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Sarah Orne Jewett House (1774)

Discover an author's inspiration (South Berwick, Maine)

Iconic Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett was born in her grandparents’ eighteenth-century house in 1849. She lived there with her family until she was five years old, when the family built a Greek Revival house next door. As Sarah gained attention as a writer, she and her family lived in the two Portland Street homes in the center of town, but it was her grandparent’s house that Jewett so loved, she used it as the setting for her first novel, Deephaven (1877).  Jewett and her older sister Mary inherited their grandparents’ house in 1887, when Jewett was thirty-eight; by this time, Jewett was a successful author and living part of the year in Boston with her partner, Annie Fields. Still, Jewett returned for several months each year to the South Berwick home she loved.

Today, Sarah’s beloved home is Sarah Orne Jewett House, a National Historic Landmark.

Sarah Orne Jewett House reflects not only the Jewett sisters’ eclectic tastes and their desire to preserve family’s tradition, marrying Georgian architecture with Aesthetic Style; the house also reflects the life, work, and passion of Sarah, who created a life of artistic and literal freedom for herself in Victorian America. The Greek Revival house next door is a visitor center incorporating a museum store, programming space, and community meeting space.

For a more in-depth look at Sarah Orne Jewett and her South Berwick home, visit www.jewett.house, one of Historic New England’s new digital visitor experiences.

Plan Your Visit

Location

5 Portland Street
South Berwick, Maine 03908

EXPLORE DIGITAL TOURS

Days & Hours

Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays
May 31 – October 15

Tours on the hour
11 AM – 3 PM

Admission

$15 adults
$13 seniors
$7 students

Free for Historic New England members

Accessibility

Tour involves standing, walking, and stairs. Visitors with limited mobility may be able to enjoy a first floor tour of the house and grounds. Visitors can access a virtual tour of the museum from the comfort of our visitor center. Folding chairs are provided for visitors who would like to use them while on tour. The site is not equipped with ramps, elevators, or lifts. Service animals are welcome. We are happy to work with you to make your visit an enjoyable one and we encourage visitors with questions or requests to call ahead.

Directions

From south, I-95 to Maine Exit 3; from north, after the York tolls, take Exit 2. Follow Route 236 north 10 miles to South Berwick. At intersection with Route 4, turn right. House is in center of town, where Routes 236 and 4 divide.

Parking

Ample street parking on Portland and Main Streets. Municipal lot on Portland Street within short walking distance of the house.

Contact Information

Upper Hall

Sarah Orne Jewett House is typical of Piscataqua region Georgian-style houses with its wide staircase and landing featuring a large window.

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  • Upper Hall

    Sarah Orne Jewett House is typical of Piscataqua region Georgian-style houses with its wide staircase and landing featuring a large window.

  • Sarah Orne Jewett House

    When she died in 1930, Mary Jewett left the house to Historic New England.

  • Library

    On the walls of the Jewetts' library hang photographs of literary figures Sarah came to know after she became a successful writer.

  • Parlor

    Featuring fine woodwork, the parlor reflects the Jewett sisters' passion for the lives of their ancestors and for preservation of the past.

  • Dining Room

    The Jewetts' dining room is decorated with dark blue accents and evokes a bygone era of seafaring prosperity.

  • Mary's Room

    This room contains the finest woodwork on the second floor and unique 1770s flocked wallpaper.

Trees with autumn foliage along a riverbankConflict

For at least 13,000 years, the Wabanaki, or “People of the Dawn,” lived on and with the land here, in the area they named Quamphegan. The Wabanaki travelled locally and seasonally, planting crops such as squash, beans, and corn in the spring, gathering berries in the summer, and hunting for survival through winter, but the rivers were their main sources of food. Nearby Quamphegan Falls was an important fishing site on the river for catching migratory fish including alewives, shade, salmon, and eels.

Naming this river Newichawannock, or “river of many waterfalls,” the Wabanaki relied on waterways as transportation routes, using dugout and birchbark canoes. They created and used footpaths, many of which later became area roadways.

The arrival of European colonists, beginning the in the beginning in earnest in the early 1600’s radically disrupted the lives of the Wabanaki: disease brought by the colonists to which the Indigenous had no immunity; land dispossession, forced removal, enslavement, eradication of ancestral traditions through conversion to Christianity, and a series of worsening conflicts despite early attempts by the Wabanaki to coexist.

Today, through persistence and resilience, the Wabanaki people living in Maine continue to thrive.

Between about 1670 and 1720, conflict between the Wabanaki and the European colonists surged, one area of conflict being the use of the waterways and land. Intent on exporting Maine timber, the colonists dammed the rivers and erected sawmills. The dams and the water pollution caused by the sawmills severely impacted the migratory fish on which the Wabanaki relied.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the European colonists had taken control of the area and incorporated the town of Berwick. They renamed the Newichawannock River as the Salmon Falls River.

One colonist profiting from the mills was Tilly Haggens, who emigrated from Ireland to Berwick around 1740 and acquired a large tract of land, including mill rights on the Salmon Falls River. Haggens’ land was framed by two early roads, one running from the river north into Berwick, today’s Main Street, and the other running east to Portland, today’s Portland Street. The two streets met at a wide intersection known simply as The Corner.

Tilly Haggens was a trader. In the mid-eighteenth century, his 80-ton sloop, The Dolphin, made regular trips between Portsmouth, NH, and Barbados, there unloading cargoes of timber and loading for import rum, sugar and cotton produced in horrid conditions by people in bondage.

Dying in 1777, Tilly Haggens, in his last testament and will, bequeathed to his son John Haggens (1742-1822) four tracts of land, a third of his mills, mill privileges, and an enslaved male, “also that negro Boy he now has with him, Caesar by name.”

While we know little about Caesar at this time, records may shed some light on his life after slavery; it is possible that after achieving freedom, he stayed on in the Haggens household.

The end of slavery in Maine is generally accepted as 1783; this is the year that Massachusetts colony, which had annexed Maine in 1652, declared slavery unconstitutional.

The 1790 and 1800 censuses list one person under the “all other persons” category used to categorize non-white, free people in Haggens’ household. It is possible that this person is Caesar.

The listed person could also have been an enslaved male named Prince. In 1772, John Haggens placed a runaway advertisement for Prince, a “well set fellow about 25 years of age, has a scar in his forehead over his left eye, had on Kersey round tail’d jacket, woolen under jacket and moose skin breeches…four dollars reward.”

Sarah Orne Jewett may have known about Caesar, and she may have heard something of his history. In her novel, The Tory Lover (1900), set at nearby Hamilton House on the eve of the American Revolution, Jewett created a world inhabited by fictional characters and nonfictional, including Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, Jonathan Hamilton, and Tilly Haggens. One character is an enslaved man named Caesar, who, Jewett writes, “…Caesar, who had been born a Guinea prince, drank in silence, stepped back to his place behind his master, and stood there like a king.”

Starting construction in 1774, John Haggens built the house that would eventually belong to the Jewett family. Wallpaper on the second floor of the house goes back to his ownership; this is known by the king’s stamp on a section of the paper, proof that the paper was imported prior to American Independence.

Around 1800, Haggens added a new one-story kitchen to the north side of the house. Haggens and his family continued to live in the house until about 1819.

In the early nineteenth century, the timber export economy of Southern Maine collapsed: deforestation, combined with Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807, fires in Portsmouth in 1802 and 1813, the Napoleonic Wars, and finally the War of 1812 shut down Southern Maine’s maritime trade.

 

 

2-southberwickcenterinthemid-eighteenthcenturyOrigins of a Writer

Captain Theodore F. Jewett, a merchant and ship owner, moved his family from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to the Haggens house in South Berwick in the 1820s. It appears that Jewett rented the house for a number of years while the John Haggens estate was settled, finally purchasing it in 1839.

In 1848 Captain Jewett’s son, Doctor Theodore Herman Jewett, his wife Caroline, and their baby daughter Mary moved into the house with the Captain. Doctor Jewett began practicing medicine in town and a second daughter, Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett, was born in 1849. The young family continued to live with Captain Jewett until 1854, when a Greek Revival house was built next door for their use. Shortly after moving into the house, a third daughter, Caroline Augusta Jewett, was born.

Theodora Sarah Orne Jewett, named for her father and grandfather, but known to all as Sarah, would grow up to become one of Maine’s finest and most famous writers.

Jewett became interested in writing early, at the age of nineteen publishing her first story, “Jenny Garrow’s Lover,” under the pen name A.C. Eliot in the Boston publication Flag of Our Union. The following year, at the age of twenty, she published her first story, “Mr. Bruce,” in the Atlantic Monthly, embarking on a long relationship with the journal, its editors, and the literary society of Boston and beyond.

1-sarahornejewett1870-1890_historyA Comfortable Home

“I was born here, and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and all the chairs in their places.”                                        –Sarah Orne Jewett, 1895 interview

Her grandfather’s house was a constant in the life of Sarah Orne Jewett; she used the house as a setting for her first novel, Deephaven (1877):

“The rooms all have elaborate cornices, and the lower hall is very fine, with an archway dividing it, and panellings (sic) of sorts, and a great door at each end, through which the lilacs in front and the old pensioner plum-trees in the garden are seen exchanging bows and gestures.”

In 1887, Sarah (pictured) and her sister Mary inherited the house and moved in with their mother. Sarah’s younger sister, Caroline, and her husband Edwin Eastman, took ownership of the Greek Revival house next door.

Mary and Sarah decorated their grandfather’s house for their own use, expressing both a pride in their family’s past and their own independent, sophisticated tastes. While the sisters retained earlier wallpapers in four rooms, they made a dramatic statement in the Aesthetic style in the front hall, choosing a bold Arts and Crafts pattern of tulips on a reflective ground to complement a William Morris carpet in the “Wreath” pattern. By this time Sarah, 38 years old, was a successful author, at the center of a coterie of New England artists, and spending at least half the year at the Boston home of, or traveling with, her life partner Annie Adams Fields.

Annie Adams Fields (1834-1815) was a poet, philanthropist, social reformer, and brilliant society hostess, with whom Sarah Orne Jewett shared a decades-long love relationship following the death of Annie Fields’ husband James T. Fields (of Ticknor and Fields, a major American publishing company of the nineteenth century). The Jewett-Fields relationship was one that allowed them both to pursue their careers while at the same time being fulfilling and mutually supportive.

Spending summer months here, Sarah Orne Jewett devoted much of that time to her writing, producing as much as 20,000 words a day. Sarah chose her grandfather’s writing desk by the second floor hall window at which to work; from here, she could look out on the center of town, finding inspiration in its people for her characters and stories. Sarah also found inspiration in the natural world, whether gardening, walking with her dogs, canoeing, or riding her beloved horse Sheila. For Sarah, nature was also a refuge: as she wrote in a 1902 letter to Annie Fields: “I get such a hunted feeling like the last wild thing that is left in the fields.”

From an early age, as seen in her diaries, Sarah questioned the traditional female role in Victorian society. In her writing, a repeated theme emerges, that of independent heroines breaking out of confines, whether literal or figurative. Her 1884 A Country Doctor is a frankly feminist novel, asserting a woman’s right to have a career: “It counted nothing whether God had put this soul into a man’s body or a woman’s.” In 1896, she completed her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs, a work that shows her evolution. Here, the heroine has already broken free of societal barriers and is drawn into a deep and loving, though unlikely, friendship. Ultimately this love expands beyond the two main characters, to the larger human community.

In 1902, on her 53rd birthday, Sarah was thrown from a carriage. Her injuries effectively curtailing her productive writing, Sarah became a mentor to other writers, notably Willa Cather.

Sarah passed away at home in 1909. Since that time, her room has remained essentially unchanged.

Her sister Mary died in 1930, leaving the old family home to nephew Dr. Theodore Eastman. Eastman bequeathed the old Jewett house and the newer Greek Revival house, which he also owned, to Historic New England, then the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, upon his own death just a year later in 1931.

15-exhibitionspaceinthevisitorcenterBecoming a Museum

After Sarah Orne Jewett’s death in 1909, her bedroom was left as it was. The enshrinement of her bedroom and two small display cases of objects, assembled by Theodore Eastman, indicate the Jewett family had an interest in keeping Sarah’s memory alive and may have allowed visitors to see the house. Eastman’s subsequent gift of both Jewett houses to Historic New England supports this desire.

In its early years as a museum, Sarah Orne Jewett House was named the Sarah Orne Jewett Memorial and the Jewett-Eastman house next door became the Eastman Community House. Though Theodore Eastman left Jewett House to Historic New England, he did not leave its contents. The many books in the house were given to Harvard Library (Eastman’s alma mater) and the remaining contents were left to Eastman’s cousin, Mrs. H. H. Richardson of Boston. Some objects and furnishings stayed in the house, on loan or given to Historic New England by Mrs. Richardson, but others left the house. Furnishings were loaned from various interested parties, such as Elizabeth and Henry Vaughan of nearby Hamilton House, to help fill any missing gaps in the furnishing plan. In 1933 Harvard returned a number of books to the house on permanent loan.

From 1951 through the 1970s, visitors to Sarah Orne Jewett House were greeted by South Berwick native Elizabeth Hayes Goodwin (1895-1992). Miss Goodwin was hostess at Jewett House, giving tours several days a week during the summer months and serving as live-in caretaker from an apartment in the back ell. Goodwin, who had known Jewett when she was a girl, had a deep devotion to the house and to sharing it with the public. “For some lucky visitors…a tour of the house ends with tea in Miss Goodwin’s own living room, once the Jewett kitchen,” wrote Marie Donahue in a 1977 article for Down East Magazine. “There are several mementos given by the Jewetts to the Goodwin family, including, in a place of honor, a miniature yellow tea set which Miss Goodwin as a child received from Sarah.”

In 1972 Historic New England honored Miss Goodwin for her many years of service at the house by dedicating the breakfast room to her. A plaque still hangs in the room today alongside a portrait of Miss Goodwin by local portrait artist Al Brule.

The Greek Revival house of Sarah’s youth served as a community center for decades in the twentieth century and became South Berwick’s library in 1970. The house was deaccessioned by Historic New England in 1984 when a local group, the Jewett-Eastman Memorial Committee, formed to take care and ownership of the property. During the years when the house served as the town’s library, Historic New England acted as an adviser to the Jewett-Eastman Memorial Committee and held preservation easements protecting the property. By April 2012, the library had outgrown Jewett-Eastman House, and moved to a new home. This presented the opportunity for Historic New England to reacquire the property, which is now a visitor center for community art exhibitions and programming.

Landscape History

A c. 1835 map shows landscape features are carefully recorded, including a rectangular plot labeled “Garden” near the 1774 dwelling. The house and garden may well date to the same time. Sarah Orne Jewett described the site as “an old plot of ground where several generations have been trying to make good things grow.” Until the 1900s Jewett preserved her venerable grounds in literature depicting “wide green yards and tall elm-trees to shade them.”

Young Jewett enjoyed red roses around her door and happily smuggled herself into her grandmother’s enclosed front yard for the crumpled petals of blush, white, and cinnamon roses that she used to make a delicious coddle. Jewett achieved fame as a writer early in life, treasuring the privacy and inspiration of what she christened “my own New England garden.” In 1887 Sarah and her sister Mary made a midlife move into their late grandfather’s colonial house and perfected the olden backyard plot.

Today visitors enter at the gate and see many heirlooms that Jewett described: peonies and roses in “great clusters…heavy with dew and perfume,” the London pride of midsummer “most gorgeous to behold,” white mallows and orange tiger lilies, and finally crimson cardinal flowers that “belong to the old nobility.” On the west side there is a collection of herbs mentioned in Jewett’s masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs. On the east side grows the ancient shrub of “The White Rose Road.”

Property FAQs

Find out about group tours, restroom, photography policy, and more.

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  • Can I park at the museum? Is there street parking?

    There is ample street parking available surrounding the house and visitor center.

  • Are there restrooms?

    Yes. There is a restroom in the visitor center.

  • Do we need to take a tour or can we just look around?

    All visitors to the house receive a guided tour.

  • Can I visit the grounds at any time?

    The museum grounds and garden are open daily from dawn to dusk.

  • Can I take photographs inside the museum?

    Interior and exterior photography for personal use is allowed at Historic New England properties. For the safety and comfort of our visitors and the protection of our collections and house museums, we ask that you be aware of your surroundings and stay with your guide. Video, camera bags, tripods, and selfie sticks are not permitted. Professional/commercial photographers and members of the media should visit the press room for more information.

  • Is there a museum shop and restaurant on site?

    Sarah Orne Jewett House has a small museum shop located in the visitor center. The shop offers a selection of books by and about Sarah Orne Jewett, local history, gift items, and Historic New England publications. The museum is located in South Berwick’s downtown area with multiple options for lunch. Our staff is happy to make recommendations.

  • How can I book a group tour?

    Please call 207-384-2454 or visit our Group Tours page for information.

  • How do I become a member of Historic New England and get more involved?

    Join Historic New England now and help preserve the region’s heritage. Call 617-994-5910 or join online.

  • Do you provide admission discounts for EBT cardholders?

    EBT cardholders from all fifty states can show their card for $2 admission to house tours for up to four guests per card.

Related to this Property

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