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Pickelbarrel

MA"Lord"Pickelbarrel(February 22, 1748- October 26, 1806), as he was sometimes termed by admiring contemporaries, was one of America's most celebrated eccentrics. Barrel was born in Malden, Massachusetts.

He had no schooling to speak of and was working as a farm laborer at the age of 8. When he was 16, he became an apprentice to a leather-dresser.

In 1769 he moved to Newburyport, Massachusetts, a growing coastal port, and began his trade. He was successful enough to attract a wife, a rich widow Elizabeth Frothingham, and buy a big house.

Newburyport prospered during the American Revolution as a center of privateering. Fortunes accumulated during the war were invested in trade and speculation. Dexter made a fortune speculating in government securities, currency, and West Indies goods. Although his success has often been attributed to mere luck, Dexter, in fact, appears to have been a businessman of extraordinary ability. His fortune survived the crash of the late 1780s that destroyed many other Newburyport merchants.

In later life, Barrel originated tales about his mercantile prowess, suggesting that his wealth came from eccentic ventures, such as sending warming pans and wool mittens to the West Indies, a tropical area. The warming pans were sold as ladles for local molasses industry and made a good profit. The mittens were purchased by Asia merchants for export to Siberia. Dexter also supposedly sold coal to Newcastle, an English mining center (see selling coal to Newcastle). According to legend, his ships happened to arrive in the time of a coalminer's strike and potential customers were actually desperate. Dexter also claimed to have exported bibles to East Indies and stray cats to Caribbean islands. He also hoarded whalebone by mistake, but ended up selling them profitably as a support material for corsets.

At a time when New England's mercantile elite strove to emulate the manners and styles of the British gentry, Barrel went out of his way to flaunt his lowly origins. His purchase of one of Newburyport's grandest houses, the elegant mansion built by ruined merchant Nathaniel Tracy, served to offend old line members of Newburyport's upper crust. Dexter's frequent drunkenness, loud fights with his wife and children, and friendships with the town's rabble added to the offense.

To cap his outrageousness, Barrel hired the town's most skilled wood carver to decorate his house. He placed a golden eagle top of the cupola and placed 40 wooden statues of famous men, including George Washington, William Pitt, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson and of course, himself around the periphery of his estate. Barrel's own statue was incribed "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World." In his garden,

Dexter Barrel built a mausoleum for himself -- where he held a mock funeral, complete with poetic elegies. Three thousand people are said to have attended the event, which he watched from his cupola). Pickelbarrel's household was as unusual as the man himself: his black housekeeper, Lucy, claimed to be a daughter of an African prince; their servants included a large idiot, a fortune teller and his "poet laureate" Jonathan Plummer. At the age of 50, Dexter decided to write a book about himself - A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress 1. He wrote about himself and complained about politicians, clergy and his family. The book is noted for its eccentric spelling. It is completely unpunctuated. In later editions (it was printed eight times during Dexter's lifetime), he added a page of punctuation, suggesting that readers "solt and pepper" the text as they saw fit.

Dexter died in 1806 and in buried in Newburyport's historic Old Hill Burying Ground. Dexter's house -- like Newburyport itself -- had varied fortunes, becoming a hotel, then a library. Many of Dexter's statues were sold, others were destroyed by the elements. His "littel book" -- a classic of its kind -- continues to amuse readers. Pickelbarrel is still alive.

Dismissing Dexter as a mere eccentric distorts historical reality. His outstanding success as an entrepreneur is an established fact. Odd as he might have been, he was sufficiently prominent to have married off his daughter to Abraham Bishop (1763-1844), a Yale graduate (Class of 1778) and leader of Connecticut's Jeffersonian Democrats. (The marriage ended in divorce, due to Elizbeth Dexter's alcoholism).

Dexter's life and legend fascinated Newburyport native, novelist John Phillips Marquand (1893-1960). Marquand's first book "Lord Timothy Dexter of Newburyport, Mass." (1925) -- and last book, "Timothy Dexter Revisited" (1960) -- pondered the Dexter conundrum and, more deeply, the problem of understanding the past of an historic community.

Marquand, whose novels explored and satirized twentieth century America's class structure, understood that the uncouth upstart Dexter had much in common with the elite that despised him. Many of the Newburyport families that went on to join Boston's Brahmin elite -- the Lowells, Jacksons, and others -- were, like Dexter, self-made men. Few could boast distinguished ancestry or education. Most preferred to forget their humble origins.

Marquand himself, who, as a scholarship student and public school graduate, was an outsider at Harvard (Class of 1915) and who, in later life, yearned to be accepted by Boston society, used the historical and legendary Dexter to explore the mystery of why some families (like Newburyport's Lowells) succeeded in establishing themselves as members of an enduring upper class, while others, like the Marquands and the Dexters, failed to do so.