
The Maine homestead of former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was declared a national monument Monday by President Joe Biden after a two-month push by advocates of the trailblazing labor and women’s rights leader.
Perkins was the first female cabinet member, a post she held from 1935 to 1946, making her the country’s longest-serving secretary of labor.
She played a role in New Hampshire history, pushing President Franklin Roosevelt to appoint John G. Winant, a Republican, who’d just finished his third term as the state’s governor, to be the first director of the Social Security Board, now the Social Security Administration.
Biden Monday signed a proclamation establishing the Frances Perkins National Monument in Newcastle, Maine, after a campaign that began in October. He signed the proclamation in the Department of Labor’s Frances Perkins Building Monday afternoon. Attending the ceremony was Perkins’ grandson, Tomlin Perkins Coggeshall, of Newcastle, Maine.

In remarks preceding the signing, Biden called Perkins “one of America’s greatest labor leaders,” pointing out that many of the benefits that Americans take for granted – a minimum wage, child labor laws, overtime pay, and Social Security among them – were because of her.
“Through the Fair Labor Standards Act, she cemented the idea that if you’re working a full-time job, you shouldn’t have to live in poverty,” Biden said Monday. “A simple proposition. And if you work a little extra, you should get extra money for overtime. Not a crazy idea.”
Perkins’ 57-acre Maine property on the Damariscotta River, including the 1837 homestead – known as the Brick House — has been in the Perkins family since 1750. They ran a saltwater farm and brickyard on the property for much of that time.
Perkins, who died in 1965 at the age of 85, grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, but spent summers at the farm with her grandmother, Cynthia Otis Perkins, and considered it home.
Coggeshall, Perkins’ grandson, and his husband, Christopher Irvine Rice, the last people to live in the house, founded the Frances Perkins Center at the site in 2009. The property was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2014. Despite that, it was listed on Maine Preservation’s 2018 Most Endangered Properties List.
A $5 million capital campaign allowed the Francis Perkins Center to buy the site from the family in 2020 and begin a restoration. Earlier this year, the Francis Perkins Center was named a Maine Preservation 2024 Honors Award recipient.
With the National Monument, the Francis Perkins Center will donate the “core” 2.3 acres of the property to the federal government. The initial donation includes the Brick House, the barn and adjacent land. The Francis Perkins Center would maintain ownership of land to construct a private education center.
National Monuments are similar to National Parks, but usually smaller, and aim to protect land or buildings of significant historic or natural value. They are traditionally designated by a presidential proclamation.
Most of the 134 National Monuments are overseen by the National Park Service, many of them in the Southwestern United States. Aside from the new Perkins Homestead, the only National Monuments in New England are Katahdin Woods and Waters, in north-central Maine, and the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of Cape Cod.

Perkins’ New Hampshire connection
Winant, a Republican, was in his third term as New Hampshire governor in September 1934, when Perkins suggested that Roosevelt appoint him to head a three-person board that would mediate a nationwide United Textile Workers strike. More than 300,000 workers – including thousands of workers at mills in Manchester and Nashua – had walked off the job to demand the right for all textile workers to unionize.
Perkins had been impressed by the way Winant had handled an 8,000-worker strike at Manchester’s Amoskeag mills the year before.
In the larger UTW strike, Winant worked out a resolution that not only brought the strike to an end, but also created the National Labor Relations Board the following year.
In 1935, Perkins suggested to Roosevelt that Winant head the Social Security Board. He briefly resigned before the 1936 election so he could campaign for Social Security, which Republican presidential candidate Alf Landon wanted to abolish, before taking it up again after Roosevelt won the election.
At Perkins’ suggestion, Winant in 1939 was elected director-general of the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. He later became U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, a post he held for most of World War II.
A statue of Winant was installed outside the New Hampshire State Library in Concord in 2017.

Women in history recognized
The National Monument designation comes after Biden’s March executive order to strengthen the recognition of women’s history.
“The establishment of the Frances Perkins National Monument furthers the administration’s commitment to recognizing women’s contributions to our country,” the White House said in a Monday news release “The Biden-Harris administration has invested more than $40 million to restore and support sites that recognize and elevate the stories of women who have shaped American history.”
Included in that, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland Monday announced five new National Historic Landmarks that will increase the representation of women’s history in historic sites across America and additional new actions to advance Biden’s executive order.
Haaland Monday announced five new National Historic Landmarks, the Department of the Interior’s highest recognition of a property’s historical, architectural, or archeological significance:
- The Charleston Cigar Factory in Charleston, South Carolina, which as the American Cigar Company Building, were cigar factory workers – led by Black women – went on strike for better pay and working conditions, and against gender and racial discrimination on the job.
- The Furies Collective House in Washington, D.C., which recognizes the former home of a group of young activists who created a social and political community credited with recognizing the existence and needs of lesbians in the women’s movement in the early 1970s, and who published a newspaper focused on questions of women’s identity, relationships, and roles in society.
- The Lucy Diggs Slowe and Mary Burrill House in Washington, D.C., which includes the residence of Lucy Diggs Slowe, the first dean of women at Howard University, and her partner Mary Burrill. An advocate for educational parity between men and women students, Slowe helped modernize student affairs at Howard and other historically Black colleges and universities.
- Azurest South in Petersburg, Virginia designed in the International Style, an architectural style developed in the United States and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s that dominated mid-20th century architecture, by Amaza Lee Meredith, a pioneering Black woman architect.
- The Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth House and Studios in San Patricio, New Mexico, which recognizes the home and workspace of 20th century Realist painter Henriette Wyeth.
The National Park Service also announced a $500,000 grant from the Historic Preservation Fund to support the renovation of the Seneca Falls Knitting Mill, a part of the Seneca Falls Village Historic District in New York. The fund’s support will enable the National Women’s Hall of Fame to expand its programming on women’s history and restore the mill, which was one of the few places in Seneca Falls to employ women during its 150 years of operation.
Also Monday, the Department of the Interior released a new report on representation of women across sites of national importance, including National Historic Landmarks, national monuments, and national park sites. The report assesses which federal sites are significant to women’s history and offers opportunities to improve the recognition of women’s contributions to our country across the National Park Service, including through the National Historic Landmark program.