Elizabeth George Speare

Born in 1908, Mary Elizabeth George grew up in this house at 69 Laurel Street. Her parents, Harry and Demetria, would often take her on jaunts in the woodlands surrounding Melrose, and that landscape, decades later, would serve as a creative inspiration. In 1958, writing under her married name of Elizabeth George Speare, she published the children’s novel “The Witch of Blackbird Pond,” a work of historical fiction which would go on to win the Newberry Medal and become the bestselling book ever written by a Melrosian, enjoyed by generations of children and adults alike.

Speare graduated from Melrose High School in 1926. In her junior year, she helped to found the MHS Girls’ Club, an extracurricular organization created to provide a forum for young women’s issues. While “Blackbird Pond” was set in the 17^th century, its teenage heroine, Kit, might best be understood in light of Speare’s own suburban adolescence in Melrose. The novel’s major theme of an individual in conflict with a social order that expects a high degree of conformity from young women would not have been alien to Speare’s youthful experience.

As part of the city’s Wayfinding and Creative Placemaking initiative, local artist Sheila Farren Billings has painted an electrical box at the southwest corner of Main Street and the Lynn Fells Parkway in honor of Speare. This is the first time the city has memorialized its most widely read native daughter.