Rosamond Thaxter collection, 1962-1989
Collection Scope and Content
The collection includes promotional materials for Sandpiper (1962), Rosamond’s biography of her grandmother, Celia Thaxter; an inscribed map and a boat schedule that were inserts in this volume; newspaper articles (originals and some photocopies) and obituaries about Rosamond; the Sept. 1966 issue of the Westbrook Junior College’s publication The Mirror, focusing on highlights from the Maine Women Writers Collection and including items about both Rosamond and Celia Thaxter; and photographs of Rosamond and her home, Champernowe Farm.
Biographical/Historical Note
Rosamond Thaxter was the granddaughter of poet Celia Laighton Thaxter. She was born on Cutts Island at Kittery Point, Maine, on April 14, 1895, eight months after her grandmother’s death. She was known for her philanthropy but was also a public speaker, world traveler, businesswoman, and writer.
Growing up on Cutts Island at the turn of the 20th century, Rosamond was her parents’ and her community’s only child. Other than during springtime visits with her cousins, her only playmates were animals and the books read to her by adults. Like her grandmother, Rosamond was a child of the sea, birds, grasses, and flowers, her closest companions.
Their solitary upbringings by the sea infused Rosamond’s connection to her grandmother as well as the biography she would pen, Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter. At age 86, Rosamond recounted her own life–in connection, again, to her family’s cultural and literary achievements at the Isles of Shoals–in a short, self-published memoir entitled Aunt Rozzie Remembers.
Rosamond grew up a daughter of privilege. She was the only child of John Thaxter, Celia’s second son, and Mary Gertrude Stoddard, the wealthy daughter of the mayor of Worcester, Massachusetts. Rosamond’s parents met at the Appledore Hotel, built by Celia’s father, Thomas Laighton, in 1848. There, at the first summer resort in Southern Maine to cater to New England’s elites and artists, Mary became fascinated by the hotel’s famous hostess, Celia, and fell in love with her son, John, a farmer. Through this union and especially the wealthy Stoddard social milieu, Rosamond joined the ranks of the first families of Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Kittery Point, Maine.
Rosamond received an education befitting her social class. She was taught at home by her mother until age ten, when she began attending Kittery local schools. From there, at age fifteen, she was sent to the Berkshires to attend Miss Hall’s School, whose ideal, according to Rosamond, was to graduate virtuous ladies. She moved on to Miss Edith May’s Travel School, which took her to Paris, London, Brussels, and Florence, among other European locales. Rosamond writes that she never liked school and considered herself a mediocre student, but she credited those years with two priceless gains: her lifelong friendships and love of travel. Rosamond never married. As the only Stoddard grandchild, she put her inherited wealth toward the civically-minded activities and causes that mattered to her: the promotion of historic preservation, the arts and libraries, hospitals and schools, her church and, most of all, the Girl Scouts, an organization she championed.
Her first book, Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter (1962), is lovingly dedicated to her father. In it, she chronicles her grandmother’s complicated life, presenting her as a “gifted and courageous” woman who grew from island waif to national celebrity. Woven from memory, photographs, correspondence, diaries, and published poetry, Sandpiper is no hagiography. Rosamond provides an unusually frank portrayal of her grandmother’s hard work to support the family and personal struggles with depression; Celia’s exceptional closeness to her mother, leading to near collapse after her death; as well as her lifelong care of her first son, Karl, whose crises with mental illness Celia sought to resolve through her poetry, 19th-century Spiritualist practices, and traditional Christianity. In Rosamond’s portrait of Celia, the Isles of Shoals play a consistent role as both home and muse. Rosamond’s description of Maine’s first generation of resort hotels will be of particular interest to cultural historians researching post-Civil War travel from cities to the cooler reaches of northern New England. In 1982, Rosamond turned her writing toward herself, publishing Aunt Rozzie Remembers. This short memoir of living under Celia’s proud shadow is especially valuable for its documentation of what is otherwise a sparsely documented life. She died in 1989 at age 94 at the Thaxter family home on Cutts Island, known as Champernowe Farm, and is buried at First Congregational Church Cemetery in Kittery Point, Maine.