The Keasbey Sisters: Keepers of the Past
By Senior Museum Researcher and Interpreter Cynthia Winslow
During Women’s History Month, Macculloch Hall Historical Museum honors sisters Frances Hitchcock Keasbey (1862–1939) and Louisa Edwina Keasbey (1864–1941). The sisters were the great-granddaughters of Louisa Macculloch and granddaughters of Mary Louisa Macculloch Miller, pictured here in a family photograph taken on Mary Louisa’s 74th birthday in May 1878.
Only glimpses of their early lives remain, but family writings offer touching insights. Their father, Anthony Quinton Keasbey, commemorated milestone birthdays by writing poems for his daughters. In “Thirteen,” written for Louisa, he reflected on her step into adolescence:
“My Lulu in her teens to-day!
She flings her childish gauds away…
She looks with eager, wistful gaze
Far on through life’s enticing maze…
Through years to brighten more and more,
Till three and ten shall be three-score.”
For Frances’s sixteenth birthday, he wrote “The First Diamond,” celebrating the promise of youth and the future ahead:
“How bright her own first diamond shines,
In maiden’s eyes at sweet sixteen!
How fair the earth, how pure the sky
Reflected in its liquid sheen…
And dancing in its crystal depths,
In shapes of joy, the future glows.”
The Keasbey family lived in Newark’s Clinton Hill neighborhood near the law offices of Anthony and his sons. When Anthony retired, he returned with his daughters to Morristown and built a home called “Good Rest,” located not far from Macculloch Hall.
In adulthood, both Frances and Louisa became, in their own ways, “keepers of the past” for a family connected to the Morristown community since 1810.
Frances, who never married, preserved the family’s handwritten cookbook begun by her great-grandmother, Louisa Macculloch. She added several recipes of her own, carefully marking them with her initials and the date. Today, this cookbook is a treasured primary source in the MHHM collection and helps illuminate everyday life in the historic house.
Louisa Keasbey carried forward her family’s tradition of community service. Born just a year after the death of her namesake, Louisa Macculloch, she became part of the fourth generation of her family to serve in Morristown’s Female Charitable Society, a women-led organization founded in 1813. Her great-grandmother had led the organization for more than thirty years, and her grandmother, Mary Louisa Macculloch Miller, had been a member for over sixty.
Louisa first served as a manager and was later elected Treasurer in 1907. Her most notable contribution was organizing the 1913 exhibition commemorating the Society’s 100th anniversary. Her handwritten notebook—now preserved at the Caroline Rose Foster North Jersey History & Genealogy Center at the Morristown & Morris Township Library—records more than 250 objects loaned for the exhibition. Several of those objects are now part of the MHHM collection, including the portrait of Louisa Macculloch and a fire screen made by Mary Louisa Macculloch Miller when she was a young girl.
Through their efforts to preserve family objects, documents, and traditions, Frances and Louisa Keasbey helped ensure that women’s stories endure. Macculloch Hall Historical Museum honors the sisters for their role in safeguarding the past so it can continue to inform and inspire future generations.