Marion Nicholl Rawson

Marion Nicholl Rawson (June 24, 1878; Plainfield, New Jersey – December 4, 1956; Providence, Rhode Island) was an artist, author, lecturer, and illustrator. She was born Edna Marion Nicholl and grew up in Scotch Plains, New Jersey, of which she later wrote the town history, Under the Blue Hills, left in manuscript at her death but published as part of the town’s bicentennial celebration in 1974.

Rawson graduated from Swarthmore College. After college, Rawson first worked as an art teacher in the public schools of New Jersey and Brooklyn, during which time she met her eventual husband, Jonathan Ansel Rawson, Jr.

They had two children, Jonathan Nicholl Rawson (the fifth Jonathan Rawson in a direct line, but generally taking different middle names to evade Roman numerals) and Patricia Alden Rawson, later Curll. Marion Rawson was left a widow at 50 by her husband’s early death, requiring her to support herself, with the eventual aid of her children. This she did as an author, painter, historian and lecturer. For some years she lived with her son, moving throughout the mid-Atlantic states as he followed a career as a manager of successive W. T. Grant stores; then with her daughter in Rhode Island; and finally again with her son, who had settled in Providence.

However, she always spent a summer of four or more months in her home in East Alstead, New Hampshire, a small town north of Keene, in the country presided over by Mount Monadnock. The Rawson homestead in the center of East Alstead, where successive Jonathan Rawsons had lived since the family settled there in 1782, had passed by some vagary of inheritance to cousins, but she and her husband had early purchased what she called “the Little House.”

Mrs. Rawson was a sketcher and watercolor artist, and she continued to sketch and paint all her life, holding frequent sales of her work in Bellows Falls, Vermont, Alstead, Providence (where she was a long-time member of the Providence Art Club) and other places in New England. She never had electricity or running water installed in the house, preferring to live there every summer until her death under the same conditions (kerosene lanterns, dug well and outhouse) that had sufficed for the earlier generations whom she made it her lifework to study.

Work

In 16 years Rowson wrote and largely illustrated 13 books on the homemade arts and crafts of the early American home, farm, shop and countryside. All were published between 1927 and 1941, 12 of them by E. P. Dutton, New York, with the history of Scotch Plains yet to come. Those works are as follows:

• Candle Days: The Story of Early American Arts and Implements (Appleton-Century Co., 1927), 307 pp., with photos.
• Country Auction (Dutton, 1929), 261 pp., with photos.
• When Antiques Were Young: A Story of Early American Social Customs (Dutton, 1931), 271 pp., with photos.
• From Here to Yender: Early Trails and Highway Life (Dutton, 1932), 308 pp., illus. by the author.
• Sing, Old House: Hallmarks of True Restoration (Dutton, 1934), 414 pp., illus. by the author.
• Little Old Mills (Dutton, 1935), 367 pp., illus. by the author; reprinted, Johnson Reprint Corp., 1970.
• Handwrought Ancestors: The Story of Early American Shops and Those Who Worked Therein (Dutton, 1936), 366 pp., illus. by the author.
• Of the Earth Earthy (Dutton, 1937), 414 pp., illus. by the author.
• Candleday Art (Dutton, 1938), 383 pp., illus. by the author.
• Forever the Farm (Dutton, 1939), 380 pp., illus. by the author.
• The Antiquer’s Picture Book (Dutton, 1940), 96 pp., illustrations by the author gathered from the earlier books.
• The Old House Picture Book (Dutton, 1941), 96 pp., further illustrations by the author gathered from the earlier books.
• New Hampshire Borns a Town, a history of Alstead, NH, called simply The Town, 1763-1883 (Dutton, 1942), 319 pp., illus. by the author.
• Under the Blue Hills: Scotch Plains, New Jersey (The Historical Society of Scotch Plains and Fanwood in Cooperation with the Scotch Plains American Revolution Bicentennial Committee, 1974), 210 pp., illus. by the author.

Persondata
Name	Rawson, Marion Nicholl
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Short description
Date of birth	June 24, 1878
Place of birth
Date of death	1956
Place of death