News

Longyear’s 2009 Fall Tour

October 12, 2009

This year's four-day itinerary included the Museum's eight Mary Baker Eddy Historic Houses; the Mott Gallery at the Museum; Red Rock in Lynn, Mass.; a tour of Boston; the one-room schoolhouse attended by George Glover, Jr., in North Groton, New Hampshire; and First Church of Christ, Scientist, Concord, New Hampshire.

With New England's dazzling red, orange, and yellow leaves as a backdrop, 30 visitors from all over the United States attended Longyear's 2009 Fall Tour of the Museum's eight historic houses and other places of importance in the life of Mary Baker Eddy.

This year's tour was the culmination of a Longyear goal: to bring each house and site to life through the words of its original inhabitants, as recorded in historical documents. Tour guides have been working in recent years to research this material and incorporate it into their tours.

For instance, at the house in Rumney, poems written by Mrs. Eddy after she arrived there in 1860, that address her experience in the previous house in North Groton, were read aloud.

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This year's itinerary included new additions, such as the one-room schoolhouse where George Glover, Jr., sometimes attended-opened for Longyear's Fall Tour for the first time by the Groton Historical Society. Arriving at the school (a few hundred feet down the road from Daniel and Mary Patterson's house on Hall's Brook Road), visitors went inside to view the classroom, desks, and exhibits, and were later treated to cider and cookies.

Additional stops on the tour were: a Sunday service at The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston; a visit to Red Rock at Lynn, Massachusetts; several stops in Tilton, New Hampshire, where Mrs. Eddy lived as a teenager and again as a young mother; and a tour and short hymn sing at First Church of Christ, Scientist, Concord, New Hampshire, built in 1904 with funds provided by Mrs. Eddy.