Mary Harrod Northend

She was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on May 10, 1850, to William Dummer Northend and Susan Stedman Harrod Northend. Her father, a descendant of colonial governor William Dummer, was a criminal lawyer and a state senator, as well as the author of a history of Massachusetts titled The Bay Colony.[1] Her younger brother was architect William Wheelwright Northend.[2] She suffered from poor health most of her life and missed a great deal of school as a child due to illness. When she took up writing, she was in her fifties.[3]

Northend began publishing "short historical sketches" in newspapers in the early 1900s, taking photographs with her Kodak camera to illustrate them. Dissatisfied with her own photographs, she eventually hired a professional photographer to come along with her on outings.[3] According to the Anaconda Standard she had over 14,000 photographs to her credit by 1910; due to her "extreme nervousness," she could not physically take the pictures herself, but closely supervised their creation.[4] She published countless photographs in books and periodicals under her own name, and ran a successful business selling images to editors, architects, decorators, and historians.[5] By 1915 she had published in 37 periodicals, including the Boston Herald, the Ladies' Home Journal, and The Century Magazine, and published two books.[3] At first she focused on colonial cookery, furniture, and decorating, later branching out into architecture and landscape.[5] She traveled all over New England, writing about homes and gardens and supervising the photography, often spending hours arranging a single room before a photo shoot.[3]

She died at Salem Hospital on December 17, 1926, from surgery made necessary by an auto accident.[6]

Historic New England has collected over 6,000 glass plate negatives and several thousand prints of Northend's photographs.[1] In 2014, her work was included with that of Alice Austin, Edith Guerrier, Ethel Reed, Sara Galner, and Edith Brown in an exhibit at the Boston University Art Gallery titled Craft & Modernity: Professional Women Artists in Boston (1890-1920).[7]

• Colonial Homes and their Furnishings. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1912.
• American Homes and their Furnishings in Colonial Times. London: T. F. Unwin. 1912.
• Historic Homes of New England. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1914.
• Remodeled Farmhouses. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1915.
• Eberlein, Harold Donaldson (1915). Architecture of Colonial America. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
• Garden Ornaments. New York: Duffield & Company. 1916.
• Historic Gardens of New England. New York: Mentor Association. 1916.
• Memories of Old Salem: Drawn from the Letters of a Great-Grandmother. Moffat, Yard and Company. 1917.
• Door Lore. Clinton, Iowa: Curtis Service Bureau. 1920.
• The Art of Home Decoration. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1921.
• The Party Book. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. 1921.
• The Small House: Its Possibilities. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1923.
• We Visit Old Inns. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. 1925.
• American Glass. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1926.
• Historic Doorways of Old Salem. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1926.

• Gamble, Jeanne M. (2008). Surroundings of Inspiration: The Progressive Era Through the Lens of Mary H. Northend, 1904-1926. Harvard University (dissertation). OCLC 463296763.
• "Mary Harrod Northend". Streets of Salem. March 28, 2015.

• "Mary Northend Photographs of Houses and Interiors". Winterthur Digital Collections.

• Works by Mary Harrod Northend at Project Gutenberg