Abby Epplett, Historian

Last night — June 13, 2024, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. — I attended the webinar How NOT to Make Films: 15 Years of Failures, Mishaps, and Lessons Learned hosted by documentarian Adam Mazo and educator Dr. Mishy Lesser , co-founders of Upstander Project , and moderated by N. Bruce Duthu , a professor at Dartmouth. For a portion of the talk, they were joined by special guest speaker Ben Pender-Cudlip , a filmmaker and cinematographer. I appreciated how each speaker described their cultural and ancestral background before speaking so the audience could better understand their point of view. Mazo and Dr. Lesser are Ashkenazi Jewish, Duthu is from Houma Nation in Louisiana, and Pender-Cudlip has British ancestry. Dr. Lesser and Mazo created their first film, Coexist , in 2014 to bring awareness to communities in Rwanda twenty years after a genocide. Mazo had first visited Rwanda in 2006 and returned to attend workshops. Dr. Lesser wrote a teacher’s guide to accompany the fil

I recently finished the book One Goal: A Coach, A Team, and the Game that Brought a Divided Town Together by Amy Bass , published by Hachette Book Group in 2019. Bass is a professor of history and career writer with a special focus in the history of sports. This modern history book covers the state championship winning boy’s Lewiston High School soccer team from Lewiston, Maine . Known both as the location of Bates College and a longtime mill town, Lewiston has more recently become a refugee city for people fleeing from conflict in Somalia and other East African countries. In the book, Bass described the importance of a local kids team in bringing together a town filled with people from different backgrounds. Bass introduced the top players of the soccer team, almost all refugee children with a handful of Mainers. She quickly juxtoposed the family-oriented, East African, Muslim culture of the refugees to community-oriented, French-Canadian, Catholic culture of long-time

On Thursday, August 17, 2023 at 7:00 p.m., I watched the webinar Seaside Escapes: The Art & Architecture of the New England Coast lead by Jane Oneail of Culturally Curious . I have previously watched two talks by Oneail: Revolutionary Design: Modern Architecture in New England in May 2023 and George Tooker: Modern Life & Magical Realism in June 2023. Just like for the past two talks, the event was sponsored by the Greater Manchester Integrated Library Cooperative or GMILCS , which describes itself as “a nonprofit consortium of public and academic libraries in New Hampshire”.

Last August, I visited Sarah Orne Jewett House & Visitor Center in South Berwick, ME, a property of Historic New England . At that time, I experienced a disjointed and unpaced tour. Hoping to better capture the spirit of the house and gain more information, I signed up for a members-only virtual tour held via Zoom on Thursday, March 9 at 6:00 p.m. and was not disappointed! This version of the tour was presented by Marilyn Keith Daly , the site manager of the two South Berwick, ME houses for HNE, the other being Hamilton House . The Jewett House was last curated by HNE employee Nancy Carlisle in 2018. Daly began with an overview of the house before it became the property of author Sarah Orne Jewett . Her home was built in 1774, and Jewett was born in the house in 1849. The house belonged to her grandfather. Her childhood home next door, which now serves as the visitor center, was built in 1854 when Jewett was 5 years old. Jewett grew up with her older sister Mary Rice

On the same day I visited Old York Historical Society and Sayward-Wheeler House , I stopped in a few other places throughout York, Maine, including a historical marker, a little bridge, a big bridge, and a nature preserve. All of these stops are free and open to the public.

During my three-day trip of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area, I visited Sayward-Wheeler House , a Historic New England (HNE) property in York, Maine. The house was owned by the Sayward-Wheeler family throughout its time as a private residence, from 1719 to 1977, and went through few updates.

During my three-day trip of the Portsmouth, New Hampshire area, I visited Old York Historical Society in York, Maine. The society owns and maintains several buildings and historic properties that I saw on my trip, including their Museum Center, Jefferds Tavern, York Corner Schoolhouse, the Old Gaol, and Emerson-Wilcox House.

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 Baldwin apples ,

For stop five on my trip through Maine, I went back to Wiscasset to visit another Historic New England (HSE) 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.