MUSEUMS
Search the Night Sky
How do you find a comet like Maria? A Quaker education helps
By Tim Folger
The Maria Mitchell House
1 Vestal Street
Nantucket, Massachusetts
Down a quiet lane leading off Nantucket’s cobblestoned Main Street stands a two-story house covered with unpainted shingles weathered gray by rain and fog. Built in 1790, its clean lines and lack of ornamentation mark it as a Quaker home. Beyond the threshold is a world shaped by a culture that prized integrity, humility, and equality—Quaker values that nurtured Maria Mitchell, America’s first female professional astronomer.
The furnishings are simple and spare, with one gleaming exception: Maria’s precious brass telescope. On the night of October 1, 1847, Maria (pronounced Ma-RYE-uh), then 29, excused herself from a family party and climbed, lantern in hand, to the roof. Her nocturnal ascent surprised no one. Maria was a highly skilled amateur astronomer, tutored from childhood by her father, and had been using her 2.75-inch refracting telescope up on the roof walk for years. What did surprise her family was the proud announcement she made around 10:30 p.m.: She had spotted a comet. Prior to that night, all the first sightings of comets had been with the naked eye. Indeed, the King of Denmark had offered a gold medal for the first telescopic sighting of a new comet, and he gave it to Maria. The discovery of comet Mitchell 1847VI made her world famous and led to her appointment as a professor of astronomy at Vassar, soon after it was founded in Poughkeepsie, New York.
Maria’s unusually bold career was a reflection of her unorthodox upbringing. Her parents, William and Lydia, egalitarian Quakers to the core, believed in educating all their children. The Mitchell family members were so principled that they refused to wear clothing made from cotton picked by slaves. Instead they wore silk in the summer and wool in the winter. But they were not so devout that they were beyond bending a few rules. William and Lydia even bought their children a piano, although Quakers often frowned upon music.
William Mitchell supported his family in a variety of ways, including servicing ships’ chronometers. He taught all nine of his children, boys and girls alike, to help him, but Maria was his best student, and like him, she loved astronomy. By the time she was 12, she had helped her father record the exact time of a solar eclipse. By age 17 she had started her own school for girls, emphasizing the study of science and math. Upstairs from the parlor is a closet-size study that her father built for her with wood left over from the addition of a new kitchen downstairs. On the wall outside the room is a note in Maria’s handwriting: “Miss Mitchell is busy. Do not knock.”
Courtesy of the Nantucket Maria Mitchell Association |
Maria never married or had children of her own, but she left a shining legacy that still endures, long after her death in 1889 at age 70. At Vassar, where she studied sunspots, Jupiter, and Saturn, she mentored several women who became astronomers and who helped make the astronomy department there among the best in the country. Not far from Maria’s own Nantucket house, and within sight of her simple tombstone in the Prospect Hill Cemetery, are two small domed observatories. Inside them, on summer nights, children can still study a night sky that once so enchanted a determined young Quaker woman.
