Image Gallery
Rumney, N. H.: A Higher, Wider View
House on higher ground
From 1860 to the middle of 1862, after being forced to leave North Groton, the Pattersons lived in this rented house in Rumney. Situated on a sunny knoll not far from the town center, this house represented an improvement in their circumstances, as Patterson’s dental practice picked up. Mrs. Patterson’s health improved and she resumed writing, mainly poetry.
The Pattersons’ cottage before recent restoration
Starting in 2005, the house was painstakingly restored to look much as it did when the Pattersons lived here. The removal of the deteriorated siding revealed that at one time the cottage had had a saltbox roof line cutting diagonally across the rear side window. Sometime before the Pattersons moved here, the house had been enlarged to create a five-room Cape-style cottage.
Parlor where townsfolk visited
The interior is furnished in keeping with a modest rural home in the mid-nineteenth century. In this room, as the Civil War raged in the South, Mary Patterson received a letter from her long-lost son, then serving in the Union Army (for more on her son, click here).
The household’s best
Parlor cupboards at this period generally held the household’s best china, to be set out for guests. In the wake of their financial difficulties in North Groton and the loss of much of their property, however, it is unlikely that the Pattersons would have had much in the way of fine porcelain soon after arriving in Rumney.
Often bedridden
A basin and pitcher with a towel sit ready on the bureau in the bedroom. Mary Patterson was often bedridden with the maladies that had shadowed much of her life. Here at Rumney and after leaving this house, she continued to seek healing through systems like the Graham dietary regimen, also through treatments by Dr. Vail at his Hydropathic Institute and by the so-called “magnetic healer” Phineas Quimby in Portland, Maine.
Simple furnishings
The wide floorboards painted gray, the bright flowered wallpaper, and the practical furnishings are typical of a modest up-country New England home in the Civil War period.
