The Face that Remembered
When a secondhand store painting felt like home
The Finding America series explores the nation’s first 250 years through individual lives – ordinary people who lived close to history as it unfolded. These stories are grounded in records, memory, and place, and focus on how Americans lived while those historic decisions were being made. Together, they trace the slow, human work of building a nation – day by day, household by household, life by life. Visit the archives to read the entire series.
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Release Date: June 9 , 2026
The Face that Remembered
On a November afternoon in 1883, a sixteen-year-old girl named Jennie Hazen was walking past a secondhand picture dealer’s shop in Buffalo when she stopped.
In the window, among the old paintings, was a portrait of a girl looking back at her. The girl in the painting was dressed in the style of the last century – arranged, Jennie would later insist to her family, as a fright. But the face was her own.
Jennie looked at her reflection in the glass. She looked at the painting. The resemblance, the Buffalo Courier reported, was wonderful.
Jennie went home to Angola Township full of her discovery, insisting that someone had been painting her picture without her knowledge and dressing her in old-fashioned clothes. Incited by curiosity, some of the family went to Buffalo to see for themselves. They were as amazed as Jennie.
Then someone turned the painting over.
On the back: a name. Jennie. And the painter’s mark: Richardson, Philadelphia.
The painting was purchased for three dollars and fifty cents and sent to Jennie’s grandmother in Erie – Mrs. Dr. M. J. Clark, born Jane Ann Marie Ryerson, daughter of Eliza McMichael. The grandmother opened the package, looked at the portrait, and recognized it immediately.
This was Jennie Elizabeth McAllister McMichael. Her grandmother. A Philadelphia girl whose adventures during the Revolutionary period, the Courier noted, had been told “at hundreds of firesides by the grandfathers and grandmothers of the present generation.” 1
The painting had been lost. The stories had survived. And now a sixteen-year-old girl had walked past a secondhand shop on a Buffalo street and paid three dollars and fifty cents to bring them back together.
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Jennie Elizabeth McAllister was just seventeen and attending a prominent Philadelphia seminary when a twenty-four-year-old soldier named Edward McMichael took shelter in her building.
Edward’s situation was complicated in the way the Revolution made many people’s situations complicated. Prior to the start of the war, he’d been a prominent Philadelphia merchant, so when hostilities seemed eminent, he quickly joined the patriot army, serving as a lieutenant in the Third Battalion as early as February 1776. 2
Within months, however, he’d changed both his mind and allegiance.
By the time he and Jennie Elizabeth met sometime in the fall of 1776, Edward was a commissioned officer in a Scottish Regiment, and, in a very real sense, the Romeo to her Juliet – her father was a Continental Army surgeon, an unrelenting foe of British rule and champion of American liberty.
Jennie Elizabeth and Edward fell in love anyway. Then they eloped.
For the next seven years, Jennie Elizabeth balanced her love for country with her love for Edward.
“…Thus we find Mrs. McMichael placed in an unenviable position, being the wife of a man engaged in deadly combat with the members of her own family. It was a trying ordeal, but she remained a true and faithful wife through it all. She prayed for her husband’s safety; visited him in camp, and ministered to his comfort; but her petitions to the Throne of Grace were always accompanied with an earnest appeal that the God of nations would smile approvingly on the cause of liberty and grant success to her people in their struggle for independence.” 3
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At some point – the historic records are unclear and stories related by the McMichael family offer no dates – Edward was captured on an espionage mission the Buffalo Courier compared to that of Major John André, and sentenced to death by firing squad.
His distraught wife was allowed to visit until the deed was done, and Jennie Elizabeth came with a plan.
Concealing metal files beneath her clothing, she spent her visits weeping dramatically over her doomed husband while secretly sawing through the shackles on his wrists and ankles. Her sobs and cries covered the scraping of the files, and after hours of work she finally freed him from his chains.
But Edward didn’t let on.
The night before his execution, he asked for a few private moments with his wife, and the request was granted.
“The provost withdrew and in ten minutes he returned. He found a woman convulsed with grief, powerless to speak. With the tenderness of a humane man, he gently took her arm and left her weeping from the room. He escorted her to the dwelling she had occupied during her husband’s incarceration and returned to his quarters to prepare for the work of death.” 4
Soon afterward, however, a sentry burst in with alarming news: the “grief-stricken woman” had suddenly recovered and sprinted away the moment the provost turned his back!
“In haste to a visit to the prisoner’s room was made, and the officer was considerably relieved to find his prisoner all safe. He was lying on the bed in his uniform, the red sleeves of which could be distinctly seen upon the arms thrown over his head. He had fallen into a dose, the last sleep on earth, they thought, and so would not arouse him, but they kept a sharp eye on him.” 5
As dawn broke, the provost marshal went to get his prisoner. He called Edward’s name.
No answer.
He drew closer.
“Come, Captain McMichael,” he said, “meet this like a brave soldier.”
And at that, much to the astonishment of the provost and guards, off the prisoner’s cot rose Jennie Elizabeth, dressed in her husband’s uniform!
Edward was long gone, back in the safety of his British comrades. As for Jennie Elizabeth, she was briefly arrested but eventually released. 6
On October 19, 1781, negotiations were underway in Yorktown for British forces to surrender. The city had been under siege for three weeks, the battle had been lost. As on countless other days since her marriage to Edward, Jennie Elizabeth was there, in the thick of things, tending the sick and injured.
What happened next would be added to McMichael family lore.
About two o’clock the patient [Jennie Elizabeth was attending] began to wander in her mind. Her words were incoherent for some time, but suddenly she exclaimed in low clear tones: “In a few hours a new nation will be born into the world, or else it will be strangled in its embryonic state.” 7
Two hours later, the town crier made the announcement: Cornwallis had surrendered.
When the woman Jennie Elizabeth had been caring for heard, the news, she shouted, “Thank God,” three times. And beside her, Jennie Elizabeth whispered the same.
The war officially ended on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris. For his part, Edward was ordered to stand trial for treason or face immediate loss of civil rights, property forfeiture, and the inability to inherit or pass on property by the Legislature of Pennsylvania. He chose the later. His property was confiscated, and their only child, a boy named John, was left behind in Philadelphia, to be raised by Edward’s family.
Edward and Jennie Elizabeth left Pennsylvania for good and crossed into Canada, eventually settled in Norfolk County, Ontario. The government granted them land, and the Lord granted them ten more children to raise in the Canadian wilderness, including Eliza, who would someday become the mother of Jane Ann Ryerson, Mrs. Dr. M. J. Clark, Jennie Hazen’s grandmother.
The stories of Jennie Elizabeth and Edward had traveled five generations by the time Jennie Hazen saw herself reflected in a secondhand shop window. They’d been passed from parent to child, grandparent to grandchild, face to face, year after year. The files in the prison cell. The uniform switch in the dark. The Yorktown surrender. All of it carried forward in the telling, the punchlines preserved as carefully as the facts.
The portrait had traveled a different route – Philadelphia to a secondhand dealer’s shelf in Buffalo, by what path no one could say.
But on a November afternoon in 1883 the two lines of transmission converged, and a young woman saw a painting, saw herself in it and understood, without yet knowing why, that she was looking at something that belonged to her. And she took it home.
Copyright 2026 Lori Olson White
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End Notes
1 “Like Her Great-Great-Grandmother,” Buffalo Courier, Buffalo, NY, November 28, 1883, P. 4.
2 New Jersey. (1775). Extracts from the journal of proceedings ... Burlington, [etc.] Collins [etc.] 1775-76. reprinted by order, Sailer.
3 Egbert Americus Owen, “Sketch XXXII: Captain Edward McMichael,”Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement, or, Norfolk’s Foundation Builders and their Family Genealogists, W. Briggs, Toronto, ONT., CAN., 1898,P. 181.
4 “Like Her Great-Great-Grandmother,” Buffalo Courier, Buffalo, NY, November 28, 1883, P. 4.
5 “Like Her Great-Great-Grandmother,” Buffalo Courier, Buffalo, NY, November 28, 1883, P. 4.
6 “Like Her Great-Great-Grandmother,” Buffalo Courier, Buffalo, NY, November 28, 1883, P. 4.
7 Egbert Americus Owen, “Sketch XXXII: Captain Edward McMichael,”Pioneer Sketches of Long Point Settlement, or, Norfolk’s Foundation Builders and their Family Genealogists, W. Briggs, Toronto, ONT., CAN., 1898, p. 181-184.
A great love story. Thanks for sharing.
What a wonderful, well written story! A good read.