Abby Epplett, Historian

After a hiatus from the blog due to lots of traveling and photo editing, I’m back with an overview of quick history stops in southern Maine, where I visited back in August.

On my sixth and final stop of my tour of Maine, I visited Marrett House in Standish, operated by our favorite old house tour organization, Historic New England (HNE). This sprawling home, now on the National Register of Historic Places , is named for its second set of residents, the Marrett family. The father, Daniel Marrett , became the underpaid minister of the local church in 1796 and had better luck managing an apple orchard. When he was not giving sermons or grafting trees, Daniel raised six children with his first wife, Mary . After she died young, he remarried to Dorcas Hastings and had another eight children. The house must have been incredibly crowded.   Remarkably, considering the number of people involved, the house passed smoothly from one generation to the next. Daniel and Dorcas’ third son, Avery , inherited the house and orchard, turning the operation into a profitable business. The orchard’s specialty was Bal...

For stop five on my trip through Maine, I went back to Wiscasset to visit another Historic New England (HNE) property and National Historic Landmark . Built by shipping investor  William Nickels and his wife Jane in 1807, Nickels-Sortwell House is a federal-style mansion with a ridiculous number of windows. Like many owners of grand houses in Maine and New Hampshire, the Nickels family was a victim to President Thomas Jefferson’s disastrous Embargo of 1807 and the subsequent War of 1812 . Both William and Jane had died by 1815, so the debt saddled children rented out the house. This started a tradition of renting at Nickels-Sortwell House, which continues to this day. The back portion of the house can be rented through Vacasa if you have the budget for it.

My fourth stop on my Maine adventure was Bowman House , an 18 th century Historic New England (HSE)  property in Dresden, Maine. The home was commissioned in 1762 by wealthy and well-connected Jonathan Bowman . He was the cousin of John Hancock and a Harvard classmate of President John Adams and Governor John Wentworth of New Hampshire . The architect was Gershom Flagg , an expert from Boston who also designed the nearby Pownalborough Courthouse , where Bowman served as a judge. The family made much of their money through the shipping industry and Transatlantic trade .

Stop three on my two-day tour of Maine was Castle Tucker , a property of Historic New England in Wiscasset, Maine. This charming tourist town has a history as a busy port along the Sheepscot River stretching back to the early colonial era. Many residents in the 18 th and early 19 th century made their fortunes through the shipping industry’s Transatlantic trade routes.

My second stop on my adventure in Maine was Hamilton House , located in South Berwick just down the road from Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum & Visitor Center . These Georgian style homes were built around the same time, with Hamilton House constructed around 1785 by wealthy privateer Jonathan Hamilton. He copied and enlarged the architectural features seen at Jewett House. Notable similarities include the layout of the houses, three-story buildings with four rooms on the main floor, a grand central staircase, and a wooden arch in the atrium, reminiscent of a ship’s hull. Hamilton House is more traditionally decorated than its counterpart across town, with Neoclassical wallpaper and white trim. The owner of this opulent manor paid double the taxes of the next best house in town. Due to the high price in upkeep and the economic downturn surrounding the Jefferson Embargo of 1807 and the War of 1812, the Hamilton family was forced to sell the house during the second generation....

In mid August of 2022, I took a trip to southern Maine, visiting six properties owned by Historic New England houses over the course of two days. The first of these houses was Sarah Orne Jewett House Museum & Visitor Center , once home to a local romance novelist. Compared to Willa Cather for her use of “local color”, or using dialectical spellings for speech alongside detailed descriptions of the landscape and the people in it, Jewett’s books shared the stories of Maine characters familiar to her and her neighbors.