Sturgis/Haskell block

by Mary Grow

The east (river) side of Augusta’s Water Street has another individually-listed 19th-century historic building besides those described in The Town Line articles published Feb. 4 and Feb. 11. The 1899 five-story brick building at 325-331 Water Street was first known as the Gannett Building, later as the “Journal” Building and now as the University of Maine at Augusta’s (UMA’s) Handley Hall.

Gannett building

The Gannett Building was presumably named for Augusta publisher William Howard Gannett (1854-1948), who published magazines in Augusta beginning in the mid-1880s (see The Town Line, Nov. 12, 2020). It was designed by Arthur G. Wing, described in Wikipedia as a local architect who died in 1912; this writer found no additional on-line information about him.

Wikipedia calls the style commercial Renaissance Revival. There are three street- level store fronts and above each four stories with three windows each, the whole topped by a cornice. The windows have granite sills; the most conspicuous arches are on the fourth floor.

According to Wikipedia, this building was the first owned, as opposed to rented, home for Augusta’s Kennebec Journal newspaper. Often described as Maine’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Kennebec Journal began in January 1825 as a four-page weekly produced by Russell Eaton and Luther Severance.

Augusta became Maine’s capital in 1827, and after state government became established in 1832 the Kennebec Journal gained importance and a new revenue source. It became a daily paper on Jan. 1, 1870.

Various people owned the newspaper in the 19th century. The Gannett family was not involved until mid-1929, when William Howard Gannett’s son Guy P. Gannett (1881-1954) added it to the Gannett Publishing Company papers.

A Jan. 8, 2015, Kennebec Journal article by Craig Crosby on the 190th anniversary of the newspaper says the younger Gannett moved headquarters to a Willow Street building his father had previously owned. Apparently the move was soon after the June 1929 purchase. Crosby fails to say where the move was from, leaving uncertain the date the Journal left what was presumably by then called the “Journal” building.

At another unstated time the University of Maine at Augusta bought the building and contracted with WBRC Architects Engineers to change it from office space into art and architecture teaching areas, with a ground-floor gallery. A WBRC web page shows the exterior, labeled Gannett Building, and says interior work included undoing earlier changes to uncover “wooden beams, punched tin ceilings, masonry walls and wooden floors.”

(According to its website, the WBRC firm was founded in Bangor in 1902 by two young University of Maine engineering graduates named John F. Thomas and C. Parker Crowell; the firm was Thomas and Crowell. Thomas soon moved to Massachusetts; Crowell stayed with the firm for the next 54 years, with its name changing as partners joined and left.

The ninth name, in 1987, was the longest: Webster/ Baldwin/ Rohman/ Day/ Czarniecki. By 1989 Day had left and Bromley and Rich had joined; the new group chose the initials WBRC, and so far no one has changed it. WBRC has branches in Portland, Maine, and in Florida, Maryland and Michigan.)

UMA gave the building its third name, Handley Hall, in honor of UMA’s first female president, Allyson Handley. She took office on March 1, 2008, at the age of 60, and held the post for six years.

A 2018 announcement of her becoming president of the Johns Hopkins Alumni Association says UMA was the third college she served as president. It credits her with changing UMA’s undergraduate architecture program to “a four-year, accredited architecture degree,” giving graduates a head start in the profession.

The “Journal” building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on May 2, 1986, at the same time as the buildings described below and the Kresge and Doughty blocks and the Masonic Temple discussed in the Feb. 11 issue of The Town Line.

Noble block

On the inland (west) side of Water Street, starting at the north end, listed buildings include a four-building block built after the 1865 fire described in the Feb. 4 The Town Line article. They are the Sturgis and Haskell Buildings, 180-182 Water Street, and the Noble Block, 186 Water Street, both built in 1867; and the Whitehouse Block at 188 Water Street, built in 1865 (since the fire was in September 1865, it must have been constructed in a hurry).

The brick buildings are three stories tall, in the commercial Italianate style, and connected by a cornice. The northern two are off-white with two different types of blue window trim, the southern two yellow with white window trim. The style of window trim varies not only from building to building but between second and third floors on each building.

Each separate building would have a single street-level entrance and triple windows on the second and third floors, except that the northernmost, and last finished, Sturgis and Haskell Building has a rounded corner as it fronts the intersection where Bridge Street comes downhill to meet Water Street. There are only two east-facing windows on the upper floors overlooking Water Street; the third windows face northeast from the rounded corner.

Architect John C. Tibbetts, of Augusta, designed the double building for Ira Sturgis and Erastus Haskell. A 1985 Maine Historic Preservation Commission inventory says the original cast-iron store fronts at sidewalk level remained, but with larger-paned windows. Arches above the windows at 180 Water Street had been filled in to make the windows square-topped. The building at 180 was then owned by Carrie Chan and 182 by Peder K. Baughman.

Tibbetts also designed the Noble Block next south, for Thomas C. Noble. Wikipedia says the first story of the Noble Block was finished in 1865 and the upper floors in 1867.

Portland-based architect Francis H. Fassett, whom readers met before as designer of the Williams Block on the east side of Water Street (see the Feb. 4, The Town Line) designed the southernmost and first-built of the four buildings for Owen C. Whitehouse. Before the fire, Whitehouse had his dry goods store on the same site. In the new building, Wikipedia says Whitehouse’s dry goods store was on the second floor; street-level tenants included “Augusta Savings Bank and the United States Pension Agency.” Fraternal organizations, unspecified, used the top floor.

Augusta 19th century businessmen Ira Sturgis, Erastus Haskell, Thomas Noble and Owen C. Whitehouse

The quantity and quality of information in readily available sources about Ira D. Sturgis, Erastus Haskell, Thomas C. Noble and Owen C. Whitehouse varies.

Ira Daggett Sturgis (1814 or 1815 -1891), oldest son of James and Nancy (Packard) Sturgis, was a Vassalboro farmer turned lumber baron whose family began operations in The Forks, farther up the Kennebec River, in the 1830s.

An on-line history called Canada Road Chronicles (hereafter Chronicles) says in 1835, Sturgis married Augusta native Rebecca Russell Goodenow (1815-1894). They had four children; the older boy was named Ira.

During the 1840s and 1850s, Sturgis and a half-brother ran water-powered sawmills in Vassalboro, and he bought large tracts of timberland in the northern Kennebec Valley. Captain Charles E. Nash, author of the chapters on Augusta in Henry D. Kingsbury’s Kennebec County history, says Sturgis’s factory on Seven Mile Brook, in Vassalboro, built wooden items, including “the first orange and lemon boxes ever exported from the state of Maine.” His nearby shipyard built ocean-going vessels.

Sturgis shifted his interest to Augusta briefly; spent the late 1850s and early 1860s in the lumber business in Aroostook County and New Brunswick; and returned to Augusta.

In 1867, Chronicles says, the younger Sturgis daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, married Josiah Manchester Haynes, of Waterville. Sturgis and Haynes promptly formed the Augusta-based Kennebec Land and Lumber Company, with Sturgis president and Haynes treasurer. A more recent on-line source, A Capital Happening (hereafter Happening) on Facebook, dates this company to 1861. Happening and Nash name Albert Daily as Sturgis’s partner.

Nash says Sturgis made production of steam power cheaper by using sawdust as fuel. A second steam-powered mill in Pittston was soon accompanied by a modern ice house. Sturgis established the connections that made Kennebec River ice familiar in major cities in the southern United States (see the May 14, 2020, The Town Line for more information on ice harvesting on the Kennebec).

In February 1870 a flood washed away a substantial part of the Augusta dam, the fourth time it had been damaged since it was first built in 1837. Sturgis oversaw its reconstruction in July 1870, supervising engineer Henry A. De Witt and the work crews.

Haynes became Land and Lumber Company president in 1875, according to Chronicles; Happening and Nash say the lumberyard burned in October of that year. Both agree Sturgis and another Augusta businessman named Thomas Lambard formed Sturgis, Lambard and Company (in 1876, according to Happening; Chronicles and Nash add Sturgis’s nephew, Ira Randall, as a third partner). That company became Augusta Lumber Company (in 1889, according to Happening); Sturgis was its president until his death. Augusta Lumber Company appears to have remained in business until it was sold in 1941.

Erastus Haskell (1815 – 1891 or 1892), was born in Winthrop. He learned the shoe trade in Waterville and worked in East Vassalboro for three years, moving to Augusta Dec. 1, 1840. Before the 1865 fire, he ran a shoe store on the east side of Water Street, in one of the buildings that burned. The New England Business Directory lists him as an Augusta boot and shoe dealer in 1883 and in 1889.

Haskell served as a City of Augusta assessor for three years, and “served three years in each of the branches of the city government,” according to Nash. He married Mary C. Williams; they had two sons and daughter. Haskell died in Augusta and is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery.

An on-line genealogy lists Thomas Chadbourne Noble, who was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 24, 1807; married Adeline Treby Johnson (1817-1901); and died Feb. 5, 1901, in Augusta. They had four boys and one girl; the second boy was Thomas Chadbourne Noble (1846-1890).

Another genealogy includes Thomas C. Noble of Augusta, born in 1845, who married Edith Goddard on Jan. 22, 1880. He died in 1889 and she remarried.

Probably the Thomas C. Noble who was eager to have a new building in 1865 was the older, who would have been 58 by then, rather than his son, barely 20.

Owen C. Whitehouse was one of nine children of Vassalboro residents Daniel Whitehouse, Jr., and Merab (Coleman) Whitehouse. With his older brother Seth he went into the dry goods business in Augusta in 1846. The S. C. and O. C. Whitehouse company “did a large and successful business,” Nash wrote.

Whitehouse had other business interests besides dry goods. A 50th anniversary history of Augusta Savings Bank, founded Aug. 10, 1848, lists him as added to its incorporators in 1852. When the 1833 Freeman’s Bank was reorganized on April 6, 1864, as Freeman’s National Bank, he was one of the directors. The 1877 Maine Register shows him as a dealer in wool and skins at an unspecified Augusta location and a seller of flour and grain on Water Street.

Whitehouse also served his city. Annual reports show he was a fence viewer and a tythingman in 1870-71, and an overseer of the poor in 1883. (Tithingman is the modern spelling, and the term, originally related to keeping order in church, by the 1870s probably referred to a local constable.)

Main sources

Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892)

Websites, various

Next: still more of Augusta’s historic buildings.

Historic map of Downtown Augusta.

by Mary Grow

The City of Augusta’s list of designated historic places includes four districts. The Water Street district, supplemented by recognition of individual buildings, covers a good part of the main business street that parallels the Kennebec River on the west bank.

The district is described as running from the Commercial Street intersection south to the old courthouse and post office at 295 Water Street, which is individually listed and was described previously (see The Town Line, Jan. 7).

Commercial Street angles inland from Water Street a long block north of the Calumet bridge and parallels Water Street to Winthrop Street, which descends from the west. Opposite Winthrop Street, Front Street runs toward and then south along the river, separating the southern end of the district from the riverbank.

Wikipedia says the Calumet bridge, built in 1973, was until 2009 the Father Curran Bridge. It was named after Rev. John J. Curran, who served from 1962 until 1972 at St. Augustine Church and who died in 1976. The legislature renamed the bridge after two claims of sexual misconduct were raised against the late priest and one was found credible.

The Water Street district was listed in 2017. Wikipedia says it qualified as a Historic District because it has a concentration of 19th-century commercial buildings, built “to serve an economy based on water transport and state services.”

The first three individually listed buildings on the east (river) side of Water Street, running from north to south, are as follows:

The Colonial Theater at 139 Water Street is the second incarnation of the second theater on the site. The original one burned in a 1912 fire that also destroyed nearby buildings; the new one succeeded it in 1913. It was designed by Harry S. Coombs (1878 – 1939), a Lewiston architect. Coombs’ building was heavily damaged in another fire in 1926 and was promptly repaired and expanded.

Wikipedia describes the style as Beaux Arts and Georgian Revival and says the 1926 version added Art Deco features. The building is brick on a concrete foundation, two stories high, large enough to cover most of the space between Water Street and the Kennebec River. The center section has three ground-level doors; a parapet raises the central roof above the level of the two side roofs.

The building was used as a theater until 1969. In its early days it showed silent films with a live orchestra accompanying them, including premiering silent films by Vassalboro native and author Holman Day (1865 – 1935). 1Seating capacity was over 1,200 people.

After the theater closed it was used for occasional events and for storage. On Oct. 8, 2014, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the longest lasting and most important theater in downtown Augusta and “an eclectic example of early 20th century design by a noted architect.”

A Dec. 2, 2019, Kennebec Journal article by Keith Edwards describes on-going restoration efforts, which began inside and by December 2019 involved straightening the parapet, which had leaned over the sidewalk, and repainting the front its 1926 yellowish-brown color. The project cost was estimated at up to $8.5 million.

On Sept. 16, 1865, a fire repeatedly described as the most destructive in Maine to that time destroyed almost the entire downtown area, from the wooden bridge across the Kennebec (built after the original bridge washed out in 1837, predecessor of the Calumet bridge) south to Winthrop Street and from the riverbank west across the railroad track that runs on the uphill side of Commercial Street.

Contemporary accounts, notably one in The New York Times, say more than 40 buildings housing more than 100 businesses and office were des­troyed (a later report said 80 buildings were destroyed and 20 more damaged). Losses were estimated at half a million dollars, not all covered by insurance.

Among the burned buildings were the post office, telegraph office and express office; an unfinished railroad depot; the federal “Quartermaster, Commissary and Pension Offices”; two hotels; all the city’s lawyers’ offices and banks (the banks saved their records and money); and all the miscellaneous retail businesses.

The only building south of the bridge that survived the fire is the 1862 Williams Block at 183-187 Water Street. Maine architect Francis H. Fassett (June 25, 1823 – Nov. 1, 1908) designed it.

Fassett’s Williams Block consists of three three-story brick commercial buildings sharing common walls. Second and third story windows have arches; the flat roof has a cornice that projects over the sidewalk.

Wikipedia says Fassett designed the building for Reuel Williams, a prominent 19th-century Augusta businessman and politician. The Williams Block is a comparatively subdued example of Fassett’s architectural style; one source calls it Italianate, in contrast to his more common Victorian Gothic structures like Augusta’s South Parish Congregational Church (to be described later in this series). The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

Continuing south, the Libby-Hill Block at 227-233 Water Street is unusual in that it is built of granite. The Maine Historic Preservation Commission’s application for national recognition lists the architect as unknown. It says wealthy businessmen B. Libby and H. H. Hill had the block built in 1866, choosing granite to limit future fires.

The block is flat-roofed, with granite brackets supporting a granite cornice. This block also consists of three connected buildings, much modernized in exterior appearance.

According to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, the first businesses on the street floor, from north to south, were A. D. Millett’s “dry and fancy goods store”; George Dewell’s barbershop; and James Patterson’s “book and music store.” George Cony used the upper stories for a dancing school and an “assembly hall.”

The block was owned by Maine Savings Bank when it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.

Hiram Hovey Hill, M.D.

Physician and Surgeon
(April 10, 1810 – December 2, 1889)

Dr. Hiram Hovey Hill was a widely respected physician and surgeon. On Tuesday, June 15, 1886, his fellow physicians honored him at a banquet at the Augusta House in recognition of his 50 years in practice. The brochure describing the occasion includes Hill’s speech of thanks, in which he summarized his early life.

Hill said he was born in Turner, and when he was 15 and 16 he lived with Mount Vernon’s village doctor and decided medicine would be his career. Beginning at 21, he studied under three Augusta and Hallowell doctors and took courses at the Medical School of Maine at Bowdoin for two years. After a year at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, he returned to Bowdoin to graduate, because he, said, he couldn’t afford to finish at Pennsylvania.

Hill started his practice in Augusta on June 15, 1836. He told his 1886 guests that he immediately “found as I began to have patients that I didn’t know much,” so he kept learning, developing a system of thorough examinations to ensure no symptoms were overlooked.

Soon after opening his office, Hill married Sarah Ann Carpenter, of Augusta, who died in 1864. In 1870 he married Clara Lothrop Dalton, of Norridgewock. He had no children.

Hill was among the founders of the Maine Medical Association and an early president, according to one of the association’s publications. He was active in promoting medical progress, working to improve the state medical school and helping found Maine General Hospital, in Portland, where he served as a consulting surgeon. (Francis Fassett was the architect for the original hospital building.)

Waterville (later Colby) College gave Hill an honorary degree in 1853.

Hill practiced almost until he died. The medical association publication says he was on a call on Oct. 5, 1889, when he fell in a dark stairway and seriously damaged his right hip. He never recovered, and was bed-ridden until he died at 2:30 p.m. Dec. 2. A multitude of fellow practitioners, patients and friends attended his funeral.

According to the 1886 brochure, 50 guests, mostly doctors, attended Hill’s testimonial dinner, and others sent regrets full of praise for the honoree. One non-medico was former Maine Governor Selden Connor. Another was Judge W. P. Whitehouse (see The Town Line, Dec. 10, 2020), who praised Hill’s testimony in Superior Court cases.

Francis H. Fassett, architect
(June 25, 1823 – Nov. 1, 1908)

Francis H. Fassett was born in Bath (Maine; the reference to Bath, United Kingdom, in Wikipedia is almost certainly an error). He left school at 14 to work in a store and at 18 was apprenticed to a local builder. He began designing almost immediately and in 1864 moved to Portland, seeking more opportunities. Portland suffered a major fire in 1866, and Fassett built many of the replacement buildings.

Fassett was Maine’s most prominent architect in the 1870s. He is credited with designing up to 400 public and private buildings. His style is described as High Gothic; many of his designs feature towers, turrets, and elaborately decorated door and window openings.

Surviving Portland buildings include the Francis Hotel and the former Baxter Library, on Congress Street; the Sacred Heart Church, on Mellen Street; and the three-story duplex Francis Fassett house, on Pine Street.

Fassett’s apprentices included his son Edward, who collaborated on Sacred Heart Church, and John Calvin Stevens (Oct. 8, 1855 – Jan. 25, 1940), a more famous architect than his preceptor. Among many libraries, churches and private houses (including Winslow Homer’s Prout’s neck studio), Stevens designed the 1901-1902 Governor Hill Mansion, in Augusta (to be described later in this series). In 1918 he remodeled the 1833 Blaine House (see more about the Blaine House in The Town Line, Jan. 21).

Fassett married twice, first to Mima Ann Welch (July 12, 1825 – Dec. 9, 1859) and in 1861 to Harriet Bagley Hudson (1829-1916). Edward Francis (1848-1922) was his first-born, followed by William Green (1850-1886), Walter Hudson (1852-1888) and Anna Elizabeth (1855 – ??). Their half-siblings born to Francis and Harriet were Frederick Gardiner (1865-1951), Mima (1867-1950) and Harriet Hudson (1869-1940).

Main sources:

Websites, miscellaneous

Next: more historic buildings, continuing south on the east side of Augusta’s Water Street.

The Kennebec Arsenal compound in the early years, above, and the arsenal today. (mainepreservation photos)

by Mary Grow

Augusta Part 3

The previous articles in this series on historic places talked about some early Augusta sites and buildings. Two more, besides the Cushnoc Archaeological site and Fort Western discussed last week, are on both the National Register of Historic Places and the list of National Historic Landmarks. They are the Kennebec Arsenal on the east bank of the Kennebec and the Blaine House on the west bank, beside the state capitol building.

The Kennebec Arsenal was built as a result of strained relations between the United States and Britain, which peaked in the War of 1812 (June 1812 – February 1815); and of later border disputes between the State of Maine and the abutting Canadian province of New Brunswick, which peaked in the Aroostook War (1838-1839).

During the War of 1812, British warships repeatedly attacked Maine. The British seized Fort Sullivan, in Eastport, (built in 1808-1809) in July 1814, capturing 65 soldiers. (This writer has found no suggestions why the fort was named Sullivan. Perhaps after New Hampshire’s Revolutionary War General and later state Governor John Sullivan [Dec. 17, 1740 – Jan. 23, 1795]?)

In September 1814, British General John Coape Sherbrooke led the Penobscot Expedition. With 3,000 troops from Halifax, he defeated American forces as far up the Penobscot River as Hampden and Bangor, and seized Machias.

Following this success, the British renamed the Machias fort Fort Sherbrooke and held Castine and the territory east until the war ended. They called the area New Ireland. The February 1815 Treaty of Ghent returned the area to the United States, although disputes over islands near the border continued and, Wikipedia says, Eastport was not returned to the United States until June 30, 1818.

The Wikipedia article adds that the departing British took back to Halifax 10,750 pounds that Castine had accumulated from tariffs and used the money to found Dalhousie University.

The end of the war did not settle the border between the United States and the Canadian province of New Brunswick. There were arguments over what is now northern Aroostook County and southern Madawaska County, as settlers from both sides moved into the area.

Consequently, in 1827 the federal government developed plans for a major arsenal in Augusta, on a site south of Fort Western accessible by ocean-going ships. The arsenal was built between 1828 and 1838.

Wikipedia says the original, mostly granite buildings, built between 1828 and 1831, were “commandant’s and officer quarters, barracks, stables, a carriage shop, and the main armory.” By 1838, the commandant’s building was enlarged and redesigned in Greek Revival style, and two magazines, a munitions laboratory, an office, a wooden stable and a granite and iron perimeter fence were completed. Other sources list buildings differently, but it is clear there were at least eight early granite buildings.

In 1838, Maine and New Brunswick sent soldiers to their common border. United States General Winfield Scott came to the Kennebec Arsenal to negotiate with his friend John Harvey, then Lieutenant-Governor of New Brunswick. The two agreed to recall the respective militias and the dispute cooled.

In August 1842 the Webster-Ashburton Treaty established the boundary between the United States and Canada that exists today, including the Maine-New Brunswick line that runs along the Saint John and Saint Francis rivers. (Webster was Daniel Webster from New Hampshire, at that time United States Secretary of State; he is also known for his role in negotiating the Compromise of 1850. Ashburton was Alexander Baring, First Baron Ashburton, a British financier and diplomat.)

After Maine became less significant in international affairs, the arsenal became less vital. Wikipedia says the government made weapons in it during the Mexican War (1846-1848) and the Civil War (1861-1865); but it was too remote to be practical for major production.

The federal government closed the Arsenal, issuing the order in 1901 and finishing the process in 1903, and transferred the property to the State of Maine, owner of the Maine Insane Hospital (later the Augusta Mental Health Institute [AMHI]). The mental hospital was established by legislation in 1834 and the first buildings were completed in 1840, adjoining the Arsenal grounds on the south.

By the early 20th century, the state needed more hospital beds. Beginning in 1905, the wooden buildings on the Arsenal grounds were demolished and the granite buildings were redone and integrated into the hospital.

An on-line site describes the building called the “Old Max,” designed by Lewiston architects Coombs and Gibbs and added at the eastern side of the grounds in 1907-1909. Four stories high, built of granite and brick and designed to harmonize with the earlier Arsenal buildings, it was for maximum security patients, those too dangerous for the hospital and too mentally ill for prison.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Maine and other states moved to a new model of mental health care that minimized confinement in institutions. State officials debated what to do with the formal Arsenal/hospital. The Old Max became a state office building.

The Kennebec Arsenal was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in August 1970 and as a National Historic Landmark in February 2000.

In 2004 Save America’s Treasures, a National Park Service grant program, provided funds that state officials used for work on the granite wall and iron and granite fence around part of the original Arsenal property.

Three years later, the state sold the Arsenal property to a private company. A contemporary description lists eight major buildings on the property, plus the fence and gate, retaining walls and a wharf. Wikipedia says there are six buildings.

Conditions of the 2007 sale included a requirement that the new owner preserve and maintain the property. However, the owner let the Arsenal deteriorate to the point where in 2013 Maine sued to force the company to return the property. The owner did some work and promised more, Wikipedia says; but by 2013, the Arsenal was listed as a critically endangered historic landmark.

Contemporary photos of the Arsenal show clearly the light-colored interlocking granite blocks. An on-line site describes it as “one of the best and earliest surviving examples” of a 19th-century federal munitions depot.

Other descriptions feature deterioration, vandalism and graffiti.

Judging from two recent letters to the editor in the Central Maine newspapers, there has been no improvement. In December 2020, a Manchester resident referred to proposals to renovate the Arsenal for commercial or residential space and mourned the failure of city, county and state governments to act.

A second writer echoed the concerns in January 2021and extended them to the entire AMHI site. He called it a “historic gem” that should be preserved as representative of an important part of social and medical history.

The Blaine House, also called the James G. Blaine House, is the fourth Augusta property that is designated both a Historic Place and a Historic Landmark. It is part of Augusta’s Capital Complex Historic District. The Capitol building and Capital Park are also part of the complex and additionally have individual Historic Places listings.

The house stands at 192 State Street, just north of the Capitol building. It is named for James G. Blaine (1830-1893), whose life was summarized earlier in this series (see The Town Line, Aug. 20, 2020).

The Blaine House today. (Internet photo)

The Blaine House was originally a Federal style mansion, built in 1833 by a retired mariner, Captain James Hall. In 1862, Blaine bought it as a gift for his wife, the former Harriet Stanwood.

In the 1870s, Blaine had the original building remodeled and enlarged, making it Victorian and Italian in style and putting an addition on the west (back) side. The house remained in the family until 1919; Wikipedia says it housed the state Committee for Public Safety during World War I.

James and Harriet Blaine had seven children. When Harriet Blaine died in 1903, she left the house to three surviving children and two grandsons. The youngest daughter, Harriet Blaine Beale (1871-1958), had a son, Walker Blaine Beale, for whom his father, Truxton Beale, bought out the other heirs.

Walker Beale was killed in France in World War I, and his share of the house returned to his parents. Truxton Beale gave his share to Harriet, by then his ex-wife, making her sole owner.

In 1919, Harriet Blaine Beale donated the house to the State of Maine in memory of her son, specifying it was to be used as the Governor’s house. She became a writer, publishing children’s books and editing a collection of her mother’s letters. She died at her New York City home and is buried in Bar Harbor.

The legislature in 1919 accepted the gift and the condition. Maine architect John Calvin Stevens remodeled the building in neo-Colonial style, and in 1921 Carl Milliken became the first governor to live there. Most of his successors have also chosen to live in the historic house.

Governors have used the house to entertain famous guests, including President Ulysses Grant, advocate for the blind Helen Keller and aviator Amelia Earhart. An on-line source says some chief executives used it to promote Maine; for example, Governor Louis Brann, who served from January 1933 to January 1937, attracted large crowds to his celebrations of Maine Summer Visitors’ Day.

The Blaine House was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1964 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In 1989, Governor John McKernan started a restoration program that included creation of Friends of the Blaine House, a nonprofit organization that helps the state fund building maintenance. Friends of the Blaine House has a website, www.blainehouse.org, with information about the building, the organization, the gift shop and tours.

Wikipedia says in 2014 heat pumps were installed to reduce the horrendous heating bill.

When current Governor Janet Mills opened the annual Christmas light display on the building on Dec. 11, 2020, she called it “a Celebration of Resilience.”

Kennebec County Courthouse

by Mary Grow

Augusta
Part 1

The City of Augusta has 44 listings on the National Register of Historic Places, but some overlap. Nonetheless, the capital city has a substantial share of the 136 historic places in Kennebec County.

Some of the buildings are private houses built for, owned by or otherwise connected with prominent individuals and families. Many public or formerly public buildings are also on the list.

Four of Augusta’s designated historic sites (and Fort Halifax, in Winslow) are also on the National Park Service’s list of National Historic Landmarks. They are the Cushnoc Archaeological Site, Fort Western, the Kennebec Arsenal and the Blaine House.

Kennebec Arsenal (photo by Joe Phelan)

According to the National Register on-line list, the earliest Augusta listing, on Oct. 1, 1969, was the Arnold Trail to Québec. Three buildings were recognized in 1974: the Kennebec County Courthouse at 95 State Street, the Lot Morrill house at 113 Winthrop Street and the Old Post Office and Court House at 295 Water Street.

The most recent is listing is the Hartford Fire Station, at 1 Hartford Square, listed on Jan. 1, 2018.

The Arnold Trail marks Colonel Benedict Arnold’s march to Québec in 1775 with an army of 1,100 men. This unsuccessful attempt to capture the British stronghold has been commemorated in history books and in the novel Rabble in Arms by Maine writer Kenneth Roberts. The Daughters of the American Revolution placed markers along the trail from Pittston, south of Augusta, to Eustis, almost on the Canadian border.

The marker in Pittston, on the east bank of the river, was placed in 1913 at the site of Arnold’s headquarters at Major Reuben Colburn’s house. In preparation for the expedition, General George Washington directed Colburn to send scouts up-river to evaluate the route and watch for British spies. An on-line site says the two men were Samuel Berry and Dennis Getchell, from Vassalboro.

Washington also ordered a fleet of 200 bateaux equipped with both paddles and poles. (A bateau is a flat-bottomed boat designed for use in shallow water; photographs of 20th-century reenactments show Colburn’s craft with high flared sides and pointed bows and sterns.) Workers at Colburn’s shipyard built the bateaux, using green lumber; the boats leaked copiously, soaking the expedition’s supplies of food and ammunition.

Old Fort Western

Arnold moved his headquarters north to Fort Western on Sept. 23, 1775. Another on-line site shows a marker and a photograph of a punch bowl Arnold is said to have used at the fort.

The DAR installed the next marker up the river in 1919, on the east bank across from the Winslow Congregational Church to mark the expedition’s landing place on Sept. 26, 1775.

Two more markers had been installed in 1917 on the west side of the river. One is in Waterville’s Castonguay Square to show where the soldiers re-embarked after carrying their bateaux around Ticonic Falls. The other is in Fairfield, at the intersection of Willow Street with Route 201 and Upper Main Street, between downtown Fairfield and Interstate 95; it marks one of the places where soldiers stopped to repair the bateaux.

The Kennebec County Courthouse, another early listing, is at 95 State Street. On-line sources say it was designed by architect James Cochran and built in 1829 by Robert Vose, under Cochran’s supervision.

The two-story granite building is in early Greek Revival style, with Doric columns across the front on both levels. The center block is topped by a wooden belfry. When the bell tower was restored in 2000, a plaque was added dedicating it to legal personnel and others “who under this tower have contributed to the impartial and effective administration of equal justice under the law.”

The original courthouse was enlarged twice, in 1851 and in 1907, in each case using granite and taking care to preserve the architectural style. The architect for the 1907 addition was almost certainly George Henri (or Henry) Desmond (1874 – 1965), of Massachusetts. Desmond also worked on the 1911 expansion of the capitol building.

Augusta sessions of the Maine Supreme Court were held in the courthouse for 140 years, from its opening in 1830 until 1970.

Between 2012 and 2015 a modern judicial center was built on the east side of the old building, connected by a skywalk. That building was designed by PDT Architects, of Portland, (since 2019, CHA Architecture). Most court business is now conducted in the new building.

Lot Morrill House

The two and a half story brick Lot Morrill house on Winthrop Street is also an example of Greek Revival architecture, built about 1830. Lot Myrick Morrill (1813-1883) was born in Belgrade. He was a lawyer who entered politics as a Democrat and temperance advocate and was elected a Democratic state representative in 1854.

In 1856, he switched to the anti-slavery Republican party and served as a state senator in 1856 and as Maine’s 28th governor from January 1858 to January 1861. He represented Maine in the United States Senate from January 1861 (when Hannibal Hamlin resigned his seat to become vice-president under Abraham Lincoln) until July 1876, when he resigned to become President Ulysses Grant’s Secretary of the Treasury.

Morrill bought the Winthrop Street house in 1845 and it remained in the family until his widow, Charlotte, died in 1918. In 1919 the successors sold the house to John Edward Nelson (1874 – 1955).

Nelson was born in China (Maine) and educated in Waterville and at the Friends School, in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Colby College, Class of 1898, and earned a law degree from the University of Maine at Orono in 1904. He practiced in Waterville until 1913 and then in Augusta.

Nelson served as a Republican in the United States House of Representatives from March 1922 to March 1933, losing a bid for another term in 1932 and returning to his law practice until he retired in 1946.

Wikipedia says in 1931 the Fish Committee (chaired by New York Representative Hamilton Fish) recommended outlawing the Communist Party and taking other steps to discourage Communism. Nelson, a member of the committee, wrote a minority report describing the committee majority’s anti-Communism as hysteria and saying there was no serious domestic threat and no need for new laws.

The Lot Morrill house is currently owned by Sandor, a Maine-based Limited Liability Company, and is described on-line as a multiple occupancy building.

The old court house and post office at 295 Water Street is the third of Augusta’s earliest-listed historic buildings. One source lists it as the Olde Federal Building. Several sources call it Maine’s best surviving example of the Romanesque Revival style of architecture. It is built of Hallowell granite, two and a half stories tall, with a central tower, smaller side towers and dramatic arches at street level.

The building was designed by Mifflin Emlen Bell (1847-1904), described in Wikipedia as the supervising architect with the United States Treasury Department from 1883 to 1887, and his successor, William Alfred Freret (born Jan. 19, 1833, if any reader would like to give him a thought on the anniversary; died Dec. 5, 1911). It opened in January 1890. Wikipedia says it cost $178,281.20, and its conveniences included steam heat and a hydraulic freight elevator.

Augusta needed a large new post office by 1890 because of the volume of mail generated by publishing businesses in the city, including those of E. C. Allen, Peleg O. Vickery and William Gannett (see The Town Line, Nov. 12, 2020).

Architect Bell worked on the final stages of the Washington Monument and designed the federal buildings for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, as well as many post office buildings, including those in Keokuk, Iowa; Quincy, Illinois; Aberdeen, Mississippi; Auburn, New York; and Nebraska City, Nebraska.

Freret succeeded Bell when Bell resigned and served from June 1887 until either 1888 or March 1890 (Wikipedia gives both dates). He was a New Orleans native who had served in the Confederate army. Most of his other government buildings are in the South – post offices in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and the Carolinas, for example.

Wikipedia’s only reference to a Freret-designed building north of the Mason-Dixon Line is the former post office in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, now City Hall. It resembles Augusta’s old post office, and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since March 1972.

Augusta’s former post office and court house has not been used for federal government purposes since the 1960s. It is now a commercial building owned by Vickery Downing Associates Inc., of Yarmouth.

Main sources:

Websites, miscellaneous

Next: more historic sites in Maine’s capital city.