Sarah Orne Jewett lived in the Jewett-Eastman House for 33 years, from 1854 to 1887 or 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.

Photo from Sarah Orne Jewett by F. O. Matthiessen

 

Was this house Dr. Jewett’s office for a time?

 

The Greek Revival house, 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 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.

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 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.

Bread oven, Jewett-Eastman House

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.

Fireplace in the back room of the Jewett-Eastman House

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, died in 1931. He left both properties to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA), now Historic New England.

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 the South Berwick Public Library on the first floor of the house. When SPNEA put the property on the market in 1984, the Jewett-Eastman Memorial (JEM) Committee was incorporated and raised funds to buy the building, 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.

-- Text and color photos by Wendy Pirsig

Works by Sarah Orne Jewett
Published During Her Years in the Jewett-Eastman House

This list is provided by Dr. Terry Heller of Coe College. Full texts of all these stories, novels, poems and essays are at the Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project.

1868
Jenny Garrow's Lovers [story]
The Baby-House Famine [poem]
1869
Mr. Bruce [story]
1870
The Shipwrecked Buttons [story]
In a Hurry [poem]
The Girl with the Cannon Dresses [story]
1871
The Spendthrift Doll [poem]
The Orchard's Grandmother [story]
The House that Ran Away [story]
Half-Done Polly [story]
The Boy with One Shoe [story]
1872
The Yellow Kitten [story]
The Best China Saucer [story]
Daybreak [poem]
Grown-Up [story]
Desert Islanders [story]
1873
The Kitten's Ghost [story]
Birds' Nests [essay]
Doctors and Patients [essay]
Protoplasm and House-Cleaning [essay]
The Old Doll [poem]
The Shore House [story]
The Turtle Club [story]
The Water Dolly [story]
1874
Jake's Holiday [story]
The Sparrow's Mourners [poem]
Miss Sydney's Flowers [story]
The Little Doll that Lied [poem]
Cartridges [essay]
My Friend the Housekeeper [story]
1875
Prissy's Visit [story]
Tame Indians [essay]
Together [poem]
Marigold House [story]
Deephaven Cronies [story]
Woodchucks [story]
Patty's Dull Christmas [story]
1876
Discontent [poem]
The Pepper-Owl [story]
Nancy's Doll [story]
Deephaven Excursions [story]
A Lost Doll [poem]
1877
Deephaven [novel]
1878
Play Days [stories]
A Late Supper [story]
Beyond the Toll-Gate [story]
A Lost Lover [story]
Patty's Long Vacation [story]
Verses [poem]
Only a Doll [poem]
Materials for American Fiction [essay]
1879
Old Friends and New [stories]
Lady Ferry [story]
Theodore Herman Jewett, M.D. of South Berwick [essay]
Paper Roses [story]
Domestic Touches in Fiction [essay]
At Home from Church [poem]
A Sorrowful Guest [story]
A Bit of Shore Life [story]
Good Luck [story]
1880
A Little Traveler [story]
Flowers in the Dark [poem]
Verses for a Letter [poem]
Hallowell's Pretty Sister [story]
Cake Crumbs [story]
A Night in June [poem]
An Autumn Holiday [story]
Two Mornings [poem]
In a Christmas Letter [poem]
Stolen Pleasures [story]
1881
Country By-Ways [stories]
Two Musicians [poem]
Andrew's Fortune [story]
Sheltered [poem]
A Bit of Foolishness [story].
On Star Island [poem]
Miss Becky's Pilgrimage [story]
River Driftwood [essay]
The Soul of the Sunflower [poem]
From a Mournful Villager [story]
At Waking [poem]
Jack's Merry Christmas [story]
1882
Good Society Novels [essay]
A Country Boy in Winter [poem]
The Plea of Insanity [essay]
Tom's Husband [story]
Missing [poem]
The Color Cure [essay]
Pleasant Rooms [essay]
Waiting [poem]
Lucky People [story]
Deplorable Improvements [essay]
The Mate of the Daylight [story]
Woodland Mysteries [essay]
A Guest at Home [story]
An Afternoon in Holland [essay]
After Christmas [story]
1883
The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore [stories]
Jack's Merry Christmas [story]
A French Country Girl [essay]
The Eagle Trees - To J.G.W. [poem to John Greenleaf Whittier]
A New Parishoner [story]
A Landless Farmer [story]
Ungathered Flowers [essay]
Katy's Birthday [story]
A Dark Carpet [story]
The Hare and the Tortoise [story]
Miss Manning's Minister[story]
The Confession of a House-Breaker [essay]
Perseverence [poem]
Every-Day Work [essay]
Tree Planting [essay]
An Only Son [story]
Dunluce Castle [poem]
A Good Inheritance [essay]
The Christmas Eyes [story]
1884
A Country Doctor [novel]
An Adventure [essay]
The Becket Girls' Tree [story]
A Visit Next Door [story]
The Church Mouse [story]
A Farmer's Sorrow [poem]
The News from Petersham [story]
Buttons [story]
Misdirected Energy [essay]
1885
Farmer Finch [story]
A Marsh Island [novel]
Mary and Martha [story]
1886
A White Heron and Other Stories
A White Heron [story]
Three Friends [story]
The Dulham Ladies [story]
Marsh Rosemary [story]
York Garrison, 1640 [poem]
A Garden Story [story]
The Two Browns [story]
The King of Folly Island [story]
1887
The Story of the Normans [history]
A Christmas Guest [story]
The Courting of Sister Wisby [story]
A Caged Bird [poem]
Miss Peck's Promotion [story]
My School Days [essay]
The Landscape Chamber[story]
Law Lane [story]

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