5 Portland Street
South Berwick, ME 03908
Phone: 207-384-2454
www.historicnewengland.org/historic-properties/homes/sarah-orne-jewett-house
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) was the author of novels, short stories, and poems. Her works can best be described as “American literary regionalism,” since she wrote about what she knew and loved the most: the immediate area, its houses, its people, its history, and its distinctive charm.
This house was built at the bustling intersection of two main roads in 1774 for merchant John Haggins. After Haggins died in 1819 the house was lived in by the family of another merchant, Theodore Jewett. Jewett bought the house in 1839. The Jewetts were a growing family. Sarah Orne was born here in 1849, and in 1854 the Greek Revival Jewett Eastman House (the visitor center now) was built next door. Generations of the Jewetts and Eastmans lived in both houses. In the 1880s Sarah and her sister Mary updated the interior of the old family homestead to reflect current tastes, repapering the walls of the central hall and carpeting the main stairs with a runner designed by Englishman William Morris (1834–1896), a leader in the late-nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement. Sarah Orne Jewett died in 1909, and in 1931 her nephew donated the property to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.