Preservation’s
MATRONS
by SALLY ZIMMERMAN Retired Senior Preservation Services Manager
Women claimed leadership roles in Historic New England’s earliest days Editor’s Note: This year is the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which extended full voting rights to American women. The decades-long campaign for the vote has sparked retrospective appreciations for the many ways in which those years of activism and reform transformed women’s lives and place in society. With that in mind, a look at the origins of Historic New England offers insights into the breadth and scope of women’s involvement in the early days of the organization and its place in the historic preservation movement in the United States.
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Edith Greenough Wendell speaking at the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Hancock at First Church in Quincy, Massachusetts. Courtesy of the Portsmouth (N.H.) Athenaeum.
n Saturday, December 18, 1909, William Sumner Appleton traveled to the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord to assess “property of revolutionary value,” probably in connection with his interest in the Sons of the American Revolution. The following Monday he returned, hoping to persuade the owner not to modernize the Jonathan Harrington House, which faced Lexington Green. Harrington, one of eight men killed in the first military engagement of the Revolution on April 19, 1775, died on the doorstep of his Georgian residence. Appleton met with the owner on December 22 for further talks and to conduct a study of the house. This time, accompanying him were restoration
architect Joseph Everett Chandler and a second person, in whose “auto” they had ridden. By December 28, Appleton, having failed to persuade the owner not to alter Harrington’s house, determined to fight such losses and began conversations to establish the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), now Historic New England. The person who drove Appleton and Chandler to Lexington was Edith Greenough Wendell (18591938), president of the Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, wife of a Harvard English professor, and the mother of four. Wendell lived a life of deep civic engagement, including long service to the Girl Scouts’ national council. During World War I she chaired the Massachusetts Women’s Liberty Loan HistoricNewEngland.org
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