537 Summer St
Burlington, IA, USA

Mary Darwin House

The Mary Darwin House is a historic house located at 537 Summer Street in Burlington, Iowa. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on January 24, 1980.


Description and history

This house served as the residence of Mary Abigail Platt Darwin from 1866 to 1886. Darwin was major figure in the Women's suffrage movement in Iowa in the late 19th century. She and her husband, Charles Ben Darwin, resided together in Burlington from 1851 until he left for Washington state in 1870. They later divorced. That same year Mary Darwin chaired the first meeting of the executive committee of the Iowa Woman's Suffrage Association. She became a popular speaker on the subject throughout the state, but she was eventually shut out of the statewide movement because of her more liberal attitudes on such topics as free love. After living in Washington, D.C. from 1876 to 1880 she returned to Burlington and became involved with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union on both the local and state levels.

The house is a brick structure in a vernacular Italianate style. It is composed of a two-story main block that is three bays wide, and a projecting full-sized projection with a polygonal bay on the north side. The whole structure is built on a limestone foundation. The house features shallow hipped roofs; wide, bracketed eaves; brick friezes that are painted white; and two wooden verandas.

National Register of Historic Places - Mary Darwin House

Statement of Significance:

This house is principally significant as the residence, from about 1866 until 1886, of Mary Abigail Platt Darwin (1821- 1886), a major figure, both locally and at the state level, in the women's suffrage movement of the late 19th century.

A graduate (1845) of Oberlin College, Mary Darwin came to Burlington with her husband, Charles Ben Darwin, in 1851. The first city directory reference to their living at 537 Summer is 1866, the year Charles left his wife, and Burlington, for Washington state (they were later divorced). Beginning about 1870, Mary Darwin was listed in city directories as a "professor of logic, rhetoric and English literature", subjects she taught in a "select school" run out of her house on Summer Street.

By the mid-1860's, however, Darwin was becoming best known as an "able speaker" about women’s rights and in particular the suffrage issue. She first came into attention at the Ladies' Sanitary Convention in Des Moines, in November 1863, where she made an impassioned speech on behalf of Annie Wittenmyer, whose work for the Sanitary Commission (founded during the Civil War to provide food, medicine and clothing for soldiers) was then subject of controversy. By 1870, Mary Darwin was a significant force at the state level, that year chairing the first meeting of the executive committee of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association. The same year, she organized and became president of the Burlington Woman's Suffrage Society, whose membership totaled 50. She was an outspoken defender of women's suffrage throughout the state and became a popular speaker. However, her attitudes on such issues as free love were more liberal than those of other suffragists. As a result, she was shut out of the statewide movement after only several years of leadership. Mary Darwin returned to Burlington after a 4-year period of self-imposed banishment (1876-1880) in Washington, D.C., and immediately became involved in the WCTU both locally and at the state level. She agitated for, and succeeded in securing, a franchise division within the WCTU by 1883, by pointing out that one way to achieve many reform goals was to be able to vote.

Mary Darwin died in Burlington, in 1886, after two years visiting relatives in California.