Islands Association, said Herrick Bray’s experience was grueling.
“She had to climb 156 steps on each tower three times a night,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to walk 156 steps. I have done it many times over the years, and I have stopped doing it. It is a killer.”
Herrick Bray lived a life of activity and influence through the second half of the 19th century and opening decades of the 20th, a time when most women had little opportunity to make their mark outside the home. She was an abolitionist, suffragist, temperance leader, lay minister, innkeeper, writer, “editress,” naturalist, lecturer, matron of a women’s shelter, and philanthropist, dedicating decades to public service.
“I hate to call her a heroine, but there are so few women who stand out in the 19th century. They’re all sort of lost to history, whatever they might have done,” said Martha Oaks, chief curator for the Cape Ann Museum.
Herrick Bray was also reportedly a lot of fun. A slightly younger Gloucester woman, Ada C. Bowles, wrote in an appreciation after Herrick Bray’s death that as a young woman, she had been “a bright-eyed glowing brunette, full of jovial life and elfish pranks. . . . She was not only the life of the old Herrick Homestead, but of the village.”
“A quick sense of the ludicrous, in person or occurrence, found her power of mimicry wide-awake, and no company could be long dull or morose with her in their midst,” Bowles wrote. “And within the same hour, if called to discuss some question of ethics or a theological dogma, she was quite as alert and forceful.”
Herrick Bray brought that verve to the Massachusetts Legislature, where she lobbied for extending the vote to women in 1872 while president of the Women’s Suffrage Association of Gloucester. She died in 1921, having seen the passage of the 19th Amendment and cast her first ballot in the November election. She also ran for office, unsuccessfully, in 1875 after the Gloucester Republican Party nominated her “by acclamation” for a seat on the School Committee.
While Herrick Bray lived on Thacher Island, she developed a fascination with aquatic plants that made her an early authority in their study, and she was among five local leaders who formed the Cape Ann Scientific and Literary Association in 1875, laying the groundwork for the Cape Ann Museum.
She wrote essays on snails and trap-door spiders, according to newspaper accounts, and gave lectures on topics including the apostle Paul; “The True Missionary Spirit”; Gloucester past, present, and future; and botany — “recommending the inculcation of a love for flowers in the minds of the children.”
Her husband, Alexander Bray, was a deacon in the Universalist church, which merged in 1961 with the American Unitarian Association to form the Boston-based Unitarian Universalist Association, and she served as president of the Women’s Universalist Missionary Society of Massachusetts. Herrick Bray opened one meeting of the society with a talk comparing daily religious practice to a ladder climbing nearer to God, The Boston Globe reported.
“Just think for a moment what it is to make one person happy each day for 20 years,” she said. “You have then made 7,300 persons happy. Every individual should feel the obligation of extending a helping hand to those in need.”
The Brays left Thacher Island in 1869 and seven years later brought the hospitality industry to Gloucester’s Magnolia section, which began to transform from a farmstead into a popular tourist destination. “They opened a café and entertained noted people, who in turn spread abroad the name and fame of the place,” the Globe reported. “In 1877 she opened Willow Cottage, Magnolia’s first hostelry.”
Guests reportedly included Louisa May Alcott, who wrote her novel “Jack and Jill” at the inn and gave Herrick Bray a cameo as “Mrs. Grey”; Edward Everett Hale, author of “The Man Without a Country”; and artist William Morris Hunt. Herrick Bray also launched and edited a summer publication called “Magnolia Leaves,” “which carried contributions from people well known in the literary world during its existence in the early 80s,” the Globe reported.
Bray died in 1885, and five years later Herrick Bray became the inaugural superintendent of the Universalist-run Bethany Home for Young Women in Boston’s South End, the state’s first women’s shelter, which she led for three years.
Later, she served as president of the newly formed Addison Gilbert Hospital Women’s Auxiliary, which she would lead into the 1910s, and was a member of the Wintergreen Club for prominent women over 50, founded by Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
She continued her volunteerism almost until her death in June 1921, when she was remembered at a massive funeral inside the West Gloucester Universalist Church.
Thirteen years earlier, Herrick Bray had published a pamphlet memorializing Mehitabel “Aunt Hitty” Haskell, a prominent Gloucester woman. In describing her, Herrick Bray wrote words that could have been about herself.
“She had full faith that every soul was created to develop, to be something, to have a real place, and do a real work in the world,” she wrote, “and to be faithful to the inner light of the highest and best of our convictions.”
See the original article on The Boston Globe’s website.
