Designed by Charles Bulfinch ca. 1806, this house represents the lives of two notable Boston women: Hepzibah Clarke Swan (1757-1825) and Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910). Swan was one of the five original members of the Mount Vernon proprietors whose goal was to transform Beacon Hill into a fashionable neighborhood. She had the three row houses at numbers 13, 15, 17 built for her daughters and another for herself at number 16. Her collection of French furnishings is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, as are several of the family portraits she commissioned Gilbert Stuart to paint.
Julia Ward Howe, who is best known as the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic written at the beginning of the Civil War, lived at 13 Chestnut during that period, one of her several residences in Boston. Howe was a noted reformer and early participant in the women’s club movement after the war. She was joined by a group of women, including Caroline Severance (1820-1914), in founding the New England Women’s Club in 1868, one of the first women’s clubs in the country. Howe was a leader in the woman suffrage movement and helped found the Woman’s Journal. Howe read papers at the meetings of the Radical Club, a club for women and men who were “daring thinkers” which often met at this site. In 1879, three years after her husband’s death, Howe moved to 241 Beacon Street.
