Annual Meeting

Jane Tucker, Maine’s Gilded Age Spy

In 1894, Maine-native Jane Tucker was a stenographer scrabbling to get by when she took a job as a gilded age spy. Her target: Madeleine Pollard, former mistress of Congressman W.C.P. Breckinridge, whom she had sued for breach of promise when he failed to marry her as pledged. The trial was a national sensation, and while Pollard took center stage, Tucker, alias Agnes Parker, worked quietly behind the scenes, befriending Pollard and in their heart-to-heart conversations, stealing her secrets. Tucker was so successful that no one discovered her secret task or her real identity for over 100 years. In this illustrated talk, we’ll see how a scrappy stenographer used shorthand, underwear, and a whisk as tools for a clever spy, and how her amazing exploits were subsequently hidden by history.

Dr. Elizabeth DeWolfe is Professor Emerita of History at the University of New England where she taught for thirty years. She is the award-winning author of Shaking The Faith: Mary M. Dyer’s Anti=Shaker Campaign and The Murder of Mary Bean, about the short life and sad death of a textile mill operative. Her recent book Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy, features the previously unknown work of Wiscasset native Jane Armstrong Tucker. DeWolfe makes her home in southern Maine with her husband, Scott, rare books dealer at DeWolfe & Wood Books, and Floyd, a feral cat turned couch potato.