Maine
Maine home of Frances Perkins, first female Cabinet member, seeks national monument designation
The Frances Perkins Homestead as 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 – soon could become Maine’s second national monument.
The nonprofit Frances Perkins Center is asking President Biden to declare Perkins’ longtime family home on River Road in Newcastle a national monument, to be run by the National Park Service. It would become Maine’s second national monument, along with Katahdin Woods and Waters, which received the designation in 2016.
Officials from the Frances Perkins Center planned to announce the request Thursday during a Zoom news conference, which was scheduled to include U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, Maine Commissioner of Labor 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 transformational New Deal measures as Social Security, the 40-hour work week, child labor laws and the minimum wage.
A photo at 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
Supporters and people who have worked on the creation of other national monuments say the Perkins site has a good chance of being 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 would honor women.
Officials at the National Parks Conservation Association, which works with the National Park Service on creating sites, is not aware of any other proposals for new National Park Service locations that would honor women besides this one, said Kristen Brengel, the association’s senior vice president of government affairs.
“There are a couple reasons why this has a really great shot at becoming a national monument, and one is that the president said he’s looking to designate more sites to honor women’s history,” Brengel said from her office in Washington, D.C. “Another is the enthusiasm from the congressional delegation in Maine 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 run by the National Park Service, about a dozen are dedicated to women’s history or a particular woman, Brengel said. Those 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 than one woman or movements in women’s history, including Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of women taking over manufacturing jobs to bolster the war effort during World War II.
Brengel said there’s no typical timetable for how long a national monument request might take to get approved. But because Biden’s executive order established his desire to have more sites dedicated to women and his term will end in January, the approval could be “sooner rather than later,” Brengel said.
Though Perkins shied away from publicity and let FDR make the grand public announcements of new programs, historians and researchers in recent years have written about her crucial importance to so many measures aimed at making working people’s lives better.
“If you had a weekend, you can thank Frances Perkins. If you or anyone you ever loved has collected Social Security benefits, you can thank her. If you’re a child who got to go to school instead of to work in a factory, you can thank her,” said Stephanie Dray, a writer who researched Perkins extensively for her historical fiction novel “Becoming Madam Secretary,” which came out in March. “She’s just everywhere around us.”
A NATIONAL HISTORIC LANDMARK
The Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014 and has been run by the nonprofit Frances Perkins Center since 2020, when the organization purchased the property. The center opened in 2009 with a small exhibition space in Damariscotta.
Giovanna Gray Lockhart, the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, stands near a gallery wall of old family photos inside the Perkins family home in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
An exhibition on Perkins’ life in a restored barn is open to the public, as are trails through the 57 acres of fields and forest on the property. The center hopes to open at least some 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 government’s role is to help provide social justice and economic security for all, and that mission will be met by 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 of learning about American history.”
Generally, a national park contains a variety of natural resources and covers a large area, while national monuments preserve one nationally significant area and are usually smaller, according to the National Park Service website. Lockhart said the Frances Perkins Center hopes to retain a portion of the homestead property as its headquarters, “so that our work continues.”
A sign marks the trailhead at the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Though her parents were from Maine, Perkins grew up largely in Worcester, Massachusetts, and her professional life kept her in New York and Washington, D.C., much of the time. But she came back 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 at the age of 85 and is buried in Newcastle.
Perkins graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1902 and later got 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 Committee on Safety of the City of New York 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 institutionalized frequently during their marriage. He died in 1952.
SECRETARY OF LABOR
Perkins worked on various labor-related boards and commissions before being appointed New York state industrial commissioner in 1929 by Roosevelt, who was then New York’s governor. She became Roosevelt’s secretary of labor when he became president.
At first, she didn’t want the job in Washington, 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 she’d accept only if he accepted her list of conditions, which included proposing and pushing through measures that would champion labor rights and women’s issues in a variety of ways, including Social Security and a minimum wage.
“She knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish and became the point person on all these things we know today, like Social Security or the 40-hour work week,” Leebaert said. “She saw an opportunity to get these things done, and she was extraordinarily successful.”
Lily Hayden-Hunt works on cataloging Frances Perkins’ books at the center in Newcastle. Hayden-Hunt is one of two interns from Mount Holyoke, Perkins’ alma mater. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Lockhart said many of Perkins’ views about work and the rights of working people were forged during the time she spent on her family’s Maine homestead – a farm that, for a time, had a brick-making operation.
“I think that helped shape her character and led her to believe that, if you’re working hard your entire life and you become unable to work, there should be some mechanism to help you,” said Lockhart.
Pingree, a Democrat representing Maine’s 1st Congressional District, is a ranking member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversees the Department of the Interior, including the National Park Service.
A spokesperson for Pingree said in an email this week that the congresswoman is supporting the effort to create a national monument at Perkins’ home because “she was a trailblazer, 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’s and the United States’ history.”
In a news release about Thursday’s announcement, more than a dozen other current and former Maine elected officials were quoted as supporting the proposal, including U.S. Sen. Angus King, Gov. Janet Mills, Maine Senate President Troy Jackson and Maine House Speaker Rachel Talbot Ross.
Coincidentally, the Roosevelt summer compound, preserved as Roosevelt Campobello International Park, is about a four-hour drive up the coast, just over the Canadian border from Lubec, and also is open to the public.