Representative women of New England/Adelaide N. Blodgett
ADELAIDE NICHOLSON BLODGETT was born in Fitchburg, Mass., January 10, 1847. She is the daughter of Charles' Nicholson, a sea captain of the old-fashioned type, a man of integrity and ability. The son of an officer in the French army. Captain Nicholson came to this country from France at the age of twelve. He married Mary Ann Varney, who was born in Boston, and who lived at the North End, in former days the court end of the town, as it has been called. Captain Nicholson died some twenty years ago.
Mrs. Blodgett, on her mother's side, is a descendant of Nicholas Browne, who settled in Lynn, Mass., before 1638, and a few years later removed to Reading. He was a Deputy to the General Court of Massachusetts in 1641, 1655, 1656, and 1661.
Her great-grandfather, Seth Ingersoll Browne (William,3 Cornelius,2 Nicholas1), was one of the "Mohawks" who helped throw the tea into Boston Harbor, December 16, 1773, and was a non-commissioned officer m the battle of Bunker Hill.
Captain and Mrs. Nicholson removing to Newton when their daughter Adelaide was a mere child, she received her early education in the schools of that town, attending later Maplewood Institute in Pittsfield, Mass. She married Mr. W. H. Blodgett, a member of the well-known Boston firm of Joel Goldthwaite & Co., June 14, 1865, and settled in Newton, where she has since resided. Mr. and Mrs. Blodgett have two children, Grace Allen and William Ernest. The daughter, Grace Allen, a graduate of Smith College, is married to Dr. R. H. Seelye, one of the most skilled surgeons of Western Massachusetts, and resides in Springfield, where she is a power in the educational and moral forces of the community. William Ernest Blodgett is a graduate of both Harvard College and Harvard Medical School. He is making a specialty of orthopedic surgery.
Mrs. Blotlgett has always been a student, and, while travelling extensively in Europe with her children, was as busy with books and music as they. She has been a member of the Eliot (Congregational) Church for thirty-six years, and has given herself with much enthusiasm to its needs a«d concerns. She is now president of the Woman's Home Missionary Association of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She was for three years president of the Social Science Club of Newton, which has for one of its good works the support of a vacation school in Nonantum (a manufacturing village in Newton) at an outlay of six hundred dollars a year. She was president of the Newton Federation of Women's Clubs, and was elected treasurer of the Massachusetts State Federation of Clubs at the time of its founding, a position which she filled for eight consecutive years.
Though Mrs. Blodgett has filled many public positions admirably, it is in her own home that she is at her best. It is here that one finds many evidences of her cultured tastes, and, seeing the personality of the mistress, does not wonder at her power of hiaking and keeping friends.