Image Gallery
North Groton, N. H.: Years of Isolation and Growing Conviction
The Pattersons’ cottage by the mill stream
Viewed here from the bridge over Hall’s Brook, this little five-room cottage is where the future Mary Baker Eddy lived from 1855 to 1860—five years of invalidism and disappointment. But these were not wasted years, for during this period she had a growing conviction, and finally evidence, that it was the faith in medicine that healed rather than the drug. 
18th century foundation
When Mary and Daniel Patterson moved here in 1855, the house was about thirty-five years old. It had been built around 1820 on the site of a former grist mill. The lower courses of the foundation are the stones that were laid for the grist mill in the mid-1700s.
View from the windows: a wagon road and a sawmill
The front door is just two steps above the ground. Mary Patterson would have looked out on a dirt wagon road and the sawmill in which her husband had bought a part interest. The road ran across what is now the lawn, down to a wooden bridge over the brook. A few neighbors lived nearby. 
A rough-sided country cottage
When Mrs. Longyear located this cottage in 1920 it had been moved to a field half a mile away and had long been neglected. It was sided with the kind of bare, rough clapboards that probably covered the house when the Pattersons lived in it. Most likely the clapboards were stained to protect them from moisture. 
Moved back, restored, painted
Mrs. Longyear had the house moved back to its original site beside the brook. To protect the house from the waterside moisture, the clapboards have been stained a color typical of buildings nearby and of the same era. The window sashes have been painted the color they were in the 1850s, as revealed by a recent paint chip analysis.
Lost in foreclosure
All the Pattersons’ possessions were auctioned off to settle debts in 1860, when the couple’s cottage was foreclosed and they were forced to leave. The furnishings on display, although not original to the house, are appropriate to the period. The chairs and table typify the use of the parlor as a social room for receiving visitors.
The Pattersons’ bedroom
This is the kind of bed the Pattersons might have owned, the mattress supported on a rope-strung bed frame. In this room Mary Patterson spent endless days in bed and was so infirm she had to be helped up into a sitting position. Her many hours alone were spent studying her Bible or reading Jahr’s New Manual of Homeopathic Practice. When she was well enough, she attended the nearby North Groton Union Church (destroyed by heavy snowfall in 1969).
Kitchen windows high above a rushing brook
In 1855 the kitchen windows looked across to a neighboring cottage on the other side of the brook. The kitchen is furnished with artifacts typical of the mid-nineteenth century, like the wood stove and the country cupboard with its pitchers and pots.
Remains of a vanished venture
At the foot of a man-made sluice, now overgrown, researchers have uncovered the rusty remains of the waterwheel for a 19th-century sawmill — Daniel Patterson’s failed venture into the business world.
