Women of Achievement: Written for the Fireside SchoolsBrawley, Benjamin Griffith
History
Women of Achievement: Written for the Fireside Schools
Brawley, Benjamin Griffith
African American women -- Biography; Women -- Biography
The state of Massachusetts has always been famous for its history and
literature, and especially rich in tradition is the region around
Boston. On one side is Charlestown, visited yearly by thousands who make
a pilgrimage to the Bunker Hill Monument. Across the Charles River is
Cambridge, the home of Harvard University, and Longfellow, and Lowell,
and numerous other men whose work has become a part of the nation's
heritage. If one will ride on through Cambridge and North Cambridge and
Arlington, he will come to Lexington, where he will find in the little
Lexington Common one of the most charming spots of ground in America.
Overlooking this he will see the Harrington House, and all around other
memorials of the Revolution. Taking the car again and riding about seven
miles more he will come to Concord, and here he will catch still more of
the flavor of the eighteenth century. Walking from the center of the
town down Monument Street (he _must_ walk now; there is no trolley, and
a carriage or automobile does not permit one to linger by the wayside),
he will come after a while to the Old Manse, once the home of Emerson
and of Hawthorne, and then see just around the corner the Concord Bridge
and the statue of the Minute Man. There is a new bridge now, one of
concrete; the old wooden one, so long beloved, at length became unsafe
and had to be replaced. In another direction from the center of the town
runs Lexington Road, within about half a mile down which one will see
the later homes of Emerson and Hawthorne as well as that of Louisa May
Alcott. Near the Alcott House, back among the trees, is a quaint little
structure much like a Southern country schoolhouse--the so-called
Concord School of Philosophy, in which Emerson once spoke. It is all a
beautiful country--beautiful most of all for its unseen glory. One gives
himself up to reflection; he muses on Evangeline and the Great Stone
Face and on the heroic dead who did not die in vain--until a lumbering
truck-car on the road calls him back from it all to the workaday world
of men.
It is in this state of Massachusetts, so rich in its tradition, that
there resides the subject of the present sketch. About halfway between
Boston and Worcester, in the quiet, homelike town of Framingham, on a
winding road just off the main street, lives Meta Warrick Fuller, the
foremost sculptor of the Negro race.
There are three little boys in the family. They keep their mother very
busy; but they also make her very happy. Buttons have to be sewed on and
dinners have to be prepared for the children of an artist just as well
as for those of other people; and help is not always easy to get. But
the father, Dr. S. C. Fuller, a distinguished physician, is also
interested in the boys, so that he too helps, and the home is a happy
one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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