Preservation’s Matrons

by SALLY ZIMMERMAN Retired Senior Preservation Services Manager Preservation’s MATRONS

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. O 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 (1859- 1938), 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 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.

left Caroline Osgood��Emmerton, a founding member of the Board of Trustees of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, checks on students in a needlework class held at the Seaman’s Bethel in Salem, Massachusetts (courtesy of the House of the Seven Gables). page 29 From left, Abba Goold Woolson served as Maine’s vice president in SPNEA’s first decade (courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection. The New York Public Library). Adeline Fitz was among the organization’s first board members. Mary Lee Ware hosted SPNEA’s initial annual meeting at her home on Beacon Hill in Boston.

Committee, part of a national effort that recruited 60,000 women to sell bonds financing the war effort.

The obituary for Wendell in The New York Times called her “a national leader of movements to preserve historical sites,” and indeed, her crowning achievement was the rescue of the c. 1716 Warner House in her husband’s ancestral home of Portsmouth, New Hampshire: the landmark brick mansion was to be demolished for a gas station. In 1931, during the Great Depression, Wendell raised the funds to purchase the property, founding the Warner House Association and opening the site as a museum just a year later, in what her friend Appleton called “one of the most remarkable instances of preservation in America.”

Perhaps Wendell’s early involvement with Harrington House influenced Appleton to enlist Elizabeth Welles Perkins (1848- 1928), also active in the Colonial Dames, to sign his 1910 petition to the Massachusetts General Court for the incorporation of SPNEA. Perkins, sole heir to her mother’s fortune and the only woman on Appleton’s legislative petition, joined Wendell on the young Society’s first board of trustees. The early leadership of the organization was remarkable for the number of women who were involved, and for the range of interests and achievements they represented.

While Appleton’s society followed a common model of the day with the installation of regional vice presidents in each New England state, not so typically, the early trustees and vice presidents included equal numbers of men and women. Among the women, many had acquired organizational leadership skills in the patriotic women’s groups of the day, such as the Colonial Dames and Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), but their life experiences reflected a range of origins. Two of the first board members, Adeline Fitz (1861-1938) and Ida Louise Miller (1863-1954), both of Wakefield, Massachusetts, were active in the DAR (Fitz as its national president general) and came from old New England families but neither had been born into great privilege or wealth.

Other early women trustees, vice presidents, and officers, such as Alice Mary Longfellow (1850- 1928, Appleton’s cousin), Caroline Osgood Emmerton (1866-1942), and Mary Lee Ware (1858-1937), shared Appleton’s elite upbringing, but as single women, they had more freedom to use their considerable wealth and influence in lives of service. Their legacies resonate today.

It was at Ware’s 41 Brimmer Street home on Beacon Hill in Boston that the first annual meeting of Appleton’s organization was held.

Emmerton was another founding member of SPNEA’s Board of Trustees, whose legacy of service to her native Salem, Massachusetts, prompted the Salem Evening News to dub her the city’s “Person of the Century” in 1999, nearly sixty years after her death. Emmerton was passionate about preservation as well as the assimilation of new immigrants into American society. She combined both passions in the complex of early buildings she purchased and restored not just for their antiquity, but also as a settlement house that offered English, sewing, carpentry, and other classes for eastern and southern European immigrants in her rapidly industrializing city. Beginning with the 1908 purchase

and restoration of the TurnerIngersoll House (now the House of Seven Gables), Emmerton went on to acquire and repurpose five more seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses for her settlement work.

Through its early decades, SPNEA’s regional leadership brought together other notable women, among them Theodate Pope Riddle (1867-1946), an architect, patron of Hill-Stead Museum (the 1901 Farmington, Connecticut, home of her parents, which she designed), and founder of the nearby Avon Old Farms School. The latter she designed in a retrospective English cottage style and constructed from masonry quarried and timber felled at the site. Riddle served as SPNEA’s Connecticut vice president in the early decades of the 1900s.

Among the most exceptional of the early leaders of the organization was Abba Goold Woolson (1838-1921), who was Maine’s vice president in the first decade of the organization. An educator, women’s rights activist, and author, Woolson taught Latin and higher mathematics, traveled widely (including to the

Yosemite Valley, where she met and befriended the naturalist John Muir), and advocated for dress reform among other topics that supported women’s health, physical and intellectual education, and equal roles in productive life. In 1873 Woolson edited a lecture series given in Boston by female physicians titled “Dress-Reform,” supplying the closing lecture herself and arguing, “The girls of today should be saved before they have learned to wear the woman’s dress, with its countless abominations, that they may be enabled to grow up untrammeled, vigorous, and happy, to show the world a nobler womanhood and a noble race of children than our country offers now.”

The positions these women held on the question of suffrage is known only for Riddle and Woolson. In 1892, Woolson spoke at Pembroke College (now part of Brown University) in Providence, Rhode Island, on behalf of the Women’s Suffrage Association. As Connecticut considered ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, Riddle wrote an open letter to Governor Marcus Holcomb, published in the Hartford Courant

on April 20, 1920, in which she asked, “Are you and the antisuffragists entirely satisfied that this man-controlled world is the last word in efficiency and wisdom? Have not the men made rather a mess of it?”

How the other female vice presidents and officers of SPNEA might have responded to that question is unknown. Several of them, such as Wendell (whose husband was engaged in antisuffrage efforts), very likely did not support full voting rights for women, given that many prominent “club women” of wealth and privilege were content to use the influence of their positions in elite society without the franchise. But the organization’s early leadership brought them together on behalf of the region’s history and heritage. In the summer of 1920, when twothirds of the state legislatures had voted to ratify the amendment, thirteen of SPNEA’s thirty officers, vice presidents, and trustees were female and they, along with their male counterparts, had brought the organization through its initial decade and well into the twentieth century.