Charles Felton Pklgin, author of "Blennerhassett," for the purpose of historical research, she is an active member, holding the office of vice-councillor. Her interest in the work of the legion is thus explained:—
As is well known, Aaron Burr, third Vice-President of the United States, was a grandson of Jonathan Edwards, theologian, President of Princeton College. His mother was Estlicr Edwards, daughter of the Rev. Jonathan and wife of the Rev. Aaron Burr, Sr. Her son, Aaron Burr, was cousin to Edward6 Edwards; and Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia Burr Alston, and Mary Edwards McKinney, Mrs. Drake's grandmother, were second cousins.
From her girlhood the story of Theodosia Burr, with its mysterious tragical ending, has had for Mrs. Drake a strong fascination. The brief verdict, "Lost at sea," was supplemented in 1850, some years before the birth of Stella Drake, by the confession of an aged pauper in the Cassopolis (Mich.) poorhouse, that he had been one of the pirates by whom the "Patriot," the vessel in which Mrs. Alston had taken passage at Charleston, S.C., on December 30, 1812, for New York, had been captured, and that he himself had been set to tip the plank on which she walked to her death off the stormy shore of Cape Hatteras. He remembered her for her marvellous beauty and her unshrinking fortitude.
This grewsome tale was told to Mrs. Drake's grandmother McKinney by a Mrs. Parks, who heard the confession.
One of Mrs. Drake's sisters, Mrs. Jeanne Ogden Miller, of Salt Lake City, bears a striking resemblance in the general outline of her features to Vanderlyn's portrait, a profile view, of Theodosia Burr, as reproduced in James Barton's "Life of Aaron Burr."
A comparison of the photograph of another sister, Mrs. Katherine McKinney Herbert, with the photograph of a painted portrait, supposed to be that of Theodosia Burr, reveals a marked likeness between the two. Of this more below.
It was from an article in a Chicago newspaper that Mrs. Drake, while living at her father's home in Sturgis, Mich., first heard of the existence in Elizabeth City, N.C., of a portrait which was thought to represent the daughter of Aaron Burr. It was owned by a Dr. Pool. In the summer of 1888 Mrs. Drake, then staying with her parents at Virginia Beach, N.C., visited the home of the Pool family, only a few miles distant. On the parlor wall, over the mantle-piece, hung the portrait of a young woman of great beauty, dressed in white. She knew it at once as the picture she had come to see, and she felt confirmed in her belief that it was a portrait of Theodosia Burr because it resembled her sister, Katherine McKinney Herbert. Miss Pool (now Mrs. Overman), daughter of the deceased doctor, told her how it came into her father's possession, as the gift of a patient, a Mrs. Mann, to whom it had been given by a sailor lover many years before. The portrait and two silk dresses that accompanied it as presents had been taken from an abandoned pilot boat off Cape Hatteras, these articles being found in the cabin. The sailors who boarded the boat found, or professed to have found, nothing to identify either the vessel or the owner of the dresses and the original of the portrait. After the picture came into the possession of Dr. Pool and its story became' known, it was surmised that the pilot boat was the missing "Patriot," and the dresses a part of the wardrobe of Theodosia Burr Alston, of whom the picture is considered by Mrs. Drake to be an undoubted likeness.
Mrs. Drake's story of the picture will be retold by Mr. Pidgin in his forthcoming book, whose object is to throw light on the mystery that enshrouds the fate of the beautiful and accomplished Theodosia Burr.
A. ELIZABETH NEWELL and OPHELIA S. NEAVELL, twin daughters . of Fisher Ames and Ann Elizabeth (Whipple) Newell, were born June 6, 1841, at the home of their maternal grandfather, Benjamin Whipple, in Charlestown, Mass. A. Elizabeth, the first named of the two sisters, is now the .sole female survivor of her father's family.
Miss Newell's father, Fisher Ames Newell, a sea captain, was son of Thomas and Poll
