Explore the home of the writer and regionalist
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In this episode of Someone Lived Here, Kendra Gaylord brings you to Sarah Orne Jewett’s home in South Berwick, Maine. The home was built in 1774 and was lived in by the Jewett family for about 100 years.
The home, this town, and it’s residents were the inspiration for many of Sarah Orne Jewett’s novels and short stories. Her writing is often described as regionalism, but behind her trailing descriptions of the Maine countryside, she was detailing the lives of independent women. Although these books were fiction we can see that independence mirrored in her own life which she lived here and in Boston with her partner Annie Fields.
We learn more about Sarah, Annie, and the Jewett Family by talking with the Southern Maine Site Manager for Historic New England, Alyssa Sweet. She brings us through the dining room, library, and the bedrooms. We get to explore Sarah Orne Jewett’s writing desk and her cozy bedroom on the second floor.
You can watch the YouTube video to experience the home, or even better visit the Sarah Orne Jewett House from June to October.
This episode wouldn’t be possible without Historic New England. Their work has preserved houses for over 100 years. Thank you to the entire Historic New England team: Alyssa Sweet, Laura Sullivan, and Keith Foster. Professor Terry Heller has collected the letters and diaries of Sarah Orne Jewett online through The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project. Nancy Wetzel’s correspondence on Sarah Orne Jewett quotations was wonderful. The book Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and her Work by Paula Blanchard is a great biography and was very helpful in producing this episode.
Tim Cahill created our music. Thanks to my brother for recording all video footage. Photos below taken from my 2024 visit to the Sarah Orne Jewett house. You will be able to find a full transcript and sources of this episode below the photos and video, the YouTube video also has captions available.
Below is a transcript for S3E8 of Someone Lived Here at Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine. If you have any questions about the show or suggestions on how to make it more accessible please reach out at someonelivedhere [at] gmail.com.
Kendra Gaylord: Welcome to the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick, Maine. The home, this town, and its residents were the inspiration for many of her novels and short stories. Sarah Orne Jewett is often described as a regionalist, but behind her trailing descriptions of the Maine countryside. She was detailing the lives of independent women. And although these books were fiction, we can see that independence mirrored in her own life, which she lived here and in Boston with her partner Annie Fields. This is Someone Lived Here, a podcast about the places people called home. I’m your host, Kendra Gaylord. [Music]
We’re outside a large white colonial house with big pane, 12 over 12, windows surrounded by black shutters. Like a lot of colonial houses, it looks like a box with a few triangular details mixed in. The dark roof is hipped with three pedimented dormer windows popping up symmetrically, along with two brick chimneys on either side. From the sidewalk, there is a brick pathway which leads you to the front door with lilac bushes on either side. A small portico shelters the black front door. And on the other side of that front door, in the front hallway is Alyssa. She is the Southern Maine Site Manager and oversees three houses for historic New England, including the one we’re in right now. The Sarah Orne Jewett House is very old, but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Alyssa is going to explain just how not simple it is.
Alyssa Sweet: The wallpaper is a reproduction, but it is a arts and craft movement wallpaper of red tulips with a silver background. And it really brings the outdoors like inside, which is one of the themes that we’ll see throughout the house. What is also interesting about this hallway is the molding and just the architecture in this. So that is all original to the house. The house was built in 1774 by a man named Tilly Haggins. It becomes a part of Sarah’s family, I think the early 1800s or so. And it’s the house that Sarah is born in in 1849. And at the time of her birth, her grandfather, her step-grandmother, both of her parents, and her older sister are living here. And 5 years after that, her mom becomes pregnant with her younger sister Carrie. And they say, “That’s it. That’s too many people. We can’t fit in this house anymore.” and they build another house actually right next to the house that we’re standing in. And that is now our visitor center today. And that’s actually the house that Sarah grows up in. Though she spends a lot of time in the house that we’re standing in cause her grandfather is still here and he’s very influential to her imagination and her stories.”
Kendra Gaylord: She just mentioned the wood moulding in this hallway. The entire ceiling is filled with painted white wooden details, cornices, dentils. But why take my word for it when you can hear Sarah’s description of this front hallway from her first novel, Deep Haven? “The rooms all have elaborate cornices, and the lower hall is very fine, with an archway dividing it, and panelings of all sorts, and a great door at each end through which the lilacs in front and the old pensioner plum trees in the garden are seen exchanging boughs and gestures.” There is an illustration that was included in an edition of Deephaven, and it hangs framed next to the staircase. The sketch is nearly identical to the hallway we’re in today, but the back door isn’t wide open, but instead boarded up while it’s getting repaired. We’re going to walk past that door to get to the dining room in the back left of the house. And when you walk in here, there is only one thing you can really notice.
Alyssa Sweet: So, welcome to our dining room. What’s really cool about this wallpaper is that it’s silver and like an indigo blue and indigo blue in wallpaper at the time that this wallpaper was installed in about the 1840s was very hard to get your hands on. And it is one of the examples in this house where there’s wealth in this house, but you may not necessarily know how much wealth unless you know all these details.
Kendra Gaylord: And this wallpaper is one of those details. The wallpaper has one of the brightest blues I’ve ever seen, especially considering it’s over 150 years old. The wealth that made this wallpaper possible didn’t come from Sarah’s father, a doctor. It was her grandfather who purchased this home. He was a sea captain. Like most sea captains from the early 1800s, his wealth is directly connected to the slave trade. He sailed ships with lumber and likely fish to the West Indies where it was traded for rum and molasses. Dried saltfish was a major export from New England and was used to feed the huge populations of enslaved people who were forced into the grueling planting and processing of sugar cane. The rum and molasses and other traded goods could be purchased in South Berwick at Theodore and his brother’s store across the street from this house. In the corner of the dining room with the shimmering blue wallpaper behind it is a portrait of Sarah Orne Jewett.
Alyssa Sweet: We have a portrait of Sarah about the age of 30, which is about the age that she was when she first publishes Deephaven. And that’s her first published novel. And it’s about two women, young women, who go up to a house in Maine that one of the women has acquired, like inherited, and their summer adventures up there. It’s about friendship, it’s about love, it’s about loyalty and just kind of finding out and expressing who you are in your young 20s. And it’s around this time that Sarah starts finding these relationships and falling in love. And most of the time she’s not falling in love with men. She’s falling in love with women. And the one of the main characters in Deephaven is loosely based off of a love interest, a love interest of her.
Kendra Gaylord: That love interest, both the fictional woman and the real woman, were named Kate. In Sarah’s diary at 22, she writes about Kate after spending four days with her in Newport, Rhode Island. “Ah, my dear darling Kate, what lovely days those four were. The walks and talks by sunlight and starlight, and at twilight in the house, the sea and the sunshine, and the delicious Newport air, and the kind, charming people I saw, and that blessed Kate herself. How I wish I could do something for you to show you that I love you, Kate. When I try to talk about it, the only words I can think of seem such weak, silly, meaningless ones, and just the same ones which people use when they do not mean half that I do.”
But Sarah might have figured out those words when she wrote Deephaven. She writes about the stars that the characters Helen and Kate stared at while rowing together at twilight. “It seemed as if we were alone and the sea shoreless and as the darkness closed round us softly we watched the stars come out and were always glad to see Kate’s star and my star which we had chosen when we were children. I used long ago to be sure of one thing that however far away heaven might be it could not be out of sight of the stars. And in the following chapter there are three pages devoted to Kate. I think I should be happy in any town if I were living there with Kate Lancaster. I will not praise my friend as I can praise her or say half the things I might say honestly. She is so fresh and good and true and enjoys life so heartily.”
Alyssa Sweet: Other things that I do like to point out in this room is another illustration which you can see. It’s another Woodberry illustration.” That’s another illustration that was included in Deephaven just like the one of the stairs. “And there is a cabinet a buffet of a kind in the right side of the illustration. And if you look behind you, you’ll notice that it is the same cabinet buffet piece of furniture, which is really cool. What is even cooler about that is one of the doors occasionally will pop open and it really spooks guests.”
Kendra Gaylord: I did not see the buffet pop open. But to avoid such a ghostly situation, let’s explore the library cause I’m sure nothing ghostly has ever happened in a library.
Alyssa Sweet: So, one thing that you will notice in this house is that there is books in almost every room. As far as we know, this was the library when her grandfather lived here. This was the library when her father lived here, and she continued to have it as a library when she was here.
Kendra Gaylord: The room is at the front of the house with wood paneling halfway up the wall and a rich orangey red paint on the rest. There is a fireplace, a writing desk, a sofa, and bookcases on either side of a window that nearly reach the ceiling. There is artwork all over the walls and above the fireplace is a very good photo.
Alyssa Sweet: I think one of my favorite photos in this entire house is the one up here and we call it a traffic jam and it’s the center of town as as it is today. Today it’s very busy and congested, but this traffic jam is not cement trucks and logging trucks and cars. It’s sheep and goats.” Now, I have worked pretty hard to not let you guys hear the outside, but this intersection is very busy and loud despite having no sheep in it. So, if you occasionally hear a big truck making a left turn, we can just pretend I was trying to capture the greater ambiance of this house. I mentioned the bookcases, but I don’t think I did them justice.
Kendra Gaylord: And beautiful like um bookcases with glass.
Alyssa Sweet: So, those are the original bookcases um from the Jewett home. And I believe uh the majority of the books that we have here are from her and her family’s original collection, which is really special. While she’s writing and kind of discovering herself, she’s mainly writing short stories and eventually she kind of gets her short short stories written and published in the Atlantic. And that’s when she meets Annie Fields and James T. Fields.
Kendra Gaylord: When it comes to Sarah’s writing career, she had a long road of rejections that almost stopped her. She had a short story published locally when she was 14, and then at 20, her first short story was published in the Atlantic. But it seemed like she couldn’t get anything else published. It took 3 years of constant submissions to get her second story in the Atlantic. In her correspondences and in letters, you can see her struggling with if she should keep trying, asking the editors who published her work before if she should just give up. They told her to keep going, but the common refrain was, “There seems to be good characters for a story and good scenery, but no incident, no story.” She wrote back, questioning her ability to find the plot. “It seems to me I can furnish the theater and show you the actors and the scenery and the audience, but there never is any play.” When Sarah was in her young 20s getting these pieces published in the Atlantic, James T. Fields was on the edge of retirement in his mid-50s. While Sarah continued to build her writing career with his Atlantic successors as her editors, it wasn’t until the 1880s that Sarah and Annie Fields began a true correspondence. We’re going to cross the hallway to the parlor, which is much brighter than the library and has a few of Sarah’s books on display.
Alyssa Sweet: So Sarah becomes friends with James T and Annie Fields. He dies rather suddenly and unexpectedly. And Annie is heartbroken as any wife would be. And Sarah does the the right thing and she goes down and she visits Annie for a morning visit which typically in Victorian times would last anywhere from 1 to 4 weeks normally around 3 weeks. Sarah stays for 3 months and when they emerge out of this morning period um they consider themselves to be a couple. Now what exactly does that mean in Victorian time periods? They continue the rest of their lives living in what we call a Boston marriage, which is a term comes from Henry James’ novel, The Bostonians, though it’s never actually used in the book, but it inspires the book. And what it means is that it’s two women that are living together in a relationship. It could be romantic, it could not be romantic. And in this case, it’s romantic. And we know that cause we have Sarah and Annie’s diaries, and we have their letters written back and forth to each other. And we know how much they loved each other. We don’t know the extent of their physical relationship. Similar to how you won’t know the extent of your friend’s physical relationships with their partners, but we know that they loved each other. They cared for each other. They exchanged rings. So, for all intents and purposes, they are a committed couple partnership for the rest of their lives.
We have a portrait of Annie sitting over here. She was stunning. She was beautiful. She was the socialite of Boston. She also is a daughter of a doctor. So they connected kind of that way and for the majority of the year they spend their time together down in Annie’s brownstone in Boston on Charles Street and they have these salons and at these salons they invite other like-minded individuals. So they have artists, they have philosophers, they have philanthropists, they have Annie is a big abolitionist. So they have abolitionists that come on their Sunday afternoon salons and it’s this group of people that get together and they chat. They exchange ideas and included in that is this group specifically of women who are also all like-minded and they’re all artists and they’re all encouraging each other and holding each other up. And included in that is Sarah Wyman Whitman who is a very close friend of Sarahs. We also have a portrait of her over here as well. And she is an artist. She is actually the artist who is designing a lot of the book covers for Sarah’s books. So if you look right here, we have an example of Country of the Pointed Firs. And that book design that’s on top of it was done by Sarah Wyman Whitman.
Kendra Gaylord: The first edition book cover is green with gold engravings of three Mayflowers. Their stems go down to the bottom of the book where instead of a root system, you find a heart. Many of the books on the tables in this room show this collaboration of their work, but those aren’t the only pieces by Sarah Wyman Whitman on display here. We’re now going to go back out into the hallway.
Alyssa Sweet: Yes, we’re walking up the stairs on this beautiful William Morrison carpet that is a reproduction, but it’s stunning. Green floral. Another example of that like outdoor feeling. It feels like you’re walking on a forest floor. And on the landing, we can look out at Sarah’s garden. Looks a lot different than it did back in the day. Sarah had a lot more trees than we have now and the post office wasn’t there. But overlooking this beautiful arched window is that stained glass work that Sarah Wyman Whitman did.
Kendra Gaylord: It’s a yellow iris with like it’s it’s actually shaped quite similarly to the window.
Alyssa Sweet: Yes, it is. It was custom made for for this.
Kendra Gaylord: But that’s not the only iris by the other Sarah that we could find in the second floor hallway. Despite it being in the middle of everything here is Sarah Orne Jewett’s desk which is matching to the set of bookshelves in the library.
Alyssa Sweet: And then kind of behind you to the side we have Sarah’s writing desk. So this is her original writing desk. We bought it back a few years a like probably like 10 to 15 years ago from a private sell which is really cool that we have it. And if you look at it, there is a photo on it of Sarah sitting at this desk overlooking the window. And we’ve tried to recreate that desk as much as possible. This is, the chair of the desk is the only place in the house that we allow visitors to sit on furniture. So if you come visit on tour, you can sit at Sarah’s desk and pretend that you’re like writing, which I think is kind of fun.
Kendra Gaylord: I have been on tour in this house twice and both times I have taken photos in that chair and the view is good from there. The window overlooks the busy intersection and the actual desk is amazing. It’s got bookcases behind glass above it and dresser drawers below.
Alyssa Sweet: The bookcase has a glass arched doors that that pull out so you could get the books that are in there. And if you look at them, we have a collection of her books that are in there that have the yellow irises that Sarah Wyman and Whitman did. And all the books that are in there are part of that collection of the original household books. And right off of that, like right next to it, is actually the doorway into Mary’s room, which Mary is the reason why she’s able to live this lifestyle is cause she’s the one taking care of the house. So, let’s head right on in there.
Kendra Gaylord: Mary is Sarah’s older sister, and her room is a bit more traditional than the rest of the house with a white canopy above a wooden bed, candlesticks, and floral paintings on the wall. But the most noticeable thing is the wallpaper, which is older than this country.
Alyssa Sweet: What is cool about this is this is the original wallpaper to the house. It is a flocked wallpaper, which means it is has like a texture to parts of it. and it is one of four remaining examples of 18th century flocked wallpaper in North America. What is even cooler about this wallpaper is that it has the original stamp from the stamp act. It has it’s like a crown. If you look over there right behind Mary’s bed, you can see the faint outline of a crown in black.
Kendra Gaylord: It’s kind of hard to notice because the wallpaper is full of dark patterns and colors and textures.
Alyssa Sweet: It’s hard to see, especially because it’s an overcast day, but there’s mica that was put into the wallpaper as well. And with the idea that keep in mind when this wallpaper was installed, there would have been candlelight, so it would have been flickering. So, it would have reflected off of those pieces of mica and kind of create this like glowy, flowy uh iridescent feeling in this room.
Kendra Gaylord: But we aren’t the only people who had observations about this wallpaper. Sarah Orne Jewett wrote about it in Deephaven and she wasn’t quite as positive as we were. “It is very remarkable that there seems to be no ghost stories connected with any part of the house, particularly this. We are neither of us nervous, but there is certainly something dismal about the room. The huge curtain bed and immense easy chairs, windows, and everything were draped in some old-fashioned kind of white cloth, which always seemed to be waving and moving about of itself. The paper was captured in a French prize somewhere sometime in the last century and part of the figure was shaggy and therein little spiders found habitation and went visiting their acquaintances across the shiny places. The color was an unearthly pink and a forbidding maroon with dim white spots which gave it the appearance of having moulded.”
Alyssa Sweet: But the reason that Sarah and Annie are able to live the lives that they they lead and Sarah is not your like typical stay-at-home housewife, especially in this house cause this this is a big house. It they had house servants like they had a staff that was running this house is because Mary is the one that’s doing those traditional roles and Sarah didn’t need to. And their younger sister Carrie was also very very important to both of their lives. And her younger sister has her only child Teddy and Carrie and her husband actually moved into the Jewett home that was built when she was born and they live there.
Kendra Gaylord: Mary and Sarah inherited this house in 1887 when the sisters were nearing 40 while their married younger sister Carrie inherited the house next door. She raised her son Teddy there and was widowed. Carrie passed away before Teddy turned 18 and he found a room to stay here that shares a wall with this one.
Alyssa Sweet: Sarah and her sister Mary play a very important role in Teddy’s life. As we’ve mentioned before, the three sisters are very, very close. And Sarah and Mary never have children of their own. So, they kind of already attached themselves to Teddy as the only the next the one and only next generation of the family. They’re very influential in his life and he actually ends up living here in this house with them for a period of time and once Mary passes away the house gets inherited to Teddy and that’s kind of the the way that we start the Historic New England starts kind of acquiring it is from there.
Kendra Gaylord: The room feels bright and airy with a light floral wallpaper and some of the same colonial revival touches as Mary’s room above the entry door is an old sign reading Dr. Jewett. It originally would have hung outside Sarah’s father’s office, but it has an added connection since Teddy also became a doctor. But there is also some alternate history where that sign would have been for Sarah as well. As a child, Sarah followed her father on doctor’s visits, and she had briefly wanted to become a doctor herself. But even though she never became a doctor, she memorialized the job and her father in her book, A Country Doctor.
The book follows Nan, an orphaned girl who is raised by the local doctor. Later in the book, she finds herself arguing with newly found well to-do relatives about her goal to become a physician. The argument against Nan is cutting. “But I warn you, my dear, that your notion about studying to be a doctor has shocked me very much indeed. I could not believe my ears. A refined girl who bears an honorable and respected name to think of being a woman doctor. If you were 5 years older, you would have never dreamed of such a thing. It lowers the pride of all who have any affection for you. If it were not that your early life had been somewhat peculiar and most unfortunate, I should blame you more. As it is, I can but wonder at the lack of judgment in others. I shall look forward in spite of it all to see you happily married.”
But the character Nan doesn’t cower. She fights back. “Nobody persuaded me into following such a plan. I simply grew toward it. And I have everything to learn and a great many faults to overcome. But I am trying to get on as fast as may be. I can’t be too glad that I have spent my childhood in a way that has helped me to use my gift instead of hindering it. But everything helps a young man to follow his bent. He has an honored place in society and just because he is a student of one of the learned professions, he ranks above the men who follow other pursuits. I don’t see why it should be a shame and dishonor to a girl who is trying to do the same thing and to be of equal use in the world. God would not give us the same talents if what were right for men were wrong for women.” [Music]
Although Sarah never became a doctor, she immortalized their role in small communities like this one in Maine. But the thing I love about this book, which you can see in this one conversation, is Sarah found her play. Her fears and the early criticism of her work not having a plot, they’re gone in this novel. She still captures the places, the people, the scenery, but she also found a protagonist who isn’t afraid to do what she wants, no matter the tension and drama it create. We’re now going to head to the other side of the hallway, past Sarah’s desk, and to the guest room in the front.
Alyssa Sweet: And this is wallpaper that Sarah and Mary would have installed. Very different from a lot of the other rooms. A little groovy, a little psychedelic, not nature-based, very geometric.
Kendra Gaylord: This wallpaper looks like it belongs in a modernist house. It’s different grays and symmetrical patterns that create diamonds or starbursts depending on where you focus. It’s a bit of an optical illusion. It made me realize that this whole house is just generations layering on top of each other. It’s hard to know exactly what anyone’s preference was because it’s so thoroughly mixed together. This room would have been the guest room used by many of Sarah’s friends. It would have likely had visits from Sarah Wyman Whitman, Celia Thaxter, and John Greenleaf Whittier.
Annie Fields visited, but not as often as you would think. She preferred Boston or her place in Manchester by the Sea. In comparison, South Berwick seemed pretty rural. So instead, Sarah lived her life split between three residences. In her letters, you can see the swap. For many months, writing letters to her sister Mary. The rest of the months writing loving letters to Annie. This is a bit of one from 1882. “I’m sure you know just as well this minute, as if I could really put my head in your lap and tease you as you sit at your desk. It is just like being with you still. I believe everything of me but my boots and clothes and the five little stones and the rest of the things in my pocket and the hairpin all goes back to Charles Street and stays with you half a day at a time. Perhaps you wish you could…” The letter ends there. The next page is missing.
These letters continued even after Sarah stopped writing her short stories and novels. Her career ended at 53 after a carriage accident which injured her head and neck. She struggled with concentration, memory loss, and dizziness. She wrote to a friend 4 years later with some optimism. “I’ve really come back to some sense of pleasure in life. Though I feel like a dissected map with a few pieces gone, the rest of me seems to be put together right.” This guest room also has one of the only photos of Sarah and Annie together. Above the dresser, which has pottery from Celia, is a photo of the two women in Annie’s home library in Boston. The two women are each at their own work. Sarah silhouetted by the left window appearing to be at a desk while Annie sits on a chair lit up by the window on the right with an open book in her hands. There’s another photo of Annie in this house that I think it’s time to see. We’re now going to head into Sarah’s room.
Kendra Gaylord: And so this is like a little mini hallway before.
Alyssa Sweet: Yes. So, originally this room would have been bigger, but when the back of the house is added on, they needed to add a way to get to the back stairwell where the servants’s quarters would have been. So, Sarah recommends that they cut off parts of her room to create this like little hallway. Um, so her room’s a little bit smaller.
Kendra Gaylord: This room feels a lot smaller. Every other room had multiple walls of windows, but this room isn’t bright like that. It’s mostly deep green painted paneling with a small fireplace and many doors. Sarah’s sleigh bed is tucked up close to the left window, while her desk is next to the window on the right. That window features her initials, SOJ, which she etched into the glass. I’m going back to my wallpaper once again.
Alyssa Sweet: This wallpaper is a olive green base with a pale pretty yellow design on it. And the design of it is actually an S with a leaf floral motif and then little floral leaves kind of like spacing it out. Um, if you are a Historic New England member and you come visit us, this is the stamp that we will put in your passport.
Kendra Gaylord: In this room, I think we may have found Sarah’s style. A slightly brooding room that feels like the colors of Maine were let in. It’s filled with all the things she loved and what she found useful. Next to her bed, attached to the door frame, is a pen in a small little cup that she could grab in bed. Next to her mirror, above her dresser, are many dangling pairs of eyeglasses. There is a portrait of her father on her bedside, and above it in the corner is a mirror. The room has two mirrors and no matter where you are, you can see the center of the mantle. The mantle is filled with books, a chalice, paintings, and silhouettes. But right in the center is a portrait of Annie. So no matter where Sarah was in the room, she could still see her. In this room, Sarah feels very alive. And you feel like you might be trespassing.
Alyssa Sweet: You can still feel Sarah here. I I think the entire house you can feel Sarah and her presence here, but this room especially, like you can you can you can feel her here and sometimes it almost feels like you’re intruding.
Kendra Gaylord: I think one of the reasons it feels like that is because this room was never changed from how she had it. She didn’t die in this room. She died in the connected guest room where all her friends had stayed. She had a stroke in March at 59 years old and by June she was gone. But this room never knew what it was like to be lived in by anyone else. It was closed by Mary and was left untouched when the house was passed to Teddy. He gave the home to Historic New England after his death, and it’s been properly protected and memorialized since then.
So, here we are in a room that still feels like her because it was the place she was herself with her glasses and her books and her portrait of Annie. Annie continued to write little notes in her diary during Sarah’s slow decline in her final weeks. “She’s often very amusing and told the nurse last night that she wanted John to buy a 5-cent mouse trap this morning to catch me with.” The diary is filled with lines that feel very light and ones that feel very heavy.
After Sarah died, Annie attached a copy of Sarah’s poem, Boat Song. And just like the writer described in Deephaven, she brings us out onto a small boat at nighttime. But now it’s no longer her introduction. It’s her goodbye.
Now rest your the oars and let me drift
While all the stars come out to see.
The birds are talking in their sleep
As we go by so silently.
The idle winds are in the pines,
The ripples touch against the shore,
Oh rest your oars and let me drift,
And let me dream forevermore.
The sweet wild roses hear and wake,
And send their fragrance through the air;
The hills are hiding in the dark,
There is no hurry anywhere,
The shadows close around the boat,
Ah, why should we go back to shore?
So rest your oars and we will float
Without a care forevermore.
Thank you for listening or watching this episode of Someone Lived Here. I visited this house in June 2025 and filmed the home so you can see this podcast with visuals on my YouTube channel. I want to thank Historic New England for keeping this house standing. Alyssa Sweet for giving us this tour and welcoming us in. Laura Sullivan and Keith Foster for saying yes and helping organize. Thank you to my brother for filming all the footage of the home. Thank you Tim Cahill for the wonderful music and professor Terry Heller who has collected the letters and diaries of Sarah Orne Jewett online through the Sarah Orne Jewett text project. The book Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work by Paula Blanchard is a great biography and it was immensely helpful in researching.
If you want to try out one of Sarah Orne Jewett’s novels, my favorite was a country doctor, but they’re all very good. I do one episode of Someone Lived Here every year, but you can go to my YouTube channel or my Patreon for monthly stuff by me that is slightly less serious. Thank you again for listening. I’m your host, Kendra Gayord, and this was Someone Lived Here.
Sources:
Sources:
Interview with Alyssa Sweet at Sarah Orne Jewett House, June 18, 2025.
Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and her Work by Paula Blanchard, 1994.
Deephaven by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1877.
A Country Doctor by Sarah Orne Jewett, 1884.
The Sarah Orne Jewett Text Project
Diary of SOJ – January 1872: https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/soj-diary-1871.html
SOJ letter to AAF – Feb 19, 1882: https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1882.html
Diary of AAF – February 1909: https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/fields/diary-1907.html
SOJ letter to Sara Norton – Aug 5, 1906: https://www.sarahornejewett.org/soj/let/Corresp/1906.html
Historic New England Sarah Orne Jewett House pages:
https://jewett.house/topic/17th-and-18th-centuries/
https://jewett.house/deepzoom/the-country-of-the-pointed-firs-2/
https://jewett.house/topic/a-place-to-write/
‘Coastal History: Cod integral to Maine, triangle trade route’ The Press Herald – Feb, 2020: https://www.pressherald.com/2020/02/19/coastal-history-cod-integral-to-maine-triangle-trade-route/
Map of Jewett Story: https://www.oldberwick.org/history-articles/people/19th-century/thomas-dearborn-jewett-17901864-merchant-and-betsey-lord-jewett-17911867.html
