Sargent House Museum, c. 1782, Gloucester, MA: a Cape Ann Classic - History Bites: New England

Welcome to Cape Ann and the historic seafaring city of Gloucester. For over 100 years, the Sargent House was the home of sea merchants, American patriots, and community and religious leaders. Built in 1782, the Sargent House is a fine example of high-style Georgian domestic architecture. Located in the heart of the city, the house was enlarged during the federal period and converted into a museum during the height of the colonial revival. Judith Sargent married John Stevens in 1769 when Judith was only 18 years old. The house was constructed for the couple about a decade after their marriage. The young couple previously resided with John's parents in East Gloucester until they could build a house of their own. Judith was born into a prominent seafaring family of 10 children. The family, according to the Sargent House Museum, was considered to be cultured, politically aware, and civically active. Much of Judith's knowledge was self-taught through her family library, and her deep interest in education and her family support led her to write poetry at an early age. Judith was one of the first American proponents of the idea of equality of the sexes, arguing that women, like men, were capable of intellectual accomplishment and should be able to achieve economic independence. Judith Sargent would go on to write more than 100 essays advocating for women's education and rights. The most famous work was On the Equality of the Sexes in 1790, which paved the way for new ideas proposed by other feminist writers of the century. According to author Margaret A. Nash, although women's employment opportunities were restricted to the domestic arena, Sargent suggested that were women able to obtain the same education that had long been afforded men, it would follow that they would be granted the same access to employment as well. The wine cooler was custom-made in New Orleans. It is part of the furnishings donated to the Sargent House Museum by the descendants of Winthrop Sargent, father of Judith Sargent Murray. Judith's husband, John Stevens, was a ship's captain, and he had inherited financial difficulties from his father's estate. Stevens, like many others of his time, suffered further financial losses during the Revolutionary War. The expenses he incurred constructing the new home, coupled with unwise speculations and failed maritime investments, led Stevens to financial ruin. Given her husband's financial troubles, it's little wonder that Judith Sargent believed that when men and women married, they should have separate financial lives from one another. She argued that mothers who are working for wages should be able to keep those wages for themselves rather than going into the bank account of their husband. In the spring of 1786, John Stevens turned ownership of the new house to his father-in-law and fled the country. Within five years, Stevens will have died in debtors' prison on St. Eustatius Island, leaving Judith Sargent a poverty-stricken widow. Family records state that this portrait and the adjacent one of her husband, Winthrop Sargent, were rejected in favor of another set by Stewart. Winthrop was the brother of Judith Sargent. He served in the military for seven years, mostly artillery, and he fought in several battles, including Trenton and Princeton, led by George Washington. Upon the organization of the Northwest Territory, Sargent was appointed as Secretary General of Ohio. He became acting governor when Governor St. Clair was called to Philadelphia. The main stairwell would lead to the establishment of the Sargent House Museum. In 1915, representatives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art sought to purchase the house. The Met's interest lay exclusively with the stairwell, and it was the museum's intention to gut the house and transport the stairwell to New York and display it as a shining example of early American craftsmanship. Upon hearing of the Met's intentions, two members of the Sargent family, Winthrop and Charles Sprague, the latter of whom was head of the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, along with a Universalist minister named Levi Powers, began fundraising, and they were able to purchase the home. Four years later, the house was opened to the public as a house museum. The house was sold in 1797 to Frederick and Abigail Gilman. Their son, Samuel Gilman, spent his early childhood here. He was a student attending Harvard when he wrote the lyrics to Fair Harvard, which is still played at Harvard University's graduation ceremonies. Soon after his father, Frederick Gilman, died, the family sold the house to Benjamin Howe in 1801. Born and educated in Boston, Caroline met Samuel Gilman while he was attending Harvard, and the couple were married in 1819. They would later move to Charleston, South Carolina, where Samuel would serve for 40 years as a Unitarian minister. Caroline became one of the most popular women writers of the first half of the 19th century and edited one of America's first periodicals for children. Caroline also wrote about slavery in two books, Recollections of a Housekeeper and Recollections of a Southern Matron. The Sajan children were raised in the established Congregational First Parish Church. However, in the 1770s, Judith, her siblings, and her parents all converted to Universalism and helped to fund and create the first Universalist church in the nation. A short while after the death of her husband, John Stevens, Judith married her longtime friend and minister, John Murray, in 1788. Julie Marie was born three years after Judith's marriage to John Murray. She married Adam Lewis Bingaman, a Harvard graduate. Adam was from Mississippi and after graduation became a successful cotton planter and politician. He was recognized as the leader of the Democratic Party in Mississippi. Julie is buried next to her mother at the Bingaman Cemetery in Natchez, Mississippi. Judith wrote many of her best known works in this writing closet. For example, she wrote the poem Lines Written in My Closet in 1782, just after she had moved into the new house. Judith writes, Yes, I must write. It soothes and calms my mind. And with my pen, my fairest hours I find, retired from care to this far distant spot. Would, I could say the world, but then forgot. My various musings, pensive, grave, and sad, and moments too, my secret joys made glad, are here indulged, while none presumes to trace, my loved retreat, my little sheltering place. The husband of Judith Sargent, Reverend Murray founded the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church in 1779, the first Universalist congregation in the United States. Born in England, Murray became a disciple of Reverend James Raleigh, a London clergyman whose writing formed the doctrinal basis for the Universalist denomination. In 1770, after the death of his first wife and their only child, Murray came to America, where he took up the life of an itinerant preacher, spreading for the first time on American shores, the doctrine of universal salvation. During the Revolution, George Washington appointed Reverend Murray as a chaplain in the American Army. He was brought to Gloucester to preach Universalism by Judith's father, Winthrop. Because Congregationalism was the official state religion, all parishioners were expected to pay pew taxes to the first parish church in Gloucester. The Sargent family and others refused to do that, paying their taxes instead to the Universalist church. Eventually, this case was tried in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and the Universalists won, thereby establishing the legal precedent for the separation of church and state. This second floor room takes its name from Benjamin Kent Howe, Sr., who, along with his wife, Lucy Sayward Foster, in 1802, purchased the house from the Gilmans. Several years later, they renovated, including a federal-style addition that doubled the size of the building and turned the space into a two-family home. The Howes raised seven children in their half of the home. Fitzhenry Lane was a native of Gloucester, and his style of painting would come to be known as Luminism, which emphasizes the effects of light in a landscape painting. The Howes were a family of dedicated Universalists and community servants, and Benjamin served as treasurer of the church for 40 years. He was a founding member of the Gloucester Lyceum, which would later become the public library. The Howes Museum also features a small collection of original works by John Singer Sargent, who is regarded as the leading portrait artist of his generation. The artist was also a descendant of the Sargent family and loved the house and its ties to post-revolutionary Gloucester. This portrait of the artist's father was given to the museum in 1920 by John Singer Sargent and his sister Emily, who also was an artist. This palette is thought to have been used when Sargent painted his Triumph of Religion murals at the Boston Public Library. A red pigment, violet cobalt, was discovered when the tablet was examined at Harvard's museum.