Wayland A to Z:  Lydia Maria Child

When Lydia Maria Child moved to this town in 1853 to care for her elderly father, it was the beginning of her twenty-seven-year, love-hate relationship with the town of Wayland.  Maria, famous novelist, an author of the first important books on women’s rights, and on the abolition of slavery, and the first woman editor of a national newspaper was stuck in the Wayland she called “this little drowsy village.”

The small house on Old Sudbury Road, which she later inherited from her father, was the only home she and her husband, David, were ever able to own.  The Childs were always moving from rented rooms and boardinghouses, from a hardscrabble farm in Northampton and an unheated house in West Newton.  David Child was a Harvard graduate and a lawyer who believed in all the idealistic causes Maria cherished.  His career, however, was a long series of financial failures.  Money was Maria’s continual worry.  All their married life, it was Maria who was the family breadwinner.

Lydia Maria Child has been called Wayland’s most famous citizen, yet in her day few townspeople sympathized with the Child’s political views.  Maria’s own brother James, who lived a mile down Old Sudbury Road, was mortified by his sister’s very public abolitionist stands.  Maria wrote a friend that David was “violently treated and nearly mobbed” at a Civil War aid meeting in Wayland Center when he said slaves who offered to fight for the Northern army should be permitted to do so.  When her neighbor raised the Stars and Stripes to show he felt the war was being fought solely to preserve the Union, Maria hung a white flag on her garden gate.

Maria railed against the unnecessary extravagance of the new 1878 town hall and the high taxes in Wayland.  She resented the fact that members of the First Parish Church insisted their ailing minister, the Reverend Edmund H. Sears, hold not one, but two services a Sunday, forcing him to retire from the Wayland pulpit.

Still Maria found a few in Wayland like the Reverend Sears and the miller William Grout, who shared her view that slavery was an injustice which should be abolished.  Over the years she made warm friends with many of her neighbors and townsfolk.  She loved to send little gifts such as slippers to the elderly Reverend John Burt Wight, and a favorite book of hers, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to her neighbor George Gleason.  She delighted in sending presents to the Cutting children next door.  Her letters to friends here are full of “thank you” for homemade gifts of doughnuts, crullers, bread and butter.

In her last years, after David’s death, Maria found it too difficult to maintain her home in Wayland during the coldest months.  Maria, who spent each winter in rented rooms in Boston, wrote a neighbor how much she missed her views of Wayland’s “broad open meadows and golden sunsets.”  In letter after letter to Wayland friends, she spoke of her homesickness “for my humble old nest in Wayland.”