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Ethel Irene Duke Barrows



Ethel Barrows                         Jay Wilkinson

Antique dealers from the Hamptons drove to East Calais to drink Aunt Ethel's tea and talk down JFK.  Their pickups filled with battered chairs, from garage sales, carriage houses and pilfered sheds.  Estate sale heirs will later purchase the transformed antiques from California designers who drape them with Navajo prayer rugs and tout their authenticity.  The dealers left primitive ladder backs fashioned with hand-turned stiles and smith-cut nails in the outbuilding that tilted toward the mill pond.  Ethel rocked on the second story porch as turtles with warmed backs snapped dragonflies hatching amongst lily pads.  

Blade sharpened on the family millstone, she cut out a seat woven by a Green Mountain sheep farm widow abandoned by a '49er.  And another assembled in a Chicopee sweatshop by a twelve-year old orphan immigrant.  Ethel split cane, twisted rush, poked and threaded and wove whole again.  Tiny octagons and inward-pointing chevrons stiffened maple, ash and beechwood frames.  

They paid her five dollars a chair, supplies included.  Driving away, they laughed at her subscription to Grit and tossed their cigarette butts out the window.  These entrepreneur sophisticates thought they had an old hill woman who knew only her tools.  Who told tales of her family history back to William the Conqueror.  And whose link to the world was the D.A.R.  Well ...true but incomplete.  She had typed theWar Department orders that sent Black Jack Pershing’s men into mustard gas and Argonne trenches.  And held inviolate the secrets of the Treasury from Andrew Mellon to Henry Morgenthal.  

Aunt Ethel knew well the value of a dollar, but traded in loyalty, craft and conservation.

(Almost everything is true, unless my mother lied about her aunt.  Ethel Barrows lived to age 101.  DAR = Daughters of the American Revolution, a “patriotic”, genealogy-restricted organization.  Pershing - veteran of U.S. invasion of Cuba who commanded the AEF in Europe in WWI.  Ethel was the personal secretary to the Secretaries of the U.S. Treasury during the presidencies of Herbert Hoover, FDR and Harry Truman.)


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