As students across the country return to school this month, for September’s Object-of-the-Month we feature an inkstand used by Henry Longfellow’s older brother Stephen. Made of pewter, an alloy made of mostly tin with small amounts of copper, antimony or lead, this inkstand measures 7" long by 4 ¾” wide by 2” high, and stands on four round feet. A hinge running down the center of the top enables lids to be raised to reveal two compartments. Inside are a glass inkwell, and a metal box for holding sand that would be sifted onto the paper to absorb excess ink left by the quills and dip pens of the era, thereby preventing the paper from being covered with ink smears. The concave design of the sand shaker’s lid was a design feature intended to facilitate the collection of sand that had already been applied to the paper, as it would be recycled and returned to the shaker for repeated use. The rest of the space in the inkstand would have been used to store other writing implements; quills, pens, nibs, pen wipes, etc. The inkstand is in many ways the precursor to the plastic pencil box used by so many elementary schoolchildren today.
The inkstand is inscribed on multiple surfaces, mostly with Stephen Longfellow’s name and initials, repeated over and over. Also, an image drawn in ink on the bottom of the sand shaker depicts a crudely drawn four-legged animal, perhaps a dog. At least one date (pictured above), reading "1818", is also etched into the metal, indicating that Stephen owned this inkstand when he was thirteen years old and then a student at a private school in Portland, Maine called the Portland Academy. The Portland Academy was established in 1794, but in 1803 it moved into a new brick building on Congress Street, only a couple blocks down from the Longfellow home.
Family accounts indicate that Stephen was, at best, an indifferent student. The repeated scratchings made on this inkstand perhaps reveal that he was inattentive to lessons in school and easily distracted. Unfortunately, during its history the Portland Academy’s records suffered from two significant fires, one in 1814 while Stephen and Henry were students there (and which incidentally occurred in the office of the Longfellow boys’ father, in which the Academy’s records were stored at the time), another much later in 1866. Both fires destroyed the school’s records, so a clearer picture of Stephen’s time there is lost. Stephen and Henry later attended Bowdoin College together where Stephen’s lack of focus on academics continued, as evidenced by a suspension in 1824 for varied offenses and rules violations. Even so, he managed to leave Bowdoin with a degree in 1825.