The Williams Sisters

The Williams Sisters occupied the Otis House in the mid 19th century, operating the grand Bulfinch Mansion as a boarding house.

From 1854 to 1868, the four Williams sisters — Lavina, Maria, Caroline, and Eliza — ran a boarding house at the Otis House, originally on 1 Lynde Street and located in today’s West End. All four of the Williamses were unmarried, and they lived at the Otis House while running the boarding house. The sisters went into business together to financially support themselves after the death of their mother and the remarriage of their father. As operators of a boarding house, the Williamses not only provided meals and boarding, they functionally acted as “surrogate family” for boarders. The job of running the boarding house was considered by American society to be an extension of women’s narrowly-conceived responsibility for domestic duties. During the nineteenth-century, the same period as the boarding house, a one-story addition for storefronts was added to the Otis House.

Genteel boarding houses provided a comfortable, respectable middle-class home-like setting. Boarders could expect to live in sizable, well-kept rooms furnished with their own or “house” furniture, to sit down to three home-cooked meals per day in the dining room, and to entertain their guests in a well-appointed communal parlor on the first floor. Keepers and boarders could establish stable, long-term relationships and serve as surrogate family members for one another. According to a former boarder, Susan Thatcher, the eldest sister was “blind and helpless, but said to have been a most intelligent woman.” Miss Thatcher stayed at the house as a child with her mother when her father, an admiral, was at sea. She remembered that the boarding house was “first-class in reputation and prices. An old-fashioned boarding house, more like a large family.”

Today, the Otis House spotlights the Williams’ sisters in their tours. In March 2015, an hour-and-a-half “Ladies of the House” tour featured Sally Foster Otis, Dr. Elizabeth Mott, and the Williams sisters.