Home of Elizabeth, Sophia, and Mary Peabody
53 Charter Street

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-94), the oldest of the three famous Peabody sisters of Salem, was one of the most important women of her time. She was drawn into the world of education and moral improvement as a young woman. By the age of thirty, she had opened and run two schools and worked at Bronson Alcott’s controversial Temple School in Boston. Elizabeth later opened the nation’s first kindergarten — on Boston’s Beacon Hill, in 1861 — and was largely responsible for the spread of the kindergarten movement in America. She was also one of America’s first female publishers, printing antislavery tracts, children’s books by Nathaniel Hawthorne (her brother-in-law), and the Dial, the journal of the Transcendentalists who gathered at her Boston bookstore. Elizabeth’s own writing reveals her connections to some of the most important thinkers of her time: Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, Record of a School (Alcott’s Temple School), and A Last Evening with Allston (the painter Washington Allston). Elizabeth’s bookstore was the site of “Conversations” held by Margaret Fuller (1810-50), in which women and men engaged in high-level intellectual and political discussions. In this way, Elizabeth provided an early forum for women lecturers such as Harriet Martineau. Throughout her long life, Elizabeth worked to improve the lives of women and minorities, and founded a school for the orphaned children of former southern slaves. After her death in 1894, Elizabeth’s friends opened the Elizabeth Peabody House — a combination social service agency and kindergarten in Boston — to carry on her work.

Sophia Amelia Peabody (1809-71) suffered from debilitating migraine headaches and was raised as an invalid. Despite her infirmity, however, she taught herself chemistry, astronomy, and languages, and developed her artistic talent as well. Sophia eventually found freedom from her overbearing family (and her headaches) when she married Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1842. During their two decades together, the couple had three children and Sophia nurtured her husband’s writing career — at the expense of her own art. After Nathaniel’s death in 1864, she edited and organized his American Notebooks, and in 1868, Sophia and her children moved to Europe where she died in 1871 in England. Her daughter Rose went on to found an order of Dominican nuns dedicated to caring for terminally ill cancer patients who were unable to afford care (see S35).

The youngest sister, Mary Peabody (1806-87), shared her sister Elizabeth’s passion for education and writing. In 1843, Mary, a thirty-seven-year-old teacher, married the prominent educator Horace Mann who was instrumental in the establishment of Salem’s Normal School (see S38). Mary raised their three sons while her husband served in the United States Congress and toured America lecturing on temperance, education, and abolition. Following her husband’s sudden death in 1859, Mary briefly ran her own school in Concord before going to work at Elizabeth’s new kindergarten in Boston. Mary also helped her sister write the definitive Moral Culture of Infancy and Kindergarten Guide and was largely responsible for editing and publishing The Kindergarten Messenger between 1873 and 1875. Mary Mann’s literary output included a biography of her late husband, a Christian cookbook, and a romance set in Cuba and loosely based on her stay in that country in the 1830s. She also authored books on flowers and the plight of the American Piute Indian tribe.