The Jewett-Eastman House:
Home of Sarah Orne Jewett from 1854 to 1887
Sarah Orne Jewett lived in the
Jewett-Eastman House for 33 years, more than half her life, and wrote over
140 works while it was her home. In 1849, when Jewett was born, her family
resided with her grandparents in the c. 1774 mansion on the corner of Main
and Portland Streets in South Berwick, Maine. Today, we call this the Jewett
House. There Captain Theodore F. Jewett had lived since the early 1820s,
had raised Sarah's father and uncles, and had become the town's most prominent
shipbuilder and merchant. After two sons died in the 1840s, Captain Jewett
persuaded Sarah's father, Dr. Theodore Herman Jewett, to practice his medical
profession close by. For the doctor's growing family, the Jewetts in 1854
built next door on Portland Street the home that later came to be called
the Jewett-Eastman House.
The Greek Revival home, where
Sarah grew up with older sister Mary and younger sister Caroline, has changed
little over the years. Originally it had no porch. A map of the 1860s seems
to indicate that Dr. Jewett worked from a small office out-building in
the back yard. By the 1870s, he had moved his practice into the house,
using the newly added porch as an entrance for his patients. A detached
barn stood in the rear, from which Dr. Jewett may have driven his carriage
on house calls in the country, many a time with young Sarah at his side.
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Jewett-Eastman House
Portland Street
South Berwick, ME
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In this house, as a
teenager, the author began her professional career. She drew upon her childhood
here, the evenings of story-reading by the living room fireplace with the
old Dutch Biblical tiles, her memories of going to sleep in her second
floor back bedroom, and "waking in my warm bed" to hear "the sleds creak
through the frozen snow as the slow oxen plodded by." From this house's
doorway she had crossed Portland Street hundreds of times to attend Miss
Olive Raynes' school, and to climb hillside fields to discover a bubbling
spring or a sentinel pine.
South Berwick in the 1850s and
1860s had become a textile mill town, and its pre-industrial village, a
little commercial center with a variety of shops and elm-shaded streets,
was the Jewett girls' universe; uncles, aunts, cousins and playmates welcomed
them from doorways up and down dusty Portland and Main Streets. The family's
Congregational church and several others stood nearby. Beyond lay the Salmon
Falls River, and up the hill stood Berwick Academy, where Sarah walked
to high school classes, graduating in 1865, as her father had before her.
One can imagine this young woman, not yet twenty, mailing her first magazine
manuscripts at a post office housed in a storefront across the street from
the room where she wrote them. In 1868 she got word that her first story
was published, "Jenny Garrow's Lovers," a tale of unrequited love.
The character of this South Berwick
childhood surely shaped her writing, but so likely did the threats to this
village way of life. The neighborhood surrounding the Jewett compound underwent
profound changes in Sarah's twenty-first year. First the Cummings shoe
factory and housing complex sprang up on Norton Street behind the Jewett
homes. Then on Main Street a quaint row of shops right outside the family's
windows was replaced by a brick commercial block following a devastating
fire in July 1870. These abrupt transformations signaled the rural way
of life Jewett had known would soon disappear, just as had the seafaring
of her grandfather's day. That this upheaval sealed her literary ambition
is unproven, but as the young author developed both friends and readers
in Boston -- and matured under editors like James T. Fields and William
Dean Howells of The Atlantic Monthly -- her writing began to satisfy
them all by capturing the vanishing details of rural Maine for readers
of urban and industrialized America.
In 1877 Jewett published Deephaven,
a collection of sketches she'd begun during the year of the fire. She continued
to produce a stream of stories, novels, poems and essays from her childhood
home on Portland Street, most notably A Country Doctor, inspired
by her father. He died in 1878, and her younger sister married the same
year, but Sarah and her sister Mary remained in the house with their mother
Caroline. Jewett's literary friendships also led her into the Boston cultural
establishment, where in time she spent much of the year. An easy train
ride connected the world of Charles Street and Beacon Hill with that of
South Berwick village.
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Dr. Theodore Jewett's office
probably was at the back of the left veranda. (th)
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Meanwhile the Jewett
House, next door on the corner, had become, since Captain Jewett's death
in 1860, the residence of Dr. Jewett's brother William. When he died in
1887, Sarah and Mary Jewett moved with their mother into the mansion, and
sister Caroline and her husband Edwin Eastman returned to the smaller house
with their eight-year-old son Theodore. The rear of the Jewett-Eastman
House seems to have been expanded at that time. By now, Sarah Jewett's
reputation was international. The two Jewett houses in the center of South
Berwick had become the town's most celebrated residences, receiving visits
from John Greenleaf Whittier, William James, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Julia
Ward Howe, Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Madame Therese Blanc and other
prominent intellectual figures of America and Europe.
Details of the Jewett-Eastman
property continued to thread themselves through her stories. "A Neighbor's
Landmark" begins: "The timber-contractor took a long time to fasten his
horse to the ring in the corner of the shed..." We can wonder if in 1894
the author wrote while looking out her Jewett House bedroom window at the
ring fixed to the corner of a shed behind the Jewett-Eastman House.
Though Sarah Orne Jewett died
in 1909, Mary remained in the Jewett House until 1930. Dr. Theodore Eastman,
a physician like his grandfather, upon his death in 1931, bequeathed both
properties to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities
(SPNEA).
From 1931 to the present day,
the Jewett-Eastman House has been a community center for the town of South
Berwick -- at different times a tea room, a gathering place for bridal
showers and other festivities, and a meeting hall for such organizations
as the South Berwick Woman's Club, the South Berwick Rotary, and even a
1950s group called the Sarah Orne Jewett Garden Club. In 1971 volunteers
organized South Berwick Public Library on the first floor of the house.
When SPNEA put the property on the market, the Jewett-Eastman Memorial
Committee was incorporated and raised funds to buy the building in 1984,
SPNEA retaining historic preservation covenants. Today we can enjoy the
architectural details remaining from Jewett's day - the tiled fireplace,
the dining room cupboards, the author's signature scratched on the window
glass. Even now, with computers in many rooms and trucks rumbling past
the white picket fence, the identity of the house is mingled with the memory
of Maine's beloved author.
Wendy Pirsig
Jewett-Eastman Memorial Committee
South Berwick, Maine
2004
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Arron Sturgis, building
historian, believes that the porch on the left and the doctor's office
at the end of the porch were added after the original construction.
Local maps suggest the addition was completed before 1872. (th)
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