259 Bradford Street. [2016, Dunlap]
Text last updated on 20 November 2016 | I have a sense that a wonderful old love story rests quietly behind this elegant Greek Revival-style doorway. Certainly, there is a tale of great friendship. This was the home in the early 20th century of Forbes Liddell and his wife, Myra Ravenscroft Liddell, who began summering in Provincetown in the 1910s. Their daughter Katharine Forbes Liddell (d1960), was graduated from Bryn Mawr College, attended Oxford University, and earned a master’s degree from Yale University. She taught English literature at the Madeira School, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley College, and Sarah Lawrence College, retiring here year-round in 1956, when she started working on a biography of Henry James. Throughout the 1950s, the Advocate dutifully recorded in its society columns the presence every summer of Miss Edith Morrison, the comptroller of Sarah Lawrence, as the guest of Miss Lidell, often for weeks at a time. (Sigh.) They were together in the summer of 1960, when Lidell died. The next year, Morrison bought the house for $4,000. It passed to Georgia M. Coxe in 2002. Coxe’s photographic portrait of Mischa Richter is in the collection of the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. That the house looks to be in a fine state of preservation can almost certainly be attributed to its having had so few owners.
¶ Republished on 15 October 2023.
259 Bradford Street on the Town Map, showing property lines.