On a small hill, with fields stretching down to the Sheepscot River, Gordon Davis gives a quick tour of his longtime family home. The white, two-story Federal-style house, with its two tall chimneys, dates back to around 1800.
Built by a shipowner and merchant along the river a few miles above Wiscasset, the house is nearly unchanged by time and is a witness to life in Maine before and after statehood.
Davis says the original owners may have cleared gage woods to make fields, and cut pine trees on the property to saw into lumber and timbers. It was a large and comfortable house by the standards of rural Maine but still heated by multiple fireplaces, as opposed to stoves or furnaces.
Earle Shettleworth, Maine’s state historian, says it wasn’t an easy life for many people in those early years of the 19th century. He says that life helped shape the independent, determined character of so many Mainers.
“All you need to do is look at who was picked for the state seal in 1820– the farmer and the mariner,” he said, noting that farming, fishing, and related tasks defined much of Maine life in those years.
“And the sea also snows the pine tree,” the Historian said, symbolic of lumbering, which would become one of Maine’s dominant industries later in the 19th century.
He says in the years before statehood, Maine was growing rapidly, as people looked for land to build homes and farms. Coastal areas were fairly well settled at the time, but populations were spreading inland, up the rivers, in search of opportunity. In a very few years, those rivers and streams would drive manufacturing plants of all kinds.
In 1800, Maine’s population was 151,000. Just 20 years later, at the time Maine became a state, it had nearly doubled.
Shettleworth says most Mainers at the time lived in small, likely cramped homes, and while for life those people were hard by modern standards, old house restoration expert Les Fossel says it was the way everyone at the time had to live, and they were used to it.
“People say you can’t keep a house warm with fireplace,’ said Fossel. “Yes you can, Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here.”
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