A photo of Adelaide Butnam pinning a corsage on a fellow alumna at a Westbrook reunion in 1969. Butnam was in her early 80s at the time the photo was taken. (Photo courtesy Michael Uhl)
(This abbreviated profile of Deborah Nichols Morton constitutes the 13th submission to “The Round Pond Chronicles of Adelaide Butman.” The next installment will be the last, highlighting Adelaide’s full life after leaving Westbrook and Round Pond.)
“There is often a single shadowy figure among the pantheon of family elders whose influence seems to leap out of the past and touch one with special intensity.”
With these words, Carol Brightman began her profile of Deborah Morton, “In Search of Aunt Deb,” which appeared in the October 1983 issue of Down East magazine.
That search began in earnest three years earlier when we made the fateful decision in 1980 to buy a vintage, if decrepit, saltwater farm not far from Round Pond. As we transitioned to full-time residence over several summers, Carol gradually joined what had been passed on from family lore about of her great-great-aunt to the professional world of the esteemed educator in whose name an award is presented annually to Maine women of distinction, an honor Carol herself would eventually attain as an author of considerable achievement.
The private Morton known to her family was consistent in one significant feature with the treasured Westbrook mentor who Adelaide Butman, in the most recent of her chronicles to appear in these pages, had described as “soft on boys.”
Morton attended closely to the education of her Brightman nephew and great nephew. The Brightmans had become linked to the Mortons and the Nichols – both prominent families in Round Pond – when in 1870 Carol’s great-grandfather, B.F. Brightman, late of New Bedford, Mass., migrated to the hamlet, now a widower, met and married Deborah’s older sister, Ida. When B.F. left the “fine residence” his family occupied on the King Ro and relinquished his job superintending a fish oil factory on Round Pond’s Moxie Cove, he transported his family, including Carol’s grandfather, Carl Godon Brightman, to establish a fishery at Sitka, Alaska. Carl’s aunt Deborah took charge of his education by sending him tutors from Harvard and Westbrook College. She played a similar role with Carol’s father, Carl Gordon Jr.
But the Deborah Morton, who earned such high repute among her contemporaries, inhabited a wider public sphere. Much of what Carol was now discovering about the legacy of the woman for whom she was named is summarized on the website of the Deborah Morton Society (une.edu/deborahmorton).
Morton’s 60 years of association with Westbrook, herself a graduate and valedictorian, provided ample scope for her professional life as a dean and teacher, as well as the interests she pursued outside the classroom.
Westbrook Seminary was founded by the Kennebec Association of Universalists in 1831. Its co-educational mission for many decades was preparatory for those wishing to advance their learning elsewhere, and to allow that clever girls like Adelaide Butman, according to her father’s plan, might be finished into ladies to improve their life prospects.
The presence of religion at Westbrook seemed confined to the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer by the student body at mealtime. But one imagines it was the underlying Universalist principal of inclusion that would have appealed to a person of Morton’s broad intellectual and cultural appetites and drew her to support social reforms across many fronts, including woman’s suffrage. When the girls at Westbrook sought to free themselves from the confining corsets of contemporary fashion, Morton stood with them, but urged them to lodge their protests with dignity.
As a genteel single woman of disposable means, Deborah Morton enjoyed considerable independence, dividing her summers between improving proficiency in her chosen fields, French and German – whether in Paris and Bonn, or at Middlebury College and Harvard – and travel. She accompanied parties of young women to tour the European continent on multiple occasions, crossing the Atlantic 14 times in all.
Following her retirement she decamped one exotic winter for Cairo. In Portland during World War Two, Morton volunteered at the Red Cross and wrote letters on behalf of wounded soldiers, as she perhaps had done during the Great War, when, during a five-year leave of absence from Westbrook, she was engaged in that war effort as well.
Such facts as I have sketched here on Morton’s life and many more can be found on the website referenced above, and in Carol Brightman’s article in Down East. But even the minor dip in Morton’s story I have undertaken here to close the circle on a project left undone these many years and led to the belated appearance of the “Butman Chronicles,” has raised more questions about Morton’s life than it has answered.
Filing in some of these biographical ellipses might be of interest only to the Brightman/Morton descendants in my own circle, notably, some detail on whatever links Aunt Deb maintained with the area where she was raised? I find no record of her visiting Round Pond – although I can’t believe she hadn’t. Nor is there evidence she stayed in touch with her local family beyond the Brightman nephews.
We know she’s buried Round Pond, but I have found no notice of her funeral nor her obituary. Was her childhood an idyll like Adelaide Butman’s, the details adjusted for the 30 years that separated their births? Certainly Deborah got the best of Round Pond’s great years of prosperity, when the hamlet was home to seagoing merchant traders, fishing fleets, shipyards, and a quarry and oil factories at peak production? We don’t even know what led her to choose French and German as her field of instruction.
Finally, as a combat veteran myself, one personal curiosity is to wonder if, as a girl of 8 or 9, Deborah registered impressions of those who returned to the hamlet after the Civil War – or of those who didn’t?
Leaving these private matters aside, there are many other corners of Morton’s life that the official record does not address; we are presented the stones but not the mortar. From what little I’ve been able to discover, only Butman’s light encomium offers a modest glimpse of the person behind the exemplary figure.
If there is a longer paper trail beyond the thin archival documentation I have found (with the disclaimer that I might have found much more had I the time to divert from other writings and engage in a deeper investigation), indeed many gaps might be filled, especially if there were letters, diaries, journals and remnants of the reams of paper generated by her classroom and administrative duties. I fear there is no such record.
What remains is fodder for the imagination. In the meantime, the search for Aunt Deb goes on..
(Michael Uhl is a writer living in Walpole. For more information, email michaeljohnx@gmail.com or go to shorturl.at/hsHN9.)
