No. 5219 Morton Taylor House, painting on brick.
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 House built by the Mortons in 1796 was located on Dudley Street (then called Stoughton Street) nearly across the street from the James Swan House.
Perez Morton (1750-1837) and Sarah Wentworth Apthorp (1750-1846) were married at Trinity Church, Boston, on Feb. 24, 1781. They moved to the mansion that had belonged to Sarah?s grandfather and later to her uncles Thomas and Charles. As the property of a Loyalist expatriate, it was subject to confiscation, and in 1784, Perez Morton purchased the rights of Charles Ward Apthorp, of New York, and Thomas Apthorp, of London, to the property. There was a family scandal in the late 1780s, and it is supposed that Perez had an affair with Sarah?s sister Fanny who killed herself. The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy, published in 1789, was assumed for a time to have been written by Sarah since it dealt with a similar situation. Scholars now attribute the novel to William Hill Brown, a neighbor of the Mortons who knew about the scandal.
No. 2281 Detail from 1874 Hopkins Atlas
Three poems that appear in Sarah’s collection My Mind and Its Thoughts appear to date from the period of the affair. They are an essay on Marriage, a poem, Stanzas to a Recently United Husband, and another poem, Conciliation.
No. 926 Portrait of Sarah Wentworth Morton, published in “Philenia: the life and works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846.” By Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis in The Maine Bulletin, vol. xxxiv, no. 4, December 1931.
Perez purchased the land at the corner of Dudley and Burgess Streets in 1794 and added to it twice. The Mortons moved from Boston to the Dorchester site in late 1796 or early 1797. Sarah said that the house was built according to her own whimsical plan. Charles Bulfinch, however, was her cousin, and the design of the house has been attributed to him. Bulfinch designed the Swan House across from the Morton House.
No. 929 Perez Morton, published in “Philenia: the life and works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846 .” By Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis in The Maine Bulletin, vol. xxxiv, no. 4, December 1931.
Kimball ascribes the design to Bulfinch, saying that ?He designed the Morton House with an octagonal projecting room, the ellipse, truncated in this case so it does not project, being reserved for the up-stairs drawing room.?
Sarah’s publications include poems contributed to literary magazines. Her first long poem was published in December, 1790, Ouabi: or The Virtues of Nature, An Indian Tale. In Four Cantos. Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer Andrews, 1790. Other works include: Beacon Hill. A Local Poem, 1797; The Virtues of Society. A Tale Founded on Fact, 1799; My Mind and Its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays, 1823.
No. 3586 Photograph of the Morton Taylor House published in Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and the Early Republic by Fiske Kimball. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922.
In 1806 Perez was elected Speaker of the lower house in the General Court of Massachusetts and was re-elected in 1807, 1810 and 1811. He was appointed to Attorney General in 1810 to fill a vacancy. He served in this position until 1832.
On Sept. 27, 1803, Perez mortgaged the property to his brother Joseph Morton. On July 7, 1808, Joseph Morton sold the estate to Cornelius Coolidge. Sometime before that the family had moved out. The property was later acquired by the Taylor family. It was taken down in 1891.
The Mortons moved between 1803 and 1808 to a piece of land purchased by Sarah at what is known as Allen?s Plain, fronting on Pleasant Street and adjoining Stoughton Street. The house was known as the Pavilion. Perez died there in 1837. In 1841 Sarah sold the property to William D. Swan, instructor, of Dorchester. It was demolished in the 1880s.
No. 944 Photograph published in “Some Old Dorchester Houses.” By Marion A. McBride in New England Magazine, May 1890.
No. 8950 Morton Taylor House 1890
No. 21033 Sarah Morton Portrait by Gilbert Stuart at the Worcester Art Museum
No. 21522 Sarah Morton Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
No. 494 Taylor Morton House from Dorchester Old and New 1630-1930
No. 927 Back of Taylor House “Philenia: the life and works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846.” By Emily Pendleton and Milton Ellis in The Maine Bulletin, vol. xxxiv, no. 4, December 1931.
Sources:
Clapp, David. The Old Morton and Taylor Estates in Dorchester, Mass. (Boston: Press of David Clapp & Son, 1892). Reprinted from the N. England Historical and Genealogical Register for Jan., 1892.
Kimball, Fiske. Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922 )
McBride, Marion A. “Some Old Dorchester Houses.” New England Magazine, May, 1890.
Orcutt, William Dana. Good Old Dorchester: A Narrative History of the Town, 1630-1893.Cambridge: The University Press, 1908 [c1891] )
Pendleton, Emily and Ellis, Milton. “Notes from Philenia. The Life and Works of Sarah Wentworth Morton, 1759-1846.” The Maine Bulletin, Dec. 1931, v. xxxiv, no. 4.