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The Sanborn Parlor: The Sanborns and Webster Cottage
This parlor is dedicated to one of the women descended from Ebenezer Webster. The portrait above the fireplace portrays his Wife Abigail Eastman Webster (1739-1816), Daniel Webster’s mother. She is the great grandmother to Kate Sanborn (1839-1917), an influential writer of her time. She wrote stories about the town of Hanover and spent a great deal of time here.
The polished maple desk, on loan to the Webster Cottage by Dartmouth College, was made by Kate Sanborn’s great-grandfather, Captain Ebenezer Webster, and came to Hanover with her widowed grandmother, Mrs. Ezekiel Webster. Kate’s mother, Mrs. Mary Webster Sanborn, died young, and Mrs. Ezekiel continued to live in her son-in-law’s house to help bring up his motherless family. That son-in-law was Edwin D. Sanborn, Professor of English at Dartmouth, traveled, urbane, witty, and learned. His house on North Main Street was the gathering place for distinguished visitors to the college, and from babyhood Kate Sanborn was exposed to their good talk, which was in itself an education.
Formally, she studied music in Andover and elocution in Boston. Only her wit and lack of pomposity saved her from being a blue-stocking. She wrote as easily as she talked, and her first short stories were published and, as her brother dryly notes, paid for, when she was just eleven. In her teens, she set up school in the ell of her father’s house, above the woodshed, and at twenty, she was teaching in St. Louis in the Institute connected with Washington University where her father was a member of the English department for four years.
She returned to Hanover to begin a 54-year public career, writing, speaking and teaching. There was nothing high-flown or elegant about her writing; she chose simple subjects such as her dog, her little brother and his friends and their adventures with cows and “monsters.” She taught at Tilden Seminary, Packer Institute and Smith College. She lectured at “lyceums” and lunatic asylums, in churches and town halls, and her style was as “fresh, rational and full of commonsense” as her subjects were original: “Spinster Authors of England,” “Are Women Witty?,” “Tortures from Terrible Talkers.” I remember my parents laughing over her book “Adopting an Abandoned Farm”. This best-selling account of her misadventures as a lady farmer must have discouraged many romantic would-be back-to-earth lovers.