Hawthorne House Trustee Tom McKosker dug deep into Hawthorne history, and he found a treasure! With help from The Bangor Public Library, Local History and Special Collections Tom found “Nathaniel Hawthorne,” an oration delivered before the alumni of Bowdoin College in Brunswick on July 10, 1878, by Joseph W. Symonds. The oration was published that year and the full scan is available here:
https://hawthorneassoc.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Symonds_Nathaniel-Hawthorne_1878.pdf
Tom provide a summary of the oration and that is printed below. Thank you Tom!
In the summer of 1878, the alumni of Bowdoin College gathered in Brunswick to hear one of their own remember Nathaniel Hawthorne. The speaker, Joseph W. Symonds, was born in Raymond in 1840 and went on to serve on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court: a Raymond boy paying tribute to the most famous boy the town ever raised.
Reproduced here in full, his oration holds one of the earliest and finest published accounts of Hawthorne’s boyhood on the shores of Sebago Lake: the years in this house, the woods and the fishing, the solitary skating on the winter ice, the days he would call the happiest of his life. Hawthorne’s own words run through it, from “I lived like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed” to his wry admission that “it was there I first got my cursed habits of solitude.”
With thanks to the Bangor Public Library, Local History and Special Collections
Christmas with the Hathorne Family, December 1818 – Our friend Norma Jepson, from across the pond in England, has put the finishing touches on her new work, Christmas with the Hathorne Family, December 1818. It is a historical rendition of what Christmas probably was for young Nat and his family.
Please read it by following this link.
A Day In The Life of Nathaniel Hathorne – Our friend Norma Jepson, from across the pond in England, has put the finishing touches on her new work, A Day In The Life of Nathaniel Hathorne. It is a historical rendition of what an average day would be like for young Nat.
Please read it by following this link.
Bowdoin College News – highlighted the Maine Calling NPR presentation about Nathaniel Hawthorne and his youth in Maine. In addition to his boyhood in Raymond, Hawthorne attended Bowdoin.
Read from the downloaded PDF here, or find the original posting here .
National Park Service – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne – Though Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne graduated together as members of Bowdoin College’s class of 1825, the friendship between the two men truly started with the above letter, written by Hawthorne to Longfellow on March 7, 1837. Hawthorne had been “scribbling” for periodicals for years, without significant financial success. His friend Horatio Bridge encouraged him to collect some of these short works into book form and secretly…[Read more]
https://www.nps.gov/articles/longfellow-and-hawthorne.htm
Hawthorne in Raymond – A June 15, 1986 talk given by Professor Melinda Ponder of Boston College at the annual meeting of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society held at the Hawthorne House in Raymond, ME. The original spelling “Hathorne” is used for the family name. The literary and biographical references given at the end of the paper will be of interest to anyone interested in doing further research.
Click HERE to access the full transcript.
The Boyhood Home of Nathaniel Hawthorne – By Lois Varney of South Casco, Maine. The date and name of publication is not available. Appears to be from around 1985 in a lakes area newspaper.
Click HERE to access the article.
Downeast Magazine, September, 1962
From an article by Herbert Edwards
Click HERE to access the Down East article.
Click HERE to access the 1921 Portland Evening Express article.