News
Lynn Restoration: A Progress Report
April 19, 2010
This house on Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts, is a vital, major landmark in the history of Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science movement. Our Image Gallery depicts Longyear’s progress in restoring the house to the way we believe it looked when the Discoverer of Christian Science first laid eyes on it. This is the first of several progress reports that will appear here in the months ahead as spades break ground and exterior restoration goes forward.
In early 1875, Mrs. Eddy (then Mary B. Glover) was living in yet another rented room, this time at the Scribner boarding house on Broad Street. For nearly three years she had been moving from place to place as she worked on the manuscript for her book, which would be titled Science and Health. Across the street from Scribner’s she noticed that a brightly painted house at number 8 Broad Street was for sale. At the end of March, she paid down approximately one half the total price of the house, took out a mortgage for the balance, and at last had a home of her own.
This house is truly historic. In it the first edition of Science and Health was completed. Here, even before her book was published, Mrs. Glover and her students took the first steps toward forming a church. With her marriage to Asa Gilbert Eddy here in 1877, Mrs. Glover became Mary Baker Eddy. Here she formed the Christian Scientists’ Association; chartered the Church of Christ (Scientist), as it was then styled; and chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in Boston. Here the very terms “Christian Science” and “Christian Scientist” were adopted for her Cause.
Years later Mrs. Eddy, writing to one of her students about the house where she had toiled over Science and Health and brought it to completion, told him: “I can show you the room in which I sat – and I have the chair in which it was done…. It was in that house I got sheltered, or I never could have done what I did…” (letter to Joseph Eastaman, 1895).
During 2010 Longyear Museum’s staff and consulting experts will be restoring the exterior of this important landmark. In this and future website postings we will report on progress.
