Madam Eckel: The Weird Sister of Sharon and Amenia

Sharon, like most towns, has had its share of people who marched to the beat of a different drummer. Lizzie St. John Eckel Harper, better known to many as "Madame Eckel", is one of Sharon’s best known eccentrics. Born in 1838, her unsavory background and later life was chronicled in her autobiography, Maria Monk’s Daughter. In 1932, local historian Leonard Twynham, in an effort to separate fact from fiction, wrote a short booklet purporting to give the "true" story of Madame Eckel. The following excerpt forms the introduction to this work, published under the title Madam Eckel, The Weird Sister of Sharon and Amenia.

Strange stories are related by Dame Rumor, in the region of Sharon and Amenia, about a woman of rare charm and questionable behaviour who, as a child, was adopted there by natives and who, in later life, returned to buy a home in the mountains to which she invited the fashionable set of New York to come on holiday. Report places her as a child in the homes of Huldah Bump and Horace Clark of the same community; and states that as a beautiful girl in her teens she attracted the attention of railroad officials supervising construction on the line near Wassaic and that through them she established contact with a wealthy clique from the metropolis. It is commonly said that she hob-nobbed with William Vanderbilt and his stratum; that she lived in Paris for a period as a coquette of questionable habits; that she brought to her mountain home such a notable character as Benjamin Butler of Lowell, Mass., whom Gamaliel Bradford has depicted among the "Damaged Souls" of American history; and that finally she became a nun of the Catholic Church. There are countless variations of this tale to be heard from the lips of the old-timers who remember seeing her handsomely mounted on her favorite steed or driving her sporty carriage along the dirt roads. It is the purpose of the author to present the facts in the case.

He has found in the hands of only one family of the vicinity a volume of her autobiography, "Maria Monk’s Daughter." Doubtless the fires in West Woods have thinned out the copies in the neighborhood, though probably only a few were ever owned locally. The association of her name with the scurrilous book, "Disclosures of Maria Monk," purporting to expose evil conduct at the Black Nunnery in Montreal, doubtless gave rise to many exaggerated tales. In trying to locate Madam Eckel’s own volume the author discovered that three times in succession an advertisement was banned from the pages of the Publishers Weekly on the ground that it was a black-list volume. Only after demonstration of the falsity of the claim that it was anti-Catholic was the want-ad inserted. It should be noted also that the story of her experiences is so decidedly an argument in favor of Catholicism that many copies are retained by church libraries. Then too it must be taken into account that only a small number came from the press. The book was "Published for the Author" by The United States Publishing Company, 13 University Place, in 1874, was copyrighted by Mrs. Lizzie St. John Eckel, New York City, N.Y., and was printed by John F. Trow & Son, of East Twelfth Street, New York. It appeared in brown, green, and purple binding, and contains a fine frontispiece picture of the author as well as several illustrations of regional interest, -- Aunt Huldah, Aunt Mercy, Betsy "Dot", The Little White Cottage, My Mountain Home, St. Genevieve’s Chapel, and My Solitude. It is a rare book of 604 alluring pages which should be prized as a choice item of literature recounting the struggles of an intense and erratic spirit.

This volume shows how old wives’ tales in any town must be taken with a grain of salt; but perhaps they are spicy enough to start with. The absurd story is abroad that the man who brought her to Amenia Union was Pope St. John, an old sea captain from New Orleans or Mobile. No credence can be given to it. Then her brother – was his name Miles St. John? What was the connection with the St. Johns of this area? Local residents must solve this puzzle. I think her record in the book is to be believed. Why too should we not accept her account of the contact established with people from the city? The talk about town is that she flirted with men on the railroad; but when she was a girl the northern terminum of the Harlem Division was Dover Plains, -- indeed a long stroll from a hill above Wassaic. The assumption that a priest wrote the volume to which her name is attached, for reasons of propaganda and because she could not write it, is gratuitous and bigoted; she indeed had both wit and wisdom enough to compose the text. Not only did the Catholics not pay her, but she had a hard time to dispose of the number printed and to collect commensurate profits for her labor. The notion that John Cotton Smith attended her church for the service of dedication misses the mark by a goodly part of one century. The wild tale that Eckel was a very rich man from Baltimore values her deal in the marriage market too highly. Judging by the number of liens on the property after the Madam, a widow, bought it from George Lambert and fixed it over, she was not floating any gold ships. Then too read of the "hard times" suffered by herself and husband as mentioned in the book. My pamphlet will also disprove the groundless tale that the daughter Mary, who became a nun, gave all her mother'’ vast holdings to a convent. Nor is there any truth in the story that as a girl in Amenia Union a copy of "The Disclosures of Maria Monk" fell into her hands, that she read it, and at once decided to pose thereafter as the daughter of the notorious refugee.