Wilhelmina Harris


Wilhelmina Sellers Harris was an American historian and writer. Harris’s connection to American history began in 1920 when she was hired as social secretary to Brooks Adams and his wife, Evelyn. Adams was the last descendant of U.S. Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams to live in the family home, Peacefield, also known as the Old House, in Quincy, Massachusetts. Harris lived and worked with them for almost seven years.
In 1948, after raising her family, Wilhelmina Harris applied for and was hired by the National Park Service to work at Peacefield, which it had recently added to its portfolio of historic sites, because of her intimate knowledge of the household. Two years later, Harris was promoted to superintendent and she continued to serve the Adams family and the National Park Service until her full retirement 37 years later, in 1987. By the time she retired, Wilhelmina Harris had written a dozen books on the property, overseen several Adams property construction updates, and received many professional awards.

Career

In October 1920, recently graduated from college, Wilhelmina Harris was hired through an employment agency as social secretary to Brooks Adams and his wife. Harris lived with and worked intimately with the family.
The Adams household spent winters at their home on Beacon Hill in Boston and summers at the Old House in Quincy. Thomas Boylston Adams noted that "the twice-yearly trip from Quincy to Boston, a distance of a dozen miles, required the effort of Napoleon preparing to invade Russia. All this Miss Sellers managed." Harris became student, protégé and confidante to Adams. Historian Laura Miller writes:
Harris also accompanied Adams on his frequent travels abroad. They spent weeks or months in London, Paris and the south of France, Italy, Egypt, and Jerusalem, among other places.
This chapter of her career came to a close with the death of Brooks Adams on February 13, 1927; Evelyn Adams had died the previous December. In his will, Adams left Harris $30,000.
In 1948, the recently widowed Harris applied for a job as an Historic Aide at the Old House, now owned by the National Park Service and called the Adams Mansion National Historic Site. Two years later, she was promoted to superintendent; she was the second, and for the entirety of her tenure the only, woman superintendent of an NPS national historic site.
During her thirty-seven years as superintendent, Harris raised money, organized publicity events, developed relationships with the city of Quincy, and repaired, expanded and protected the physical environs of the site. But her interpretive approach to the history of the Old House, based on the stories she had heard from her first employer, remained constant, and that was not without its critics. In 1955, NPS Historian Frank Barnes wrote:
Perhaps in response to this criticism, Harris compiled a ten-volume inventory of the contents of the Old House, including all of the legend and lore that had been passed down to her by Brooks Adams. Her former secretary and successor as park superintendent Marianne Peak told author Laura Miller that Harris "was never one to talk about any imperfections of the Adams family."
At her retirement in 1987, Thomas Boylston Adams remarked: "Sometimes, I think that Mrs. Harris has taken such wonderful care of this property that she invented the Adams family to go with it." She herself liked to say, "My duty here is to stand in the way of progress.”

Personal life

Born in 1896 in Franklin, Alabama, Wilhelmina Sellers, known as "Willie" to her family, was the last of eight children born to William and May Sellers. In 1916 she moved to Boston to study piano at the Faelton Pianoforte School, graduating in 1920.
She married U.S. Army Colonel Frank Ephraim Harris on September 22, 1928. Col. Harris, twenty-eight years her senior, had been a friend of Adams, who had introduced them. They purchased a large Colonial Revival home across the street from the Adams family home. Together they raised three sons, all alumni of Milton Academy and Harvard University.
Harris gave private piano lessons from 1938 to 1948 and founded the Quincy Junior Concert Orchestra.
Colonel Harris died in 1947 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
In 1991, Wilhelmina Sellers Harris died at the age of 95, four years after she fully retired from the NPS. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Her obituary was published in the New York Times.

Awards and recognition