Thomas Jewett (1790-1864) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s great uncle. He was Capt. Theodore F. Jewett’s brother, and business partner in their successful shipbuilding and merchant enterprise at Pipe Stave Landing in the generation after Jonathan Hamilton. In 1860, after Capt. Jewett had died, Thomas Jewett was said to be the wealthiest man in South Berwick.

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Thomas Dearborn Jewett was born on May 8, 1790 in Rochester, New Hampshire, and seems to have come to South Berwick about 1815 with his father, Dearborn, and two brothers, Benjamin (b. 1792) and Theodore F. (b. 1787). This older brother Theodore was Sarah Orne Jewett’s grandfather, the sea captain who around 1820 moved his family into the Haggens house at the Corner that we today know as the Sarah Orne Jewett House. Thomas Jewett may have built his house about the same time.

His wife, Elizabeth (Betsey) Lord, was born in Rollinsford (formerly Somersworth), NH, in 1791. She seems to have been the daughter of Capt. Nathan Lord (1758-1807), a partner of Jonathan Hamilton.

Three examples of ships the Jewett brothers built at Pipe Stave Landing illustrate the scope and character of their maritime commerce upon their arrival in South Berwick:

1824 - Marion - 330 tons; length, 99.4 feet; beam, 27.5 feet; depth, 13.75 feet. William Hanscom, builder, Berwick. Ichabod Goodwin, Samuel Coues, Timothy Ferguson and Theodore Jewett, owners. Triangular trade, Europe, West Indies and the South. Wrecked off Key West in 1843.

1825 - Olive & Eliza - 386 tons; length, 111.7 feet; beam, 27.7; depth, 13.9 feet. William Hanscom, builder, Berwick. Ferguson & Jewett and I. D. Parsons, owners. Theodore F. Jewett was master on first voyage, the triangle and Liverpool. Later sailed throughout the Atlantic and to the Far East. Grounded 1846 in Dry Tortugas, with 118,431 barrel staves.

1832 - Berwick - William Hanscom, builder, Berwick. Lost 1846 in a collision off Cape of Good Hope under the command of Samuel W. Jewett, Theodore F. Jewett’s son.

Though Thomas Jewett seems never to have gone away to sea, he was immersed in the business of trading, as well as investing in property in the South Berwick area. The brothers operated a West Indies trade goods store in South Berwick village. In the 1830s the store seems to be at 10 Portland Street, as shown on a map of 1835. The business was still at that location in 1860.

Mary Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett’s sister, described the inventories handled by her grandfather and great uncle as she recalled the early 1800s when writing in around 1890:

“We read interesting lists of brocades, satins, velvets, silver, china, and glass which was sent for from England before the Revolution by the rich and great, and wonder just what was meant by the strange names of materials oftentimes, but while we should probably find few actual luxuries in the stock of the general store of 1800 or thereabouts we should find a great variety surely both in quantity and arrangement from great bins of coarse salt, corn, salt fish, down to pins sold by the ounce in bulk, and in bulk it literally was with the queer round heads twisted on. Along with the pins went skein, cotton, wooden combs, queer gauze ribbons, laces, tapes, queer collage bonnets and so forth. Who nowadays would know what Rouen cassimere was, or calimanco, or paduasoy, and yet all these and many other like materials were of common use a hundred years ago, and perhaps later. Broad cloths and other materials for mens clothing, satins for vests, gast silk and lawn handkerchief for men's neckties, great bell crowned beaver hats, strange shaped shoes, high shell combs were in every well-provided stock, along with writing paper, wafers, sealing wax, quill pens and blotting sand, beside medicines, hardware, and a few books.”

Thomas Jewett’s ledger from 1850

Thomas and Betsey Jewett may have raised at least seven children in their Portland Steet house: Mary Elizabeth (1817-1890), Sarah “Sally” Orne, (1820-1864), Thomas Dearborn, (1823-1899), Olive Maria, (1828-1832), John Lord, (1826-1832), Horace (1834-1897), and Charles Cogswell, (b. 1831).

This youngest son seems to have been named for the family’s 34-year-old neighbor, attorney Charles N. Cogswell. During the Civil War, Charles C. Jewett served as a surgeon with the 15th Massachusetts Infantry, according to the "History of York County." He was a physician still living in 1880.

Mary Elizabeth married attorney and businessman John B. Nealley. After the death of Charles N. Cogswell, they lived in the house that still stands at 169 Main Street.

“Sally” Orne Jewett married her cousin, Elisha Jewett, the son of Benjamin Jewett. They lived across the street at 176 Portland Street. She died a few months after her father, in complications from childbirth.

Thomas Jewett died in 1864 at age 74, the last of the trio of Jewett brothers. After his wife Betsey died in 1867, Elisha Jewett seems to have inherited the Thomas Jewett homestead where his wife had grown up. In 1866 he married Charlotte T. Cross of Portsmouth, NH.

In 1890 the street next to the house was named Jewett Street, according to
the South Berwick town report of 1891. It was later changed to Jewett
Avenue.

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