Lizzie Sparks Pickering

Lizzie Wadsworth Sparks Pickering (May 1, 1849-Aug. 29, 1906) lived in the Director’s Residence on the grounds of the Harvard College Observatory for 29 years with her husband, Edward C. Pickering, the fourth director of the HCO. During her tenure, she played a key role in both the groundskeeping and the social life at the observatory.

In an obituary presented to the Cambridge Historical Society, of which Lizzie Sparks Pickering was a longtime member, the Director’s Residence was described as “an emphatic expression of Mrs. Pickerings’ individuality, blending stateliness with genial warmth, [which] centered for twenty-nine years the life which has been an important factor of the social energy of Cambridge.”¹ Considered “one of Cambridge’s most accomplished gardeners,”² Pickering designed and maintained elaborate landscaping on the Observatory properties, with flower arrangements said to rival botanic gardens which “made her garden on the hillside an ever-shifting but never failing harmony of color all summer long.”³

Pickering was known for her key role in university social life, and her legacy as “the institution’s vivacious and charming hostess.”⁴ She sponsored plays and afternoon teas for students, and she handled the hospitality arrangements for assemblies in Cambridge of world-renowned scientists and scientific organizations, including the National Academy of Science.⁵ She maintained close ties and correspondence with many of the other women affiliated with the university, particularly Williamina Fleming, Anna Draper, and Ruth Poulter Bailey.⁶

Pickering also had an impact on the scientific activities of the observatory. She accompanied her husband on a location-scouting trip to the Colorado Rocky Mountains for Harvard’s new mountain top observatory, which was eventually constructed in Arequipa, Peru.⁷ She was credited with being one of the first to recognize the promising mathematical abilities of her Scottish maid, Williamina Fleming, who was as a consequence given the opportunity to work on the observatory staff and who would go on to an illustrious career as the leader of the Women Astronomical Computers at Harvard and the HCO’s first Curator of Astronomical Photographs.

Lizzie Sparks Pickering was the daughter of Jared Sparks, a well-known historian who served as the President of Harvard University from 1849-1853.⁸ She married Edward C. Pickering in 1874.⁹ She died of illness on August 29, 1906, at age 57, and she is interred next to her husband at the Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, MA.¹⁰

Written by Elizabeth Coquillette, 2022

Citations:

^{1- Elizabeth H. Houghton, “Lizzie Sparks Pickering: An Obituary Notice presented to the Cambridge Historical Society,” privately printed, 1909.↩
2- Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took Measure of the Stars (New York: Viking, 2016), 15.↩
3- Houghton, “Lizzie Sparks Pickering,” 10; Paul A. Haley, “Williamina Fleming and the Harvard College Observatory.” The Antiquarian Astronomer: Journal of the Society for the History of Astronomy, no. 17 (June 2017).↩
4- “Lizzie Sparks Pickering,” The Cambridge Tribune vol. XXIX, no. 27, Sep. 1, 1906; Sobel, The Glass Universe, 9.↩
5- Ibid.; Houghton, “Lizzie Sparks Pickering”, 6.↩
6- Sobel, The Glass Universe; Houghton, “Lizzie Sparks Pickering”; “Lizzie Sparks Pickering”, The Cambridge Tribune; Haley, “Williamina Fleming and the Harvard College Observatory.”↩
7- Sobel, The Glass Universe, 39.↩
8- Solon I. Bailey, The History and Work of Harvard Observatory, 1839 to 1927; an outline of the origin, development, and researches of the Astronomical observatory of Harvard College together with brief biographies of its leading members (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 251.↩
9-Ibid. ↩}
^{10- “Lizzie Sparks Pickering”, The Cambridge Tribune.↩}