hint of their personalities have been preserved in the records. When Stoughton and the President’s house were committed to Father Abdy, it was agreed that “Harvard College” (that is, the first Harvard Hall) should be “continued to Mary Prentice,[1] and the Establishment for the Bed-maker is to be paid to them accordingly.” Up to that date, we infer, one femme de chambre was considered enough for the whole institution. In the year of the Declaration of Independence “the estate of the late Sarah Wedland” was paid 17s. 4d. “for cleaning the College Hall & out Houses”; and “Widow Morse” was gazetted “to be Sweeper of Hollis & the South Half of the College House, provided she be able constantly to attend the Duty herself.”[2] In the last clause we detect the same old note of distrust of the candidate’s professional qualifications. Sweeping, it would seem, was formerly reckoned an art not possessed by all, and when possessed, exercised with the true artist’s fitfulness and temperamentalism.
Like her predecessors, Mrs. Morse apparently found her duties no bar to what may fairly be called excessive
- ↑ Probably the widow of Thomas Prentice, a brickmaker who lived opposite the present Botanic Garden, and died in 1709. She died in 1760, aged 84, having buried two more husbands with perfect equanimity; for her tombstone (still standing in the Cambridge graveyard) records that she was “not impatient of Life, but satisfied with it.” Paige, History of Cambridge, 630.
- ↑ Faculty Records, June 25 and Aug. 10, 1776.
