Home of Aroline Gove
254 Lafayette Street

Aroline Chase Pinkham (1857-1939) was born in Bedford, Massachusetts, the youngest child and only daughter of Isaac and Lydia Estes Pinkham (see S9). Her education took place in the Lynn public schools where she graduated at the head of her class in 1875. She taught for five years at Lynn’s Cobbett School, using her earnings to help establish the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company. Aroline was the first treasurer of the family business and held the position for over sixty years. She was particularly interested in the welfare of the company’s female employees, advocating regularly on their behalf, and became known as a woman of sympathy and unfailing courage. In 1882, Aroline married William Gove who served as a state representative in the Massachusetts legislature, later becoming a member of the Governor’s Council. After her husband’s death, Aroline oversaw the building of Carcassonne, a mansion in Marblehad whose construction provided much-needed work for tradespeople during the Depression. In 1922, at the cost of sixty thousand dollars, Aroline supervised the building of the Lydia E. Pinkham Memorial Clinic in honor of her mother. Designed to provide health care services to young mothers and their children, the clinic is truly a lasting tribute to the work of mother and daughter. In his memorial address delivered at Aroline’s funeral service, the Reverend Bradford E. Gale, minister of the First Unitarian Church, called her “a noble woman who shall long be remembered for her thought of others. A woman of grace, unstudied charm and superlative devotion to what she thought was right. In her presence you felt the strength of her character. Active, vigorous to the last, she died as she expressed a desire to die… ‘let me die working.’”¹⁰⁶ Later that year, a group of Aroline’s friends published this sermon as a tribute to her remarkable life.

Notes
106. In Memoriam: Aroline Chase Gove, 1857-1939 (Salem, Mass., 1939), 61.