The Woods of Melrose

The Melrose Historical Commission is not just charged with preserving buildings. It is also mandated to preserve historic landscapes. One such landscape is Sewall Woods Park, the remaining nine acres of what was once a thirty-acre forest belonging to Samuel E. Sewall.

Sewall died in 1888; his wife, Harriett, died in 1889, and their daughter, Dr. Lucy Sewall, died in 1890. Lucy’s dying wish to her sister, Louisa Cabot, was that this land be given to the town of Melrose on the condition that not a single tree ever be cut down, and that it be maintained in its “present wild condition.” True to her sister’s memory, in 1891 Louisa donated this land to the town with those stipulations.

For the Sewalls, these woods were not just a scenic backdrop. Nina Moore Tiffany, a family friend, recalled how the Sewalls would encourage their summer guests to explore the woods in the late afternoon, and when they had returned from their jaunt, dinner would be served at outdoor tables. Frequent guests included such close friends as William Lloyd Garrison, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Lucy Stone, and their favorite cousins, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott. When you walk the paths through the Sewall Woods, you are quite literally following in their footsteps.

Harriet Sewall was, among other things, a poet, and her work is suffused with forest imagery. In honor of National Poetry Month, here is a poem she wrote that was inspired by these very woods:

THE WOODS OF MELROSE

Again, O you dear forest trees,

For your companionship I yearn;

The longing love which you appease

I fondly fancy you return.

For when I left you yestermorn,

And cast a lingering look behind,

Your gestures beckoned my return,

Your calls came to me on the wind.

Oh still I hear those sweet recalls,

The extended arms I seem to see,

And long to leave the city walls,

And fly, dear Melrose, back to thee.