Minnie B. Jewett
Resident · 1902–1917
Minnie B. Jewett came to 11 Chesley Road in 1902, when her husband Asa C. Jewett bought the house, and lived here until her death at home on November 15, 1917 — fifteen years in the house, longer than all but a few of its residents.
The record of her is thin, as it too often is for the women of these households: two newspaper death notices. The Boston Globe gave her age as 39 — which would put her birth around 1878 — and her home as “Chesley road, Newton Center,” where her funeral was held. The Massachusetts Historical Commission report on the house erased her entirely, calling her husband “unmarried” — a mistake the Jewett page untangles.
Asa remarried after her death; his second wife, Elizabeth, conveyed the house in 1927 after he died. But it was Minnie who kept this house through the Jewett era’s first fifteen years — the years of the 1914 piazza, the Jewett & Bemis partnership, and her husband’s long rise through the Masonic orders.