One of America’s most important women spent many of her quieter days on the banks of the Damariscotta River in Newcastle, at a saltwater farm that had been in her family since colonial times.

For Frances Perkins, a labor leader who helped create Social Security, the 57 acres of field and forest were a place to escape the rush of public business that normally consumed her.

She would arrive so exhausted at her summertime haven that she sometimes slept for a week, Amanda Hatch, acting executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, said last week.

The modest brick house and barn she loved, as familiar to her as anywhere, are the centerpiece of a National Monument created in December, the culmination of years of effort by preservationists and Perkins devotees who knew that by preserving the home they would also succeed in highlighting the memory of the first woman to serve in a president’s Cabinet.

Perkins is worth remembering as “the very first woman ever to serve as a member of an American Cabinet after a century and a half” of the country’s existence, historian William Leuchtenburg said, adding that what she did “for working people, for women, resounds with us today.”

“She is a model for all of us, men and women in the America of the 21st century,” he said in 2018, when my son Kiernan was working a summer job as a communications assistant for the Perkins Center and we both sat with him at his summer place overlooking the water in Damariscotta.

Leuchtenburg, who died in January at age 102, told us Perkins took a college course that required her to visit nearby factories and “was so appalled at what she encountered that she spent a lifetime trying to improve the lives of the exploited.”

“I was young and was inspired with the idea of reforming, or at least doing what I could, to help change those abuses,” Perkins later recalled.

Almost a decade later, Perkins witnessed the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that killed 146 people, mostly immigrants. The death toll spurred Perkins to create a commission to probe factory conditions. She became its lead investigator.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt respected Perkins enough that when he became New York’s governor, he tapped her to serve as the state’s industrial commissioner.

After Roosevelt won the presidency in 1932, he wanted Perkins as his secretary of labor.

“Instead of being overwhelmed with this honor, she presented him with a series of demands” before she would take the job, Leuchtenburg said, successfully insisting FDR agree to impose a minimum wage, limit workplace hours and create a retirement system for older Americans.

Over time, Perkins’ agenda became the law after a series of “pathbreaking pieces of legislation,” including her masterpiece, Social Security, Leuchtenburg said.

In a 1935 radio address, Perkins said the “bitter experience” of the Great Depression allowed the nation “to emerge with a newfound insight and maturity.”

“We have had the courage to face our problems and find a way out. The heedless optimism of the boom years is past,” Perkins said. “We now stand ready to build the future with sanity and wisdom.”

Perkins, who kept working until her death in 1965,”made a lifelong venture” of trying to improve the lives of ordinary people, Leuchtenburg said.

I like to think Frances Perkins had happy times alongside the river in Maine; it was as much of a home as she ever had. She returned again and again to restore her energy and consider what work to do next.

The homestead was “always a place of rest and restoration” for Perkins, Hatch said. The center’s director said she hopes visitors will “take silent walks in the woods” to think and pray, as Perkins did, and discover “the power of the place itself.”

Although the new national monument at her former farm opens to the public on June 21, the house itself won’t be ready for tourists this year. In the meantime, though, a fabulous barn and its exhibits are impressive — and free — while the rest of the property remains a very nice spot to walk. “It’s a good place to relax,” Perkins herself once wrote.

Buried beside her husband just up the road, Perkins said before her death there “is always a large horizon” ahead, and continued, “I am not going to be doing it! It is up to you to contribute some small part to a program of human betterment for all time.”

Perhaps a visit to her home can help instill that drive and inspiration today. We need it.

The monument, located at 478 River Road in Newcastle, will be open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. beginning Saturday, June 21, and then on Thursdays through Sundays until Sept. 28. Its nature trails are open from dawn to dusk daily.