Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 03, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

“Reject hatred without hating.”—Mary Baker Eddy

 

Mary Baker Eddy Historic House (opened 1931)

8 Broad Street, Lynn, Massachusetts

 

The most famous bath in history led the ancient Ancient Greek Archimedes to discern whether jewelers had added base metal to King Herod II’s gold crown. After his discovery, Archimedes ran naked through the streets of Syracuse crying, “Eureka! I found it!” Another aha! moment that originated from a watery discovery occurred when Mary Baker Eddy slipped on a patch of ice. An intriguing destination is the Mary Baker Eddy Historic House.

The indomitable woman who achieved world renown started life on a modest farm in rural Bow, New Hampshire. Mary Morse was born in 1821, the youngest of six children of Mark and Abigail Baker, devout members of the Congregational Church. In her twilight years, Mary recounted the evening her father’s home sermon lasted too long; as his eyes closed in prayer, she stuck a pin in his behind to terminate the session. Remembering Mark, she wrote, “Father kept the family in the tightest harness I have ever known.” In contrast, she was extremely close to her mother, whom biographer Robert Peel referred to as “the summer to Mark’s winter, the New Testament to his Old.” In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, Mary recalled at age eight hearing a voice thrice repeat her name. Sensing a holy presence, Abigail read her a passage from the prophet Samuel, “Speak, Lord; for Thy servant heareth.”

When Mary was fourteen, the Bakers moved to a farm near Sanbornton Bridge, New Hampshire, where she attended Sanbornton Academy. As a woman in that era, she was unable to attend university; fortunately, her brother, Albert, a graduate of Dartmouth College, served as her tutor. Albert took over the law practice of Senator Franklin Pierce, later President Pierce. Albert’s 1841 death from kidney failure devastated the twenty-year-old Mary. Two years after his passing, she wed thirty-three-year-old George Washington Glover. The couple moved to South Carolina, where George had business interests. Tragically, he contracted a fatal case of yellow fever six months later. Mary would recall, “I married young the one I loved.”

Mary returned to her parents in Sanbornton, where her only child, George Washington Glover II, was born in 1844. Often bedridden and unable to care for him, Mary relied on housekeeper Mahala Sanborn to help with her son’s care. After Abigail’s passing, Mark remarried, and the active boy was no longer welcome in his home. A stay at Mary’s sister’s house was also short-lived, and well-meaning family members again placed George with Mahala, though it was against Mary’s wishes.

Suffering from a toothache, Mary went to the nearby town of Franklin for an appointment with Dr. Daniel Patterson, her stepmother’s relative. He wished to move their relationship to a personal plane, but the impediment was that Patterson was a Baptist, and Mary was reluctant to convert. However, as Daniel promised to make a home for her son, Mary took a second trip to the altar.

Mary convinced Daniel to move to North Groton to be near George. However, he reneged on his promise to help her regain custody. She was devastated when Mahala and her husband took George to Minnesota, then considered the Far West. His adoptive parents informed him Mary had died. Mother and son wouldn’t be reunited for twenty-three years.

The loss sent Mary, already ill, into near invalidism. Left alone for stretches of time by her itinerant dentist husband, she felt isolated in the remote mountain town. What made matters grimmer, Daniel, a poor provider, accumulated debts and they eventually lost their home.

During the Civil War, the governor of New Hampshire tasked Patterson with delivering funds to Northern sympathizers in the South. He stopped to see the battlefield of Bull Run, where Confederate soldiers incarcerated him in a Richmond jail. Six months later, Patterson escaped and rejoined Mary. Some years later, after an affair with a married patient, Patterson begged Mary for forgiveness. The wronged wife responded, “The same roof cannot shelter us. You may come in, certainly, if you desire, but in that case I must go elsewhere.”

In 1865 Mark Baker passed away, leaving the bulk of his estate to his widow, and a dollar to each of his children. The following year, while walking to a temperance meeting in Lynn, Massachusetts, Mary slipped on a patch of ice and sustained a spinal injury. Christian Scientists view the episode as her burning-bush revelation. After reading the Bible, Mary regained her ability to walk. She wrote of the cure, “In the year 1866, I discovered the Christ Science or divine laws of Life, Truth, and Love, and named my discovery Christian Science.”

She spent the next decade searching the Scriptures and began teaching others her Christian healing method. Mary published her findings in 1875 in her cornerstone work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Initial sales were dismal, though Queen Victoria, Thomas Carlyle, and the Archbishop of Canterbury received copies. Bronson Alcott, father of the author of Little Women, expressed initial interest.

In the spring of 1866, Mary met Asa Gilbert Eddy, a Singer Sewing Machine salesman, who came to her for treatment in Christian Science due to his heart condition. Upon his recovery, Gilbert, as he was known, became devoted to Mary and her doctrine. When they married a year later, the forty-six-year-old groom was a decade younger than his bride. Their union was chaste, but deeply spiritual. He took an office in downtown Lynn, advertising his services as a Christian Scientist practitioner—the first to do so publicly.

In 1879 Mary and a handful of students organized the Church of Christ (Scientist), and Mary became its pastor. Two years later, she obtained a charter for the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, authorized to teach Christian Science.

The Eddys relocated to Boston, where Gilbert passed away in 1882. Mary continued to heal, teach, write, and preach in ever-larger venues, until finally, in 1894, the original edifice of The First Church of Christ, Scientist, opened its doors. A little more than a decade later, an extension that seated five thousand was built to accommodate the growing congregation.

Despite its struggling start, Mary’s book Science and Health eventually sold more than nine million copies and has been translated into sixteen languages and English braille. In 1907 Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, called her “our nation’s greatest woman.” Mary Baker Eddy founded The Christian Science Monitor which has garnered numerous Pulitzer Prizes. The Christian Science church has branches worldwide, in eighty countries. Her rise from obscurity to the acknowledged leader of a religious movement was phenomenal at a time when women did not have the vote. Mary passed away at age eighty-nine. Although her church’s popularity has diminished, it has outlived the Gilded Age empires of Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller. Mary Baker Eddy remains controversial: some believe in her doctrine; others denounce the Church of Christ, Scientist, as neither Christian nor a science.

Mary’s final resting place is on the shore of Halcyon Lake in Mount Auburn Cemetery, situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her bronze casket holds a copper box containing her published works. Her Vermont white-granite memorial consists of eight fifteen-foot-high columns without a roof. The monument holds reliefs of roses (Mary’s favorite flower) and morning glories, selected for their symbolism of opening to light and closing to darkness.

 

Mary Baker Eddy Historic House

With eight historic house museums tracing her life, Mary Baker Eddy may hold the record number. Her Broad Street residence in Lynn was the first home she purchased, and throughout her life she kept a photograph of it on her desk. She recalled, “Very sacred to me are the memories that cluster around my old home.”

A modern glass foyer serves as the visitor’s entrance. Visitors can stand in the attic under the skylight where Mary finished her manuscript of Science and Health and learn more about how she founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, and chartered the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. The house has two parlors—the first-floor parlor where she taught her classes and held the original modest church services; the second-floor parlor which was part of her private quarters, and likely where she wed Gilbert Eddy. The house, which now looks much as it would have when Mrs. Eddy lived there, displays wallpaper reproduced from original scraps found behind the door frames. Furnishings are of the period, though not original to the house.

In addition to touring the house, visitors are welcome to view an exhibit about her years in Lynn (1875–1882) and examine reproductions of the first three editions of Science and Health (the third carries an early iteration of what became the church’s official seal: a cross and crown). To that edition, Mary also added a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

 

A View from Her Window

When Mary looked out the window, she saw the room she used to rent, a reminder of how fortunate she was to finally have a home of her own.

 

Nearby Attraction: Grand Army of the Republic Museum

Founded by the Union Army in 1885, it honors those who fought to save the Union in the Civil War. There are six rooms of memorabilia spanning the Revolutionary War to World War I.

 

 

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