New Photos and information about Ellen Swallow Richards emerge from old New Hampshire Farmhouse
It has been a rare occasion in my research to discover any new photos of Ellen, Robert, or any of her friends and contemporaries. The same ones are always surfacing (most from the MIT Museum) with little new to add to the collection. With this thought in mind, one might imagine my supreme delight in receiving an e-mail on December 23 from Charlie Rosenberg of the Jamaica Plain Historical Society. He had been contacted by a museum curator in Gilford, New Hampshire regarding an old journal and some photos, both of which referenced Ellen and her husband, Professor Richards. While I have been delighted to hear of a more leisure and casual side of Ellen and her Professor, the Museum curators have been more interested in how the materials ended up in the collection from the farmhouse. Further, they wondered how this all related to the former owners and inhabitants of the farmhouse. As we attack this question from both the “Ellen” side as well as the Gilford, NH farmhouse side, we find ourselves immersed in an endless sea of online links, each leading us to just one more piece of information. I have even found some new writings about Ellen by Caroline Hunt that until this quest had been unknown to me. Today, I received the first of several photos from the Gilford farmhouse collection and am so pleased to be sharing these for the first time ever. Diane Mitton, curator for the Thompson- Ames Historical Society in Gilford, NH, and I will continue to update this blog with our discoveries. We anticipate you will be as excited as we are to bring to light one more aspect of a remarkable woman, Ellen Swallow Richards.
This photo was taken by Professor Richards at Marblehead, MA in 1899. So far, the woman on the right has not been identified.