Born: June 6, 1834, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Died: January 5, 1915
Lived: 148 Charles Street, Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (42.35779, -71.06874)
Buried: Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA
Sarah Orne Jewett was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine. She never married but established a close friendship with writer Annie Adams Fields and her husband, publisher James Thomas Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After the sudden death of Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett's life in what was then termed a "Boston marriage.“ Some modern scholars have speculated that the two were lovers. "The two women found friendship, humor, and literary encouragement" in one another's company, traveling to Europe together and hosting "American and European literati." On September 3, 1902, Jewett was injured in a carriage accident that all but ended her writing career. She was paralyzed by a stroke in March 1909, and she died on June 24 after suffering another. The Georgian home of the Jewett family, built in 1774 overlooking Central Square at South Berwick, is now a National Historic Landmark and Historic New England museum called the Sarah Orne Jewett House.
Together from 1881 to 1909: 28 years.
Annie Adams Fields (June 6, 1834 – January 5, 1915)
Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909)
Days of Love edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1500563325
ISBN-10: 1500563323
Release Date: September 21, 2014
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Beacon Hill is a historic neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, the population of Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood is 9,023.
Address: Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (42.35779, -71.06874)
Type: Historic Street (open to public)
National Register of Historic Places: Beacon Hill Historic District (Bounded by Beacon St., the Charles River Embankment, and Pinckney, Revere, and Hancock Sts.), 66000130, 1966
Place
The window on the top 92 Mount Vernon Street marked the studio for two decades of sculptor Anne Whitney, who was part of a group of American women sculptors gathering around actress Charlotte Cushman in Rome in the mid-XIX century. In 1878, Addy Manning and Anne were living and working in their new studio in Boston. In 1888, Anne purchased 225 acres in Shelbourne (476 North Rd, Shelburne, NH 03581), and Adeline and her spent theirs summer on the farm. Although the home of Annie Adams Fields and her husband, publisher James T. Fields, at 148 Charles Street, does not survive, it was the site of their important literary salon. Prescott Townsend was a significant figure in local GLBT civil rights history. Toward the end of his life, his two remaining properties on the Hill were on its North Slope, traditionally the side where servants of patrician South Slope residents lived. He accommodated a motley collection of tenants, mostly young gay men, in an eight-unit building at 75 Phillips Street; Prescott himself inhabited an old brick townhouse at the end of Lindall Place, a cul-de-sac that terminated just behind the Philips Street apartments. A subterranean corridor lined with cubicles connected the basements of the two buildings. The tunnel was said to have housed runaway slaves in transit on the Underground Railway prior to the Civil War. The Drawing-Room at 148 Charles Street with Miss Jewett and Mrs. Fields, from a photograph lent by Mr. M. A. DeW. Howe, in Sarah Orne Jewett, by Francis Otto Matthiessen, 1929
Life
Who: Anne Whitney (September 2, 1821 – January 23, 1915), Annie Adams Fields (June 6, 1834 – January 5, 1915) and Prescott Townsend (June 24, 1894 – May 23, 1973)
Anne Whitney had a “Boston marriage” with her longtime partner Adeline “Addy” Manning (1836-1906.) During the late Victorian era, such marriages between women, generally professional and upper class, were both common and accepted by society at large. After the death of James T. Fields in 1881, his wife Annie Fields continued to support the work of many women writers, including Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909), who spent winters with her, poet Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-96.) Fields was also active in charitable works. She spent many hours at the Charity House on Chardon Street and cofounded the Cooperative Society of Visitors, a case review agency that made recommendations to the central administration of Boston’s relief organizations for aid disbursement. The Society was absorbed into the Associated Charities of Boston. Fields’s book “How to Help the Poor” (1884) served as an unofficial guide to the programs and policies of Associated Charities. Prescott Townsend was an American cultural leader and gay rights activist, from the 1930s through the early 1970s. He was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the fourth child (third son) of Kate Wendell and Edward Britton Townsend; his mother was both a descendant of Myles Standish and other Mayflower passengers, and the great-granddaughter of the American founding father Roger Sherman. He attended the Volkman School, graduated in 1918 from Harvard University, and attended Harvard Law School for one year. He spent the summer of 1914 in logging camps in Montana and Idaho, and traveled to North Africa and the Soviet Union. He returned to Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood, where he began a relationship with theater producer Elliot Paul, with whom he founded the experimental Barn Theatre in 1922. Paul introduced Townsend to numerous avant-garde creatives, including openly-gay writer André Gide. Townsend operated speakeasies, restaurants, and theaters, cultivating a bohemian neighborhood on Beacon Hill's Joy Street. He pioneered the popularity of A-frame houses, building several in Provincetown. He was later a founder of the Provincetown Playhouse, where the works of Eugene O'Neill were first performed. In the 1930s, Townsend repeatedly addressed the Massachusetts legislature as an acknowledged homosexual man advocating for the repeal of sodomy legislation, urging the lawmakers "to legalize love." He was indulged due to his Boston Brahmin status, but ignored. While working at the Fall River shipyard during WWII, Townsend was arrested on Jan. 29, 1943 for participating in an "unnatural and lascivious act". The Mid-Town Journal headline reported, "Beacon Hill 'Twilight' Man Member of Queer Love Cult Seduced Young Man". He didn't deny it, and was sentenced to eighteen months in the Massachusetts House of Corrections on Deer Island. No one in his influential family applied any pressure to shorten his jail time. A month later he was officially stricken from both the New York and Boston Social Registers. Townsend had, for years, been suffering from failing health brought on by Parkinson's Disease, and on May 23, 1973 his body was found in the Beacon Hill apartment of John Murray who had been caring for him during the final years of his life. The police reported that "when we came in to take charge of the body, Mr. Townsend was found in a kneeling prayer position at his bedside." Of his entire family, only one sister, a nephew and a great-nephew attended his memorial service at the Arlington Street Church.
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
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Mount Auburn Cemetery is the first rural cemetery in the United States, located on the line between Cambridge and Watertown in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, 4 miles (6.4 km) west of Boston.
Address: 580 Mt Auburn St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA (42.37479, -71.14449)
Type: Cemetery (open to public)
Hours: Monday through Sunday 8.00-19.00
Phone: +1 617-547-7105
National Register of Historic Places: 75000254, 1975. Also National Historic Landmarks.
Place
With classical monuments set in a rolling landscaped terrain, Mount Auburn Cemetery marked a distinct break with Colonial-era burying grounds and church-affiliated graveyards. The appearance of this type of landscape coincides with the rising popularity of the term "cemetery,” derived from the Greek for "a sleeping place." This language and outlook eclipsed the previous harsh view of death and the afterlife embodied by old graveyards and church burial plots. The 174-acre (70 ha) cemetery is important both for its historical aspects and for its role as an arboretum. It is Watertown’s largest contiguous open space and extends into Cambridge to the east, adjacent to the Cambridge City Cemetery and Sand Banks Cemetery.
Notable queer burials are at Mount Auburn Cemetery:
• Roger Brown (1925–1997), professor at Harvard University from 1952 until 1957 and from 1962 until 1994, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1957 until 1962. During his time at the University of Michigan, he met Albert Gilman (died 1989), later a Shakespeare scholar and a professor of English at Boston University. Gilman and Brown were partners for over 40 years until Gilman's death from lung cancer in 1989. Brown's sexual orientation and his relationship with Gilman were known to a few of his closest friends, and he served on the editorial board of The Journal of Homosexuality from 1985, but he did not come out publicly until 1989. Brown chronicled his personal life with Gilman and after Gilman's death in his memoir. Brown died in 1997, and is buried next to Gilman.
• Katharine Ellis Coman (1857-1915), author on economic subjects who lived with Katharine Lee Bates (Author of "America the Beautiful"), and died at her home, was cremated at Mount Auburn Cemetery but was buried with her parents at Cedar Hill Cemetery, Newark, Ohio.
• Abby Adeline Manning (1836-1906), painter, and her partner, Anne Whitney (1821-1915), poet and sculptor, together.
• Amy Lowell (1874–1925), poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926.
• Annie Adams Fields (1834–1915), author and hostess; wife of James Thomas Fields, later companion to Sarah Orne Jewett.
• Charlotte Cushman (July 23, 1816 – February 18, 1876), actress, her last partner was lesbian sculptor Emma Stebbins, who sculpted Angels of the Water on Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, New York City.
• Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) was a leading American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. She founded the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
• Harriet Goodhue Hosmer (1830-1908), sculptor. She was devoted for 25 years to Lady Ashburton, widow of Bingham Baring, 2nd Baron Ashburton (died 1864). Lady Ashburton was born Louisa Caroline Stewart-Mackenzie, youngest daughter of James Alexander Stewart-Mackenzie. Hosmer was good friend with Charlotte Cushman and Matilda Hays, Cushman’s partner, left Charlotte for her.
• Alice James (1848-1892) (in the nearby Cambridge Cemetery), American diarist. The only daughter of Henry James, Sr. and sister of psychologist and philosopher William James and novelist Henry James, she is known mainly for the posthumously published diary that she kept in her final years. Her companion was Katherine Peabody Loring and from their relationship it was conied the term “Boston Marriage”.
• Henry James (1843-1916) (in the nearby Cambridge Cemetery), American writer. He is regarded as one of the key figures of XIX century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
• Stewart Mitchell (November 25, 1892–November 3, 1957) was an American poet, editor, and professor of English literature. Along with Gilbert Seldes, Mitchell’s editorship of The Dial magazine signaled a pivotal shift in content from political articles to aesthetics in art and literature. In 1929 he became the editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Richard Cowan (1909-October 24, 1939)’s diary, which he started while he was a student at Cornell, chronicles the life of a young gay man in Boston in the 1930s. Cowan committed suicide at the age of thirty. His forty-seven-year old mentor and long-term lover, Stewart Mitchell, was devastated. Mitchell resigned as president of the Massachusetts Historical Society on account of a “personal misfortune,” and wrote a friend, “There is no running away from a broken heart.” According to the Boston Herald Nov. 9, 1957: “Mitchell directed that the urn containing his mortal remains be buried, “but not in winter,” in the lot “where my dear friends Georgine Holmes Thomas and Richard David Cowan now repose”.”
• Francis Williams Sargent (1848 - 1920) and Jane Welles Hunnewell Sargent (1851 - 1936), Margarett Williams Sargent’s parents. Margarett Sargent (1892-1978) was born into the privileged world of old Boston money; she was a distant relative of John Singer Sargent.
• Henry Davis Sleeper (1878-1934), a nationally-noted antiquarian, collector, and interior decorator, who had a long lasting friendship with A. Piatt Andrew, an economist, an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, the founder and director of the American Ambulance Field Service during WWI, and a United States Representative from Massachusetts.
by Elisa Rolle
Queer Places, Vol. 1 edited by Elisa Rolle
ISBN-13: 978-1532901904
ISBN-10: 1532901909
Release Date: July 24, 2016
CreateSpace Store: https://www.createspace.com/6228297
Amazon (print): http://www.amazon.com/dp/1532901909/?tag=elimyrevandra-20
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