As a child growing up in Old Lyme in the 19th century, Phoebe Griffin Noyes loved pressing flowers to make pigments for painting, playing school with her sisters and reading books.

She continued her interests into adulthood, showing talent in painting miniatures and founding her own school in town. But her legacy wouldn't end there.

More than a century later, a library in the center of town stands in her honor.

Writer Carolyn Wakeman provided such details and more on Noyes' life and legacy at a lecture last week at the Phoebe Griffin Noyes Library. The Florence Griswold Museum co-sponsored the event, called "Phoebe's Place: Life and Letters on Lyme Street."

"It is in no small measure because of Phoebe Griffin Noyes' influence as artist and educator that Old Lyme became the important center for art and culture that it remains today," Wakeman said to a room full of people.

Sharing research based on Noyes' letters, Wakeman depicted the library's namesake as a deeply religious woman with a wry wit. Dignified and humble, Noyes loved teaching children, as well as dancing, playing games and holding soirees.

Born in 1797, Phoebe grew up on Lyme Street with her sisters and her parents, Joseph Lord and Phoebe Griffin Lord, according to Wakeman. Her father died suddenly in 1812 when her mother was pregnant with her last child, whom she named Josephine.

Soon after, her mother sent teenaged Phoebe to live with Phoebe's uncle in New York City, said Wakemen. Phoebe continued to visit Lyme, but lived in New York for the next decade where she was educated and showed promise in the arts, according to letters between Phoebe's mother and uncle that Wakeman read at the event. Phoebe painted miniatures, one of the few occupations, besides teaching, in which women could earn a living at that time, Wakeman pointed out.

According to the lecture, it became financially difficult for Phoebe's mother to maintain a house in Lyme and support her many daughters - especially during wartime - after her husband's death, even with an inheritance. While Phoebe's mother placed an advertisement in a newspaper to rent out her farm, she ended up instead earning money by educating local girls who boarded with her, said Wakeman.

Phoebe and her sisters "alternated their visits away from Lyme so that two of them were home to instruct young girls from the village in reading, writing, arithmetic and history, while also teaching them sewing and needlepoint."

In her mid-twenties, Phoebe settled in Lyme - in the area that later became part of Old Lyme - and later married and raised five children with merchant, Daniel Noyes, of Westerly, R.I., said Wakeman.

According to Wakeman, Daniel Noyes built his own store at the corner of Lyme Street and Ferry Road and had also previously purchased a tavern. The building was was put up in the 1730s as a parsonage and later became a tavern that served, in the decade before the Revolutionary War, as the "setting for heated discussions among Lyme patriots." Phoebe Griffin Noyes opened her own school in the former tavern, using the ballroom as a classroom, with a few rooms for her children and boarding students.

"For many years, mother devoted herself to teaching largely for the purpose of helping to support the family, but even more, I think because of her intense desire to make the most of her life by stimulating and encouraging, intellectually and morally, the many who were brought under her influence," wrote Noyes' youngest son, Charles, in a letter read aloud by Wakeman.

Noyes' also painted portraits of her children and later wrote letters of encouragement when they traveled for their education, Wakeman said.

An excerpt of Noyes' obituary in 1875 stated that: "... her native town could not but show the effect of her having lived in it so long, diffusing her influence, at once vivifying, purifying and elevating, through so many of its homes and training even successive generations of her town's women. Mothers and daughters after them had their homes beautified by her artistic ideas and enriched by all the cultivated tastes she awakened." Edward Salisbury, the husband of Phoebe's close friend Evelyn MacCurdy Salisbury, wrote the obituary with details provided by one of Noyes' sisters.

Phoebe's family later decided to commission a public library at the site of the aging Lord home in honor of Phoebe, said Wakeman. According to the library's website, Charles H. Luddington, Noyes' son-in-law, paid to have the library built in 1897 in her name.

Wakeman, who grew up in Old Lyme, writes a history blog for the Florence Griswold Museum and is the author of "The Charm of the Place: Old Lyme in the 1920s."

Wakeman said she researched Noyes' life by reading her letters, as well as letters sent to her and letters about her. Most people saved their letters and they became a record of family history, she said.

"It sounds intrusive to be reading someone else's mail, but actually in the 19th century, women's letters were expected to be read aloud and shared," Wakeman said at the beginning of the lecture. "They were a major source of news and a way of communicating, so that people could keep in touch with each other, family members, neighbors, people who moved to other parts of the country or who were visiting and away from town."

A Florence Griswold Museum blog that Wakeman wrote about Phoebe Griffin Noyes is available at florencegriswoldmuseum.org.

K.DRELICH@THEDAY.COM

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