The Story of Emeline

I recently found a sheet of scribbled notes I’d made in 1989 while watching a PBS episode of The American Experience titled “Sins of Our Mothers – The Story of Emeline”.

When the episode aired in 1989 it interested me only because it showed places and things I’d seen in my youth, some of them hundreds of times, and because the ancestral roots of my paternal grandmother, and at least four generations of her family before her, were in Fayette, Maine.  

After finding the notes, I found and watched “Sins of Our Mothers” again, this time at archive.org [Ref. 1.] This episode, produced by David Hoffman, is the legend of a 19^th century girl, born Emeline Bachelder in Fayette, Maine. Though the episode aired in 1989, the story of Emeline was told to Hoffman's film crew in 1975 by Fayette native, Nettie Mitchell, age 89.

The core of the story that Nettie was eager to tell is that a girl from Fayette, named Emeline (her surname is never mentioned), age 13, went to Lynn, Massachusetts to work in the woolen mills to earn money to help her poor family. She returned home a year later, having given birth to an illegitimate son who had been sold to a childless family in Lynn. Emeline told no one at home of the birth. In her early 30’s, Emeline met and married a much younger man who had come from Massachusetts to work on highways. Within a year of the marriage the man’s family came to visit him and were shocked to find that he had married his own mother.

Really?

In watching the episode a second time—31 years after the first—my interest was still in physical things, not Nettie Mitchell’s story. I was only curious about the location of Mosher Pond, near which Emeline had lived in her later years, but I made the mistake of first entering an internet search string of Emeline Gurney Fayette Maine. I was immediately distracted from geography to genealogy and to the story details, when I found two Find a Grave web links related to Emeline Bachelder [Ref. 2. and 3.].

Reference 3. is  a page for Gustavus Chamberlain, Emeline’s son by her marriage to George Chamberlain in August 1843. It includes a post of the record of Emeline’s later marriage in Fayette to Leonard Gurney on April 16, 1878.

Reference 2. is a page for Emeline Bachelder Gurney. It includes posts of Emeline’s record of death and page 11 of the 1880 U.S. Census for Fayette, Maine that was enumerated on June 9, 1880. The census answers the question of Leonard’s age relative to Emeline’s. Leonard Gurney and his wife, Emeline C. are listed as age 76 and age 64, respectively. As Leonard was 12 years older than Emeline at the time of the 1880 Census enumeration, it would take considerable time-warping for him to have been14 years younger than her when they married two years earlier. Leonard Gurney was not Emeline (Bachelder) Chamberlain's son.

The record of Emeline's death in October of 1897 at age 81 years 9 months puts Emeline's birth in January of 1816. Given that, she was 62 when she married Leonard Gurney and 27 when she married George Chamberlain. Had George Chamberlain been her son, he would have been age 13 when they married.

Minimal research strongly suggested that Emeline (Bachelder) (Chamberlain) Gurney did not marry her son.

Two other links that presented analyses of Nettie Mitchell’s story confirmed that. One was by Juli Kearns [Ref. 4] and the other by Michael F. Dwyer [Ref. 5.].  The latter's 24-page research paper published in the November 2012 issue of The Maine Genealogist documents his exhaustive (197 footnotes cite his sources) quest for details. Both researchers found that Emeline did not marry her son.

As for the story, at minute 54 of the episode Nettie says “All of my life there’s been one thing that has stood out in my mind. It is a true story. That’s the pity of it. It’s a true story”. The narrator follows with “It’s true that Emeline Gurney was shunned by the town for something, but whether she actually married her own son as Nettie said, or whether people in town only believed she did, or Emeline was shunned for being poor or stupid, we may never know.”

How did this story achieve national attention in the 1980's?

You can thank David Hoffman. On 15 Feb 2019 he posted a a six-minute video to Youtube, giving an account of how filming Nettie Mitchell originated. He titled this post “The Strangest Story I Ever Captured on Video”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh4ZJy94x6E&t=0s  

This is a transcript of what Hoffman tells his viewers:

“Hello, I'm David Hoffman, filmmaker, and you've clicked on this clip either because you're a subscriber or because you're interested in the story of Emeline, this girl who marries a guy and finds out that that guy is her son. It's a true story. Happened in Maine a long time ago in the 1800s, and it happened that back in 1976 [it was in 1975] I was doing television commercials that were documentaries. That's very rare--the idea of a documentary commercial that's real, that's not fakey reality like you see all the time now. The sponsor of the commercials that I'm about to make and I come up with this idea to photograph independent Americans for the Bicentennial, 1976, and independent Americans, independent thinkers. How do we find them? So we call reporters from around the country in little towns, and reporters are good storytellers right?, and we say Hey, who's the best storyteller you know? and we get this huge list, six or seven hundred names, and we call each of them on the phone and we ask kind of  interesting questions: Do you like your life? Do you like your work? How do you feel about what you do?--vague questions-- and then we listen. Is the answer “Well I don't know” or is the answer “I do know and here's my feelings” and when they do that they move up the scale until we got to 100 people and then we recorded a hundred people on phone and just listened what is the quality of their story, their voice, their honesty, their integrity, everything, independent Americans and then we went down to twelve and the twelve had each a three-minute commercial made about them. Nettie Mitchell from a little town in Maine, 88-year old [she was 89] reporter, was one of those people. So I go to film, takes a week to film the commercial, her in all kinds of situations. You can see it. I'll give you a link in the description, anyway we're filming the commercial and each day Nettie is going like this to me [tapping his head] “David, I have a story I want to tell. I have a story I want to tell.”  I'm saying, “But, Nettie, I gotta focus on what I'm doing, I'll get to that story”. So at the very end I've completely forgotten. She taps me on the head: “David, the story?” I set up the camera and out comes Nettie Mitchell telling the story of Emeline. It's an amazing 14 minute recording incredible and you can see that on my youtube channel as well I'll give you the link. That story just mesmerizes me. She tells it so beautifully, so 1800’s, so Puritan New England, you can feel in her language that properness of her age. I love it. So we take the story to Judith Rossner and she's a great novelist of her time and she wrote the book looking for Mr. Goodbar if you know that book and she buys the story from us for a movie or a novel and she pays Nettie. So Nettie now gets some real money because Judith Rossner gives her money and I keep that story, through many moves, carrying a videotape. Fifteen years later I'm making American Experience shows--PBS American Experience--and I tell the executive producer there’s this story in Maine about this woman who married her son by mistake and how she was ostracized by the town and treated horribly and died in poverty. I get the money to make a documentary for American Experience and we call the documentary “Sins of Our Mothers”. The “we” is me and Rocky Collins. He works with me. He's at that point a director and a writer from New England--very important because he and I craft the moody piece that is Puritanism of that time mixed with the sin that she committed and how the town treated her. The story that rocky and I worked out, and that he directed, is a kind of a detective search. Is this story true? That's going to be the story arc, finding out the truth of the story. And fortunately Nettie actually met Emeline, and another old, old woman in a nursing home also met Emmaline and she's also in the film. So we have secondhand stories and the original people who met Emeline--especially Nettie. So the film airs on PBS, gets very good reviews, and in New England people are a bit disturbed by the feelings, but around the country where they don't really know New England it's a very interesting movie and it fades into my archive until now, where it's apparently pretty popular on YouTube and I'm really happy about that. Oddly enough about 15 years after the movie was made, the documentary, some guy writes an opera I think it's called “Emeline” which is amazing so the story lives on. I wanted to share this with you in part because if you read the comments they're so varied between people who see this as the Christianity of that time, the people who see this as anti-christian, the people who see this as the devil, the people who say this happened in my town. A few people who say this happened to me. Very touching to me. I think that some of the comments are pretty damn nasty and some people apparently feel this is part of Maine culture. I lived in Maine for a while and I didn't experience that, but I didn't live in a little town like Nettie Mitchell did, and I certainly didn't live when Nettie Mitchell did.”

What follows is a transcript from Hoffman's introduction to a 17-minute video he posted to Youtube on 3 Dec 2019. He titled this post: ”Old Lady Reveals The SIN She Witnessed In The 1890s In Rural Maine”

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CVcZ_8HPuY&list=RDCMUC6wBro4B4pf9xnBh9Xi2zcQ&index=5

Nettie Mitchell

She returned to her home. She worked very hard in the fields and all but she didn't join very freely in the social life of the community. As she grew older her parents and others began to wonder why it was that she shunned all the young gentlemen around. She was a very pretty girl and they couldn't understand it. When she was 21 they began to worry because she's passed the first mark and she's going to be an old maid. And they wanted very much for her to marry and have a home of her own. Time went on and in spite of all the urging of those about her she kept reticent. And when she was about 30 they began to wonder why it was that she didn't respond to anyone, and she was really an old maid.

In her early thirties, while she was working at home, a young  man came to town to build highways and he was a very personable young chap, and they came to board at their home. Although she was so many years older than he, he fell desperately in love with her and she with him, and they decided to marry and have a home of their own. They did. Built a little cottage down by the shore of Mosher pond. They moved in there and had been married something less than a year when his people from Massachusetts decided to come to visit them. They came down and to their horror they discovered that he had married his own mother. Of course when this was revealed their marriage was annulled, declared broken up, and he reluctantly bade her goodbye and went back with his foster parents to Massachusetts where he remained for the rest of his life.

The indignation of her parents and of the community at the fact that she had had an illegitimate child, she had concealed that fact from them all these years, it was considered a horrible sin for her to have had the child and she had married illegitimately and therefore she was entirely ostracized. Although her home was almost in sight, almost across the highway from that of her mother and her brothers and sisters who still live there, she was forbidden to enter that home, to go near it at all. None of them ever went to her or spoke to her, and nobody spoke to her. No one went near her except once in a while a kindly friend, a kindly person, who would bring her a bit of tea or some little thing. The years went by. She eked out a living by her own efforts. Made up gardens and spaded them with a spader herself, and made them to raise her food as much as possible--and knit and did very various things, a very small stipend, but it became necessary for her to become a pauper, which was another disgrace. And she had to call on the town for things for existence. There came a very severe winner and it was a long time. Of course in those days there was no means of letting anyone know what you needed, or anything. There was no telephone. There were no R.F.D.'s. There was no way of communication. And as she was ostracized and left by herself, no communication was possible for her. Early in the springtime, the mud was very very deep, one of the selectmen who lived in another section of the town was obliged to go to Chesterville. On his way up he called at the house, thought he would see how Emeline was doing. He hadn’t heard from her all winter. He knocked on the door. No response.  The door was fastened. He thought he heard a moaning sound inside, and desperately, he managed to burst the door in. And as he came inside he saw this form lying on the floor with faint moans. Throughout all these years she had suffered so terribly, seeing her mother's casket carried to the cemetery without being able to even peep inside it, and all these terrible things had been happening. And now here she lay at death's door. He picked her up carefully and laid her on her bed and went out, turned this horse about, and started for Livermore Falls to get a doctor. On the way he stopped at one house, stopped at the Edwards house, and asked Mrs. Edwards to go over, and she said I can't possibly for Will is gone with the horse and I have no way to get there. He went on up to the Dyke home and made the same request, and there the men were away with the horses. My mother was there and she said I will go home and harness the horse and go over, and she did. And she found her in this terrible condition with nothing to be found in the house that was of any possible value for diet or anything else. There were a few drops of molasses clinging to the bottom of a jug and a few grains of corn meal in the corners of a box, and nothing else was there. The poor old lady had starved to death.

She perished before the doctor arrived. The sadness of the whole thing. I had been down there as a child, sent many times with a bit of tea and some little things, and I loved the dear old soul. When my mother came home and told us what had happened I began to cry. A few days later her funeral was held at Moose Hill church. She was placed in a wooden box and, for a casket, and a simple ceremony was held. And some, several who would not have spoken to her during their lifetime, had ostracized her completely, were there at the last. At the close of the ceremony her sister went to the casket and placing her hand upon it, her other hand high in the air, she said at last she has paid for her sin. That was the tragedy of the whole, like climax of the tragedy. My mother came home so upset and so angry, and really my mother‑‑although she was a very mild person‑‑said I think her sister said more than she. She said this terrible neglect of her through all these years. [A questioner tries to ask: Do you think. . .?, but Nettie continues] The sweet, sweet little old lady, it would, would be so so grateful when even a child would come and speak to her. The silence of all those years. As a little child, a child of 13 away from home in a strange city, a surrounding she had never seen and only one person being really friendly to her and she probably had no conception of what the consequences of that association would become. I cannot see that it was truly a sin."