Sarah Orne Jewett House (1774)

The arrival of European colonists in the early 1600’s radically disrupted the lives of the Wabanaki. The Indigenous faced multiple challenges including disease brought by the colonists to which they 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.

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.

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.

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.