Access: Open to the public when the library is open.
Directions: Walk in the front entrance and walk past the gates and immediately turn to your right and back toward the portrait of Hawthorne.
GIS: 43° 54‘ 25.39“ N --- 69° 57‘ 49.41“ W

Hawthorne-Longfellow Library

Dirty Family Secrets

Walk in the front door of the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library and you will immediately be greeted by portraits of two of Bowdoin's most famous alumni: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. We will focus our attention on Hawthorne, whose portrait hangs to your right as you walk in.

Hawthorne was a descendent of William Hathorne, a deputy of the General Court of Massachusetts, who made himself famous for having Quakers publicly whipped if they dared set foot in Puritan lands. William's son, John, was one of three judges presiding over the Salem Witchcraft Trials that resulted in the executions of 20 men and women. Yet another relation was an infamous pirate on the Atlantic. There has long been a legend that the Hawthornes added the w to their name to try to distance themselves from their checkered family past.

Nathaniel Hawthorne begins his novel The House of Seven Gables, with an accused witch's curse on a Judge Pyncheon: "Pycheon, God will give you blood to drink and quench your greed for eternity." This derives from a real quote from the Salem Witch Trials. When the Reverend Nicholas Noyes asked Sara Good to confess to being a witch, she responded: "I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink."

Twenty-five years later, the Reverend Nicholas Noyes died of a hemorrhage in his neck, choking on his own blood.