Mother Barnes, ‘The Witch of Plum Hollow’

Born Elizabeth Martin, 1800 Cavan Ireland, died 1891 Ontario

(As part of our Fifty Irish Lives in Canada, we searched out women, often unrecorded or anonymized in history. I am grateful to Quinten Mitchell for bringing Mother Barnes to my attention.)

For a woman to earn the moniker ‘Mother Barnes, the Witch of Plum Hollow’, some mystery must have surrounded her.  Elizabeth Barnes earned a reputation as a fortune-teller and finder of lost objects that spread far beyond the farming district near Brockville on the St Laurence River where she lived in frugality.  Claims that she was the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter were said to explain her powers.  While that helped affirm her powers for some, her fame and earnings during her active decades were generated by satisfied customers in a remarkable display of economic agency by an immigrant single mother. 

Born in 1800 in County Cavan to a landlord and British Army colonel and a mother said to be of Spanish descent, Elizabeth Martin was a strikingly beautiful young child.  Admirably willful too; when faced an arranged marriage to an older man, Elizabeth eloped with a young soldier, Robert Harrison, to the United States in 1814.  They settled in Coburg, Canada, but Robert died a few years after the birth of their son Robert Junior.

In 1831, Elizabeth married David Barnes, a cobbler from Connecticut.  Six sons were born, four of whom would survive childhood, and three daughters.  By 1843, they had settled on a farm in Sheldon’s Corners, Ontario, a hub of United Empire Loyalists. David eventually left the family home and moved to Smiths Falls with the youngest son, David Jr, reuniting there with an older child, Sam, (later reeve and Mayor). 

Elizabeth began to monetize her reputation as a soothsayer to make ends meet, receiving clients upstairs in her tiny cottage for 25 cents.  Kindly and slight of frame, wearing a black dress and shawl, her penetrating pale eyes often unnerved her clients. She swirled tea leaves to divine answers to her clients’ concerns. If her eyes hadn’t unnerved them often her penetrating assessments of them did.  Whatever transacted between her and those motivated by curiosity or desperation to see her, word-of-mouth ensured her fame, even across the border in the U.S. 

The situation was ripe with story-telling potential.  To a young lawyer she predicted that the capital of a future Canada would be Ottawa and apparently promised him fame as its leader.  This was the future Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. She was said to possess great powers to recover lost objects.  It was said too that she identified the location of the remains of Morgan Doxtader as well as his murderer, cousin Edgar Harter who was convicted and hanged in Brockville.  From lost sheep and horses, to marriage prospects, Mother Barnes had an uncanny ability to impress her clients and they the capacity to fulfil her predictions.

Some skepticism and closer inspection suggests that willing assumptions about her powers trumped mundane, even obvious, explanations. By the time of John A. Macdonald’s consultation, he was the coming man in the Conservative Party and Confederation on the horizon. Ottawa was widely speculated as the new capital, duly announced in December 1857.  Elizabeth had a life-time of experience to bring to her assessments of marriage prospects as young lovers opened their hearts to her wise counsel.  As for the remains of murder victims and lost or stolen livestock, she no doubt knew the local gossip as intimately as anyone and probably more so. Such stories suggest that Mother Barnes restored social harmony through crime solving and restoration of lost property. If the gullible or curious were prepared to pay the 25 cents, they got their monies worth not through magic but wisdom and experience.  Mother Barnes’ role as local wise woman would no doubt have been of help to the many Irish streaming into the area during and after the Famine, notably the tenantry of the Coollattin Estate arriving in numbers in Smiths Falls in the 1850s.

Elizabeth amassed no fortune but used her earnings to support her family and some orphans. Seven children, forty-seven grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren were there to morn her death.  She was buried in an unmarked grave in Sheldon’s Corners Cemetery.

In former times, the label witch or any suggestion of occult powers could have had dire consequences for a woman. By the mid-19^th century, the balance had swung toward toleration.  From séances to automatic writing, from ‘scientific’ experiments to photography, Victorians seemed as fixated on the occult as they were on science and progress. Against the backdrop of popular fiction by authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, Elizabeth’s fame owed as much to this Victorian Gothic sensibility as to her predictive abilities.

Yet her real success was survival against daunting odds by marketing and monetizing her hard-won expertise. Two years before her death, she chuckled to a journalist that “I’m a bit of a fraud.” By then her record and repute were unassailable. On her death in 1891, The Ottawa Free Press respectfully and more accurately mourned her passing as The Wise Woman of Plum Hollow, noting that she had become an institution in her lifetime. Her reputation was burnished in 1892 when a local writer, Thaddeus Leavitt, published his short novel, The Witch of Plum Hollow.  Mother Barnes’ enduring fame encouraged some locals to erect a headstone at the Cemetery. Today, her cottage can be seen from the road that bears her name.  It has been restored from a state of near destruction.  Its small scale defies belief that it functioned as a home for Elizabeth and her many dependents.

Mother Barnes managed to achieve some economic agency in the only way she knew how.  More typical was Eliza Grimason, born Elizabeth Jane Deacon in (Northern) Ireland, who successfully ran her deceased husband’s Royal Tavern in Kingston.  Less typically, and with a whiff of scandal, she was from an early stage a close confidante of John A. Macdonald.  Her political support for him increased as her wealth grew. 

Both Elizabeth and Eliza represent countless other women who wielded influence unseen in the pages of history.   Most were denied remembrance, their lives of hard work, caring, intergenerational childrearing, agency, and resilience forgotten or dismissed by the men who wrote the record. Even those women who achieved distinction were far less likely to feature in the histories of Canada than men who achieved less.  Albeit in folklore and in the modest remains of her cottage, Mother Barnes scored another distinctive success in the mere fact that she and her life are remembered today.  That in its own way was a big of magic.

Further reading

Eamonn McKee

Ottawa, 13 June 2024

Further reading:

The Witch of Plum Hollow « arlene stafford wilson (wordpress.com)