Letters & Photographs associated with The Country of the Pointed Firs
Ken Buck, the current owner of the Anchorage has provided copies of historical and recent photographs and descriptions of the house where Jewett stayed in 1895. Nancy Wetzel also has provided recent photographs of the Martinsville, ME area. These appear here with the photographers' consent and may not be reused without appropriate permission.
Copyright © 2008, Ken Buck
The Anchorage, circa 1890, as it appeared when Sarah Orne
Jewett was there. Stone wall across from lane barely visible
at right. Original house color was medium tan with white trim.
The colors were changed to white with green trim in the 1930s.
Copyright © 2008, Ken Buck
The Anchorage, October 2004, with ocean in the distance at
left.
Sarah Orne Jewett wrote the following letters in 1895, when she was staying near Martinsville, Maine. Martinsville, according to Richard Cary,
is a hamlet at the end of one of Maine's myriad "points" that jut out into the Atlantic Ocean, several miles south of Rockland. Seeking "peace and quiet" after a nagging attack of pneumonia, Jewett accompanied by Fields, rented The Anchorage from a Boston doctor. In these idyllic surroundings, with a view of the Monhegan Light ten miles out at sea, Jewett caught up with some editorial work, walked, rode. and visited extensively, soaking up the atmosphere of the area, which has arresting resemblances to the locale of The Country of the Pointed Firs, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly starting January 1896.
Firs marching down to the shore.
Island view from Marshall Point, Port Clyde.
Port Clyde and Martinsville both are villages in the town
of St. George, ME.
Port Clyde is about 2 miles southwest from Martinsville.
From Marshall Point at Port Clyde (November 2010)
Nancy Wetzel
Copyright © 2017
Marshall Point is at the southwest end of St. George,
about 3 miles from Martinsville.
To Louisa Dresel
The transcription is by Richard Cary; click here to view the full letters and
Cary's notes.
The Anchorage
Martinsville, Maine
September 4, 1895
Dear Loulie:
I don't know whether you would find
this a good sketching ground but it is certainly a dear
untroubled corner of the world. The house stands in a green
field that slopes to the sea and we have three families of
neighbours and two empty little old houses pretty near and some
other neighbours -- the Dwyer family -- a little farther off.
One Dwyer child brings the mail for fifteen cents a week and the
boy catches cunners and lobsters (small ones two cents each) and
other Dwyers do other things and are a heritage from the last
people who were here. And this is a story-and-a-half house and I
sleep in the little back corner bedroom and look out from my bed
at a stonewall across the lane and a little field where men in
blue overalls have been digging potatoes and beyond them are the
dark pointed firs that cover most of this coast of Maine. Dear
A. F. and I say "let's go out doors" and after we have
stayed [unfinished letter ends here]
Copyright © 2008, Ken Buck
The Anchorage in 2003. The window at the farthest right is the
bedroom where Sarah Orne Jewett stayed.
The Anchorage
Martinsville, Maine
Friday
September 28, [1895]
Dear Loulie:
I began a long letter to you when I
first came and here I am just going away and it never got
finished! But I have thought of you many times and wished that
you could see this bit of country which to the eyes of my
imagination is even better than such a place as Folly Cove. I
have had a little shop going, a nice smallish table, right in
front of the window of my nice little back bedroom, and I sit
there now looking down a dear lane with stone walls, toward the
bay. There are two masts of a schooner just at the end and there
are some wind bent trees growing just at the right place at the
highest point of the lane where you seem to be able to jump over
into the water! We have been very contented and have liked our
little housekeeping so much. I have been busy with proofs and
with a little writing but I have not got done anything like what
I hoped as much I mean! However, I hope to be very busy after I
get settled down at home. My sister Mary has been here this last
week and we have sailed and walked a great deal and had most
lovely weather. ...
Copyright © 2008, Ken Buck
Goldenrod in bloom in Iowa (September 2017)
To Sarah Wyman Whitman
Click here for the full letter.
Sunday, September 8, 1895,
The Anchorage, Martinsville, Maine.
You would not think from this handsome
and large paper what a small plain bushy corner of the world
this letter comes from. The golden-rod is all in bloom, and
there is a lighthouse (Monhegan) off the coast, and the
Anchorage is a nice story-and-half house that stands in a green
field that slopes down to the sea. I sleep in a little back
bedroom whose window gives on a lane and a stone wall and a
potato field, where the figures of J. F. Millet work all day
against a very unFrench background of the pointed firs that
belong to Maine, like the grey ledges they are rooted in. I
don't think you would like it very well unless you fell to
painting and then -- Oh my! -- I don't wish for you as I do in
most places -- perhaps it is because the landscape is usually
without figures -- in spite of the potato field. But oh! I have
found such a corner of this world, under a spruce tree, where I
sit for hours together, and neither thought nor good books can
keep me from watching a little golden bee, that seems to live
quite alone, and to be laying up honey against cold weather. He
may have been idle and now feels belated, and goes and comes
from his little hole in the ground close by my knee, so that I
can put my hand over his front door and shut him out, -- but I
promise you and him that I never will. He took me for a boulder
the first day we met; but after he flew round and round he
understood things, and knows now that I come and go as other
boulders do, by glacial action, and can do him no harm. A very
handsome little bee and often to be thought of by me, come
winter.
Copyright © 2008, Ken Buck
Recent photo of the room Jewett describes herself as occupying
at the Anchorage in 1895.
Well head and farmer's field across lane from The
Anchorage,
probably where Jewett watched the potato harvesters.
November 2010
Nancy Wetzel
Copyright © 2017
The Anchorage in November 2010
with view of what was in 1895 a potato field on the
right.
This lane ends at Mosquito Harbor.
Nancy Wetzel
Copyright © 2017
Inland view from Marshall Point, Port Clye, near Martinsville.
Whether Jewett rented the local schoolhouse at Martinsville to work on her writing is a matter of controversy. Paula Blanchard argues that Jewett's description in her letters of her work space at the Anchorage makes clear that Jewett did not need to work at the schoolhouse during this period (Sarah Orne Jewett, 275n). Though an exhibit on display at the Marshall Point Light House Museum in June 2003 asserted that the town records of Martinsville showed Jewett renting the schoolhouse, the actual records have not been produced. Whether or not she used it, she may well have seen the local schoolhouse as a model for the one her narrator uses in the novella. However, the Martinsville schoolhouse is built on the same plan as many other small schoolhouses still standing in Maine.
Martinsville Schoolhouse, not far from the Anchorage,
a private home in June 2003
Marshall Point Lighthouse -- November 2010
Nancy Wetzel
Copyright © 2017
Copyright 2005-2017 - Terry Heller, compiler,
Coe College