Elinor Mead Howells

Elinor Mead Howells (May 1, 1837 – May 6, 1910) was an American artist, architect and aristocrat.

Future President Rutherford B. Hayes was her cousin and Oneida Community founder John Humphrey Noyes was her uncle.

During the winter of 1860, Mead travelled to Columbus to stay with Laura Platt, a niece of Hayes'.

After learning that a week's residence would be required, the pair traveled to Paris where they married on December 24, 1862.

The Howells moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1866 and lived in a house a few blocks north of Harvard University.

[5] The Howells family left Cambridge in 1878 and moved to Redtop in Belmont, Massachusetts.

The William Dean Howells House in Cambridge, Massachusetts was designed by Elinor Howells and occupied by her family from 1873 to 1878.