Museum Musings
...a guest blog by Susan C.S. Edwards

“Patrons of Culture”

The year I graduated from college I spent most of the summer reading Remembrance of Things Past. I had no idea what the fall might bring. With a newly minted degree in English, everyone told me I should teach. After a brief stint as a substitute teacher in a junior high school, I realized teaching was not for me. I spent the remainder of the fall at my Smith Corona manual typewriter composing dozens of letters to directors of historic house museums. Being employed at a historic house was the only thing for which I had a passion.

I received only one response -- from Edith Harman, the director of the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. She invited me to Salem and welcomed me warmly, serving a sumptuous tea in her office, while telling me everything that she could about historic house museum management. She encouraged me to keep reaching out and to pursue my goal. I was smitten. By spring The Trustees of Reservations offered me a job for the summer in their Stockbridge office where I started by giving house tours, training seasonal employees, and eventually cataloguing two museum collections. I stayed five years.

My first curatorial responsibility was to catalogue a collection of 17th and 18th century decorative arts that were purchased by Miss Mabel Choate to establish the Mission House museum in Stockbridge, MA. The correspondence and bills of sale from the giants of Colonial Revival dealers between 1927 and 1930 had never been touched so it was all virgin territory fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.

But what absorbed me as much as the remarkable collection amassed during the Depression was the passion of a single woman to preserve history through the creation of a house museum.

Over the next several years I met many more of these women whom I began calling my patrons of culture -- Clara Endicott Sears, Caroline Emmerton, Rose Nichols, Louise du Pont Crowinshield, Electra Havemeyer Webb, Florence Griswold, Theodate Pope, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Sally Dodge -- New England is filled with them. These women became cherished friends as I pursued their passion for historic preservation and the establishment of museums and historic house museums. The very first preservation effort in the United States by women was undertaken in 1853 when Ann Pamela Cunningham founded the Mount Vernon Ladies Association to save and restore Mount Vernon.

Fast forward to 2000 when once again I was employed at The Trustees. One of my curators and I were tasked with the job of creating an interpretive plan for the 1694 Paine House in Ipswich. That was the summer I "met" Sally Dodge. We created the plan and furnished the house with a fine collection of early furniture and American decorative arts purchased in the 1930s by Alice Childs Dodge with the help of her daughter, Sally.

To back up a bit, the Dodges are an old family going back to the early 1600s in Ipswich and environs. Elisha Perkins Dodge, born in Ipswich in 1847, had moved to Newburyport by 1866 with his brothers where the family established a successful shoe dynasty. Elisha and Katherine Searles Gray married in 1869 and had three sons, Robert Gray Dodge, Edwin Sherrill Dodge (a distinguished architect), and Lawrence Paine Dodge.

Robert, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, became a member of the Massachusetts Bar Association in 1897 and was a founding partner of Palmer, Dodge, Gardner and Bradford in Boston. He was active in Newburyport affairs, serving as a city councilor in 1899. In 1900 he married Alice Woolley Childs of Amesbury and for a time they lived at 2 Toppans Lane, designed by brother Edwin Dodge.

Alice Childs Dodge, a graduate of Wellesley College, was active in civic and educational affairs and served on the boards of numerous charities. The Dodges had four daughters Katharine, Eleanor, Sally and Alice.

Eventually the family moved to Boston but maintained strong ties with Newburyport. In 1916 they purchased Greenwood Farm on Jeffrey's Neck Road in Ipswich, and it became their summer retreat. Greenwood Farm was part of a land grant from the Town of Ipswich to Robert Paine. The sprawling former salt water farm includes two houses, the 19th century Greenwood farmhouse which the Dodges occupied and the 1694 saltbox built by Robert Paine, Jr., jury foreman of the Salem witch trials in 1692. The family used the latter as a guest house thus leaving it virtually intact.

Sally Dodge, christened Sarah, was born in 1907 in Newburyport and attended private day schools in Boston. In 1925, she entered Vassar College, as her sisters before her had done, but she left midway through her course of study to pursue an education in music. Sally had taken an interest in music early in life and had taken classes to study violin with Lillian Shattuck and others in Boston. 1928 found her in Vienna studying under renowned violinist Julius Winkler. Back home, she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1937. Sally devoted her professional life to music, performing and teaching. She joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory in the 1940s. Throughout her career she traveled worldwide, working with music educators and children. She was also actively involved in music education on a regional level.

Alice Childs Dodge died in 1948 and Robert Gray Dodge died in 1964 at age 91. After her father died, Sally managed more than 100 acres on the farm and cared for the Paine House.

Described by cousins and friends as a free spirit and somewhat of an eccentric, Sally maintained her devotion to music but she was also passionate about historic preservation and the environment. Bright, talented and gracious, she was proud of her heritage and was a supporter of Ipswich's 17th Century Day and Olde Ipswich Days when she opened the Paine House for tours.

In the 1970s, Sally and her sisters made the decision to donate Greenwood Farm and the Paine House to The Trustees of Reservations with a life interest for Sally. When she died in 1993, she bequeathed the property to The Trustees for preservation of the land and buildings and for birding, hiking, house tours and educational programs.

Abbott Lowell Cummings, a pre-eminent architectural historian of New England, had long taken an interest in the Paine House as an early framed structure of Massachusetts. In 1979 he published The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725 and Massachusetts and Its First Period Houses in which he cites the Paine-Dodge House as after 1702.

For Sally, this was heresy. Almost the last two decades of her life were dedicated to documenting the Paine House as a 17th century structure. She wrote numerous times to Cummings. A 1990 draft of a letter begins "Dear Abbott, We have been friends for many years, haven't we? This is a friendship I value very much." She then goes on to reminisce about family gatherings with Cummings and congratulates him on his book.

Politely but firmly she then challenges his judgment concerning interior architectural details. He never relented and they were estranged.

In 2002, The Trustees of Reservations had a Tree Ring Dating of the Paine House conducted at the Oxford (UK) Dendrochronology Lab. The report came back that the timbers of the Paine House dated to 1694. Sally would have been happy.

Thanks to The Trustees of Reservations Archives and Research Center for access to the Greenwood Farm archives.