Frances Perkins House in Maine Seeks National Monument Status

Frances Perkins Homestead seen from River Road in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

The Newcastle home of Frances Perkins — a chief architect of Social Security and other programs that helped transform the country during the Great Depression — could soon become Maine’s second national monument.

The nonprofit Frances Perkins Center is asking President Biden to declare the Perkins’ longtime family home on River Road in Newcastle a national monument, to be managed by the National Park Service. It will become Maine’s second national monument, along with Katahdin Woods and Waters, which received the designation in 2016.

Officials at the Frances Perkins Center planned to announce the request Thursday during a Zoom news conference that was scheduled to include U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, Maine Labor Commissioner Laura Fortman and several others.

Perkins was the first woman to serve in a U.S. president’s cabinet, as secretary of labor under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945, and is recognized as the driving force behind such transformative New Deal measures as the security social, 40-hour work week. , child labor laws and the minimum wage.

A photo from the Frances Perkins Center shows Perkins in front of the flag during a meeting of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Cabinet in 1937. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Advocates and people who have worked to create other national monuments say the Perkins site is likely to be approved by Biden because he issued an executive order in March directing the U.S. Department of the Interior to identify potential National Park Service sites that could honor women.

Officials with the National Park Conservation Association, which is working with the National Park Service to create the sites, are not aware of any other proposals for new National Park Service sites to honor women other than this one, said Kristen Brengel, the association’s senior vice president. government affairs.

“There are a couple of reasons why this has a very good chance of becoming a national monument, and one is that the president has said he wants to designate more places to honor women’s history,” Brengel said from her office in Washington, DC. “Another is the enthusiasm of the Maine congressional delegation and the public support there. When you look at (Perkins’) accomplishments, it puts her right up there among people who have had a huge impact on American history and people’s lives today.”

Of the 430 sites managed by the National Park Service, about a dozen are dedicated to women’s history or a specific woman, Brengel said. These include sites dedicated to abolitionist Harriet Tubman, American Red Cross founder Clara Barton, former first lady and activist Eleanor Roosevelt, pioneering black educator and women’s rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, and Maggie Walker, who was born to enslaved parents and became the first woman. to own a bank in the United States.

Others are dedicated to more women or movements in women’s history, including Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of women taking manufacturing jobs to support the war effort during World War II.

Brengel said there is no regular timeline for how long a national monument application might take to be approved. But because Biden’s executive order set out his desire to have more sites dedicated to women and his term ends in January, approval could be “sooner rather than later,” Brengel said.

Although Perkins shied away from publicity and let FDR make the grand public announcements of the new programs, historians and scholars in recent years have written about her crucial importance to so many measures designed to improve the lives of working people.

“If you had a weekend, you can thank Frances Perkins. If you or someone you’ve loved has ever collected Social Security benefits, you can thank them. If you’re a kid who had to go to school instead of working in a factory, you can thank him,” said Stephanie Dray, a writer who extensively researched Perkins for her historical fiction novel “Becoming Madam Secretary,” which it appeared. in March. “She’s all around us.”

A NATIONAL HISTORICAL LANDMARK

The Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014 and has been run by the French nonprofit Frances Perkins Center since 2020, when the organization purchased the property. The center opened in 2009 with a small showroom in Damariscotta.

Giovanna Gray Lockhart, executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, stands next to a gallery of old family photographs in the Perkins family home in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

An exhibit about Perkins’ life in a restored barn is open to the public, as are trails through the property’s 57 acres of fields and woods. The center hopes to open at least part of the 1837 brick farmhouse to visitors next year.

“Our mission is to inspire current and future generations to understand and uphold Perkins’ belief that the role of government is to help ensure social justice and economic security for all, and this mission will be accomplished through a national monument designation.” , said Giovanna Gray Lockhart. executive director of the Frances Perkins Center. “So many people visit national parks and national monuments. They are the gold standard for learning about American history.”

Generally, a national park contains a variety of natural resources and covers a large area, while national monuments preserve a nationally significant area and are usually smaller, according to the National Park Service website. Lockhart said the Frances Perkins Center hopes to keep some of the homestead property as a headquarters, “so that our work can continue.”

A sign marks the start of the trail at the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Although her parents were from Maine, Perkins grew up mostly in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her professional life kept her in New York and Washington, DC, most of the time. But she returned often, including in the summer, to the farm and homestead in Newcastle, which had been in her family since the 1750s. The Perkins property is on River Road, south of the Midcoast town of Damariscotta. She owned the house from 1927 until her death in 1965 aged 85 and is buried in Newcastle.

Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 1902 and later earned a master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University in New York City. She began a career as a social worker and economist in New York, working for the New York Consumers League and the New York City Committee of Safety in the 1910s.

She married New York economist Paul C. Wilson in 1913 and had one child, daughter Susanna, in 1916. Wilson suffered from mental illness and was frequently institutionalized during their marriage. He died in 1952.

THE SECRETARY OF LABOR

Perkins served on various labor-related boards and commissions before being appointed New York State Industrial Commissioner in 1929 by Roosevelt, who was then Governor of New York. She became Roosevelt’s secretary of labor when he became president.

At first, she didn’t want the Washington job, said Derek Leebaert, who wrote about Perkins in his 2023 book “Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made.” She told FDR that she would only accept if he agreed to her list of conditions, which included proposing and promoting measures that would support labor rights and women’s issues in a variety of ways, including Social Security and a minimum wage.

“He knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish, and he became the key person for all these things that we know today, like Social Security or the 40-hour work week,” Leebaert said. “She saw an opportunity to do these things and she was tremendously successful.”

Lily Hayden-Hunt works on cataloging Frances Perkins books at the Newcastle centre. Hayden-Hunt is one of two interns at Mount Holyoke, Perkins’ alma mater. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer

Lockhart said many of Perkins’ views on labor and workers’ rights were forged during her time on her family’s homestead in Maine — a farm that, for a time, housed a brick-making operation.

“I think that shaped her character and made her believe that if you work hard all your life and you become unable to work, there should be some mechanism to help you,” Lockhart said.

Pingree, a Democrat who represents Maine’s 1st Congressional District, is the ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Interior Department, including the National Park Service.

A spokesman for Pingree said in an email this week that the congresswoman supports the effort to create a national monument at the Perkins home because “she was a pioneer, the first female presidential cabinet member, the mother of the modern labor movement and a pioneering advocate for social justice, economic security and labor rights. This monument would celebrate this special piece of Maine and United States history.”

In a news release about Thursday’s announcement, more than a dozen other current and former Maine elected officials were cited as supporting the proposal, including U.S. Sen. Angus King, Gov. Janet Mills, Maine Senate President Troy Jackson and House Speaker Maine Rachel Talbot Ross. .

Coincidentally, the Roosevelt summer complex, preserved as Roosevelt Campobello International Park, is about a four-hour drive up the coast, just over the Canadian border from Lubec, and is also open to the public.

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