No. 5319 Painting of the John Lothrop Motley House on the face of a brick from the house
Edward A. Huebener, a former Board member of the Dorchester Historical Society, was a collector of materials relating to Dorchester history including a very large collection of graphic materials, including prints and photographs, now owned by the Society. His very own contribution to this group of materials was the idea of taking a brick from a house that had been demolished and asking a local illustrator to paint a picture of the house upon the brick. The painted bricks may be viewed at the Dorchester Historical Society.
The John Lothrop Motley House was located on Adams Street at the corner of Center Street.
The following material found on the internet was originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
John Lothrop Motley (April 15, 1814 – May 29, 1877) American historian, son of Thomas Motley, was born at Dorchester, Massachusetts, and graduated at Harvard in 1831. He then studied at Gottingen and Berlin, becoming a friend of Bismarck at Gottingen, and after a period of European travel returned in 1834 to America, where he continued his legal studies.
In 1837 he married Mary Benjamin (d. 1874), a sister of Park Benjamin, and in 1839 he published anonymously a novel entitled Morton’s Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial. In 1841 he entered the diplomatic service as secretary of legation in Russia, but resigned his post within three months. Returning to America, he soon entered definitely upon a literary career. Besides contributing various historical and critical essays to the North American Review, including a remarkable essay on the Polity of the Puritans, he published in 1849, again anonymously, a second novel, entitled Merry Mount, a Romance of the Massachusetts Colony.
About 1846 the project of writing a history of the Netherlands, in particular the period of the United Provinces, had begun to take shape in his mind, and he had already done a large amount of work on this subject when, finding the materials at his disposal in the United States inadequate, he went to Europe in 1851. The next five years were spent at Dresden, Brussels and the Hague in investigation of the archives, which resulted in 1856 in the publication of The Rise of the Dutch Republic, which became very popular. It speedily passed through many editions, was translated into French, and also into Dutch, German and Russian.
No. 4993 Engraved portrait from John Lothrop Motley, a Memoir. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Boston: Houghton, Osgood and Company, 1879.
In 1860 Motley published the first two volumes of its continuation, The United Netherlands. This work was on a larger scale, and embodied the results of a still greater amount of original research. It was brought down to the truce of 1609 by two additional volumes, published in 1867. In 1861, just after the Civil War had broken out in America, Motley wrote two letters to The Times defending the Federal position, and these letters, afterwards reprinted as a pamphlet entitled Causes of the Civil War in America, made a favourable impression on President Lincoln.
Partly owing to this essay, Motley was appointed United States minister to Austria in 1861, a position which he filled with great success until his resignation in 1867. Two years later he was sent to represent his country in London, but in November 1870 he was recalled by President Grant. After a short visit to the Netherlands, he again took up his residence in England, where the Life and Death of John Barneveld appeared in two volumes in 1874. Ill health now began to interfere with his literary work, and he died at Frampton Court, near Dorchester, Dorset, leaving three daughters.
No. 491 Photograph of the Motley house printed on p. 37 of Dorchester Old and New 1630-1930.