Mary Harrod Northend

Mary Harrod Northend (1850-1926) was an American writer specializing in American colonial architecture and home furnishings. She is best known for the thousands of photographs she either took or commissioned to illustrate her books and articles.

Early life

She was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on May 10, 1850, to William Dummer Northend and Susan Stedman Harrod Northend. Her father, a descendant of colonial governor William Dummer, was a criminal lawyer and a state senator, as well as the author of a history of Massachusetts titled The Bay Colony. Her younger brother was architect William Wheelwright Northend. She suffered from poor health most of her life and missed a great deal of school as a child due to illness. When she took up writing, she was in her fifties. According to the Anaconda Standard she had over 14,000 photographs to her credit by 1910; due to her "extreme nervousness," she could not physically take the pictures herself, but closely supervised their creation. She published countless photographs in books and periodicals under her own name, and ran a successful business selling images to editors, architects, decorators, and historians. She traveled all over New England, writing about homes and gardens and supervising the photography, often spending hours arranging a single room before a photo shoot.

Historic New England has collected over 6,000 glass plate negatives and several thousand prints of Northend's photographs.

Works