1845 to 1870

ESSEX, Massachusetts

whaling industry, Sailors' Wives, Lucy Larcom, Beverly, MA

Hannah, of Lucy Larcom’s poem “Hannah Binding Shoes”, was a sailor’s wife in the early nineteenth-century. A weathered woman who has waited twenty years for word of her husband’s whereabouts, she has remained steadfastly by her window overlooking the shore in Beverly, Massachusetts, binding shoes. She continued to ask passing neighbors of news from the harbor, but no news would ever pertain...