by Mary Grow

Final two Main Street Historic District buildings Old Post Office & Seton Hospital

Returning to the 2016 enlargement of Waterville’s Main Street Historic District, the final two buildings included are the four-story Cyr Building/Professional Building, on the northeast corner of Main and Appleton streets at 177-179 Main Street (see its photo in the Sept. 15 issue of The Town Line); and the Elks Club, on the north side of Appleton Street.

The Professional Building, built in 1923, was designed in Art Deco style by the Portland firm of William Miller and Raymond Mayo. (The Aug. 25 The Town Line article described Main Street’s other Art Deco building, the 1936 Federal Trust Company Bank.) It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on Feb. 19, 1982.

The application, prepared in July 1981 by Frank A. Beard and Robert L. Bradley of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, said “the local press” of 1923 called the building “the finest of the Waterville office buildings.” Beard and Bradley did not disagree, writing that both in 1923 and in 1981 it was “an outstanding structure in the downtown area.”

They called the Professional Building “a comparatively rare example for Maine of a very early Art Deco impulse in architecture with some features of the earlier Chicago commercial styles.” With 42 “office suites” in 30,875 square feet of floor space, it was “by far the largest such structure in the city” in 1923.

Beard and Bradley wrote that the building’s two facades, on Main and on Appleton streets, each had a street-level entrance “surmounted by low arches with elaborate low reliefs and shields.” There were five bays of large windows on the Main Street side and six on the Appleton Street side; the end bays thrust outward, “creating the effect of corner towers.”

In their 2016 application for the expanded Main Street district, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson described the steel and concrete frame of the building and the exterior “cast stone first story with buff tapestry brick on the upper stories of the south and west elevations, red brick on the south elevation, and modern metal cladding on the north elevation.”

The northeasternmost building in the expanded historic district is the Colonial Revival style Elks Club, at 13 Appleton Street, another Miller and Mayo design. Built in 1913/1914, the two-and-a-half story brick building sits on a raised basement concrete foundation, with stairs leading up to a projecting entrance.

The Elks Club has cast stone decorations and at the attic level, “four historic diamond paned windows.” Each window has “four panes of colored glass forming a larger diamond at the center,” and is set in “a projecting brick surround with a cast stone square at each corner.”

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Two other historic buildings in Waterville are outside the Main Street district, but since each gained historic recognition as a public building, your writer thinks it appropriate to describe them now.

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The older of the two is the former Waterville post office in the south angle of the five-way intersection of Main Street, Elm Street, Center Street, Upper Main Street and College Avenue. Mainely Brews now occupies its former basement, with a Main Street entrance.

Kingsbury wrote that Waterville’s first post office was established Oct. 3, 1796, with Asa Redington the first postmaster. He went on to list the successive postmasters, ending with Willard M. Dunn, appointed in 1889 for the second time (his first term was 1879 to 1885).

Kingsbury did not talk about post office buildings. Whittemore’s contributors suggested that the office moved from one rented space to another during the 19th century.

In his chapter on the early settlers, Aaron Plaisted mentioned the “little postoffice on the west edge of the Common,” where Abijah Smith was postmaster from 1832 (Kingsbury said 1833) to 1841. In 1902, according to Redington, the post office was in the ground floor of the W. T. Haines block, on the south side of Common Street (briefly mentioned in the Aug. 25 issue of The Town Line).

At that time, Redington wrote, the postmaster and his assistant supervised “seven clerks, five carriers and one substitute. The post office did $40,000 worth of business annually, and Redington predicted it would soon “be numbered among the first-class offices.”

The historic Old Post Office was built in 1911 – a Waterville timeline found on line says it opened in 1913 – and was added to the National Register of Historic Places April 18, 1977.

When Maine Historic Preservation Commission historian Frank A. Beard and graduate assistant Stephen Kaplan prepared the application for historic listing in October 1976, they wrote that the building was owned by the U. S. Postal Service and was unoccupied. Waterville’s College Avenue post office and federal building opened in 1976, according to the on-line timeline.

U.S. Treasury Department Architect James Knox Taylor designed the 1911 building. Taylor (October 11, 1857 – August 27, 1929) was the Treasury Department’s Supervising Architect from 1897 to 1912, and is credited with a long list of federal buildings.

Beard and Kaplan wrote that Waterville’s post office typified the early 20th century use of Greek Revival style for government buildings “and survives as perhaps the best of only a few such examples in Maine.”

They described the combination of a square block and a circular front that made the single-story stone building impressive, with on its front a “Corinthian colonnade of refined proportions and handsome detail. Similarly designed pilasters appear at the front corners of the block structure, symbolically unifying the block to the curve.”

The structure atop the flat roof is described as “a tall Corinthian cylindrical lantern, based in shape and character on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Athens.” (Wikipedia has an illustrated article on this monument, built in 335/334 BCE in Athens and “reproduced widely in modern monuments and building elements.”)

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The Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital at 30 Chase Avenue, on the west side of Waterville, was designed in 1963; its construction was finished in mid-1965. On July 11, 2016, it was approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.

The application for national listing was prepared by Matthew Corbett, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson, of Sutherland Conservation and Consulting, of Augusta, (all three had previously worked on parts of the applications for Waterville’s Main Street Historic District). They listed the building’s significance as architectural and its period of significance as 1965.

The architectural firm was James H. Ritchie and Associates, of Boston. The Sutherland group found that different members of the firm had initialed different parts of the 1963 plan, and that Ritchie had died in 1964.

The application explains that the building was “a good example of the Miesian school of Modernist architecture, applied to a health care facility in Maine.”

The “general characteristics of the Miesian style” that Ritchie and Associates used included “a recessed ground floor, use of concrete panels to express the building’s framing on the exterior, and the use of aluminum windows and a flat roof,” the application says.

The Miesian architectural style was a variant within the Modernist school that characterized skyscrapers and other large public buildings after World War II. It is named after Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), a German architect who began his career in Germany and emigrated to the United States after Hitler rose to power.

After the war, a source cited in the application says, the United States government financed a large number of new hospitals. Hospital designers adopted the Modernist style because they found it functional and affordable.

When Seton Hospital opened, the Sutherland team wrote, it offered “over 150 beds…and the latest in medical technologies.” They quoted from a July 27, 1965, Waterville Morning Sentinel article that began, “All patients’ rooms are quiet, comfortable, pleasing to the eye, and designed to give an excellent view of the surrounding landscape.”

The article went on to talk about air conditioning in some areas (not the patients’ rooms); four modern elevators with telephones; the “spacious lobby” with a “modern coffee shop” and a “gift and stationery shop” nearby; and the “soft-lighted and beautifully designed” chapel, with seats for over 80 people. The laboratory was “ultra-modern,” the X-ray department had “the most modern equipment.”

The second floor was for obstetrics, and was partly air-conditioned. Other patients had the third, fourth and fifth floors. The sixth floor at first provided living space for members of the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, the organization that ran Seton Hospital, and later became additional patient space.

The Sisters’ quarters included 15 bedrooms; a kitchen and a laundry room; “a sewing room, guest room and parlor”; a dining room and community room separated by a folding panel, so they could be combined for a large group; “an office for the superior”; and the Sisters’ private chapel.

The Sisters of Charity came to Waterville in 1913, the Sutherland team explained, and in April took over the I. C. Libby Memorial Hospital, changing its name to Sisters Hospital. In 1923, they built a larger Sisters Hospital, on College Avenue. By 1963, that hospital had “an 86 percent occupancy on a year-round basis, and 107 percent occupancy at the height of occupancy,” necessitating the larger Chase Avenue building.

Dr. Frederick Charles Thayer served on the Sisters Hospital board until 1931, when he set up Thayer Hospital, first in his house on Main Street and later on North Main Street. Thayer and Seton merged in 1975 to become Mid-Maine Medical Center; in 1997 the Mid-Maine and Kennebec Valley health systems merged to form MaineGeneral.

The 2016 application describes the Seton Hospital building as “vacant.” Articles in the Central Maine Morning Sentinel in August 2022 described plans to convert most of the building to apartments, with leased storage space in the basement. Reporter Amy Calder wrote that because the former hospital is on the National Register of Historic Places, “construction must preserve the historic nature of the building.”

Main sources

Beard, Frank A., and Robert L. Bradley, National Register of Historic Places.
Inventory—Nomination Form Professional Building July 1981.
Beard, Frank A., and Stephen Kaplan, National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form Waterville Post Office, October 1976.
Corbett, Matthew, Scott Hanson and Kendal Anderson, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Elizabeth Ann Seton Hospital, Jan. 18, 2016.
Hanson, Scott, and Kendal Anderson National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Waterville Main Street Historic District (Boundary Increase), June 3, 2016.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.

by Mary Grow

Main Street west side and 2016 expansion

This article continues the description of Waterville’s Main Street Historic District, going northward on the west side of Main Street between Silver and Temple streets, and adds most of the buildings in the 2016 expansion of the district.

Your writer hopes she has already inspired people to park their cars and stroll along Main Street, heads high as they admire the storefronts above street level (taking care to avoid colliding with other pedestrians with their heads down as they admire their cellphones).

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On the north side of Silver Street, at 40-44 Main Street, is what Matthew Corbett and Scott Hanson, of Sutherland Conservation and Consulting, in Augusta, called in their 2012 application for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places the Rancourt Building. This building dated from 1936 and had been so altered between 1992 and 2005 that it no longer counted as historic.

Frank Redington, in his chapter on businesses in Edwin Carey Whittemore’s Waterville history, described an earlier building on the same corner. Writing in 1902, Redington called the brick building with granite trim “a splendid block, three stories, and modern in all respects.” F. L. Thayer built it, on the lot that had housed a wooden building where David Gallert had a dry goods store and another building that Joseph Nudd rented out as a saloon.

By 1902, Charles J. Clukey owned the brick building. Clukey was one of the 100 residents who formed the committee to plan the 1902 bicentennial celebration. He was a partner with Luther H. Soper in the dry goods business for some time before starting the Clukey & Libby Company in 1901.

The Maine Memory Network on line says Clukey & Libby “ran a large department store on Main Street.” The Waterville history includes William Abbott Smith’s partial description of the company’s contributions to the tremendous parade that marked the end of Waterville’s centennial celebration on Tuesday, June 24, 1902.

One of Clukey & Libby’s entries featured “twenty-four boys in gray dusters with red advertising umbrellas.” Another was “a float with twelve young ladies in white with white and rose sunshades, the team being decorated with 500 poppies and drawn by four gray horses with white harnesses.”

The Plaisted Block, 46-50 Main Street (according to Kingsbury the second building of that name on the same site), was built in two parts, a double building on the south in 1883 and a third, wider section in 1890. Portland architects Francis Fassett and John Calvin Stevens designed the Romanesque Revival style brick structure.

Each of the three sections housed a different business in 2012, Corbett and Hanson wrote. They described brick and grey sandstone trim, arches above second-story windows and the building’s name and date “carved into the sandstone lintels flanking the central [brick] pier between the original southern two sections.”

Next north is the 1890 Soper Block, another Romanesque Revival building designed by Fassett and colleague Frederick Thompson. The three-story brick building had “a slightly projecting narrow bay at the south end” that Corbett and Hanson surmised might have covered an entrance to the upper floors.

The application describes decorative elements of brick, “rock-faced brownstone” and terra cotta. Third-floor windows have a continuous band of brownstone sills above a terra cotta band, with “a half-round arched top with a fanlight pattern above each window.”

The building date is on a brownstone plaque on the projecting bay. The name is on another brownstone plaque on the five-bay section, in a terra cotta frame and set “within a taller portion of the parapet that is framed by terra cotta scrolled brackets.”

In the business chapter in Whittemore’s history, Redington wrote that in April 1901 Luther Soper installed the first motorized passenger elevator in Waterville, running from the basement to the top floor.

Smith described Soper’s “charming” contribution to the 1902 centennial parade as a yellow and white float with “open oval panels” on sides and ends and nine girls riding on top.

The next two buildings north of the Soper Block dated from the 20th century and had been modernized on the street level, but nonetheless counted as historic. Corbett and Hanson listed them as the Robinson-Davison Company building and the Jackson Company building.

The Robinson-Davison building at 58 Main Street, put up about 1911, is described as three stories tall, Commercial Style, with a brick and metal front.

Next north, at 62 Main Street, the two-story Jackson Company building was constructed about a year later. Its façade features brick, metal and concrete elements.

The Kennebec Savings Bank building, 64-70 Main Street, had undergone several changes; as of 2012, it was dated from 1974 and was thus too new to count as a historic building. Corbett and Hanson wrote that it “was originally two late 19th century buildings” that were remodeled in 1974, 1985 and 2011-12.

“The current façade is more in keeping with the historic character of the district, and thus has a lesser impact on the district’s integrity than the previous designs,” they added.

The Barrell Block at 72-76 Main Street was built in two pieces 25 years apart, Corbett and Hanson found. The Greek Revival style north end came first, in 1850; in 1875 the Italianate south building designed by Francis Fassett was added. By 2012, a modern storefront at street level and an Italianate wooden cornice on top (replacing the earlier gable roof on the north part) united the two sections.

Next north was the Emery Department Store building at 80-86 Main Street, built in 1912 and expanded north in 1920. The 1912 Renaissance Revival style section was designed by Lewiston architects William Miller and Raymond Mayo. There were five openings onto the street; the center one held “the primary entrance in a deep recess”; the northern one provided access to the two upper floors.

The upper part of the earlier section “is divided into three sections by large two story pilasters with elaborate bases and Ionic capitals of white molded limestone.” More “molded limestone ornament” decorates a band between the second and third floors. Corbett and Hanson described a double cornice, below and above an attic section, with “EMERY MCMXII” inscribed.

The last building before the Temple Street intersection was the two-story McLellan’s Department Store building at 90-100 Main Street, dated 1920 and described as Commercial Style. It was of buff brick, with cast stone windowsills on the second floor and brick trim. The “compatible” single-story addition on the north was built after 1944.

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In 2016, the Waterville Main Street Historic District was expanded to add the connected buildings on the east side of the street north from Temple Street to Appleton Street, plus two others (to be described next week).

The June 3, 2016, application was prepared by Scott Hanson, again, and Kendal Anderson, of Sutherland Conservation and Consulting.

They explained that the additional area did not qualify in 2012 because of “the number of facades that had been covered after the period of significance [1860-1931]. The removal of these false facades from two significant buildings, exposing largely intact historic facades, extends the integrity of the existing district sufficiently to include these ten additional resources.”

Four buildings were too much changed to count as part of the expanded historic district.

• The two-story building at 129 Main Street, the corner of Main and Temple, is identified as the last surviving wood-framed building on the street; but it was covered by unhistoric aluminum siding.
• 131 and 137 Main Street are flat-roofed two-story buildings sharing a false façade added in the 1920s to buildings originally constructed before 1884.
• The 1913 Waterville Steam Laundry Building at 145-147 Main Street also has a false façade, metal.

The southernmost of the historic buildings is the three-story brick Moor Block at 139-141 Main Street, built in 1905. Its style is Renaissance Revival; the street side has granite windowsills and decorative brick trim.

Skipping the non-contributing laundry building, the Eaton Block (153-155 Main Street), designed by architects Bunker and Savage, of Augusta, and built in 1923, is described as Colonial Revival style. A two-story brick building with a two-story addition on the east (back) side, it has a recessed storefront “set within the historic cast concrete surround of the original storefront. Two steel columns support the structure above.”

The Eaton Block is one of the buildings where the 1960s façade was removed in 2016, “revealing the historic buff tapestry brick façade.” The second floor is little changed, with brick and stone details, fancy windows and stone panels with the name and date.

Hanson and Anderson added, “The [brick] pilasters on the façade were originally topped with cast stone urns that stood on the parapet above the cornice line.”

Next north is the Edith Block; one granite inset on the front says “EDITH BLOCK 1906” and another says “W. T. HAINES OFFICE.” Three stories high, brick with granite windowsills and brick trim, the Edith Block was designed in Early 20th Century Commercial style by Waterville architect A. G. Bowie.

This building, too, acquired a false front in the 1960s; as of 1916 only the ground floor covering remained, and Hanson and Anderson wrote that it was scheduled for removal.

The Waterville Savings Bank Building, on the south corner of Main and Appleton streets, dates from 1903 and was designed in Renaissance Revival style by architect William M. Butterfield, from Manchester, New Hampshire. The building has “reinforced concrete floor construction” and “a façade of tan Roman brick with limestone trim,” Hanson and Anderson wrote.

The central entrance on Main Street is recessed inside an arch supported by Doric columns; on each side “are piers with limestone details and granite bases.” On the floors above, eight windows are separated into three bays, with three windows in each side bay and two in the middle one. Some of the windows are set in arches. On the Appleton Street side, the windows above the ground floor are arranged in five sections of two or three windows.

Waterville Savings Bank was organized in 1869, according to Whittemore’s history, and in 1902 was the city’s largest bank, with more than $1.25 million on its books. The 1903 building as used until 1939, when, an on-line source says, the bank “moved across the street to a larger block” (which your writer guesses is the present home of Waterville’s branch of TD Bank, successor to Waterville Savings Bank).

The on-line source says Butterfield was born in Sidney and lived briefly in Waterville. He established his architectural business in Manchester in 1881. Because of his central Maine connection, he designed “at least ten major buildings” in Waterville between 1900 and 1910.

By 2012, the Savings Bank Building had been vacant for 15 years and was on Maine’s list of most endangered historic buildings. Area residents seeking its preservation gained their goal with the 2016 expansion of the Main Street Historic District.

Main sources

Corbett, Matthew, and Scott Hanson, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Waterville Main Street Historic District, Aug. 28, 2012, supplied by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.
Hanson, Scott, and Kendal Anderson, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form, Waterville Main Street Historic District (Boundary Increase) June 3, 2016.
Kingsbury, Henry D., ed., Illustrated History of Kennebec County Maine 1625-1892 (1892).
Whittemore, Rev. Edwin Carey, Centennial History of Waterville 1802-1902 (1902).

Websites, miscellaneous.