The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, begins with a story that was common in its time but it leads somewhere entirely unexpected. By the late nineteenth century, Florence Griswold found herself in circumstances shared by many unmarried women of her generation. Her family’s wealth had disappeared, her parents and siblings were gone, and she inherited a large house that had once reflected her family’s prosperity but had become an expensive burden. Like many unmarried women of the middle and upper classes with limited economic opportunities, she turned to one of the few socially acceptable occupations available: taking in boarders. 

Today, the boarding-house period is often a forgotten chapter in the history of historic houses. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, boarding houses were an important part of many women’s economic lives. Taking in boarders was considered an extension of managing a household, making it one of the few socially acceptable ways women could generate income while remaining within the domestic sphere.

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