*Ruth Lambert Jones was born in Haverhill, Essex County, Massachusetts, on September 5, 1896, and lived almost all of her life there. Haverhill was the home of a shoe-making industry and was known as “Queen Slipper City”. It is on the Merrimack River, 35 miles north of Boston on the New Hampshire border, 17 miles inland from the Atlantic. Ruth died in Beverly, a suburb of Boston, on October 29, 1976, and is buried in a family plot in Georgetown, Essex. In 1911 she was in the freshman class at Bradford Christian Academy. Her last work was Symbols and Other Poems, published in 1963 by the Bradford Junior College. Given her enormous output over almost half a century, it is surprising so little is known about her – no details about her life or her writing appears online. Her poetry appears to have been her only source of income and was published in a vast range of major newspapers and magazines across the United States, most notably – and regularly – in The New Yorker (1928-1941) and Harper's.
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As a youngster, we were neighbors of Ruth Lambert Jones and her sister Eleanor from 1952-60. I remember them only as two elderly ladies, although seeing that she was born in 1896, Ruth was only in her early 60s at the time. They lived at 247 Mill St in Haverhill, in a converted carriage house on the shores of Plug Pond (Lake Saltonstall). Their father had once been US Attorney for Massachusetts in the late 1890s/early 1900s. The family lived in a large mansion at 243 Mill.
The father died in 1930, and the mother had the mansion torn down, moved the carriage house to the shore of the pond, and converted it into living quarters for her and her two daughters. The mother died in 1943. The first link is to a photo in the Haverhill Public Library's Special Collections showing the Boyd Jones House around the turn of the century. The 2nd link is to a c 1960 color photo showing the carriage house (or The Garage, as they called it--I have a typewritten 1938 poem from the Christian Science Monitor under the letterhead of "The Garage 247 Mill Street, Haverhill, Massachusetts"). The caption on the photo says the two ladies in front are likely Ruth & Eleanor Jones. https://haverhill.pastperfectonline.com/Photo/A146D63C-97A2-472F-B0F3-714057777948 https://haverhill.pastperfectonline.com/photo/9927DE3B-DD5A-4BF0-AAFD-309875688850
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