Laura E. Richards’s house in Gardiner Maine burned down this Christmas. Known as the Yellow House, it was a causality of the winter storm just before Christmas that dumped vast rains accompanied by hurricane winds across much of Maine and left other cataclysmic weather damage across the country. The storm itself didn’t cause the fire; a generator used during the resulting long power outage ignited the blaze. One more bit of historical architecture, an artifact of the past, a building with a story to tell, is now gone.
A nice old house in and of itself, it had stood in Gardiner since about 1810 so it represents another blow to the character of an old Maine village; it had many stories to tell. One story is its connection to literary and historical figures,
Laura E. Richards, was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe who wrote the lyrics for The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Richards herself was a prolific writer; among ninety other works, she wrote one that took the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1917. Written with two of her sisters, it chronicled her mother’s life. Her father, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a well known abolitionist, founded the Perkins Institution, the Massachusetts School for the Blind. In 1876 Richards moved to this house in Gardiner, Maine, where her husband managed a paper mill. An elementary school in Gardiner still bears her name.
The story of the fire as reported in the Portland Press Herald, a local news paper.
SAMPLES OF THE WORKS OF LAURA RICHARDS AND JULIA WARD HOWE
While Richards’s biography of Julia Ward Howe sold, the following works are still available:
Toto’s Merry Winter, by Laura Richards, $57
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, as first printed in the Atlantic Monthy, $321