(c) 2014 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Ellen Dixey

1849 - 1924

BiographyWilliam Sturgis was born 25 February 1782, the son of William Sturgis and Hannah Mills. He was a prominent Boston merchant and co-founder of Bryant and Sturgis, and made his fortune in the China Trade. He married Elizabeth Marston Davis and they had six children, among them two daughters, Ellen (1812-1848) and Caroline (1819-1888). Caroline Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of Lewis Tappan, a noted abolitionist, and Susanna Aspinwall; they had two children, Ellen Sturgis Tappan and Mary Aspinwall Tappan. Caroline Sturgis Tappan and her sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, were minor Transcendentalist poets whose work was occasionally published in the Dial. They counted among their acquaintances William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau. The sisters, especially Caroline, were also friendly with Margaret Fuller and regularly attended her celebrated "conversations," begun in 1839.

The Tappans lived in Boston and summered in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1936, Mary Aspinwall Tappan and her niece, Rosamond Sturgis Dixey Brooks (Caroline Sturgis Tappan's granddaughter), gave the family's summer estate, Tanglewood, to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
https://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss112.html#list-ser1 I.S. 12/12/2017

During the 1887-1888 winter season, 147 Beacon was the home of Caroline (Sturgis) Tappan, the wife of William Aspinwall Tappan. Her primary residence was at their home, Tanglewood, in Lenox. She had lived at 17 Marlborough during the previous season. Her son-in-law and daughter, Richard Cowell Dixey and Ellen Sturgis (Tappan) Dixey, lived at 179 Commonwealth, and Mrs. Tappan probably was living in Boston because of the birth of their granddaughter, Rosamond Sturgis Dixey, in June of 1887. Caroline Tappan died in October of 1888 in Lenox. Tanglewood was inherited by William and Caroline Tappan’s two daughters: Ellen (Tappan) Dixey and Mary Aspinwall Tappan, who never married. In 1937, Mary Aspinwall Tappan and Rosamond (Dixey) Brooks (who married Gorham Brooks in June of 1913) donated the property to the Boston Symphony.
https://backbayhouses.org/303-berkeley/ I.S. 12/12/2017

Dixey, Ellen Sturgis (Tappan), 1849-1924
Dates:
Birth 1849
Death 1924
http://snaccooperative.org/ark:/99166/w6t585fx I.S. 12/12/2017

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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