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To read this entire issue of the Quarterly News, which includes historic photographs, you may purchase back issues by calling Longyear Museum at 1-800-277 8943 or 1-617-278-9000.

Longyear Museum
Quarterly News
Spring 1973
Vol. 10, No. 1

THE HOUSE AT RUMNEY VILLAGE

"a stepping stone on a journey of spiritual discovery "

IN RUMNEY VILLAGE, NEW HAMPSHIRE, you will find an inviting white farm house resting comfortably on a hill overlooking nearby Stinson Mountain. The house has been altered little since the early 1860's when Mary Baker Eddy, then Mrs. Daniel Patterson, lived there. In 1920 it was purchased by Mrs. Mary Beecher Longyear. It is now one of the eight Mary Baker Eddy Historic Houses maintained by Longyear Museum as a permanent heritage for all Christian Scientists.

Before opening the house to visitors, Mrs. Longyear enlarged the original small entrance hall to make it more convenient for guests to enter. Subsequent to occupancy by Dr. and Mrs. Patterson, an additional bedroom and bath may have been added to the second floor. Otherwise, the house remains unchanged and through its generous windows flow shafts of clear sunlight and mountain breezes such as Mrs. Patterson must have enjoyed as she sat in her favorite room, the parlor. Some of the original furnishings of the house have been restored to it and today you may enjoy something of the beauty of nature and home surroundings which enfolded the Leader of the Christian Science movement over a hundred years ago.

For five years previous to 1860 she and Dr. Patterson had been living in North Groton, seven miles distant from Rumney Village by mountain road. In 1855 Mrs. Patterson had induced her husband to take her to this obscure village that she might be near her young son, George, then about eleven years of age, who was living with his old nurse and her husband, Mahala and Russell Cheney. During this period she was ill much of the time. Within a year a permanent separation of George and his mother was accomplished by the removal of the Cheneys with George to the "far West," a move which seems to have been made with the approval of the Baker family and without Mrs. Patterson's knowledge. Following this loss, her illness intensified and much of her time was spent in bed. During these years, however, her mind was not idle. Children often visited her, sometimes bringing flowers and fruits. Among the young people visiting her was Daniel Kidder, whom she helped with his lessons, and who later was to represent his area in the state legislature.

The Bible, on which she relied for guidance and comfort, was her daily companion. There was time in her many hours alone to consider long-standing questions which related directly to health. In The Christian Science Journal for June 1887, she wrote, "As long ago as 1844 (1) was convinced that mortal mind produced all disease, and that the various medical systems were in no proper sense Scientific."

North Groton had a limited number of patients for a skilled dentist and this, coupled with Dr. Patterson's unwise business ventures, including his failure as a mill owner, plunged him into debt. In 1859 Mrs. Patterson suffered the humiliating experience of losing some of her furniture, her large dictionary, and a gold watch chain at an auction held to meet her husband's overdue debt. A few months later, her sister, Mrs. Alexander Tilton, brought a carriage for her and her blind helper, Myra Smith, taking them to Rumney where rooms awaited them at Herbert's boardinghouse. Later, she and Dr. Patterson moved to the white house on the hill, now the Mary Baker Eddy Historic House.

In the new environment, Mrs. Patterson's health and spirits improved. She was soon writing again and following closely the intensity of feeling between the North and the South. Her poem, "Major Anderson and Our Country," written February 6, 1861, was published in the February 14 issue of the Independent Democrat, Concord, New Hampshire. Of this period in her life, Robert Peel says in his Mary Baker Eddy, Years of Discovery, "The trumpets of war were sounding, and the martial mood blended with the vigor of Mrs. Patterson's renewed determination to break through to life."

Dr. Patterson made a determined effort to establish his dental practice and in the diaries of Cyrus and Parker Blood, former neighbors of the Pattersons in North Groton, we learn that they had teeth ext.racted by him in his Rumney office. At the time, October 1861, Cyrus recalls in his diary that he was with Mrs. Patterson when she joyfully read a letter just received from her son telling her that he had joined the Northern army. This was the first news of him she had had since he was taken west by the Cheneys in 1856.

Dr. Patterson, however, soon grew restless and early in 1862 he was commissioned by Governor Nathaniel Berry of New Hampshire to take funds to Union sympathizers in the South. He visited the Bull Run battlefield and, wandering too near the Confederate lines, was captured and the funds taken from him. After incarceration in Libby Prison at Richmond, he was moved to Salisbury, North Carolina. During the period. of his imprisonment, Mrs. Patterson was untiring in her effort to secure his release, appealing to state and national officials, even to their old family friend, ex-President Franklin Pierce. However, the doctor and a companion escaped and after two months of hardship made their way to the Union lines. Soon thereafter Dr. Patterson reached New Hampshire, arriving in Sanbornton Bridge in November 1862.

In 1862, Mrs. Patterson began to write down her thoughts on the spiritual content of the Bible, to which she refers in the Preface to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Her determination to find health strongly motivated her and she read accounts and advertisements of
healings. She even went to Hill, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine in search of a permanent cure.

Late in 1862 the Pattersons gave up their house in Rumney Village. A few of the items auctioned off when they left were later acquired by Mrs. Longyear from descendants of the auction purchasers and restored to the Rumney Historic House as permanent furnishings.

Mrs. Patterson's years at Rumney prepared her for the next chapter of her experience which would eventually lead her to the revelation of Christian Science. Her village home, nestled between majestic hills, with its sweeping views and inspirational solitude, had served as a stepping stone on a journey of spiritual discovery, a journey so important to all mankind.

Anne H. Webb

"Years make little change in town of Rumney"

AS YOU STAND by the triangular town common in Rumney Village on a winter morning it seems as though the press and confusion of modern life are a thousand miles away. Except for an occasional car or truck there is an almost unbelievable stillness. No raucous street noises. No voices. As quiet as it must have been on the mornings when Mary Baker Eddy, then Mrs. Daniel Patterson, meditating on the spiritual meaning of existence and seeking healing from semi-invalidism, looked out of her Rumney farmhouse window at the forested slopes of Stinson Mountain, the quiet broken only, perhaps, by the creak of a log-laden wagon and the shouts of a teamster.

The village itself is little changed. A gasoline pump in front of the general store ... paved roads. The same dignified little churches that were there when Mrs. Eddy lived a short distance up the road beyond the common. The Baptist church still stands, well over a century old. Many of the homes are almost as old, aged by wind and weather.

Rumney was probably a noisier, busier place in the 1860's than it is today. According to Jesse A. Barney's history of the area —"Rumney, Then and Now"— more than 1,000 people lived there in the late 1850's, when it was the commercial center for a large portion of Grafton County. The latest United States census gives the population of Rumney as about 850.

In addition to a number of stores, where townspeople and farmers could buy everything from sugar and salt to nostrums, shirts, boots, bonnets, mittens, pots, pans and axle grease, the town offered the full range of personal and domestic services, with a blacksmith, masons, stone cutters, carpenters, plumbers and shoemakers. When Dr. Daniel Patterson and his wife, the former Mary Baker Glover, moved to Rumney in 1860 he became a dentist for the town.

Local residents say that the Kelly store building in Rumney Village, which also houses the post office, has been the site of a general store since the 1850's. Just a short distance from the Mary Baker Eddy house, it was probably the place where Mrs. Eddy did her shopping.

Rumney in the late 1850's and 60's was an industrial center of no small importance for that period. There were saw mills, planing mills, grist mills, tanneries and wooden-ware makers. There was some mica mining in the area; a shop that made wheelbarrows, a brickyard, a shingle factory and a hoe and rake factory.

By the late 1850's, for instance, there was Frank Emerton's rake and mop factory and George Fletcher's glove factory, which used deer and moose hides and employed ten people. Charles Bunker had a grist mill grinding corn, wheat, oats, rye and buckwheat. Six people worked at Elijah Spare's ladder factory. One of the town's biggest industries, although small by today's standards, was a camphor refinery, which was in full operation during Mrs. Eddy's residence there. Availability of cheap wood for fuel was the reason for its existence so far from a market. Crude camphor was shipped to Rumney Depot from Boston, then taken by wagon to the factory to be melted or cooked in big steel pans over brick furnaces. This factory is said to have turned out 700 pounds of camphor every day.

Stinson Brook, which flows a stone's throw from the Mary Baker Eddy house, was lined at various times with saw mills, grist mills and wood working shops, such as Peppard's ladder mill.

Lumbering has been a major industry in Rumney since before Mrs. Eddy's time there. Even today, a sizable saw mill operates a few hundred feet beyond the Mary Baker Eddy house, using oak, maple, birch, balsam, spruce, fir and hemlock. Nearby are the ruins of another mill abandoned many years ago.

In the 1860's Rumney was not a cultural void. There was a private library of some size; also singing schools that provided community camaraderie and entertainment. Its many businesses attracted salesmen, buyers and dealers from all over Now England. There was a sense of action and movement.

When the Boston, Concord and Montreal Railroad was constructed in
1850-52, the Rumney Depot section of the town became an important stop for freight and passengers; old photos show combination trains with passengers and flat bed freight cars loaded with sawn lumber.

Little changed as it is from a century ago, Rumney typifies some of the best in New England life. It is a quiet, orderly town with houses that evidence care and pride of ownership. Its unpretentious but dignified churches show an interest in spiritual things. Its small industries, now as then, are typical of Yankee individualism and free enterprise. The beauty of its hills and streams and farmland are an inspirational contrast to urban blight, rush and confusion.

Now, as in Mrs. Eddy's time, Rumney is a place where you can find quiet and natural beauty; a place for meditation and reflection.

John Bunker

© Longyear Foundation 1973 Vol. 10 No. 1

To read this entire issue of the Quarterly News, which includes historic photographs, you may purchase back issues by calling Longyear Museum at 1-800-277-8943 or 1-617-278-9000.