by Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

In Part 1: How did a middle-class Massachusetts boy become Count Rumford? I described how Count Rumford received his title and how he was connected to Rumford Baking Powder. Now, in Part 2, let’s look Count Rumford’s items in the MHS’s George E. Ellis Papers.

The Count Rumford papers in the George E. Ellis Papers consist mainly of correspondence between Count Rumford’s adult daughter, Sarah Thompson (Countess Rumford), and James Fowle Baldwin (1782–1862), a civil engineer and Harvard classmate of Count Rumford. According to the finding aid for the Baldwin Family Papers at the Winterthur Library, Baldwin named his last born son George Rumford. The Rumford-Baldwin letters are sweet and friendly and mostly copies of Sarah’s own letters that she kept. She addresses Baldwin as “Dear Friend” and asks after his wife and family, then asks for favors. Several letters inquire about a house he’s building, then later when it’s finished, her wish to visit and see the house. The letters show a sincere and lovely friendship between the writers.

The item I found most interesting, as I do love good historical gossip, was the handwritten account in a half-empty journal titled Sketches of the Late Count Rumford. Countess Sarah recounted a period of her father’s life and transcribed letters he had written her before his death in 1814. She extolls his virtues and mentions several times his mindfulness in having a daughter, but also describes his marriage to a French woman in 1804, which followed the death of his first wife, Sarah, in 1792. Starting in 1799, after leaving Bavaria, Rumford split his time between France and England, establishing the Royal Institution of Great Britain and continuing his scientific research. While in France, he met, courted, and later married Marie-Ann Lavoisier, the widow of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

Rumford ‘s letters to his daughter Sarah, describe his new love interest in France, which Sarah includes in her Sketches:

“…a widow without children…about my own age—has a handsome fortune, at her own disposal, enjoys a most respectable reputation, keeps a good house, which is frequented by all the first Philosophers and men of eminence in science and literature of the age, or rather, of Paris. And what is more than all the rest is goodness itself.

The excerpted letters continue: “She is very clever… she has been very handsome in her day, even now at forty-six or forty-eight, not bad—of a middling size, but rather on en bon point than thin. She has a great deal of vivacity, and writes incomparably well.”

Several of the loose letters father and daughter wrote to each other were in French, which I do not know, so I relied on Sarah’s translated English versions in the book.

Lavoisier loved entertaining, dining, and company above all other activities, and Rumford was the opposite. He took pleasure in research and science and had little taste for company and dining. He preferred plain food and did not relish the joys of French cuisine. The couple divorced after three years.

Rumford wrote to Sarah on 12 April 1807: “I have the misfortune to be married to one of the most imperious, tyrannical, unfeeling woman, that ever existed, and whose perseverance in pursuing an object is equil to her profound cunning and wickedness in framing it.” Sarah noted right after this, “What a contrast between former descriptions!” Further in the same letter, her father wrote, “Do you preserve my letters, you will perceive a very different account I give of this woman, for lady I cannot call her.”

If you speak French, or just want a little more of this fun historical gossip, I recommend visiting the MHS to read these first and second-hand documents. Keep your eye out for Count Rumford, Rumford Baking Powder, Rumford, NH, Rumford, RI, and the Rumford Professor at Harvard University, Part 3: This Collection Keeps Drawing Me In