I always attribute the images that I use in my blog; if you are going to copy them, please do so as well. After the death of her husband, Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne returned to her parents’ home with her three children, a move not uncommon for widows during this period. I called from the window, “Welcome, Mr. Dike!” He glanced up, but did not see me nor smile. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famed American novelist, was born here on that day to Elizabeth Clarke Manning and Nathaniel Hathorne. This website was made possible by a grant administered by the North of Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau. By the 1840s, he was a well known author, but … “Your sister Louisa is dead!” I thought he meant that his own sister was dead, for she also is called Louisa. Can’t explain Pike. I’m sure she was all these things and a lot more, and I’m not sure whether she preferred to spell her family name Hathorne or Hawthorne. It was purchased by The House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association and moved to the museum campus in 1958 under the guidance of Abbott Lowell Cummings, a noted architectural historian and conservator. Pierce and other friends in the Democratic Party got the job of Surveyor for Hawthorne (who had worked for the Customs Service in Boston a few years earlier) in 1846.

The Death of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Little Sister, View Donna Amelia Vinson Seger’s profile on Facebook, The Boston Massacre in Black, White & Color, Salem State University History Department. Thanks for telling the story of this tragedy.

Sometimes this is difficult to do, as the sources simply aren’t there, and sometimes you can only illuminate these women through their association with something or someone who leaves a source-strewn trail. What a sad end for Louisa Hawthorne in the famous Henry Clay steamboat tragedy of which there were so many at the time.

NPS collections. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace was originally located on Union Street. I’m wondering about the different spellings of his last name. This house is special due to the event that occurred within the four walls on July 4, 1804. The news came in an appalling way. His father, Nathaniel Hathorne, Sr., was born in 1775 in Salem. And a portrait. In the introduction to the novel, he describes the Salem Custom House and pretends to find the story among the papers of a previous surveyor. It rings a distant bell about another prominent politician of the era (maybe a vice president?) It wasn’t just the distinction or associations of some of the victims, it was the way they died. Hawthorne’s parents had grown up as neighbors and were married much to the chagrin of his paternal grandparents. Apparently this was common: the fastest steamship (not the safest!) “Yes.” “What was the matter?” “She was drowned.” “Where?” “On the Hudson, in the ‘Henry Clay’!” He then came in, and my husband shut himself in his study. But upon going to the piazza, there he stood unaccountably, without endeavoring to enter.

It struck to my heart that he had come to inform us of some accident. Mr. Hawthorne opened the door with the strange feeling that he should grasp a hand of air.

I was by his side. (National Archives Identifier 530280) In addition to being an author, the facial-haired fiction-writer was also a civil servant. “Where is Mr. Dike?–I must then have seen his spirit,” said I. Nathaniel Hawthorne was descended from the Hathornes and the Mannings. New York Daily Times, Aug. 2, 1852; Nathaniel Currier, “Burning of the Henry Clay Near Yonkers,” Metropolitan Museum of Art; The survivor: the Armenia, Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen, Christie’s. He left us on Monday morning,–two days ago. Thank you for gathering what is to be know of Louisa. This is the website for Nathaniel Hawthorne College. I was astonished to see Mr. Pike get out. To make matters worse, the ship’s paddle wheels kept spinning, further imperiling those who did jump into the river. Sophia Hawthorne recounted Mr. Dike’s appearance in a letter to her mother a few days later: This morning we received the shocking intelligence that Louisa Hawthorne was lost in the destruction of the steamer “Henry Clay” on the Hudson, on Wednesday afternoon, July 27. His wife and children spelled their name that way of course, but with the rest of his family it is not necessarily so. Mr. Pike, without a smile, deeply flushed, seemed even then not in his former body. 2020

Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. Nathaniel Hawthorne was born on July 4, 1804, in a small house three blocks from the Custom House. It was located in North Branch, Antrim, New Hampshire from 1962 until 1988.

Louisa was on this journey with her uncle John Dike, the husband of her maternal aunt Priscilla Manning, who survived the wreck and traveled directly to Concord to tell Nathaniel. In a very telling and consequential mid-nineteenth-century moment, Louisa found herself, after a lifetime of service to the various family members in Salem whom she was also quite dependent on in her single state, and after a rare vacation to that celebrated hotspot Saratoga Springs, on board the paddle-wheel steamboat Henry Clay on its journey from Albany to New York City on July 28, 1852 when a ravenous fire on board forced her to choose: conflagration or the deep, dark Hudson. Thank you for this wonderful piece.

He was born, according to his older sister Elizabeth, “in the chamber over that little parlor into which we looked, in that house on Union St. Today my focus is on Maria Louisa Hawthorne (1802-52), the younger sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne: we can get to Louisa (which she was called) through Nathaniel, but also, unfortunately, through her tragic, even sensational death. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace is the home where American author Nathaniel Hawthorne was born.

When I did, there was no Mr. Dike. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Birthplace was originally located on Union Street. She choose the latter, and drowned, in one of the River’s worst maritime disasters, in the conspicuous company of former NYC Mayor Stephen Allen, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, the granddaughter of a President and the sister of a Senator, among many other victims. Oh, Donna!

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story of adultery and betrayal in colonial America, The Scarlet Letter, is published. Somewhat random but still timely posts about culture, history, and the material environment, from the perspectives of academia, Salem and beyond.

I’m sad that I can’t flesh it out a bit more: beyond the childhood companion to her brother and sister, the seamstress, the young woman always taking care of one Manning or another, the maiden aunt who was a favorite of Nathaniel’s and Sophia’s children.