Maine author Sarah Orne Jewett expressed the answer to the first question after she visited the home of Charlotte and Emily Bronte on the edge of the Yorkshire moors: 'Nothing you ever read about them can make you know them until you go there,' she said. 'Never mind people who tell you there is nothing to see in the place where people lived who interest you. You always find something of what made them the souls they were, and, at any rate, you see their sky and their earth.'
The second question is easily answered as well. Without the work, contributions, and insights of women, Portland - and the world - would be a very different place. By walking this trail, you can begin to connect with the lives of your figurative sisters, mothers, aunts, and great grandmothers in all the diversity of backgrounds that these women represent. You will never see the City of Portland in the same way again.
The Portland Women's History Trail is divided into four walks and introduces women from two centuries in a variety of settings, activities, and backgrounds. The two downtown walks, Congress Street and State Street, can be joined into one walk or traveled separately. The two neighborhood walks are Munjoy Hill and the West End.
The CONGRESS STREET WALK tells the story of 'Women at Work and in the Arts.' Sites reveal where early twentieth-century women rolled out and flavored chewing gum, folded paper boxes, clerked in department stores, and organized a telephone strike. Locations for the later twentieth-century introduce women mayors, lawyers, journalists, and judges. Nineteenth-century opera divas join modern women on stage and artists on exhibit.
The STATE STREET WALK presents 'Women in Philanthropy and Religion' and includes the story of the founding of a hospital by the Sisters of Mercy; the establishment of child care centers, a settlement house, the YWCA, orphan asylums, and an art museum, and the preservation of a historic house. Stops on the trail describe the contributions of women in religious orders and as church leaders. The walk includes sites representing the life of the Irish-American community before World War II.
The MUNJOY HILL WALK illustrates "Women and Diversity in Maritime Portland" by presenting the roles of women in two centuries of an ethnically-diverse neighborhood in maritime Portland. Six sites in Portland Harbor are viewed from the Eastern Promenade. Other locations present the lives of African-American, Jewish, and Italian-American women.
The WEST END WALK introduces 'Women in Medicine and Community Activism." The residences and work places of women nurses and doctors are combined with those of women activists who founded a school and homes
for the homeless, AIDs patients, and aged women. The walk concludes with a look at the everyday life of a working-class community. CONGRESS STREET WALKWomen at Work and in the Arts
Beginning with women who worked in a chewing gum factory, the Congress Street walk proceeds to the Cumberland County Court House and Portland City Hall, where women have held positions of leadership. It continues along Congress Street to the women of the Wadsworth Longfellow House who managed large households. The walk detours to sites of women workers along Cumberland Avenue before returning to Congress Street via Forest Avenue and continues to Free Street and the Portland Museum of Art. The Congress Street walk can be combined with the State Street walk.DIRECTIONS Go east on the Franklin arterial; right on Fore.
For more than fifty years, beginning in 1866, young women rolled out, flavored, sugared, cut, and packaged spruce, pepsin, and peppermint gum for a national market. At the factory's peak in 1907, between 90 and 115 young women earned between $3.50 and $6.00 a week for a work day that began at 7 a.m. and ended at 5:45 p.m. The wages of the male workers, a minority, were double those of the women. The company provided white aprons, caps, and sleeve protectors for the women and added a $1.00 per week for those who continued to work during the summer to keep them from leaving for jobs in seaside and mountain resorts.
C2 MAINE SPORTS HALL OF FAME, 295 Fore StreetThe two women Olympic gold medallists included in the Maine Sports Hall of Fame, which opened in 1991, are Joan Benoit who, in 1984, won the gold medal in the first women's Olympic Marathon ever run, and Sarah Billmeier, who won two gold medals for skiing in the 1994 Paralympic -WinterGames. Among other women inductees are Dot Petty world championship bowler, and basketball stars Lisa Blais Manning and Maureen Burchill Cooper.
DIRECTIONS Walk along Fore Street past the Custom House to Market Street, turn right up Market, noting the Dolphin statue on the right and the trompe loeil mural across Tommy's Park at Middle Street. At Federal Street, turn right to the Federal Court House and the Cumberland County Court House.C3
FEDERAL COURT HOUSE, 156 Federal Street and CUMBERLAND COUNTY COURT HOUSE, 142 Federal StreetThe Cumberland County Court House houses a district court and a superior court. Lawyer Harriet P. Henry, an activist in the Portland community, became Maine's first woman judge in 1973, serving in the district court until 1990. Throughout the state in 1997, four of Maine's nineteen superior court judges and six of the state's twenty-eight district court judges were women. Only one woman out of the seven justices, Caroline Glassman, who was appointed in 1983, sat on the Maine Supreme Court in Augusta. No women judges in Maine serve in the federal court, but two women, Margaret McGaughey and Paula Silsby, have served as Assistant U.S. Attorneys for the U.S. Department of justice since 1977.
DIRECTIONS Walk back down Federal Street to Exchange Street; turn right and continue to Congress Street.
C4 GAIL LAUGHLIN OFFICE (former), 119 Exchange StreetGail Laughlin (1868-1952), a prominent woman lawyer, legislator, and suffragist, had her law office here. A graduate of Portland High School, where she received the Brown medal for the highest grades among girls, Laughlin earned her law degree from Cornell and became a national suffrage speaker before returning to Portland in 1924 to practice law. Elected to the Maine legislature for three terms beginning in 1929, Laughlin succeeded in passing several laws to improve the lives of women. She sponsored bills raising the legal marriage age of women to 16 (from 13), preventing husbands from committing wives to mental institutions without medical consultation, and including women on juries. She also organized the Maine Department of Health.
C5 PORTLAND PRESS HERALD, 390 Congress StreetJean Gannett Hawley (1924-1994) was publisher and chair of the board of Guy Gannett Communications, the publisher of the Portland Press Herald, for 40 years. Directing four newspapers and a radio and TV station, Hawley inherited control of the company from her father, Guy Patterson Gannett, and was considered a force for public service journalism. She personally supported a range of causes from the arts to AIDS.
Maine Media Women (originally Maine Press and Radio Women) was organized in 1952 in Augusta by more than fifty Maine women newspaper and radio writers. Frances Hapgood, society editor for the Portland Press Herald, was the first membership chair and later became president. Agnes Gibbs of Portland Station WSCH, was the first treasurer. Among their goals are to promote higher standards and widen opportunities for women in the field.
DIRECTIONS Cross Congress Street to Portland City Hall.
C6 PORTLAND CITY HALL AUDITORIUM, 389 Congress StreetThe first soloist in the new City Hall Auditorium diva, Nordica (1857-1914). Born Lillian Norton in Farmington, Nordica became a great Wagnerian soprano who performed all over the United States and Europe. She sang for the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1893 to 1907. Called the 'Lily of the North,' Nordica saw herself as a New Englander and also supported suffrage for women. She said: 'Plenty have natural voices equal to mine, plenty have talent equal to mine, but I have worked." She died in Java from pneumonia contracted after a shipwreck. The performance of Annie Louise Carey (1841-1921), a contralto, in Portland's old City Hall in 1870 was such an event that the railroads leading to Portland and the Hall itself were overflowing with Mainers anxious "to welcome their song-bird home." Born in Wayne, she attended Gorham Female Seminary and studied in Boston before she raised enough money to study in Europe where she made her operatic debut. In addition to opera, she was especially known for her performances in oratorios. She retired at the age of forty after her marriage.
C7 PORTLAND CITY HALL, 389-405 Congress StreetAs the Portland Institute and Public Library, this site held the first woman suffrage meeting. It was called by John Neal on May 5,1870, to restore "woman to her 'natural and inalienable rights' ". Maine women finally won the right to vote after the state legislature ratified the national suffrage amendment in November, 1919. By then Portland had hired Katherine Quinn as its first public health nursing supervisor. She served from 1918 until 1946 and her name became synonymous with the city's free milk program.
The first woman to be elected to Portland's eleven-member City Council was Florence Stevens, who served from 1923-1930. The largest number of women on the Council, whose members are paid a nominal salary, occurred in 1988 when five women served, but only one woman, Cheryl Leeman, served in 1996. The Council elects the mayor. The first woman mayor was Helen Frost, elected in 1946 and 1951, followed by five other women, including Leeman; Pamela Plumb and Linda Abromson.
C8 FIRST PARISH CHURCH, 495 Congress StreetI
n the 1840s, a Portland Female Anti-Slavery Society meeting in the First Parish Church with visiting speaker, Stephen S. Foster, resulted in an anti-slavery riot. Society members, Lydia Neal Dennett and Elizabeth Widgery Thomas, escorted Foster to safety through a rear window next door to the house of Comfort Hussey Winslow. Winslow held meetings of the Society in her house as early as 1834. The church, built in 1826, survived the great Portland fire of 1866.Women in the church have been active in meeting societal needs. In 1847, women in the Channing Circle raised money in a fair to start the ministry to the poor that eventually became the Preble Chapel (see C14). In the late nineteenth century, women in the church formed a branch of the Alliance of Unitarian Women, which still exists, to support the church's activities. Among the recent directors of religious education have been two women ministers. The church regularly invites women activists in the local community to give lay sermons.
DIRECTIONS Go back along Congress a few yards to Temple; turn left toward the entrance to Portland High School.
C9 PORTLAND HIGH SCHOOL, Congress at TempleWhen Portland High School became coeducational in 1863, Congress Street was the girls' entrance. Reluctant to admit girls but anxious to save money by having only one high school, the School Committee voted: 'Whenever boys and girls use the same room to recite, the sexes enter at different doors, and retire the same way when the recitation is ended, being thus entirely separate except when in the presence of the teacher.' Al. though secondary education for boys began in 1821, girls were not admitted to high school until 1850. Girls' High, which was built on Chestnut Street in 1851, became the normal school and later the Moses Woolson Elementary School, named for their first principal.
DIRECTIONS Follow the walkway to Elm Street; note the sculpture, The Ascent, by Thomas K. Kennedy (1991); return to Congress Street and take a right. Note the Our Lady of Victories Monument by Franklin Simmons *1891), honoring Civil War veterans and modeled after Minerva, goddess of wisdom and war.
C10 PORTLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, 455 Congress Street (see also S4)When the new Portland Public Library opened at this site in 1979, the Little Water Girl statue was moved to the courtyard from Deering Oak Park. The statue honors Lillian Ames Stevens (1844-1914), the second president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and first Maine president (see also W4). The Maine WCTU supported women's suffrage and followed national President Frances Williard's "Do everything" policy, including establishing shelters for women in trouble and campaigning for a state women's reformatory. Williard said of Stevens: 'The streets of Portland have not a sight more familiar, and surely none more welcome to all save evildoers, than Mrs. Stevens in her phaeton rapidly driving her spirited horse from police station to Friendly Inn; from Erring Woman's Refuge to the sheriff's office."
Among Portland's early women authors represented here are Sally Sayward Barrell Keating Wood (1759-1855), who wrote traditional sentimental fiction, and Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806-1893), who supported women's rights in her stories, poems, and essays. Smith, who probably was the first white woman to climb Mt. Katahdin, believed that women should be free to develop their talents and said: "There are thousands capable of a sphere beyond the fireside and being thus qualified, they hold a commission from God himself to go out into this broader field."
C11 CENTER FOR MAINE HISTORY-WADSWORTH-LONGFELLOW HOUSE, LIBRARY, AND MAINE HISTORY GALLERY, 485-489 Congress Street
Succeeding women of the Wadsworth and Longfellow families managed their large households alone while their husbands served in state and national legislatures. Peleg, husband of Elizabeth Bartlett Wadsworth (1 753-1825), grandmother of the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, built the house in 1786. He served in the U.S. Congress from 1792 to 1807. Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow (1778-1851), mother of the poet, also managed her household, including eight children, and the law office of her husband, Stephen, while he served in Congress. The poet's younger sister, Ann Longfellow Pierce (1810-1901), preserved and lived in the house until her death in 1901. She bequeathed the house to the Maine Historical Society.
The Longfellow Garden Club, founded by Pearl Davis Wing(1892-1957), created and has maintained the historic garden of native plants behind the Wadsworth-Longfellow House since 1923. Wing is also noted as being the first woman to make an outdoor public speech for women's suffrage in Portland. Historical Society contains many sources for women's history, including diaries, letters, reference works, and artifacts. The diversity of people and lifeways in Maine are illustrated in the exhibits in the Maine History Gallery next door.DIRECTIONS With the Maine History Gallery behind you, look up Congress Street to your right.
C12 DEPARTMENT STORE DISTRICT (former) Congress Street from the intersection of Brown to Oak StreetAmong the major stores on both sides of Congress Street during the era of downtown department stores from the turn of the century through the 1950s, were Eastman Bros. & Bancroft; Thomas Smiley Co.; Porteous, Mitchell, & Braun Co.; Rines Bros. Co.; and J.R. Libby Co. More women were employed as saleswomen in stores than in any line of work. In 1907, the wages of the 500 saleswomen ranged from $2 a week (paid to apprentices) to $20 and $25 a week (paid to department heads), although the average was $7 a week. In the early period, women sales clerks complained about such conditions as having to stand all day without stools, but over the years a camaraderie developed and the stores set up rest/ lunch rooms for the women, each run by an organization of the clerks themselves.
Mixed in with the department stores were office buildings containing businesses operated by Portland women. Among them were: Agnes, Alice, and Loretta Sheehan, who ran the Sheehan Millinery at 537 Congress in the 1920s, and Mary and Nellie Clarity, who operated the Clarity Sisters Corset Shop in the Durant Block nearby.
The former Porteous Department Store (522 Congress Street) has recently been converted to the Maine College of Art.
DIRECTIONS Go back down Congress Street to Preble Street and turn left to Cumberland Avenue.
C13
Portland Public Market, Cumberland Avenue between Preble and ElmThe new Portland Public Market was funded and co-founded by philanthropist Elizabeth Noyce (1931-1996). She also bought buildings along Congress Street for rehabilitation and to be offered at low rents in order to encourage businesses to return to the city and generate jobs. Among her other projects in Portland were founding the Maine Bank and Trust Co. to help local banks survive a banking crisis, rescuing Nissen Baking Co. to save 300 jobs, supporting the building of a children's hospital at Maine Medical Center, and sponsoring the Cumberland County Civic Center. She also donated paintings and funds to the Portland Museum of Art.
C14 PREBLE CHAPEL, 331 Cumberland Avenue (corner Preble Street)Women have been active in running social service programs in the Preble Chapel for 150 years. In 1847, the women of the Channing Circle of Portland's two Unitarian churches (First Parish and Park Street) held a fair and raised $500 (matched by the men of the churches) to establish a ministry to the poor. In 1851, the women raised $900 to build a chapel to house those programs on land donated by Mary Deering Preble. The early women clothed the children who came to the chapel and started a sewing school to enable women to learn a trade. In 1935, Bertha Pettengill became the chapel's first woman minister, serving for ten years. The building almost fell to urban renewal in the 1960s, but in the 1980s, its mission was revitalized when the Portland ministry-at-large began to support a large variety of social programs focusing on youth and family outreach.
DIRECTIONS Turn left and walk along Cumberland Avenue, passing 339 Cumberland, the site of the former Pythian Temple, meeting place for trade unions.
C15 CASCO PAPER BOX COMPANY, 343 Cumberland AvenueWomen have always been a majority of the workers at the Casco Paper Box Company, founded in 1892 on Cross Street. In 1904, sixty-eight women and seven men assembled the rigid boxes, their hands, according to one reporter, "come to have wonderful quickness, and... the work is performed as no machine could do it.' The women were paid by piece work, averaging $8 per week. Over the years, workers have assembled rigid boxes to hold gum, candy, toilet articles, jewelry, toys, and stationery. The company has been managed for the last twenty years by Laures Perkins who moved the plant to its Cumberland Avenue location in 1979.
DIRECTIONS Continue along Cumberland to Oak Street.
C16 OAK STREET THEATER, 92 Oak Street (near Cumberland Avenue)
Each March, the Oak Street Theatre, an experimental grass roots theatrical group, presents a Women's Theater Festival including original plays and one-woman shows. Founded in 1994 by Elizabeth Buchsbaum and Michael Levine, the theater houses three companies and offers classes and workshops in the performing arts.
DIRECTIONS Continue down Cumberland to Forest Avenue.
C17 BUSINESS AND PROFESSIONAL WOMEN'S CLUB (former), 415 Cumberland Avenue (across Forest Avenue)
In 1920, Portland women founded a branch of the Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs. Until 1952, they rented club rooms here, consisting of an assembly hall, reception room, and library. In the 1920s the club had nearly 700 members. Occupations represented were doctors, insurance agents, teachers, nurses, bookkeepers, stenographers, social workers, and proprietors of tea rooms, flower, gift, corset, millinery, and dressmaking shops. The King Middle School at 92 Deering Avenue is named for Helen King, the first president of the Portland BPW Club. She was supervising principal of the Portland Public School
DIRECTIONS Turn left on Forest Avenue.
C18 NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE EXCHANGE, Forest and Cumberland Avenues In April 1919, 200 women telephone operators in Portland walked out on strike, joining their sister "hello girls" to close down five New England telephone exchanges (except Connecticut) for six days. The dispute was with the U.S. Postmaster General who controlled telephone company policies at the time and refused to allow the women a means to bargain for higher wages. Cora Smith, president of Portland Local 25A, appealed to the governor and senators to help settle the issue. The women met at the Pythian Temple on Cumberland Avenue and picketed the exchange. The dispute was settled in favor of the telephone operators with a pay raise, retroactive to January 1, of $19 a week after seven years of service and a minimum wage of $10 a week.DIRECTIONS Continue up Forest Avenue.
C19 PORTLAND PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, 25 Forest AvenueSince 1983 the Portland Performing Arts Center has been the home of the Portland Stage Company, which produces five plays a year using members of Actor's Equity, and the Ram Island Dance Company, which offers modern dance classes and performances. In its twenty-third season (1996-97), the Portland Stage Company offered China and Other Daughters, a women's perspective on the legendary daughters of Agamemnon, during Women's History Month.
C20 CONGRESS SQUARE HOTEL (former), 579 Congress at Forest AvenueDuring World War II, servicewomen were present in Portland. About 150 WACS (Women's Army Corps) were billeted in the Congress Square Hotel. They were stationed at the U.S. Army Air Corps Air Warning Service Filter Center. The residence for WAVE officers attached to the U.S. Naval Station was in the West End. For the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps see W6.
DIRECTIONS Turn left on Congress Street, passing the office of the Maine Women's Fund at 565 Congress, an organization that awards grants to non-profit groups who work with women. Cross Congress at Oak, continue on Oak to Free Street.
C21 JEFFERSON THEATER (site of), 112 Free StreetThe heyday of the Jefferson Theater lasted from its opening in 1897 until about 1910. Among actresses performing there were Lillian Russell, Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Dressler, Ethel Barrymore, Maude Adams, Lily Langtree, and Maine native, Maxine Elliott. Another Maine woman, Juanita Guptill, who conducted the orchestra, also performed at parties and other events with her Juanita Guptill's Gypsy Girls. By the time the Jefferson closed in 1933, it was used mainly for burlesque shows and movies.
DIRECTIONS Continue up Free Street towards Congress.
C22 CHILDREN'S MUSEUM OF MAINE, 142 Free StreetWhen it opened in this space in 1993, the Children's Museum looked back to its beginnings in 1977 as a demonstration project of the Junior League, a women's service organization. Using funds from sales at their thrift shop, League members were convinced of the need for a children's museum with "a hands-on learning experience,' according to their then president, Harriet Lutes. With its members creating the exhibits, the League opened the museum in the Pond Cove School in Cape Elizabeth. When it began to succeed, the League hired a director. They met their goal of establishing a self-sustaining museum and moved it to a Victorian house owned by Westbrook College. Its success in attracting visitors allowed the League to end its direct involvement in the museum's management.
The building was the former Chamber of Commerce Building and during World War 11, women served as hostesses at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Recreation Center housed in this building. African-American women served as hostesses at the Colored Community Center for Servicemen on Center Street.
C23 PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART, 590 Congress StreetThe Portland Museum of Art opened in 1983. It replaced the Libby Building, a location favored by women music teachers for their studios. Among the museum's major collections is the Joan Whitney Payton collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American paintings installed here in 1991. During Women's History Month, the museum offers a Women's Film and Video Festival.
Representing Maine women artists in the museum's collection from the nineteenth century is Susanna Paine (1792-1862). Before photography, people wishing to preserve the likenesses of family members often hired traveling portrait painters. Among them was Paine, who supported herself in Portland for a decade following 1826 by painting miniatures and portraits, sometimes in return for room and board.
Representing Maine women artists in the twentieth century in the museum's collection are Marguerite Thompson Zorach (1887-1968) and Mildred Giddings Burrage (1890-1983). Zorach first joined the Maine art scene in Stonington in 1919 where she painted in the Cubist mode. She moved to Georgetown permanently in 1923 and expanded into watercolors and embroidery. Burrage was both an artist and a historic preservationist. Although her early paintings were influenced by her studies of Impressionism in France, the influence of the times and her work as a counselor in the World War II shipyards in South Portland led her to paint realistic scenes of contemporary activities. Among her successes in historic preservation were the restoration of the Tate House in Stroudwater, the Pownalborough Court House, and Lincoln County Museum and Jail
.DIRECTIONS The Portland Museum of Art is the last stop on the Congress Street walk and the first stop on the State Street walk.
STATE STREET WALK
Women in Philanthropy and Religion
The State Street walk begins at the Portland Museum of Art and continues along Congress Street to the former Queen's Hospital at State Street. It turns east down State Street past sites depicting women's philanthropic work in both Catholic and Protestant religions. It follows Danforth Street to Gorham's corner and back to High Street via Center and Spring Streets through a varied neighborhood, including childcare centers and two mansions, before returning to Congress Square. For a shorter alterntive, see the DIRECTIONS after S18. The State Street walk begins at the end of the Congress Street walk and can be combined with it.DIRECTIONS Cross High Street at Congress, staying on the left side. Look over to High Street at the right.
S2 EASTLAND HOTEL,157 High Street at CongressLike its predecessor, the U.S. Hotel at Monument Square, the Eastland Hotel became a major employer of women as chambermaids and waitresses. Elizabeth Powers, the head of housekeeping at the U.S. Hotel in 1900 brought young women over from Ireland to work there. On of the managers of the Eastland, which opened in 1927 was Adeline Bond Rines (1887-1976), who took over after the sudden death of her husband. Rines was the first woman admitted to the Cumberland Bar Association.
DIRECTIONS Walk south on Congress to Park Street, staying on the left side. Cross Park Street.
S3 ROSA E. TRUE SCHOOL (former), 140 Park StreetWhen the Rosa E. True School closed in 1972, it was said to be the oldest continuously used elementary school in the United States. Built in 1844, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1923, it received its present name to honor a longtime teacher and principal who died in 1917. The Portland West Neighborhood Council (see WI) renovated the building to create low income housing in 1987.
DIRECTIONS Retum to Congress Street. Cross Congress Street and turn left.
S4 BAXTER GALLERY, 619-23 Congress StreetBuilt by Portland's Mayor James Phinney Baxter in 1888, the Baxter Building was Portland's public library until 1979, when it became the Portland School of Art. It now houses the Baxter Gallery of the Maine College of Art (formerly the Portland School of Art), now located on 522 Congress Street. Mehetabel Cummings Baxter (1837-1914), Baxter's second wife, was an artist and founder of the Portland Society of Art. Several women served as head librarian when the public library was in the Baxter Building including Jane Lord Burbank from 1925 to 1941 and Grace Trappan, from 1941 to 1970.
S5 TRELAWNY BUILDING, 655 Congress Street
Soon after the Baxters opened the Trelawny Building (originally called the Baxter Building) in 1910, the variety of women professionals who rented offices turned the building into a virtual women's office building. The first occupations listed were: dermatologist, osteopath, dressmaker, manicurist, and music teacher. By 1936, twenty women represented the above occupations with the addition of naturopath, nurse, beautician, chiropodist, chiropractor, and psychic. The number of women renting offices there declined in the 1950s until, by 1976, the Trelawny became almost completely residential.
DIRECTIONS Cross Congress Street at State Street to Longfellow Square and Monument (by sculptor Franklin Simmons in 1888). Look across Congress to Longfellow Commons.
S6 QUEEN'S HOSPITAL (former, now Longfellow Commons), 681 Congress at State (see also S11)During the 1918 flu epidemic, Bishop Louis Walsh, leader of the Portland Catholic community, appealed for help. Marion Weeks, a Protestant daughter of a surgeon, responded by donating her Congress Street mansion to the Diocese of Portland for a hospital. The Sisters of Mercy, an order with sixty active nuns in Portland, mobilized to staff the hospital. Additional buildings were added. TheSisters operated the Training School for Nurses between 1920 and 1986 with Sister Mary Constance McCarron as its first superintendent. When Queen's Hospital dosed in 1945, it was converted to nurses' residences.
DIRECTIONS Continue down the left side of State Street.
S7 JOHN NEAL HOUSE, 173-175 State Street
John Neal (1793-1876), an advocate of women's suffrage and other liberal causes, built the house in 1836. He was probably influenced by his mother, Rachel Neal (1769-1849), a Quaker, who opened a school for young children after her husband died, leaving her with twin babies (John and his sister Rachel). She continued to operate the school for the rest of her life. In his essay on True Womanhood, Neal said, "women ... have not only a right to think for themselves, but to act for themselves, and take the consequences, here and hereafter, without being accountable to us, anymore than we are to them" (see also W14).
S8 MONASTERY OF THE MOST PRECIOUS BLOOD, 166 State Street
The monastery was established by Sister Mary Genevieve (Bertha Rita Connell) (d. 1974) with seven sisters in 1934. It is the home of the Sisters Adorers of the Precious Blood, a cloistered contemplative order of nuns devoted to a life of prayer, founded in Quebec. The sisters support themselves by making and selling Mass cards and spiritual bouquets. Their beautiful intimate chapel is open to the public during the day. From 1919 to 1934, the building was the site of King's Academy, a school for girls and women taught by members of the Sisters of Mercy from St. Joseph's Convent. Built in 1807, the house was originally the home of Prentiss Mellen, the first chief justice of Maine, and later of Senator William Pitt Fessenden.
S9 THE STATE STREET CHURCH, UNITED CHURCH OF CHRIST, 155-159 State StreetWhen the State Street church was built in 1851, thirty-eight of the fifty-eight members were women. Women have continued to play a major role in the church. The State Street Afternoon Guild, founded in 1893, is the oldest continuously organized women's group in the United Church of Christ. It still meets each Monday at noon between October and May. It raises money for the church in rummage sales and for the church's mission by providing practical materials for schoolchildren. Women increased their role in church governance in 1971 when women became deacons. In 1977 Ellis Bliss was the first woman to be elected moderator. Among women ordained ministers who are active in the church are the Rev. Judith Blanchard, Administrative Dean of the Portland Bangor Theological Seminary, the Rev. Constance Wells, now a minister in Belfast, and the Rev. Elly Haney, who first organized the Feminist Spiritual Community of Maine in the State Street Church.
S10 ST. LUKE'S CATHEDRAL, 137-145 State Street
St. Luke's Cathedral, the center of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, was the site of the first ordination of a woman to the Episcopal priesthood in Maine when Elizabeth Ann Habecker was ordained in 1977, the year after the Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women. The action was so controversial that the priest at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on Munjoy Hill caused his church's flag to be flown upside down at half staff. The following year, Brooke Alexander Leddy was the first Maine resident to be ordained at St. Luke's. She spoke of her call to the service of God: 'I have recognized God in myself and I have loved her." Women have served as deacons at St. Luke's since 1978 and in the 1990s were a majority on the church's Vestry (board of directors). A long-standing women's service group is St. Martha's Guild.
S11MERCY HOSPITAL, 144 State Street (see also: S5)In 1942 the Sisters of Mercy took over the new six-story, 150-bed hospital. Although it was designed to replace Queen's Hospital, both continued to operate until 1945. The Sisters of Mercy came to Maine via Bangor in 1865 and in addition to the hospital, operated schools, day care centers, homes for aged women, and residences for working women throughout the state. Their first convent was at 100 Free Street. Their Mother House is now on Stevens Avenue next to the Catherine McAuley High School for girls, which they opened in 1%9 and named for the Irish founder of the order. The order opened St. Joseph's College in 1915 and moved it to Standish in 1955 (see also S23, M17).
DIRECTIONS Continue down State Street to Spring Street. At 157 Spring note the Portland Fire Museum, originally built in 1837 to house the West Female Grammar School and a fire station. Cross State at Spring and turn right on Gray.
S12 ST. DOMINIC'S CHURCH AND SCHOOL FOR GIRLS (former), corner of Gray and State streets St. Dominic's Church was dedicated in 1893 and replaced a building built in 1830 as the first Catholic church in Portland. Originally, laywomen were most active in such women's groups as the Altar Society; currently, women and girls are also integrated into church life as Eucharistic ministers and altar girls. The school, which opened for girls in 1865, was originally operated by the Sisters of Notre Dame. It was taken over by the Sisters of Mercy in 1873 when the church decided that boys and girls could be taught together in the primary grades. The Notre Dame Sisters returned to Canada, because their order only allowed them to teach girls.The Diocese closed the school in 1973 and it is now used for hospital administration. The diocese closed the church in 1998.
S13 FEMALE ORPHAN ASYLUM (former),62 State StreetA
small group of women opened the Female Orphan Asylum on Free Street in 1828 to house young Protestant girls. They moved the Asylum to this State Street location in 1870 where it remained until 1922 when it became the State Street Osteopathic Hospital until 1949. The Asylum was managed by an incorporated board of women, and, until 1896, also included a school. A governess ran the program on a daily basis, making sure the children's worldly and spiritual needs were both attended to. After 1891, boys under seven were admitted. The building is now private housing.DIRECTIONS Turn left (north) on Danforth Street.
S14 VICTORIA MANSION,109 Danforth StreetOne of Portland's best-known landmarks, the Victoria Mansion was in need of rehabilitation when the Society of Maine Women of Achievement took it over in 1943 as a gift from Clara Holmes. She and her brother, William, rescued the mansion, which was threatened with demolition, and opened it to the public in 1941. The Society, whose first president was Ann Macomber Gannett (1882-1951), changed its name to the Victoria Society of Maine Women in 1944, and by 1947, 500 women from all over the state were listed as members. Men were listed as associates until the 1960s. In the next decade, the society became the Victoria Society, still charged with the goal of rehabilitating the mansion. It is open to the public with a full range of activities including a Christmas tour of Victorian decorations. The mansion was built between 1858 and 1860 as a summer home for Ruggles Sylvester Morse and his wife, Olive Ring Merrill Morse, a native of Maine. After the death of her husband, Olive Morse sold the building to the J.R. Libby family, department store owners, but after their daughter, Alice Libby Browne, and her husband moved out in 1929, the house was unoccupied until the Holmes family purchased it.
S15 CATHERINE MORRILL DAY NURSERY, 94-96 Danforth StreetThe day nursery grew out of the Portland Baby Hygiene and Welfare Association, founded in 1916 by a group of women to distribute free milk for babies from a station at City Hall. The women expanded their plans and opened a day nursery in rented rooms until 1922 when Mrs. Franklin Payson and her son, Donald, gave the Association their present building. It was named for Catherine Morrill, an active volunteer at the nursery who died at age twenty. The nursery, a non-profit organization, continues its mission of serving low-income families. Fees are set on a sliding scale. S16 NORTHEASTERN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS (former), 97 Danforth Street
Many young women trained as stenographers, typists, bookkeepers, and cashiers at Portland's various business colleges. In 1907,500 women held such jobs, making an average of $8 a week, and 200 were attending business colleges. Although Gray's Business College, which opened in 1895, was Maine's oldest business school, Northeastern School of Business, which operated at this site from 1947 to 1970, was one of its successors. It merged with Plus/ Gray's Business School in 1970 and became Casco Bay College in 1974.
DIRECTIONS Turn left at High Street.
S17 CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL (former), 68 High StreetNow a University of Southern Maine building, 68 High Street was the location of Children's Hospital from 1908 to 1948, when it merged with Maine General Hospital. Founded to serve physically handicapped children the hospital was a center for women's volunteer work. In l927,there were thirty-two women on the Ladies' Advisory Board and forty women on the Board of Lady Visitors, who provided Christmas gifts, parties, and movies. The Junior League assisted with occupational therapy and arts and crafts. An affiliated nurses' training school continued until 1930. The empty lot next door was the site of the Storer Mansion, The Elms, built in 1801, acquired by John Mussey in 1817, and later used for Children's Hospital. The Children's Hospital building was purchased by the Salvation Army in 1948 and became the Urban Adult Learning Center in 1962 and the University of Maine Law School in 1972. S18 MISS MARTIN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS (Site Of), Corner High and Danforth Streets)
Miss Martin's School for Girls was held in the Storer Mansion from 1807 to 1817. Three Martin sisters, Penelope, Catherine, and Eliza, ran this boarding and day school in various Portland sites. When the Martin family fell into financial trouble, their father suggested that the sisters start a school to support the family. They taught the 'useful and ornamental arts" to 700 young women over a period of 30 years. When they left the High Street location, they bought a building on India Street where they lived and taught a day school until they retired in 1834.
DIRECTIONS Return to Danforth Street. Walk down Danforth to the intersection of York and Pleasant Streets. A shorter alternative route is to turn left on High Street and pick up the walk at S23 (St. Elizabeth's Child Development Center) and proceed to S21 (YWCA) and S22 (Frye Hall) on Spring Street, ending the walk by turning right on High Street to S24 (McLellan-Sweat Mansion).
S19 GORHAM'S CORNER, Danforth, Pleasant, Center, Fore, and York StreetsGorham's corner was the center of a predominantly Irish working class community. The neighborhood originated when the Irish became the first large non-English group in Portland. Over 500 came during Black '47, the year of the famine. By 1860 the Irish comprised two-thirds of the 3,900 immigrants to the city. The trip to America was dangerous; in 1864 thirty Irish steerage passengers, the majority of whom were women and children, drowned when the Bohemian sank off Cape Elizabeth. Many of the neighborhood women packed fish in the sardine canneries on Commercial Street. When the boats came in, the captain would sound a whistle and the women and children would hasten to the factory. At the turn of the century women worked at the ED. Pettengill Co. on York Street (corner of Maple), processing and canning pickles, catsup, preserves, and jellies. Sarah Standish Pettengill was president of the company from 1885 to 1905.
A representative second generation Irish-American was Barbara Joyce (1924-1990), who worked in many different jobs all her life. During the Depression at age eleven, she washed floors and shucked clams. She married at fifteen and eventually had eleven children. As a single parent, she worked as a waitress, continuing after her second marriage. In later years, she became a community activist.
DIRECTIONS Continue on to Center Street and turn left.
S20
FRATERNITY HOUSE (former), 52 Center Street and STAPLES SCHOOL (former), Center and Spring The predecessor of the Fraternity House, Portland's settlement house, was the Portland Fraternity, organized in 1870 to provide an evening school. Classes were first held in the Preble Chapel (see C14). The programs moved several times until the group acquired its own building on Center Street with a large hall, club rooms, a library, and an apartment for the residents. Some evening activities were held in the Staples School (1864 to 1971). By 1909, the weekly attendance averaged about 1200, mostly young people, aged 8 to 25. Among the activities were dramatics; cooking, drawing and printing classes; sewing and knitting clubs; a music school- Boy and Girl Scout troops; and mothers' dubs. Its programs declined, finally closing in the 1970s, but its traditions were carried on by the YWCA and YMCA.Among the women head workers of the Fraternity House were Elsie Clark Nutt (d. 1956) and Hazel Tapley (1891-1963). Nutt assisted Eva Shorey (1871-1964), special agent of the Maine Bureau of Industrial and Labor Statistics, in preparing the 1907 report on working women in Portland. They concluded: "The woman wage-earner of Portland is a person, and not merely a screw in a machine, as she would be in a larger city." A problem remained, they said: 'If some arrangement could be devised to leave a larger margin between the amount of wages received and the price paid for living expenses, the problem of the women wage-earners of Portland would be greatly simplified.'
DIRECTIONS Continue up Center Street to Spring. Turn left on Spring.
S21 PORTLAND YWCA, Spring and Oak Streets
The Portland YWCA was founded in 1894, evolving from the Female Tract Society begun in 1827, and the Portland Women's Christian Association, founded in 1869. It was first organized to 'protect girls going into cities to work, to give them safe and decent shelter, and good food, all within their small means." By 1907, the YWCA was running three homes, including a Travelers' Aid House near Union Station as well as a summer camp in Falmouth. Another camp was added in Yarmouth and on Long Island. In addition to housing the YWCA ran an employment bureau. In 1961, the YWCA moved into its new building with its popular gymnasium and swimming pool. The YWCA's programs have kept up with the times, supporting the Fair Harbor Shelter, Fair Harbor Residence, teen parent services, and a street program to meet needs of homeless teens. Founded as a Protestant organization, the YWCA has also been strengthened by its modern emphasis on racial and religious diversity.
S22FRYE HALL: WOMEN'S LITERARY UNION AND ROSSINI CLUB (former, now Holiday Inn), 78 Spring StreetFrye Hall was the home of the Women's Literary Union, founded in 1889 by Eunice Nichols Frye by combining ten smaller clubs to form its core. The goals were "to stimulate the intellectual and cultural fife of its members" through discussion of issues of the day and literary topics. An early project was to provide statuary and pictures for the public schools. in 1916 George Frye gave the Union its own building which it used as its headquarters until 1971 when the building was sold to the Holiday Inn.
The Union moved to a building at Westbrook College. The Portland Rossini Club, the oldest musical dub in the United States whose members are all women, was founded in 1869 with a goal of "mutual improvement in the art of music." It also met in Frye Hall after 1916. The club began admitting men in the late 1980s, but all the officers are still women. It now holds its concerts at the University of Southern Maine. Among long-time members of the Rossini Club is Ocy Downs, who has born in 1905 and joined the Club in the 1920s. She taught piano in Portland for more than sixty years, beginning with a studio at the Trelawny Building.
DIRECTIONS Continue on Spring Street and turn left on High Street.
<S23 ST ELIZABETH'S CHILD DEVELOPMENT CENTER, 87 High Street
St. Elizabeth's Orphan Asylum opened in 1888 as the Catholic diocesan orphanage staffed by Sisters of Mercy. The Asylum also ran a summer camp for Asylum residents on Little Diamond Island that sometimes included as many as 90 children. At its peak in the 1920s, the home housed 75 to 80 girls. Earlier, boys were transferred to the St. Louis Home. By 1961, more than 5,000 children had been residents at St. Elizabeth's. Half of the children had come from broken homes, one-fifth were half-orphaned,7 percent were temporary residents, 7 percent came from parents who both worked, and 5 percent were day boarders. After graduation from grammar school, the girls returned to relatives or to other families, but by the 1920s, older girls were allowed to remain and attend Cathedral High School. The orphanage closed in 1968 when only eleven girls remained. It reopened as St. Elizabeth's Child Development Center, offering day care.
DIRECTIONS Go back up High Street
S24 MCLELLAN-SWEAT MANSION, 107 Spring Street (NE corner of High and Spring)The mansion was the home of Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat (1823-1908), a writer, literary and art critic, and world traveler who founded the first public art museum in Maine. She was brought up in The Elms at the corner of Danforth and High Streets (see S18). She and her husband, Lorenzo de Medici Sweat, a Portland lawyer and representative to Congress, lived in Washington, D.C., in the winter and used the Spring Street house as their summer home. Upon her death, she bequeathed it to the Portland Society of Art together with a building erected as an art museum and memorial to her husband. An authority on George Sand and Charlotte Bronte, she published accounts of her travels and one novel, Ethel's Love Life, which illuminates nineteenth-century women's romantic friendships.
DIRECTIONS Continue up High Street to return to Congress Square.
MUNJOY HILL WALK
Women and Diversity in Maritime Portland
Beginning with six sites viewing Casco Bay and Portland Harbor from the Eastern Promenade, the Munjoy HUI Walk becomes a neighborhood walk as it winds down to lower Congress Street where the presence of ethnic churches, close to each other, are keys to understanding Munjoy Hill's diverse cultures. Representative women in the trail speak for those different cultures.TIME One hour
BEGIN Eastern Promenade, near Fort Allen Park
DIRECTIONS Follow Congress Street north to the end, turn right.
M1 NATIVE AMERICAN SITE, GREAT DIAMOND ISLAND, view from the Eastern Promenade
A burial site dated 1,000 AD. revealed an important archeological find - a Native American woman buried with a long stone pestle, possibly for leather working. The burial, in the process of repatriation, may have a cultural affiliation with the Pigwacket or Arosaguntacook peoples. The burial represented the most recent occupation of a large prehistoric maritime cod fishing station on Great Diamond Island. Excavated by the University of Southern Maine, the site was occupied for 4,500 years, primarily in the late winter and spring. The 25,000 recovered bones and shell indicate a focus on cod fish, deer, and soft-shell clams. The site's abundance of bones from small mammals suggests fur processing and clothing manufacturing activities.
Native Americans are still a presence in Portland, including about seventy-five students at the University of Southern Maine, a majority of whom are women.
M2 WOMEN HOTEL KEEPERS, PEAKS ISLAND, view from the Eastern PromenadeFrom the 1880s to the 1910s, Peaks Island was known as the Coney Island of Maine. Sixteen hotels, each with between ten and sixty rooms, were owned by families and run by wives; two were eventually owned and operated by widows. Ferry lines brought visitors to the island where, in its heyday, they could attend performances at the Gem Theater or the Greenwood Garden Playhouse or roller skate in the Majestic Skating Rink. Soon mothers came with their children to spend the summer and by 1920, 668 summer cottages were added to the 212 year-round houses. The number of visitors declined with the advent of automobiles and after several fires in the 1930s. The current year-round population on Peaks Island is 1,100.
M3 CAPTAIN'S WIVES, PORTLAND HARBOR, view from the Eastern PromenadeAbout one-fifth of the trading ships sailing out of Portland Harbor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included the captain's wife and young family. One example is Hannah Haskell Poor, wife of Captain David Poor, and their children, Melissa Aurora and Frances Ellen, who sailed the route between Portland and Havana, Cuba, in the 1840s. One of the ways they kept busy on shipboard was to produce handcrafts. The Maine Historical Society owns and often exhibits the Star and Compass quilt made by Hannah and David and the cedar ditty box made by David with the same design (see cover). For the wives of seamen, the Eastern Promenade was a place to look out for returning ships.
M4 HOUSE ISLAND, view from the Eastern PromenadeFrom 1906 to 1923, House Island served as an immigrant quarantine station, much like Ellis Island in New York, only on as smaller scale. The station consisted of a brick hospital, a wooden detention building, and a shingle-style doctor's residence. Before 1906, immigrants were processed at the Custom House, where in the 1890s, about 4,000 people came through annually. The Traveler's Society, originally begun by the YWCA, worked with detainees to provide translations and entertainment. When a reporter asked a German woman at House Island if America was the way she had imagined it, she answered that it didn't seem any different from home. "I had pictured in my dreams high buildings of marble.," she said, "giant skyscrapers, wealth everywhere in profusion, movement and bustle." The House Island Project of Portland Performing Arts sponsors collaborative performances in the state between artists and members of Ethnic communities.
M5 PORTLAND HEAD LIGHT, view from the Eastern PromenadePortland Head Light can be seen flashing off to the right over southern Portland. Although no woman was appointed lighthouse keeper at Portland Head, five other Maine women are documented as serving as keepers of lights in Maine, including the well-known Abby Burgess (later Grant) (1840-1892) who, as a girl, protected her family and "kept the light burning" on Matinicus Rock during a northeast storm in January, 1856. Lighthouse keepers' wives in remote locations had to be self-sufficient in order to sustain their family's material needs and to mitigate the problems of isolation.
M6 SOUTH PORTLAND SHIPYARDS, view from the Eastern Promenade
Between 1942 and 1945, women worked as welders, mechanics, crane operators, tackers, burners, pipe coverers, and painters on Liberty Ships at the Todd-Bath Iron Shipbuilding Corporation. AT its peak 3,700 women out of 31,000 people, from all over Maine and New Hampshire, built 236 ships. Women worked outdoors year round in dangerous conditions. They earned up to $1.20 an hour for an eight-hour day, six or seven days a week. Former welder, Shirley Wilder, said, "I loved welding. You need a woman's touch for welding," because she explained, it required coordination and accuracy, not brute strength. After the shipyards closed at the end of the war, jobs using their skills went to men returning from the military service. Some women had their sights raised and went back to school; others returned to clerking in stores and working in the mills and shoe shops, but Wilder was lucky: she became the first woman welder at Portland Copper and Tank Works. Seventeen of the Liberty Ships were named for women, including Lillian Nordica (see C6), Sarah Orne Jewett, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
DIRECTIONS Continue south down the Eastern Promenade to Atlantic Street. At O'Brion Street look up the hill to see the sign on the Marada Adams School, named for a former Munjoy Hill principal (see M10).
M7 SARAH JANE FOSTER AND THE FREDERICK COBB FAMILY HOME (site of), Eastern Promenade at Atlantic Street
Sarah Jane Foster (183901868), a young woman from Gray, worked as a hired girl for the family of Frederick Cobb, a railroad engineer, in 1864. Her published diary and letters about her experiences as a teacher of the freed slaves in the South from 1865 to 1868 reveal a woman who expected to be self-sufficient and to act on her beliefs. She also viewed herself as a writer and published poetry, stories, and letters from the south in the Zion's Advocate, whose offices at 82 Exchange Street she visited. For the experiences of her sister, Emma, in Portland in 1864, see M16.
DIRECTIONS Turn right on Atlantic Street.
M8 HOME OF HATTIE BRANCH, 6 Atlantic StreetHattie Branch *1898-1995) lived the life of a representative African-American woman. Born in Virginia where she worked a s a midwife, Hattie Branch came to Maine in the 1950s to start a chicken farm with her brother. She later moved to Portland and worked at Union Station and as a housekeeper. She was a self-sufficient woman who acquired income property and was famous for her home-made and home-grown Southern-style foods and her skill as a seamstress.
DIRECTIONS Continue up Atlantic to Congress; turn left and cross to Lafayette Street.
M9 HOME OF JUSTINA THOMAS (site of), 111 Congress Street (corner of Lafayette)
The house, barns, and livery stable that once occupied this corner belonged to the family of Justina Mansfield Thomas (1850-1924), a seamstress, and a representative woman on Munjoy Hill. Left as a widow with two small children, she supported herself as a dressmaker and became well-known throughout the city; she was eventually able to hire assistants. A full-length dress of grey and black satin covered with black lace and trimmed with lace and fringe, created by her in 1912, is among the collections of the Maine Historical Society.
DIRECTIONS Walk down Lafayette Street.
M10 HOME OF THE ALICE FISHER FAMILY, 39 Lafayette StreetT
he Alice Fisher family is a prominent African-American family that has traced its Maine heritage back seven generations. Members of the family over the decades contributed to Portland's history. In the early nineteenth century, one ancestor, Christopher Manuel, joined other citizens in a letter to the Easter Argus condemning local churches for treating non-white members as second-class citizens. Alice Ball Fisher's father, William Ball, a steward on the steamship Portland, was lost at sea. Alice worked as a cook and managed a family of twelve children. Her husband, Joseph, was a messenger, cartoonist, and butler for prominent families. Among their descendents is Robert Greene, a journalist in New York.DIRECTIONS Continue down Lafayette to Quebec Street. Turn left to North Street.
M11 MARADA ADAMS AND THE SHAILER SCHOOL (former), 58 North StreetFor 50 of her 72 years as a teacher, Marada Adams (18450-1938) taught on Munjoy Hill. She was the principal of the Shailer School (built in 1880-81 and now housing) until she became the first principal of the new Emerson Grammar School in 1898, where she taught until she retired in 1935. Born in a log cabin in Aroostook County, she began teaching when she was sixteen in the front room of the frame house that replaced the cabin. She introduced art to several students who later became professional artists. During her travels in Europe, she brought back statuary and paintings to decorate the school. The Marada Adams School on Moody Street is named for her.
DIRECTIONS Continue on North Street to Congress Street and turn right. At 138 Congress in the Portland Observatory, built in 1807 as a signaling tower. Turn left on Sheridan Street.
M12 GREEN MEMORIAL AME ZION CHURCH 46 Sheridan StreetEllen Odin and Moses Green, two members of the Abyssinian Church, wanted to bring the A.M.E. Zion denomination to Portland. Because of the small number of African Americans in Portland, they decided to band together to share resources and give each other strength to survive in the racist world. Odin and Green made a special trip to New Bedford to petition the Bishop to send a representative to Portland, and they founded the church in 1891. The congregation opened its new building in 1914. The women organized groups for self improvement including the Health Culture Society and a Big Sister Circle to mentor young girls. One of the most successful fund-raisers for the church has been the Thursday night chicken dinners prepared by the women of the church and open to the public. The Rev. Margaret Lawson is the first woman minister of the Green Memorial.
DIRECTIONS Turn right on Monument Street and walk one block. At the end, take the path on the left to Mountfort Street. Turn left on Mountfort, turn right on Newbury Street. The back of the old North School on Congress Street can be seen up the hill to the right. Operating from 1867 to 1979, the school served one thousand children at on
ce during its peak.M13 ABYSSINIAN CHURCH (former),75 Newbury Street
African Americans built the Abyssinian Church (Congregational) in 1818 in response to their treatment in Portland's churches. African Americans, who only represented 1 percent of the city's population, were not accepted into full participation in the churches and were only allowed to sit in the balconies. From 1829 to 1857, the church also ran a school for African Americans taught by women from the church who also organized a temperance society and a sewing circle. One of the few buildings in this area to survive the great fire of July 4, 1866, the church closed in 1917 soon after the Green Memorial opened.
DIRECTIONS Continue on Newbury to India Street.
M15 SHAAREY TPHILOH SYNAGOGUE (FORMER), 145 Newbury StreetBuilt in 1904, the synagogue served as a unifying force in Portland's Jewish community. Until it was built, the Jewish community met in private houses or above stores. Women of the temple formed a sisterhood and held raffles and suppers to raise money for the temple and support troubled families. In 1921 a splinter group formed Etz Cahim synagogue on Congress Street (at the head of India Street). Because it was an orthodox synagogue, the women sat upstairs and the men downstairs, but women were expected to help keep the temple on a sound financial basis.
A representative member of the Jewish community on Munjoy Hill is Goldie Romanow Levinsky, the wife of the son of the founder of Levinsky's store. She did the bookkeeping for the store for 50 years and served as president of the Etz Chaim Sisterhood. The Jewish community established the Jewish Home for the Aged on North Street in 1929 which closed in 1995.
DIRECTIONS Return to India Street, go one block towards Congress and take a left on Federal Street.
M16 ST. PETER'S CHURCH, 82 Federal Street
Built with funds raised by the Italian community, St. Peter's Church was dedicated in 1929 to unify the community and replace an earlier chapel built in 1911. The women's Sodality of the Sacred Heart meets once a month and raises funds at an annual Christmas bazaar and at the summer bazaar celebrating St. Rocco and the Blessed Mother, whose statues are carried through the street. Women serve as Eucharistic ministers and readers at Mass. A representative member of the Munjoy Hill Italian community, Josephine Capelluti, describes St. Peter's as the 'backbone of the community.' A cook for twenty years at the Italian Heritage Center where she also has been a board member, CapeUuti learned to cook from the first generation women from Italy. She especially enjoys the summer bazaar where the women of the church make and sell 4,000 cookies.
DIRECTIONS Walk through Levinsky's parking lot to Congress Street, turn left.
M17 EMMA FOSTER AND THE SWEETSIR BONNET BLEACHERY (site of), 312 Congress Street. In May, 1864, Emma Foster, sister of Sarah Jane Foster (see M7), came to Portland from Gray to work in the Alvin Sweetsir straw bonnet bleachery. Her job was to sew straw and tend to the shop. In her diary, she reports that she worked from 7:30 a.m. until evening, six days a week. Paid by piece work, she speeded up to a salary of $4.50 a week out of which she paid $2.50 for room and board. She found her boss difficult and left to work with her Aunt Hannah Humphrey, a milliner at 342 Congress, who trained her in the trade.DIRECTIONS Return to Congress Street at the edge of the (former) Levinsky's parking lot to the Alice Greele sign; look across the street.
M18 KAVANAGH SCHOOL (site of), 301 Congress Street
In 1877, Winifred Kavanagh, sister of Edward Kavanagh, first Catholic governor in all of New England, gave $25,000 to build the Kavanagh School for girls, kindergarten to grade 9. It opened in 1879 to 450 pupils with a teaching staff of eight Sisters of Mercy. In 1910, Cathedral High School for girls occupied the building until it was tom down in 1969. More than 2,500 young women graduated from Cathedral during its era. It was replaced by Catherine McAuley High School which opened in 1972 on Stevens Avenue. For other sites demonstrating the work of the Sisters of Mercy, see Queen's Hospital (S6) and Mercy Hospital (S11).
M19 ALICE GREELE'S TAVERN (site of), 300 Congress StreetA plaque commemorates Widow Alice Greele's Tavern, a popular gathering place in Portland from 1735 to 1775. Greele provided home-cooked meals, lodging, and entertainment. As tensions grew between the colonists and England, the tavern became a location for heated discussions. Greele gained heroic status when she defended her tavern against the flames of a British attack in 1776. Because her building was one of the few public buildings to survive, it was used for the county court sessions until 1787, when a new courthouse was built. The building was a landmark for more than one hundred years.
WEST END WALK
Women in Medicine and Community Activism
T
he walk circles from the People's Building on Brackett Street past sites of women community activists to buildings representing the history of women nurses and doctors. After the walk reaches the Western Promenade, with its view of the White Mountains, it follows residential streets to the Western Cemetery and the Waynflete School buildings before returning through a former working-class community along Danforth Street back to Brackett Street.Before the building received its present name, it had housed a school and several businesses. It served as a primary school from 1852 until 1916 with Emily J. Gray as its first principal. While a student at a school on this location in 1836, Ellen Harmon (later White) (1827-1915), the co-founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, was struck on the head by a large stone, and lay unconscious for three weeks. Several years later she began to have the visions that led to the founding of the church. She married James Springer White in Portland in 1846 and together they spread the Adventist word and published a paper and several books.
Among the businesses that occupied the building after it closed as a school was the Fred Thompson Art Company. Nellie Walker (1872-1973), an artist, was paid between $15 and $40 a week to tint photographs with watercolors. During the Depression, seventy-five women produced clothing here for needy people while developing employable skills through the WPA Sewing Project. Other dressmaking companies followed until 1967 when the building was scheduled to be demolished. It was first saved by a group of young people called Youth in Action and became a community center and alternative school. After an unsettled period, the building was again restored as a community center housing several groups, including Portland West Neighborhood Planning Council.
W2 FRIENDSHIP HOUSE, 231 Brackett StreetDIRECTIONS Turn right on Walker Street.
W3 HOME OF FRANCES PEABODY, 4 Walker StreetFrances Peabody has left her mark on the Portland community in two areas, historic preservation and AIDS education and advocacy. One of the founders of Greater Portland Landmarks, she was instrumental in the move to preserve and rehabilitate Portland's historic buildings. When a grandson died of AIDS in 1984, she co-founded the AIDS Project to provide support for people with AIDS. In 1995 she opened Peabody House on Orchard Street in the West End as a residence for men with AIDS. The young men she has befriended have shown her that one can die with dignity and with courage. She said, "I've sat with so many men and watched life leave them. So many, and they were all so brave.
DIRECTIONS Turn right on Congress Street.
W4 NEAL DOW MEMORIAL, 714 Congress StreetThe memorial is the Portland headquarters of the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the former home of nineteenth-century temperance leader Neal Dow (1804-1897). It is open to the public. Although their Maine membership has declined from 8,000 to 200 members, the WCTU carries on its mission of educating the public, especially school children, about the dangers of alcohol and drug use. Neal Dow was the author of the Maine law in 1851 that banned the use of alcohol in the state, except for medicinal purposes. It was repealed in 1855. For a related site, see the Little Water Girl statue (C10) honoring Lillian Ames Stevens, the first WCTU Maine president.
DIRECTIONS Return to Walker Street and continue to Brackett; turn right and take the second left on Neal Street.
W5 DR. ALICE WHITTIER, HOME AND OFFICE,14 Neal StreetDr. Alice Whittier (1898-1994) was Maine's first woman pediatrician. An early woman graduate of Yale Medical School, Dr. Whittier served as Chief of Pediatrics for the Maine Medical Center. She is remembered as a doctor who served all the patients who came to her, regardless of their ability to pay. In an article she wrote in 1953, Dr. Whittier said that by 1913 there had been 24 women members of the Maine Medical Association. She singled out Dr. Mary Alice Avery (1849-1904) and Lucinda B. Hatch (18641959), once president of the Cumberland County Medical Society, as having pioneering practices in Portland.
DIRECTIONS Take a right on West Street to Chadwick. turn right to pass the Bowdoin building at 135 Chadwick, where student nurses attended class. Go through the parking lot (once the Bramhall Reservoir) to Vaughan Street.
W6 MCGEACHEY HALL (FORMERLY VAUGHAN HALL), 216 Vaughan StreetVaughan Hall was the residence for student nurses at the Maine General School of Nursing between 1939 and 1951. Alida Hall, the first residence (torn down to make space for the Richards wing), was named after Alida Marie Donnell Leese, who became Director of Nursing when the school was founded in 1885 and served until 1903. Students applying for the three-year course had to be between the ages of 17 1/2 and 30 and unmarried. Tuition was $230 a year, including uniforms and room and board- During World War IL student nurses joined the U.S. Cadet Nurses Corps, organized by the government to solve the shortage of nurses. The government paid their tuition and a monthly stipend. Students came from all over Maine.
DIRECTIONS Walk down Vaughan Street; turn right on Bramhall Street.
W7 HOLT HALL, MAINE EYE AND EAR INFIRMARY (former), corner Bramhall and Congress Street The Maine Eye and Ear infirmary opened at this site in 1886. Although it treated only eye and ear disorders at first, it eventually expanded to become a general hospital. A Ladies' visiting Committee included Dr. Mary Alice Avery. its first nursing class graduated in 1896 and two years later, the nursing program was extended from two to three years and a nurses' home provided. For many years the nursing program was run by two sisters: Eleanor Campbell, superintendent, and Mary Campell, assistant superintendent. The nursing school merged with Maine General School of Nursing in 1951 to form Maine Medical Center School of Nursing, but Holt Hall was used as the nurses' residence. In 1956, Maine Eye and Ear moved to Maine Medical.DIRECTIONS To the left and down the hill from Congress stands the stable remaining from Portland's Alms House (Weymouth Street and Park Avenue). The Alms House was established in 1803 as a poor house and the stable is still used by the Parks Department. To continue the West End walk, go back up Bramhall Street to the front of Maine Medical Center.
W8
MAINE MEDICAL CENTER, Bramhall StreetIn 1956 Maine General (see W9) and Maine Eye and Ear (see W7) combined to form Maine Medical Center. Children's Hospital became part of Maine General in 1948 (see S17). New construction expanded the hospital for the next three decades and still continues. The Maine General and Eye and Ear nursing schools joined to form Maine Medical Center School of Nursing in 1951 (see W6 and W7). By the time the last nursing class graduated in 1967,644 nurses had graduated from Maine Medical. In the fall of 1966, nursing students began to attend the University of Maine.
W9 MAINE GENERAL BUILDING, 22 Bramhall Street
Maine General was the original building in this Complex. It opened in 1874 and now contains administrative offices and laboratories. A Ladies' Visiting and Advisory Board urged the hospital directors to open a school of nursing in 1885. Lectures supplemented practical bedside training five years later and, in 1902, the course was lengthened to three years. The hospital opened maternity services in 1924-25. The first women medical interns were accepted in 1927.
Student nurses were capped after passing a five and-a-half month pre-clinical course (held in the Bowdoin building). From then on they were rotated through the medical and surgical wards at Maine General in addition to their classwork. In the early years of nursing, student nurses provided much of the nursing care in the hospital and were paid a small monthly stipend. For that reason, graduate nurses often had to find private duty employment. By 1947, monthly stipends for student nurses had been dropped and students could attend a five-year program and earn an R.N. from the School of Nursing and a B.S. from the University of Maine.
DIRECTIONS Walk to the beginning of the Western Promenade. Note the view of the White Mountains to the west.
W10
UNION STATION AREA (former), view from the Western PromenadeDirectly below the Western Promenade is the site of the former Union Station, built in 1888 and tom down in 1961. In the area around the station was a small African-American community of people who worked for the railroad. Edith Thomas, an African American., ran a boardinghouse for sleeping car porters on A Street. In addition, the YWCA ran a Travelers' Aid House at 247 B Street, Providing temporary housing for young women who had recently arrived in the city looking for work.
DIRECTIONS Turn left on West Street.
W11 MARY CATE THOMAS HOUSE, 120 West Street
Now a Maine Medical Center building, the Mary Cate Thomas House is an example of a former West End mansion with live-in servants. The house was given to Mary Cate Thomas (1874-1960) by her father upon her marriage in 1909. She and her husband, William Widgery Thomas, a bank president, had seven children. They held large formal dinners with as many as 50 people for Sunday dinner. Mary Cate Thomas supervised a large staff consisting of maids, a butler, several laundry workers, a chauffeur, house-men and a nanny. Several of the servants lived in a wing of the house. Annie Mundy, an Irish-American woman, not only served as a nanny but assisted Thomas in running the household. Another servant, John Spaulding was a former slave. The Thomases provided several of their employees' children with educational opportunities. The family gave the house to Maine Medical soon after Mary Cate Thomas died.
DIRECTIONS Return to the Western Promenade and turn left; take the second left on Carroll to Chadwick Street.
W12
LOUISE PAYSON, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT, 83 Carroll Street Portland native Louise Payson (1894-1977), a landscape architect, designed the gardens for the home of her father, Edgar Payson, in 1920. Payson graduated from the Lowthrope School of Landscape Architecture in Groton, Massachusetts, in 1916 and worked for landscape architect Ellen Shipman before completing her studies at Columbia's School of Architecture and establishing her own practice in New York. The Carroll Street design was one of her first and she came to specialize in designing grounds of country estates in the Northeast, including several in Maine.DIRECTIONS Continue on Carroll and take a left on Vaughan.
W13
HOME OF EDITH SILLS, 13 Vaughan StreetEdith Coon Sills (1888-1978) is representative of a civic leader with broad interests. She was the wife of Kenneth Sills who served as president of Bowdoin College for thirty-four years. Her interest in women's education was demonstrated when she set up a fund to bring distinguished women lecturers to Bowdoin before women were admitted to the college. She also served as a trustee for several women's colleges. She was a member of many important boards including Greater Portland Landmarks and the Maine advisory committees on civil rights and the Job Corps Center. A graduate of Wellesley College, she held terms as president of the College Club of Portland and the Victoria Society of Maine Women, among other organizations. The College Club of Portland, founded by early women college graduates in 1900 for intellectual stimulation and to encourage other women to attend college, established a scholarship for a young woman in honor of Edith Sills.
DIRECTIONS Turn back towards Carroll and walk down Vaughan Street to the entrance to the Western Cemetery.
W14 WESTERN CEMETERY, Vaughan and Bowdoin Streets A walk through the Western Cemetery reveals many family stories and the tradition of denoting a woman as "the Wiffe of" instead of as an individual. Rachel Neal, who conducted a school for girls in the nineteenth century, and her twin children, Rachel and John Neal, a prominent woman suffragist, are buried here (see also S7 and C7).
DIRECTIONS Turn left on Spring Street and note the Gothic-style house at 387 Spring Street, rescued and moved by Mary Flagg before the construction of the Holiday Inn.
W15 WAYNFLETE SCHOOL, 360 and 342 Spring Street Waynflete School was founded in 1897 as the Portland School for Girls by Agnes Lowell and Caroline Crisfield with a goal of educating girls for charitable and social service employment. The women changed its name to honor an English educator and, in 1912, moved it to its present location. Now in several buildings, the school was bought by a group of parents in the 1920s. Originally a school for girls, it became coeducational in 1971 and sought a more diversified student body. Its 540 students, ranging from age 3 to 18, come from 38 Maine communities. Approximately 25 percent of the students receive financial aid. Community service is a required part of the school curriculum.
DIRECTIONS Turn right on Emery Street.
W16 HOME FOR AGED WOMEN, (former, now a Wayneflete School building), 64 Emery Street A society of women operated the Home for Aged Women in this building for more than 100 years. The society was incorporated in 1854 "for the relief of aged indigent women" by a board of women managers and supported by private funds. Although only women served on the governing board, men assisted with the finances. They opened their first home in 1856 at the corner of Elm and Oxford streets. The entrance fee was fifty dollars. The women brought their own furnishings and were free to come and go. The board of managers built the home on Emery Street and equipped it with an infirmary staffed by day and night nurses. Each resident has had her own room and ate meals in a common dining room. The entrance fee was $300. Visiting committees took care of the residents' personal needs. The apartments at 75 State Street replaced the home in 1975 when the building was acquired by Wayneflete.DIRECTIONS Walk to the end of Vaughan Street for two view sites. On your way, note St. Louis Catholic Church, which was built to serve the Polish-American community.
W17 PORTLAND BRIDGE PROJECT, view from foot of Emery Street
More than 60 women have worked during the construction of the Portland Bridge Project since it began in 1994. Because of the scope of the project, the Maine Department of Transportation and the Federal Highways Administration sought to increase the number of women working on the project by making it "woman friendly." They provided on-site child care, paid by a payroll deduction of 15 percent of wages for the first child and 7.5 percent for the second. They also hired an on-site compliance officer who assists with recruitment, training, and retention and coordinates the project with women and minority-owned business and community groups. Women have worked in such positions as welder, quality control technician, truck driver, heavy equipment mechanic, fabricator, carpenter, and operating engineer.W18
PORTLAND STAR MATCH FACTORY (former), 69 West Commercial Street, view from foot of Emery StreetDirectly below this site was the Portland Star Match Factory from 1870 to 1908. In 1888,39 women, including 28 Irish-Americans, worked in the packing room, separating finished matches into packets and wrapping them for sale and shipping. They were paid by the piece and averaged $5 a week- The women were subject to phosphorus poisoning which could not only damage teeth but produce "phossy jaw," the destruction of the jaw bone. Each woman was equipped with a basin holding a wet sponge to put out fires when the matches ignited by accident. In 1907, when 70 women worked in the match factory, many were aged fifteen or under. Around 1908 the factory was bought by Diamond Match Company and eventually moved its operations out of the city-
DIRECTIONS Return to Danforth, turn right and walk to Clark Street.
W19 DANFORTH STREET COMMUNITY
A working-class community, including many Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans, lived along Danforth Street to Brackett, including Gray, above, and Tyng, below, extending down Danforth to Gorham's corner (see S19). At the turn of the century, women walked down Clark Street to Commercial and crossed an old railroad bridge to work in a men's hat factory located on Tumer's Island. They stitched the sweatbands and added g by hand. In the first part of the twentieth century, women worked packing fish in the sardine canneries along Commercial Street from May to December. Another large employer of women was Monmouth Canning Company at 256 Commercial Street where women canned and labeled beans and brown bread.
DIRECTIONS Turn left on Clark Street and right on Gray
W20
MARION STILPHEN HOUSE, 90 Gray Street Marion Stilphen, who died in 1994, is a representative woman of the West End. She lived at 90 Gray for 57 years in the twin house at 94 Gray Street. A widow, she raised seven children and rented rooms to support the family. She worked at the dress factory at 155 Brackett Street for 28 years. The twin Victorian houses have ornate fireplaces and the original woodwork.DIRECTIONS Turn left on Brackett to return to the Peoples' Building.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Maine Humanities Council supported the Portland Women's History Trail project with two major grants. Without their backing the creation of the trail would not have been possible, and warmest thanks are extended to the Council members and staff.
Currently the trail facilitators are Stephanie Philbrick, Pat Finn, and Eileen Eagan. Polly Kaufman who received an academic year long Fulbright Scholarship is working in Norway teaching teachers about the Trail.
This website is maintained by Pat Finn of the University of Southern Maine Portland Women's History Trail, c/o History Department, 96 Falmouth Street, PO. Box 9300, Portland, Maine 04104-9300, copyright 1997, 1998, 1999. To reach Pat please email her at patfinn@usm.maine.edu.