Big Sister

Sarah Paine Perkins, the second child of James Perkins Jr and Eliza Green Perkins was named after her grandmother Perkins, and was always very close to her. Sarah was born in 1818 and was brought up at Pine Bank where the family moved after the Pearl Street mansion was given to the Athenaeum, and her grandfather died. Her older brother James died in 1824 when she was six, and her father passed away in 1828 when she was ten, and then her mother married Bishop Doane and moved to New Jersey, so Sarah stayed on where she was most comfortable, at Pine Bank with her grandmother and her younger brothers Ned and Charlie and Hal.

When she turned twenty she married a young man ten years her senior with literary inclinations. Henry Russell Cleveland had graduated from Harvard in 1827, was known to have clear judgment, a lively fancy, and an almost instinctive elegance of taste, and particularly enjoyed the English poets and the great Latin writers.

Henry had always been of delicate health, and after college he had headed west on the new canal to Geneseo where he had helped start an academy for boys. In Geneseo he contracted a fever, perhaps malaria, and almost died. His father was Vice-Consul in Havana so he visited Cuba in 1830, hoping the travel would help his health. He then travelled on to Europe; to England in 1831, and then on to Paris where he became private secretary to the American minister Rives and also secretary to the American Polish Committee where he became acquainted with Lafayette. He continued on to Geneva, and then to Florence, Rome, and Naples. When he finally returned to America in 1833 he became a proctor at Harvard. He certainly had literary inclinations, but, thinking practically, he started an academy in Boston and resumed his teaching career, documenting his methods in his book “Remarks on the Classical Education of Boys” (1834).

Henry formed an informal social group (a "mutual admiration society" in the words of one critic) called the Five of Clubs, which included the law partners Charles Sumner and George Hillard, the classicist Cornelius Felton, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The five young men met together at Pine Bank on Saturday afternoons, and talked of society and experiences and books and travels. They reviewed each others works and helped launch each others careers.

When he married Sarah in 1838, Henry's life changed. The marriage settlement stipulated that of her inheritance from her father, $30,000 would be paid to Henry as his own property. Beyond that sum, the inheritance would be given over to a trust, with the income to benefit Sarah free from the control of any husband. Soon after the marriage, he suffered an attack by a kind of nervous fever, which hung about him for some weeks, and he stopped teaching. He soon realized that his retiring habits and the delicacy of his organization gave him a strong preference for that "Domestic life, in rural leisure passed," which the poet Cowper pronounced to be so favorable to virtue and happiness.

From this period on the course of his life became placid and uneventful as, with the exception of a winter spent in Boston, a few months in Cambridge, and occasional visits to his wife's mother in New Jersey, he resided at the beautiful estate of Pine Bank.

His occupations were almost exclusively literary, though no inconsiderable portion of his time was devoted to the duties of a wide and generous hospitality. His friends long associated his smile of welcome and the cordial pressure of his hand with the breezy lawns of Pine Bank, the beautiful belt of trees which skirts its borders, its winding walks, and gentle waves that die away on its pebbled shore.

Henry's brother Horace had just returned from the "dream-land" of the west, and moved into Pine Bank as well. Horace joined into the literary activities of the Five of Clubs, and eventually went on to become one of America's first landscape architects and an associate of Frederick Law Olmsted (who would eventually turn Pine Bank into part of Boston's "Emerald Necklace"). Ralph Waldo Emerson hired Horace Cleveland to design Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, and then Horace returned west, to his "dream-land", where with a nod to his friendship to Longfellow and the Song of Hiawatha, he developed the Minneapolis park system including Minnehaha Park.

When her grandmother died in 1841, and with her mother in New Jersey with her second family, Sarah had to take care of her brothers. Charles had been suspended from Harvard in 1841 for leaving at the end of the term without permission and without passing his exams, and Sarah had to write to Longfellow to intercede with President Josiah Quincy to have Charlie reinstated. Her youngest brother Hal was expelled from Harvard for good in October 1842. She tried to help him become a farmer, but Hal, like his father, couldn't escaped his alcohol addiction and died young at the age of 25. She even took care of her mother when Bishop Doane got into severe financial distress because of the mortgages he had signed (along with funds from Charlie and Ned) made to found schools in New Jersey.

Her husband Henry Cleveland was never well. In 1841 he traveled on horseback with Charlie west through Greenfield, Charlemont, North Adams, and Williamstown, to Troy, and then back to Boston, but he developed a cough which stayed with him and made the trip uncomfortable for all. The following year he tried going back to Cuba and the Caribbean, and sailed to Bonaire, using the trip for his literary pursuits:

"I have studied Sales's Spanish Grammar entirely through, with care and attention, performing all the exercises twice; I have translated four books of Telemaque from the French into Spanish, carefully correcting my work by a Spanish translation; I have studied critically, and reviewed with care, two plays of Calderon, occupying two hundred pages; and in the same careful manner have studied through, three or four times, a volume of poetry, by Espronceda, a modern Spanish poet, the volume containing about three hundred pages. I have read Alison's History of the French Revolution, four volumes of Addison's works, all Byron's dramatic works, Dana's " Two Years Before the Mast," McKenzie's " Paul Jones," and Commodore Perry; besides a whole rabble rout of novels, tales, poems, romances, reviews, magazines, and newspapers, too numerous to be catalogued."

In May he took a steamboat for St. Louis, but his cough got progressively worse, and when he arrived he was carried to a hotel. He was feverish and bleeding from his lungs. Sarah and Charles had been summoned, and arrived in early June just in time to be with him as the last rites were administered. He died June 12th, 1843. The last words he spoke, addressed to his wife, were, "Whatever happens, we must trust in God."

Sarah returned to Pine Bank. Charlie took off to join Ned in Europe. Pine Bank seemed awfully big. Five years later, when Ned got engaged to Mary Spring, Sarah decided to give him the house.

She lived with Charlie at Oakwood on the north shore of the pond until she built her own house, Nutwood, in 1867, next door on the corner of Chestnut and Perkins Streets.

Sarah stayed in touch with Longfellow, and gave a complete set of Shakespeare to her favorite nephew Teddy when he married Edith Wharton in 1885. Sarah Paine Perkins Cleveland died, fifty years after her huband, in 1893.

Both sides of Chestnut Street on the Boston side were Perkins land until the area on the Ward's Pond side was sold to the Jamaica Plain Aqueduct Company to become parkland in the 1890's. Oakwood and Nutwood stood until the early 1970's when they became part of the Cabot Estate Condominiums and were demolished.