Meet Phebe Mitchell Kendall of Nantucket and Cambridge

The Mitchell Family of Nantucket

In celebration of Preservation Month, Preservation Massachusetts has announced fourteen projects that will receive grants for exterior restoration of their historic properties. The Maria Mitchell Association, which owns and operates the 1790 Maria Mitchell House on Nantucket, was awarded an $8,250 grant. The house has been a museum since 1903.

Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) was the third of ten children, half girls, half boys. Her sister Phebe, ten years her junior, lived and worked in Cambridge. Maria was America’s first professional female astronomer. The Mitchell house website, https://www.mariamitchell.org, has more information on the family and a wonderful collection of photographs.

Phebe Mitchell

Phebe Mitchell was born on Nantucket on February 23, 1828, into a Quaker family. William and Lydia (Coleman) Mitchell believed in equality in education, and all the children (Phebe was the seventh of ten) were educated in public schools and at home.

Lydia Mitchell was a librarian and often brought books home for the family to read. Phebe described her mother as:

a woman of strong character, very dignified, honest almost to an
extreme. … She … kept a close watch over her children, was clear-
headed … and an indefatigable worker. It was she who looked out
for the education of the children and saw what their capacities were.

Her father, “a man of great suavity and gentleness,” was a teacher, a banker, and a well-known amateur astronomer.

For almost twenty-five years Mr. Mitchell was the cashier at Nantucket’s Pacific National Bank, where he kept a suite of rooms in which the family occasionally lived. He constructed a small observatory on the bank’s flat roof, and everyone took part in watching the sky and calculating complex astronomical formulae. One night in 1847, Maria (allegedly escaping a dull dinner party) went up to look at the stars and discovered a comet, “Miss Mitchell’s comet.”

Phebe and Joshua Kendall

Phebe Mitchell and Joshua Kendall were married on Nantucket on September 14, 1854; the groom had been born in Cambridge in 1828 and graduated from Harvard College in 1853. The couple moved to Meadville, Pennsylvania, where Joshua served as the second president of Meadville Theological Seminary, which was then a Unitarian institution. Their only child, William Manning,, was born in 1856 when Joshua was the master of a private school in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. In 1860 he became the chief academic officer, or principal, of the Rhode Island State Normal School, then in Bristol; the 1860 census records Joshua, Phebe, and four-year-old Willie living in a boarding house. The state cut back funding for the school, and it was forced to close in 1864.

Joshua moved his family to Cambridge, bought the house at 123 Inman Street, and opened Kendall’s Day and Family School, a private preparatory school for boys, at 13 Appian Way. In 1906 the family took up room in the school.

The 1878 Total Eclipse of the Sun

Phebe and her sister Maria, who had become Vassar College’s first astronomy professor in 1865, visited frequently and wrote often; the three Kendalls and Maria travelled together in Europe four times in the early 1870s. In 1878 Maria invited Phebe to come with her to Colorado to observe a total eclipse of the sun that would be best viewed from sites along the spine of the Rocky Mountains, from southern Wyoming Territory through Colorado to Texas. Professor Mitchell, Mrs. Mitchell, four Vassar graduates, and their equipment traveled by train to Denver.

David Baron, a science journalist, chronicles the eclipse excitement that swept across the United States in American Eclipse: A Nation’s Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World (2017).

Astronomers and their assistants vied for the best viewing spots. The Mitchell crew arrived at their site with little time to spare.

 

Maria Mitchell chose for her observation post … a hill on the edge
of [Denver], just beyond the reach of suburban development. …
Once there, the Vassar party had no time to make elaborate
preparations. The women set out wooden chairs, erected a small
tent for shade, and mounted their three telescopes on tall tripods. (Mitchell had  brought … the same telescope she had used … to
discover her famous comet.) The view east offered an endless,
empty expanse of plains. To the west lay Denver and the Rockies
behind it. Immediately to the south sat a three-story brick building topped by a gabled roof and an ornate cross. It was St. Joseph’s Home,
a Catholic hospital operated by the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas. The nuns, … spying the astronomers in dresses, came over to tea.

Maria Mitchell, her crew, and their equipment. The individuals are not identified, but Phebe may be pictured. Photo courtesy Maria Mitchell Association.

The Cambridge School Committee

In 1879 the Massachusetts General Court enacted legislation giving women the right to vote in school committee elections. That year, Phebe Mitchell Kendall and Sarah Sprague Jacobs became the first women elected to the Cambridge School Committee. Mrs. Kendall served for fourteen years, advocating for equality of education in elementary schools. A longtime member of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage League, she served as its president for many years. She resigned from the school committee in 1894 to concentrate on organizing and editing Maria’s personal papers. Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters and Journals was published in 1896.

 

Legacy

Phebe Mitchell Kendall died in June 1907. The Cambridge newspapers all published laudatory encomiums, including a letter in the Tribune from “one who knew her.”

 

 

Joshua Kendall died in February 1913. William Mitchell Kendall (Willie) enjoyed a successful career at the distinguished New York architectural firm, McKim, Mead & White.