Historic Houses

Publishing Her Book

The house:  Longyear Museum acquired this historically important house through special donations in 2006.  A major restoration is in the planning stage. Researchers have peeled back layers of wallpaper and flooring, scraped and analyzed paint samples and floor finishes, charted the original placement of walls, windows, stairs, and heating ducts.  Much has been learned. Based on this research, the exterior will be restored to the vibrant colors Mrs. Eddy would have seen when she and her husband Gilbert Eddy lived here. Exterior and interior details, authentically restored from what has been revealed, may alter the way Mrs. Eddy's life at this period is perceived.

Its story:  Mary Glover purchased the house on Broad Street in 1875, as she was completing the manuscript for Science and Health. The address was number 8 then; it is number 12 today. In a small attic room under a skylight in the roof, she wrote the pages that completed her book and painstakingly proofread and corrected the printer's galley sheets. By year's end the first edition was published.

A sign above the second-floor windows proclaimed: "Mary B. Glover's Christian Scientists' Home," displaying the first-known use of the cross-and-crown as an emblem of her religious movement.

In this house Mary B. Glover became Mary Baker Eddy.  In the parlor on New Year's Day, 1877, she and Asa Gilbert Eddy were married. 

Mrs. Eddy wrote about her former house in Lynn: "Very sacred to me are the memories that cluster around my old home .... the earthly dwelling where Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures was written - where my husband, Dr. Eddy, and I instituted the Christian Scientists Home, and passed many happy hours in prayer to God and work for man...."*

Here she formed an association of her students on July 4, 1876, and held its meetings in the parlor. Here she founded her church, the Church of Christ (Scientist), and answered the call to be its Pastor. And here Mrs. Eddy conducted classes of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, chartered in January 1881.

In January, 1882, the Eddys took their final leave of Lynn. Down the steps of this home Mary Baker Eddy set out for her great teaching work in Boston and beyond.

*Mary Baker Eddy, Footprints Fadeless, in Mary Baker Eddy: Speaking for Herself (Boston: The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 2002), p. 105.