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| Engraving of Lydia Maria Child |
“Over the river and
through the wood to grandmother’s house we go…”
This famous poem, a classic of the holiday season is one of
the most well remembered poems relating to Thanksgiving. Natick has a
surprisingly rich literary history for a town of our size. A number of world-famous
authors have called Natick home for a period of time. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the renowned author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a frequent
visitor; Horatio Alger Jr. spent much of his later life in Natick and is buried
here. Lydia Maria Child, the author of the famous Thanksgiving poem quoted
above, spent a little over a year of her life in Natick and visited several
times afterwards. Though the famous house in question is in Medford, in honor of the Thanksgiving season we thought it would be appropriate to take a closer look at the life of this extraordinary woman with an interesting Natick connection.
Lydia Maria Child was
an influential writer and activist who took on several roles that were fairly
uncommon for women at the time. She was heavily involved in a number of social
movements including the fight to end slavery and campaigns for women’s rights and
for the better treatment of Native Americans. Her initial writing provided
advice for homemakers, but over time, Child’s determined political spirit
entered into her literary works which alienated some of her more conservative
readers. Today she is better known for her poetry, especially the poems she
wrote for children.
Born Lydia Maria Francis in 1802 in Medford Massachusetts,
Child eventually married David Lee Child at the age of twenty six and moved to
nearby Wayland. She was good friends with
William Lloyd Garrison, the outspoken and sometimes controversial Boston
abolitionist. Her father, David Convers, also eventually left their native
Medford. Following his wife’s death in
1814, David retired from work and soon began moving around to other local
towns, including Natick. David Francis
lived in Natick for about four years, between 1836 and 1840. He lived at 20 Pleasant
Street and was locally known as “Daddy Francis” to his fellow Natickites. While her father was here, Lydia Maria Child came to live with
him on Pleasant Street for a little over a year, staying with “Daddy
Francis” from the spring of 1836 to the summer of 1837. Child continued to
write during this period and two of her published works, a romance set in Ancient
Greece titled Philothea, and a guide
for Home Nurses, were produced while she lived in Natick.
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| A Very Happy Thanksgiving From All of Us Here at the Natick Historical Society |
Child had mixed feelings about Natick. While she admired the
abolitionist spirit of the preacher who spoke at the Church in Natick Center, she
found that many of her neighbors couldn’t match her progressive fervor. In a
letter from 1836, Child says that she found in her Natick neighbors “an
absence of all intellectual excitement.” That said, in the same letter she
still seems to have found the quiet and pleasant atmosphere of Natick to be “a good place to work.” Perhaps this
“good place to work” was what inspired her to produce more pieces of writing, as she hadn’t produced any new works for two years prior to her stay here.
