The Salisbury Association’s unique painting “Maria Birch Coffing with Jane E. Winslow” was carefully packed up for its journey to the American Folk Art Museum in New York City. There, it will be part of the exhibition Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art. The exhibition opens October 9th and runs through February 28, 2027.  https://folkartmuseum.org/exhibitions/

Please plan on attending the exhibit; no doubt Maria and Jennie would enjoy a visit!

The portrait:

The portrait was painted in 1844. What is so unusual about this painting is that very few portraits of this time period include the likeness of a person of color.

John Churchill Coffing was co-founder of the Salisbury Iron Company, the leading firm of iron masters in the region in the early-mid 1800’s. Maria Birch was John Churchill Coffing’s second wife.

Jane (Jennie) Elizabeth Winslow was born circa 1825 to John and Elizabeth Winslow. She does not appear to have been an enslaved person. The 1840 U.S. census lists a “free colored person between the ages of 10 and 23” in the household of John Churchill Coffing. This was likely Jennie, since she appears by name in the 1850 census as part of the household of Maria Birch Coffing (whose husband John had died in 1847).

Jennie lived in the Coffing household from age five until her early 40’s. By then the Coffings had died and she had moved to Massachusetts. She married there but died four months later, in April 1872.