Charles Bowie’s Office: Preservation and Reinterpretation at the Eustis Estate

Until relatively recently, visitors to the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, wouldn’t have known that one of the smallest rooms in the mansion once played an outsized role in running the household. Tucked off a back hallway, the space—identified on original architectural drawings as the “Man’s Room”—was overshadowed by the mansion’s elaborate interiors. A few years ago, research identified the room as the office used by Charles Bowie, the Eustis family’s longtime steward, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Earlier this year, preservation work was completed in Bowie’s office and the space has been reinterpreted to tell a fuller story of the people who lived and worked at the Eustis Estate.

Before his career in Milton, Bowie was active in the politically strategic “Ward Nine Club,” through which he and his contemporaries pushed back against anti-Black political actions in post-Reconstruction Boston. As steward at the Eustis Estate, Bowie oversaw the daily operations of the estate, managing its complex systems and the large staff that sustained the Gilded Age property. His wife, Pauline, a Swiss immigrant, lived and worked alongside him. In late nineteenth-century Boston, interracial marriages like the Bowies’ were rare, and few sites in the region document the experiences of the men and women who defied this social norm. At the Eustis Estate, however, their lives can be more concretely understood through the everyday routines and operations of a single household.

Telling Bowie’s story in the space in which he worked was a complex undertaking that took several years and collaboration across three teams. Research began in 2022, when Study Center Research Fellow Eleanor Martinez-Proctor reviewed a variety of primary sources to follow the arc of Bowie’s life from political action to domestic service, and better understand Bowie’s responsibilities as steward and the estate’s economic structure. While these sources do not offer a complete picture of the Bowies’ lives, they provide enough detail to expand narratives about workers like Charles Bowie, and to ground interpretation in documented history rather than in broad narratives about domestic service.

Site manager Karla Rosenstein worked with Martinez-Proctor to develop the narrative Historic New England would share about the Bowies. Curator Nora Carleson and architectural conservator Amy Cole Ives then worked to understand how the space may have looked during Bowie’s tenure at the estate. Ives conducted paint analysis to establish how the room was painted in the early twentieth century. Carleson selected furnishings and reproduced documents that reflect Bowie’s work, taking into account that elements of the space likely changed during his time there. Household accounts, pay stubs, and other surviving papers represent the kinds of materials Bowie would have kept on his desk—the same kinds of sources that guided Martinez-Proctor’s research about his time at the Eustis Estate.

The project reflects a central challenge in preservation: how to balance what survives, what can be verified, and what can be responsibly interpreted. The result is a modest, functional space that does not resemble the ornate rooms used by the Eustis family. Instead, it shifts attention to the people who kept the estate running and brings their lives and labor into clearer view.

Watch the video to learn more about Charles Bowie and hear from the team that reinterpreted his office, then see it in person on a tour of the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts‚ open year-round.