Charles Northend Cogswell, an attorney who served as Maine state senator and representative in the 1830s and 1840s, built this house, according to local historian Margarey Foote (1834 - 1915). Born in South Berwick in 1797, he was the son of Northend Cogswell. He attended Berwick Academy and graduated from Bowdoin in 1814 at the age of 17, then became a law partner of William Allen Hayes, according to the 1880 History of York County. According to a memoir by Mary Jewett, Cogswell shared a law office with Hayes on the second floor of the Parks Store. Cogswell died in 1846.

Charles Northend Cogswell - Photo courtesy of Berwick Academy

 

 

 

 

The intersection of Main and Academy Streets, South Berwick, about 1860

By 1860 the property was the home of John Bowdoin Nealley and Mary Elizabeth Jewett Nealley. She was Sarah Orne Jewett’s second cousin, and the daughter of shipping merchant Thomas Jewett on Portland Street. She was born in South Berwick on October 20, 1817 and was the older sister of Sarah Orne “Sally” Jewett. She also had a younger brother named Charles Cogswell Jewett, born in 1831. He became a physician.

On November 24, 1840, Judge William Allen Hayes married Mary Jewett and John B. Nealley in South Berwick. Nealley was born March 8, 1810, in New Hampshire (probably Nottingham), one of several members of his family to come to South Berwick after the establishment of the Portsmouth Manufacturing Company cotton mill in the 1830s. (Sources: family records provided by Elizabeth Hanna, including New Hampshire State Papers and Hoyt-Nealley Family Bibles.)

Historian Annie Wentworth Baer writes, “There came from the region of the Pawtuckaway hills the Nealleys, and they brought much thrift and business ability. It is said that John was well versed in cotton manufacture; Benjamin was an overseer in the card room; Charles, a fine looking man, was head of the cloth hall, and his sister – Mrs. Higley – was an able assistant. George Nealley was a merchant; Eben the tavern-keeper; and Andrew J. owned and skillfully managed the property sold to Mr. Maddox, besides many acres in Somersworth and Berwick.”

According to the 1880 History of York County, Nealley opened his practice of law in South Berwick about five years after his marriage, in 1845. That same year he joined his neighbors and other members of the Jewett family to found the local chapter of the Odd Fellows fraternal organization and construct the Odd Fellows Block. In the 1857 Maine Business Directory, Nealley was listed as a justice of the peace and the owner of a “country store.”

He was South Berwick’s tax collector in the 1860s and 1870s, and served in the Maine state senate in 1870 and 1871.

Nealley invested in considerable land in downtown South Berwick, as can be seen from the village map of 1872. Perhaps this was made possible by his wife’s inheritance following the death of her father, Thomas D. Jewett, in 1864. Some of Nealley’s property along the railroad gave rise to the name of Nealley Street about 1900. Nealley’s holdings in the 1870s also included buildings near the Portsmouth Company mill. His brothers owned South Berwick property as well.

John and Mary E. Nealley had at least four children, some of whom attended Miss Raynes’ School with their cousins, the Jewetts. A daughter, Emma, died as an infant in 1846. Two daughters only lived to the age of 24: Helen, born about 1844, who died in 1868, and Elizabeth, or Lizzie, born about 1847, who died in 1871.

Son Frederick T. Neally worked as a cobbler and harness maker. He married Addie Knox of Dover in 1879. At the Corner, off Central Square, his shop was at today’s 10 Portland Street, where the old Jewett store had been founded half a century before by his grandfather, Thomas Jewett. Mary Jewett wrote that the business was at one time known as Carpenter and Nealley.

John B. Nealley died in 1886, and his wife Mary Elizabeth in 1890.

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