Chase-Johnson papers

The Chase and Johnson families of Brunswick were closely connected with Bowdoin College, and the family papers reflect the history of Brunswick and the College in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Helen Johnson Chase was the older daughter of Henry Johnson (Bowdoin 1874), Longfellow Professor of Modern Languages at the College from 1882 to 1918. On June 21, 1912, she married Stanley Perkins Chase.

Stanley P. Chase (Bowdoin 1905) was born in Portland, Maine, on April 14, 1884. He received his Ph.D from Harvard in 1911 and taught at Harvard (1906-1907), Northwestern University (1907-1909), and Union College (1911-1925) before coming to Bowdoin, where he was Henry Leland Chapman Professor of English Literature (1926-1951). Chase and his students translated The Pearl (1932), a fourteenth century English poem; and he co-edited English Poetry in the Nineteenth Century (1923) with G. R. Elliott and Norman Foerester.

In the late 1920s, the Chases asked Felix Arnold Burton (Bowdoin 1907) to design and construct the Chase Barn Chamber at her parents' home, the Boody-Johnson House. Burton's creation was an Elizabethan upper chamber which has been used for Bowdoin classes, meetings, performances, and social gatherings for over half a century. Stanley Perkins Chase died in Brunswick on January 21, 1951. Helen Johnson Chase died in 1957.