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Image Gallery: Mary Baker Eddy's Household at Chestnut Hill, Part One
June 21, 2010
Between 1892 and the end of 1907, Mary Baker Eddy lived at her home, Pleasant View, in Concord, New Hampshire. In January 1908 she moved to a new home in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Boston. She had purchased this house just a few months earlier. In that short time she had it enlarged to accommodate the large staff needed to support her work as Leader of the Christian Science movement.
Image at top left: Household at Chestnut Hill, 1908, left to right: Alice Peck; Archibald McLellan; Elizabeth Kelly; Irving Tomlinson; Nellie Eveleth; Katherine Retterer; Adam Dickey; Jonathan Irving; Frances Thatcher; Adelaide Still; Margaret Macdonald; Minnie Scott; Adolph Stevenson.
Mary Baker Eddy's Desk at Chestnut Hill, ca 1908.
Inset: Mrs. Eddy, ca. 1898.
Most secretaries in that day were men. Mrs. Eddy worked closely with several male secretaries who handled her voluminous mail, her writings for publication, and her communications with church officers. There was no status-conscious “upstairs/downstairs” division of labor in Mrs. Eddy's household; the staff at all levels mingled much like members of a family, working together for a common goal: support for Mrs. Eddy.
The three years Mrs. Eddy spent at Chestnut Hill were extremely productive. With the daily support of her household "family," she founded The Christian Science Monitor; provided for Christian Science nursing; made further revisions to Science and Health and the Church Manual; completed a compilation of her writings, to be published as The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany; authorized a German translation of Science and Health; revised some of her shorter writings; wrote several new articles; and compiled a small anthology of her selected poems.
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