This is the story of two 19th-century Berkshire women. One moved from Stockbridge to Lenox, and the other from Lenox to England. One had a solid impact on Berkshire County and her generation. While the other, although more famous, may have had no impact on the county at all. You decide.
The teacher
Elizabeth Buckminster Dwight was born into a prominent Stockbridge family in 1801. The men in the family were major landowners, politicians, officers, and gentlemen. Their sons were well educated and continued the family tradition of prominence. The daughters, including Elizabeth, received a reasonable education for a 19th-century woman.
In 1819, when she was 18 years old, Elizabeth Dwight married Charles Sedgwick. Born in Stockbridge in 1791, Charles was 10 years her senior. His was an equally prominent family, and the sons of the house were equally well educated. It was considered a propitious match. Charles and Lizzie’s future seemed both bright and predictable. They would live out their days as eminent citizens of Stockbridge.
They did not. Instead, they made two unusual decisions. In 1821, Charles accepted the position of Clerk in Lenox. They left Stockbridge and moved to a house roughly where Springlawn is today. Then, in 1828, Lizzie went to work. Women of her class rarely worked. If they did, they were usually spinsters.
Nonetheless, Lizzie opened Mrs. Sedgwick’s School for Young Ladies. She called her school alternately “The Hive” and “The Culture Factory.” The school operated continuously for 43 years. It closed only when Lizzie died in 1864.
In the beginning, there were 12 pupils—eight living in the Sedgwick household and four in an adjoining cottage on the grounds. Later, there were more students, and some—or perhaps only one—would live off the school grounds. Some young ladies who attended Mrs. Sedgwick’s wrote about their experiences.
Through them we learn “the little schoolhouse was in the garden [behind the house].”
The school day opened with “Mrs. Sedgwick reading a chapter from the Psalms or the Prophets … her demands upon the scholars’ intellects were moderate but she insisted upon good recitation and clear understanding [of what was memorized].”
The girls studied rhetoric (art of effective writing/speaking), physiology (biology), ethics, philosophy, and history. The girls were required to memorize and recite Shakespeare, and the great Shakespearean actress (and Lenox neighbor) Fanny Kemble stopped by the school often and read Shakespeare aloud to the girls.
Mrs. Sedgwick was described as “a woman of great force and integrity.” She was also “modern” in her desire for her girls to be well educated and well rounded. She was also modern in allowing the girls to roam around Lenox in twos without chaperons. This was years before the transformation of Lenox into a glitzy Gilded Age resort, and far from a crowded tourist spot of today. The girls described Lenox as “a simple rural village.”
Students of the school included Charlotte Cushman, Alice Delano, and Ellen Emerson. Cushman became an actress equivalent in fame and stature to Katherine Hepburn. Alice Delano and her possible relationship to two American presidents is unknown. Ellen was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s daughter. Also attending was the granddaughter of President Van Buren. In short, for three decades, it was a successful school drawing young ladies from the “best families.”
Charles’ sister Catharine Sedgwick joined the household with her literary salon in her wake. As southern Berkshire County attracted more and more of the literati, the household and school in Lenox became a cultural center for the literati of the “American Lake District” and for her students.
The student
One student had a memorable name: Miss Jennie Jerome. Later her name was Lady Randolph Churchill, the mother of Winston Churchill. Did she attend Mrs. Sedgwick’s school? In support of the notion, here are three points:
- It is the type of school her family would have selected for her.
- Her connection to the Berkshires goes back to the first recorded land transfer in Lenox. Lenox was incorporated in 1767, and the first land grant recorded in Colonial Proprietor’s Record Book on October 25, 1770 was “seventy-five acres to Timothy Way and Samuel Jerome.”
- Timothy Way has faded from memory, but Samuel Jerome was the great-grandfather of Jenny Jerome, and therefore progenitor of Winston Churchill. Samuel lived on Prospect Hill Road from 1728 to 1796.
Remember the one student who lived off the grounds? It was Jenny Jerome. In a red-and-white house still standing on “Courthouse Hill” (Old Stockbridge Road today) something was found in the attic. It was a wood framed slate with “JJ” carved into it. The house was the residence of the Episcopal Reverend Justin Field. Students attending Mrs. Sedgwick’s did board with him. Is the slate, therefore, physical evidence that Jennie was one of them? Possibly, but there is a difficulty.
Jennie was born in 1854. Mrs. Sedgwick’s School closed in 1864. Would her parents have sent so young a girl away to school? Perhaps not. However, next door to the Reverend Field on “Courthouse Hill” was a house identified as Miss Lippencott’s School. It may have been a school, but it is as likely that it too served as a boarding house for students attending Miss Sedgwick’s School for Young Ladies or the Lenox Academy for Boys.
The literature advertising the Lenox Academy for Boys says, “Boys are not lodged in dormitories, but are given homes in good families where they are under the direct charge of good Christian men and women.”
There is an indisputable connection between our Berkshires and Winston Churchill through a great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Jerome. But is there a connection between his mother and the Berkshires? Not proven. For those who love to dig, don’t look for a connection between Jennie and Mrs. Sedgwick’s, look instead for a connection between Jennie and the Justin Field family.
