Tier 1 — Lucretia Coffin Mott, Nantucket chapter (b. 1793)
Adult fame is Philadelphia, Seneca Falls, the 1840 World’s Antislavery Convention. The island product is how Nantucket made her, plus the visits home after the Hicksite split.
She left at about thirteen for Nine Partners. She always called herself a Nantucket woman. That claim is the brief — and the limit. Do not build a general-purpose Mott chatbot that happens to mention the island.
Why Tier 1
- Enormous published correspondence and sermons.
- Childhood sources are thinner than Mitchell’s diaries but enough for a dated Nantucket self: Fair Street house (still standing in early accounts), mother’s shop, Brookes slave-ship diagram at school, Elizabeth Coggeshall’s preaching, grandmother Ruth Coffin Folger’s discipline.
- Dual with Anna Gardner (who stayed) is the civic payoff.
- Legal: writings PD; Swarthmore controls manuscript images.
Primary material
A — Own words
| Source | Where | Island use |
|---|---|---|
| Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (U. Illinois, 2002) | Print; many letters also in TriCo/Swarthmore digital | Voice. Includes an 1866 letter describing travel to Nantucket and family visits (A00182122, digitalcollections.tricolib.brynmawr.edu). |
| James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters, Anna Davis Hallowell (1884) | PD | Family-assembled; note editorial smoothing. |
| Mott Manuscripts, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore, SFHL-MSS-035 | 7 boxes; correspondence with Garrison, Stanton, Nathaniel Barney, etc.; 1840 England diary | Adult mind. License reproductions. |
| Sermons and Discourse on Woman | Published; PD | Rhetoric, not childhood anecdote. |
| Recollections she told children/grandchildren | Embedded in Hallowell and later biographies | Brookes diagram at age four; hayride punishment; lightning strike on the first house. Treat as remembered, not contemporaneous diary. |
B — Nantucket record
- Nantucket Friends meeting minutes; real estate; Nine Partners yearbooks.
- Robert J. Leach, “Ancestors for Lucretia Coffin Mott,” Historic Nantucket (July 1975).
- Nathaniel and Eliza Starbuck Barney (cousins; Seneca Falls); island Hicksite meeting on Main Street after 1831 — she preached there on visits.
- Anna Gardner’s island career as the stay-behind counterpart.
C — cutoff
Pick a dated self and print it on the splash screen:
- 1806 girl leaving for Nine Partners (thin A; strong place), or
- 1840s minister visiting Nantucket (thick A; she can discuss Garrison, the 1840 convention, but not 1848 as future if you freeze her earlier), or
- 1866 visitor (the surviving letter home).
Do not let one body slide across seventy years of opinions without labeling the year.
Likeness
- William H. Furness portrait, 1858 (FHL Swarthmore).
- Joseph Kyle portrait (Smithsonian NPG).
- Fair Street house described in Medford Historical Society Papers (house still noted as standing in that account). Birth house gone; lightning memory only.
Early Nantucket Lucretia has almost no childhood portrait. An 1858 face on an 1806 body is a lie unless labeled “adult remembering.”
Partners
| Org | Role |
|---|---|
| Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore | Manuscripts and portraits. |
| NHA | Island genealogy, Barney connection, Hicksite site. |
| Nantucket Meeting / Quaker historians | Discipline, women’s ministry, 1831 split. |
| Atheneum | Reform lecture culture she belongs next to, even if the 1841 Douglass night is not hers. |
| Anna Gardner scholars (NHA “Road from Abolition to Suffrage”) | Dual partner. |
Programs
- Fair Street childhood (short, place-based AR + kiosk). Mother’s shop, Brookes plate, hayride. Heavy beat 3, because A is memory.
- Hicksite visit. Dated sermon-length monologue in the register of her published ministry, set on a return to Nantucket.
- Dual: Mott × Anna Gardner. One left, one stayed. School integration and suffrage as island problems, not Philadelphia abstractions.
- Do not ship “Douglass AI” as a sidekick. If 1841 appears, it is Gardner/Pompey’s room.
Production steps
- Choose the dated self in writing with the historian. This decision drives wardrobe, corpus, and cutoff.
- Build A from Palmer + Hallowell + the 1866 Nantucket letter first. Add Swarthmore only under license.
- Map Fair Street / Main Street Hicksite site / Atheneum as AR anchors.
- Likeness: adult portraits for the visiting-minister build; interpretive youth body only with a label.
- Voice: plain speech, Quaker thee/thou used as she actually used it in letters (not costume-shop Quaker).
- Dual Gardner corpus in season 1b (Gardner’s own essays and the school fight record).
- Eval with Quaker historians and Black Nantucket historians — Mott’s Nantucket includes the Meeting’s early anti-slavery stand and the labor system that preceded it.
Budget band
$120k–$220k for a single dated self + AR street anchors. Dual with Gardner adds $40–80k (second corpus, second wardrobe, shared engine).