How I Helped Save the Home of a New Deal Trailblazer

When Sarah Peskin ’71 retired from the National Park Service in the late aughts, she inadvertently found a project that became like a second career: leading the charge to preserve the Frances Perkins Homestead in Newcastle, Maine, which culminated in an effort to get it categorized as a national monument. Late last year the site earned the designation, which protects and preserves places with historic, cultural, or scientific importance. The nation’s first female Cabinet-level secretary, Frances Perkins helped create multiple New Deal–era social programs. She spent summers at the homestead, which is located close to Peskin’s home in Walpole, Maine. Peskin felt a connection to Perkins through their shared experience as women in public service, and Peskin remains deeply involved in the stewardship of the property.

I was curious about the New Deal from the time I was in college. I’ve always had an interest in that period of American history. So much of the infrastructure we use—basic stuff everywhere in the country—dates to that time, and artists were considered workers and were subsidized and supported.

I graduated from Smith in 1971 and wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. With four kids in our family, our parents were going to help us through our undergraduate education, but after that we were on our own. I applied to urban planning programs and got a fellowship to work at New York University. The program was all at night, so you could work during the day. But I couldn’t handle living in New York in the ’70s. The lack of personal safety and security was overwhelming. I needed to see the sky; I needed to see the ocean. (Nobody told me about Brooklyn!) So, I moved to Boston and took individual courses to finish my coursework at NYU.

Meanwhile, I was working in the Massachusetts state planning office when the governor, Michael Dukakis, most his reelection primary. Our whole office was out of luck. At the time, Lowell National Historical Park had just been authorized. It was unlike any other national park—it was a grassroots effort to revitalize a very interesting city that was the birthplace of the American textile industry.

The Department of the Interior established a special commission to help get the park started, and I went there as the planning director on a two-year contract. I stayed for 10 years. That got me into working with the National Park Service. After I left Lowell National Historical Park, I competed for a permanent position with the park service. Part of what drew me to the park service is that they interpret history through place. As a colleague described it, “We get involved where the story hits the ground.”

I became chief of planning for the Northeast region. We did master plans for all the existing national parks and historical sites and evaluated potential places for inclusion in the National Park System. I was involved in evaluating many of them and did the feasibility studies for a bunch of places that are now national park sites. It was fascinating.

I used to do a lot of work at Acadia National Park in Maine. I felt really connected to this part of the state; my husband and I eventually built our little dream house here in the midcoast. I can just about see the Frances Perkins Homestead from my window across the Damariscotta River. Smithies may be familiar with Perkins because of the Frances Perkins Scholars Program at Mount Holyoke College—their version of Smith’s Ada Comstock Scholars. But I came to learn that she was far more than just a name.

I read a biography of Perkins that came out in 2009, around the time I retired. I almost wept. I knew about her because I had great professors at Smith, but she was almost forgotten from history. She’s not featured in the standard historical narratives, though she should be. It’s because of Perkins that we have Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the minimum wage. She was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of labor—the first woman in the United States to hold a Cabinet position.

She was also a working mother. I was a single parent, and there just weren’t role models. Every job I had, I was the first woman or the only one. There seemed to be no examples of people in government who had been through this, yet Perkins was right there all along if we only knew where to look.

I would never compare myself and what I accomplished to getting Social Security started. But you have doubts; you wonder if you did a good job. It does make you feel better to know that other people have been through this. What Perkins had to do in government was what I had to do without knowing that anyone else had faced these challenges.

A Smith classmate knew about the Frances Perkins Homestead because she walked her dog with Perkins’s grandson, her last remaining heir. She kept telling me about this place. It’s wooded, but there are open fields. You hike, but you’re not far from civilization if you need it. It’s rocky, and some of the trail is kind of steep, but there’s a great reward: When you walk downhill, you get to the river. It’s very beautiful; it changes with the seasons.

Perkins found refuge in this place. She came back every year. The house itself—because this family did not have enough money to mess it up—is almost like a time capsule right up until 1965, when she died. When her grandson could not hold on to the property but didn’t want it to be developed, friends of mine pestered me enough that I said, “OK, I’ll go to one meeting.”

The people there were lively, smart, and interesting. They had a lot of good ideas, but nobody knew how to take a privately owned place and turn it into a public place and preserve it, which is what I’d been doing for the past 20 years in the park service. It was like riding a bicycle. For the last 15 years since that first meeting, one thing kind of led to another. Smithies have too much going on in the brain—we’re not going to snooze in retirement.

I recommended to my colleagues that we needed to establish a national landmark, the highest status you can receive for a privately owned property. I’d never done one before, but I wound up writing the proposal myself with a little help from a consultant. I had to go before a peer review panel in Washington, D.C., full of archaeologists, but we had done our research. We defended it; we got the designation.

Then, in March 2024, President Biden issued an executive order saying there are hardly any sites dedicated to American women in the National Park System—let’s do something about it. So, they went looking for additions. We were already following best practices for national park sites. When the advance team came to look at what we had done, they were impressed. On December 16, 2024, President Biden established the Frances Perkins National Monument. We didn’t know until a week before, and time was running out for his administration. It was very gratifying to see this all come together.

Long story short, we succeeded in having the site designated as a national monument. It’s a public-private partnership park, operated by the federal government along with the Frances Perkins Center as a nonprofit partner. In my 30 years at the park service, I learned how to protect and preserve the nation’s treasures for the enjoyment of current and future generations. I feel like I know Frances Perkins, and that’s what we were trying to do in the National Park Service—connect with people about history.

As told to Kira Goldenberg