Mabel Paul Munroe Mills papers (PSNCA.H.026)

Biographical Note

Mabel Gray Paul Munroe Mills (1875-1961) lived at Rockry Hall, 425 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, from the 1930s until her death. She first married George Sweetzer Munroe, with whom she had two children, Paul (1901-1971) and Faustina (1907-1964). Faustina married John Frederick Degener III in 1930. In 1933, George S. Munroe died, and sometime between 1933 and 1935 she purchased Rockry Hall. It was during this period she married William McMaster Mills (1860-1949).

Mabel Mills was a member of several social and yacht clubs, and her correspondence reflects a busy social life. She supported the Newport Art Association, and her papers show interest in psychology, charitable and religious causes, and the war effort during World War II.

Seth Bradford designed Rockry Hall for Albert Sumner of Boston. Sumner married Catherine Barclay in 1840, and he purchased the land for the house in 1847 from Thomas Aston Coffin. The house was completed in 1847-1848. Sumner died with his wife and child in the sinking of a French steamer in November 1856. The house now sits on two adjoining lots of land. Sumner’s family, including noted abolitionist Charles Sumner and their mother Relief Sumner, sold the property to Newport real estate developer Abraham Peckham for $25,000 in 1864, according to the land records of the city of Newport. Several other residents inhabited the house over the next few decades, including Mrs. E. H. G Slater, Thomas Janney, and, for the summer of 1900, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

In 1914, Henry Earle acquired the house from a trust of Ethel H. and Paul A. Andrews. Nine years later, he sold it to James W. Dwyer, who soon after sold it to Arthur L. Linn Jr. and Florence M. Linn. They conveyed the property to the Industrial Trust Company in the early 1930s, after which time Mabel Paul Mills purchased it. In 1962, after her death, her son Paul Munroe and his wife Edith Brestow Munroe (1905-1994) acquired the property. Rockry Hall remains a private residence.

Mabel Paul Mills’s grave is in the St. Mary’s Episcopal churchyard in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.