Nichols House Museum: A Beacon Hill Townhouse With a Life of Its Own

The house at 55 Mount Vernon Street dates to 1804, when Jonathan Mason — one of the Mount Vernon Proprietors, the group of real estate speculators developing the south slope of Beacon Hill — commissioned a row of four houses from Charles Bulfinch, the architect then defining Boston's public face with the Massachusetts State House and the early U.S. Capitol. The row, numbered 51 through 57 Mount Vernon, was built for Mason's daughters, and the design is still attributed to Bulfinch today. Originally, both No. 55 and No. 57 entered through side doors on their west elevations, facing Mason's own mansion across the way; that mansion is long gone. The house was renovated in 1830, and its flat brick Federal facade, set a half-block from the State House, still reads as one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Beacon Hill the Proprietors were inventing. It is a contributing property in the Beacon Hill Historic District.

In 1885, Dr. Arthur Nichols, a Harvard Medical School-trained physician, bought the townhouse with his wife Elizabeth (Homer) Nichols. Their three daughters — Rose (1872–1960), Marian (1873), and Margaret (1879–1959) — grew up here alongside a working household of locals and immigrants: a family of five plus a live-in and daily staff of six to eight kept the four-story house running. Arthur practiced medicine from the house; his original "Dr. Nichols" sign survives, now in the library. The rooms the museum shows today are not a curator's reconstruction of a period. They are the rooms of one family, accumulated and rearranged across two generations, from the gas-lit 1880s to the radio-and-automobile age Rose lived to see. The house still carries both centuries at once: a 1936 radio sits near a 1897 dumbwaiter, and the Cyrus Carpenter & Co. stove still stands in the former kitchen, now the welcome area.

Rose, the eldest daughter, is the reason the house exists as a museum. She became one of America's first professional women landscape architects, designing roughly seventy gardens while publishing three books on European garden design: English Pleasure Gardens (1902), Spanish and Portuguese Gardens (1924), and Italian Pleasure Gardens (1928). Her training was unusually thorough for any architect of her era, male or female. She studied with Charles Platt at the family's Cornish, New Hampshire home, took architecture classes with Thomas Hastings while attending the Art Students League in New York in 1896, studied as a special student with MIT's Constant Desiré Despradelle in 1899, studied horticulture at Harvard's Bussey Institute, and continued her education in Paris and London. She also served as the Boston-area agent for Augustus Saint-Gaudens — the sculptor of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common — who happened to be her uncle by marriage, wed to her mother's sister Augusta Homer Saint-Gaudens. Rose never married. She traveled constantly, designed gardens on both sides of the Atlantic, and hosted salons in this house where intellectuals argued progressive ideas over afternoon tea. In 1915 she helped found the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and she campaigned for women's suffrage, the peace movement, and labor reform. In 1930 she inherited the house from her parents and began planning its future as a museum. She died in 1960; the museum opened in 1961.

The museum's current mission deliberately centers all three sisters, and the other two were formidable in their own ways. Marian Nichols, the middle daughter, loved automobiles and driving — early, fast, and far — and went on to found the Beacon Hill Civic Association, the neighborhood organization that still shapes the Hill's preservation politics. Margaret Homer (Nichols) Shurcliff, the youngest, took after her father and turned to athletics and carpentry. She opened a furniture business called Pegleggers and taught carpentry to children in the North End and at the family's summer home in Ipswich. She married Arthur Asahel Shurtleff (who respelled the name Shurcliff after 1930) in 1905 and raised six children — Sidney Nichols, Sarah Parsons, William Asahel, John Perkins, Elizabeth Homer, and Alice Warburton — shared her father's devotion to hand bell ringing, and, like her sisters, worked for suffrage, peace, and civil liberties. Furniture the sisters made by hand still stands in the house: chairs Rose carved, caned, and cushioned herself, and pieces built by Margaret, including an elaborate trunk and a bookshelf. The set is the physical record of the museum's unofficial motto — "19th-century house, 20th-century family, 21st-century ideas."

What makes the Nichols House different from Boston's other house museums is that nothing was staged for posterity after the fact; Rose decided ahead of time that the house would become a museum, and the collection was assembled by the family itself. The highlights are real and specific. There is sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, including "Diana of the Tower"; Flemish woven wall hangings; Japanese woodblock prints; Chinese ceramics; 18th-century Italian paintings; Oriental rugs; ancestral portraits; and Boston-made furniture spanning the 17th through early 20th centuries, with important pieces attributed to Thomas Seymour and Isaac Vose. The first-floor library and second-floor parlor anchor the tour, with the parlor wall hanging, the narrow second-floor dining room, and the pantry behind it all furnished from the family's own accumulation. Upstairs, Rose's bedroom still holds the bed coverings she made by hand over two years, the pillows embroidered by Rose, and her portrait at eighteen, painted around 1890 by her friend Margarita Pumpelly. But the everyday objects do as much work as the art: the painted-over wallpaper in a second-floor parlor — Rose's thrift at work, since stripping it would have cost more — the handmade pillows, the modest en-suite bathroom, the books left where they were shelved. Tours run about an hour, guided, and the museum welcomes visitors year-round with lectures and programs that keep the sisters' social concerns — women's history, labor, peace — in the conversation.

Hero photo: ajay_suresh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Gallery: Photo: John Phelan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Margarita Pumpelly Smyth, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Photo: Taylor Greer, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.