Writer Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) was born in the "Jewett House," on the corner of Portland and Main Streets in South Berwick. As a child Jewett moved with her family to the "Jewett-Eastman House" next door, where she spent 33 years. Then, in 1887, she moved back to the Jewett House where she wrote her most memorable novel, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), and spent the last two decades of her life.

In her 1901 novel, The Tory Lover, Jewett called her home the "Haggens house" after John Haggens, a South Berwick entrepreneur thought to have built the house about 1774 and used it as a tavern in the late 1700s and early 1800s.