Tag Archives: Salem families

July 25, 2020

The Grande Dame

By daseger

We know her instantly when we see her: from her famous John Singer Sargent portrait painted 20 years later: she is Ellen Peabody Endicott, the Grande Dame of Salem, Boston, and Washington society, standing right behind the bride at the first presidential White House wedding of Grover Cleveland and Frances Folsom on June 2, 1886. As the wife of Cleveland’s Secretary of War, William Crowninshield Endicott, she was invited to the intimate “stand-up” wedding, along with all the other cabinet ministers and their wives and so appeared in national newspaper stories over the next few weeks: her face is strong and clear-cut. One would say it was the typical Boston face. Mrs. Endicott looks like the high-bred New England woman of long descent. She wore a red pompom in her handsome gray hair at the president’s wedding. Mrs. Endicott is her husband’s first cousin. Both are descendants of the Putnam family.

The President’s wedding from Harper’s Weekly, June 12, 1886 via the Library of Congress. Mrs. Endicott is on the extreme left above.

Yes, that’s correct: Ellen Peabody Endicott was an Endicott both my birth and by marriage, and a perfect example of how early Salem families, and slightly “newer” merchant families, liked to stick together. She was the granddaughter of Joseph Peabody, one of Salem’s richest golden-age merchants if not the richest, and was born (in 1833) and raised in two beautiful houses: 29 Washington Square on the Common (now the Bertram Home) and the summer house in Danvers, which the Endicotts later referred to simply as “the farm” (now Glen Magna, owned by the Danvers Historical Society). About a decade after her marriage to William Crowninshield Endicott in 1859 they established their primary Salem residence at the venerable Georgian mansion on Essex Street now known as the Cabot-Low-Endicott House: this house became quite notable due to Mr. Endicott’s rather spectacular career (Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Secretary of War in the Cleveland administration) and their daughter’s spectacular marriage to the British politician Joseph Chamberlain. The Endicotts moved into a Boston brownstone mansion on Marlborough Street following his retirement, but still spent all of their summers in Danvers.

pixlr Mrs. Endicott’s houses: clockwise, Washington Square and Essex Street, Salem; 163 Marlborough Street, the Farm (Glen Magna).

Mrs. Endicott is a perfect example of yet another theme that has been emerging from these #salemsuffragesaturday posts: the difficulty of piecing together women’s lives when you only get references through an association—usually a husband. In Mrs. Endicott’s case, we hear about her because of her husband’s cabinet position and also because her daughter married the notable British politician Joseph Chamberlain in 1888: the transatlantic marriage was big news on both sides of the ocean and the bride’s parents are always characterized as old Yankees, Boston Brahmins, Puritan and/or Codfish aristocracy in all the stories (you can read all about the “Puritan Princess” here). There was also interest in the new Mrs. Cleveland, and on the several occasions when she traveled to Massachusetts, Mrs. Endicott was sent to meet and accompany her: consequently we get to hear about what both women wore in considerable detail.

But later in life, after her husband’s death in 1900, we begin to see Ellen Peabody Endicott for herself: in terms of her accomplishments and quite literally. She oversaw (with the help of her son, William Crowninshield, Jr., and her son-in-law Joseph Chamberlain) considerable improvements to the house and garden at the Danvers estate, including the installation of the beautiful McIntire summer house which was originally built for Elias Haskett Derby’s farm on Andover Street a few miles away in what is now Peabody. And then there are the two amazing portraits by John Singer Sargent: in oil and charcoal. The latter is very appropriately in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum, and was included in the Sargent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum just last year.

William Crowninshield’s death in May of 1901 was a national headline; Ellen Peabody Endicott (Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott), 1901 by John Singer Sargent, National Gallery of Art: Gift of Louise Thoron Endicott in memory of Mr. and Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott; Portrait of Ellen Peabody Endicott, 1905, John Singer Sargent, Peabody Essex Museum: Gift of Mrs. William Hartley Carnegie, 1957.

Appendix: Painting Ellen’s Portrait! The Sargent oil portrait in situ in Karin Jurick’s painting “Sitting Idly By”: you can see more of her work here.

4 Comments | tags: #SalemSuffrageSaturday, Art, Fashion, great houses, John Singer Sargent, Salem families, White House, Women's History | posted in History, Salem, Women's History

January 7, 2016

The Mysterious Miss Hodges

By daseger

For some time, I’ve been curious about a pair of beautiful daguerreotypes by the esteemed Boston photography studio of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1843-1863) featuring a lovely young woman identified only as “Miss Hodges of Salem”. All of the Southworth and Hawes photographic portraits are riveting, but these are particularly so: they are large, whole-plate images, they were insured by the partner photographers, and both were retained by members of the Hawes family long after the dissolution of the partnership. The description for the daguerreotype in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum reads: The Boston partnership of Southworth and Hawes produced the finest portrait daguerreotypes in America for a clientele that included leading political, intellectual, and artistic figures. Nothing is known today about Miss Hodges, but Southworth and Hawes made two costly whole-plate portraits of her for their studio collection, suggesting that she was sufficiently well-known – or sufficiently photogenic – to warrant displaying her likeness in the front-room public gallery.

Miss Hodges of Salem, c. 1850: (1) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (gift of Edward Southworth Hawes in memory of his father Josiah Johnson Hawes); (2) Metropolitan Museum of Art (gift of I. N. Phelps Stokes, Edward S. Hawes, Alice Mary Hawes, and Marion Augusta Hawes, 1937).

So which was it: well-known or photogenic? Well I’m not entirely sure, because Miss Hodges is somewhat mysterious, but I think it is the latter. I think “Miss Hodges of Salem” was Sarah Ellen Hodges, born in 1823 to Joseph Hodges and his wife Elizabeth Shipman Hodges, both of old Salem families. There are a couple of other candidates, but Sarah is my best bet. If she is indeed our Miss Hodges, she never married, and lived with family members and then alone in a boarding house on Bridge Street in Salem from 1883 until her death in 1895. The extended Hodges family was old and prosperous, with a succession of Salem sea captains dating back to the seventeenth century, but Joseph Hodges seems to have been a bit of a black sheep and I think money might have been a problem. His family of seven, including Sarah and her four siblings, moved around every few years according to the Salem city directories: from one old family home to another on lower Essex Street. And then there is this very curious entry in the Genealogical Record of the Hodges Family of New England, Ending December 31, 1894 by Almon D. Hodges (1896):

Joseph Hodges is said to have been so small at birth that he was put into a silver tankard and the cover shut; but he grew to be a very large man, like most of his race. When Gen. Washington visited Salem, Oct. 29, 1789, the babe Joseph (then 13 days old) was held up at the window to see him. Joseph Hodges was a shipmaster in his younger days, but retired early from active business. He met his death through an accident. He was walking on the railroad bridge at the northern end of the tunnel when a train of cars came on the bridge behind him. He was large and heavy and unable to escape by running, so he crouched at the side of the track, but was knocked to the flats below and died a few minutes after he was taken up.

Early retirement? Hit by a train? By sheer coincidence (?) his wife died by accident on the railroad, near the northern end of the tunnel twenty years later, according to Sidney Perley’s History of Salem (Volume III). Have these two railroad deaths–both at the northern end of the tunnel– been confused? I hope so! In any case, there are other hints that the Hodges were at most a tragic family, or at least one that did not adjust very well to Salem’s nineteenth-century transition from commerce to industry. Sarah was the only one who didn’t marry or get out of Salem, and I have no insights into what she might have done with her life. She and her siblings inherited a mere half of a house among them after their mother’s death in 1883, which they quickly sold, and then she appears to have lived alone until her death. The daguerreotypes might have been one of the highlights of her life, if indeed they depict her.

A Daguerreotype of President Millard Fillmore taken at just about the same time as those of Miss Hodges. It is about half the size of hers, and sold for over $10,000 at a 2005 Skinner auction.