A writer in “The Ladies’ Home Journal,” in a series of articles on “Wives of Famous Pastors,” says of Mrs. Conwell: 

“Mrs. Conwell finds her greatest happiness in her husband’s work, and gives him always her sympathy and devotion.  She passes many hours at work by his side when he is unable to notice her by word or look; she knows he delights In her presence, for he often says when writing, ’I can do better if you remain.’  Her whole life is wrapped up in the work of The Temple, and all those multitudinous enterprises connected with that most successful of churches.

“She makes an ideal wife for a pastor whose work is varied and whose time is as interrupted as are Mr. Conwell’s work and time.  On her husband’s lecture tours she looks well after his comfort, seeing to those things which a busy and earnest man is almost sure to overlook and neglect.  In all things he finds her his helpmeet and caretaker.”

From this busy life the family escape in summer to Dr. Conwell’s boyhood home in the Berkshires.  Here amid the hills he loves, with the brook of his boyhood days again singing him to sleep, he rests and recuperates for the coming winter’s campaign.

The little farmhouse is vastly changed since those early days.  Many additions have been made, modern improvements added, spacious porches surround it on all sides, and a green, velvety lawn dotted with shrubbery and flowers has replaced the rocks and stones, the sparse grass of fifty years ago.  If Martin and Miranda Conwell could return and see the little house now with its artistic furnishings, its walls hung with pictures from those very lands the mother read her boy about, they would think miracles had indeed come to pass.

In front of the house where once flashed a little brook that “set the silences to rhyme” is now a silvery lake framed in rich green foliage.  Up in the hill where swayed the old hemlock with the eagle’s nest for a crown rises an observatory.  From the top one gazes in summer into a billowy sea of green in which the spire of the Methodist church rises like a far distant white sail.

It is a happy family that gathers in the old homestead during the summer days.  His daughter, now Mrs. Tuttle, comes with her children, Mr. Turtle, who is a civil engineer, joining them when his work permits.  Dr. Conwell’s son Leon, proprietor and editor of the Somerville (Mass.) “Journal,” with his wife and child, always spend as much of the summer there as possible.  One vacant chair there is in the happy family circle.  Agnes, the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Conwell, died in 1901, in her twenty-sixth year.  She was the wife of Alfred Barker.  A remarkably bright and gifted girl, clever with her pen, charming in her personality, an enthusiastic and successful worker in the many interests of church, college and hospital, her death was a sad loss to her family and friends.

Not only the beauty of the place but the associations bring rest and peace to the tired spirit of the busy preacher and lecturer, and he returns to his work refreshed, ready to take up with rekindled energy and enthusiasm the tasks awaiting him.