Image Gallery
Lynn, Mass.: Mrs. Eddy as Author, Teacher, Founder
A treasured photo
Mary Glover (the future Mary Baker Eddy) bought this house on Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1875, as she was completing the manuscript of Science and Health. Mrs. Eddy framed a print of this treasured photo, taken about 1880, and nearly three decades later kept it near her desk where she could easily see it. It was the first home she had ever purchased. The man sitting in the upstairs window is her husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy. 
A major restoration
Longyear Museum acquired this historically important house in 2006 through special donations. 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. Longyear is learning new things about how the house looked when Mrs. Eddy occupied it.
Visitors to the house today will encounter an unfurnished “construction zone” as Longyear prepares for a major restoration.
True colors
The exterior of the house at Lynn will eventually be restored to the vibrant colors Mrs. Eddy would have seen when she and her husband, Asa Gilbert Eddy, lived there. The authentic restoration of exterior and interior details, based on new research by Longyear, may alter some perceptions of Mrs. Eddy’s life at that period, showing that her house was not a dull gray, but full of color within and without.
A garden on the outskirts of Lynn
Behind the house on Broad Street is a small, shaded garden. When Mrs. Eddy lived here, however, this open area was densely crowded with several other houses, and Broad Street was a bustling thoroughfare in what was at that time the booming shoe-manufacturing city of Lynn.
Up to the third floor
The staircase winds upward from the front hall to the rooms under the eaves on the third floor , and to the isolated room used by Mrs. Eddy as her study. We now know that this staircase was moved from another location, and that these third-floor rooms had some heat through a central hot-air duct.
Attic room under the skylight
In 1875 in this small attic room under a skylight in the roof, the Discoverer of Christian Science wrote the pages that completed the Christian Science textbook and painstakingly proofread and corrected the printer’s galley sheets. By year’s end the first edition of Science and Health by Mary B. Glover was published.
Becoming Mrs. Eddy
In this house Mary B. Glover and Asa Gilbert Eddy were married on New Year’s Day, 1877. Years later Mrs. Eddy wrote: “Very sacred to me are the memories that cluster around my old home, the earthly dwelling where Science and Health 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” (Mary Baker Eddy, Speaking for Herself, Boston: The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 2002, p. 105).
Where history was made
In this home, classes on Christian Science healing were taught, and on July 4, 1876, an association of Christian Science students was formed at the direction of their teacher, Mary Baker Eddy. Here Mrs. Eddy founded the Church of Christ (Scientist) in 1879, and answered the call to become its Pastor. In the parlor she conducted the earliest classes of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, chartered in January 1881. 
Taking leave of Lynn
In January 1882, the Eddys took their final leave of Lynn and their house on Broad Street. Down the steps Mary Baker Eddy walked, as she set out for her great teaching work in Boston and beyond.
