Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894) the mother of the kindergarten movement in America, lived here during the last years of her life in a house no longer standing. She was also a leader in the intellectual community in Boston. She was secretary to Dr. William Channing, an early leader of Unitarianism, and she owned a bookstore at 16 West Street which became the center of Transcendentalism. She published The Dial, a radical literary magazine, and supported women’s rights and the abolitionist movement. Her sister Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne, and her sister Mary married Horace Mann.
