Encephalitis lethargica

On September 18, 1830, Daniel Webster (1782-1852) wrote his friend Joseph Story (1779-1845), a justice of the Supreme Court, who was contemplating a trip to Wiscasset, Maine, an emphatic warning. "My sincere advice to you, My Dear Sir, is not to go. The weather is cold, & you may in some degree, expose yourself, even with the utmost care."(1)

Wiscasset, on the shore of an expansive bay of the Sheepscot River thirteen miles from the ocean [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE V OMITTED], is indeed harassed by a hostile climate. Alexander Johnston Jr., who lived in the splendid Carlton house ([ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED] and [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1, 2 OMITTED]) for almost a quarter of a century, kept a diary in which he meticulously recorded the daily fluctuations of weather, and the frequency of gales, squalls, blizzards, and northeasters is remarkable. On September 17, 1875, he wrote: "A pouring rain storm and N.E. gale began last evening," and on January 17, 1877: "So much snow has fallen that it is difficult to get into the woods with teams and the roads are full and blocked."(2)

Not only the inclement weather but the stony soil and, in the late seventeenth century, assaults by the Indians and the French combined to discourage permanent settlement. In 1660 the Davie brothers, George and John, the first recorded white settlers, built huts on the bluff where the county jail was subsequently bulk [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIII OMITTED]. After a score of years, when Indian raids were devastating the region, the Davies abandoned their primitive hamlet.

Whatever tribulations were endemic to Sheepscot Bay, it was blessed with one of the finest natural harbors on the coast of northern New England. An 1813 report of the Navy Department asserted: "The port [of Wiscasset] embraces a good harbor, free from storms, where a large fleet may ride in safety."(3) Inevitably the harbor was a magnet, and in 1729 Robert Hooper and his family came from Massachusetts, bringing cattle and fruit trees, and built a log cabin beside a great rock on the headland that juts into the bay. Hooper and the stalwart pioneers who followed him established the first lasting community in what became Wiscasset. Since sporadic attacks by Indians were still a danger, some of the houses were fortified, and a garrison was built on Fort Hill. In the 1740s Jonathan Williamson (1712-1798), one of the early settlers, was twice seized by Indians, taken a captive to Canada, and twice released.

In 1750 it was Williamson who submitted a petition for municipal incorporation to the General Court of Massachusetts, pleading for "ye Powers & privileges that Other of His Majesty's Good Subjects do Injoy."(4) Despite Williamson's eloquence, it was not until 1760 that the township encompassing the present towns of Wiscasset, Dresden, and Alna, in the county of Lincoln, was incorporated as Pownalborough. The choice of a name for the new town was a political ploy, since the Province of Maine was under the governance of Massachusetts, and Thomas Pownall (1722-1805) was the royal governor.

In the 1790s Dresden and Alna seceded from Pownalborough, citing the inconvenience of conducting town affairs over such an extensive area, and finally, in 1802, the remaining inhabitants of Pownalborough petitioned to change the name of the town on the bay to Wiscasset, stating that "the part of the Town where mercantile business is now transacted hath from the Original Settlement thereof to the present time been known and so called by the name of Wiscasset."(5) Generations of etymologists, while generally agreeing that Wiscasset is an Indian place-name, have squabbled over its precise meaning. Among the various translations are "confluence of three rivers," "place of pine tree cones," little marsh creek," "harbor town," and, simply, "outlet." The street names in Wiscasset are less controversial, There are Summer Street and Pleasant Street; Water Street skirts the harbor; Main Street bisects the town; and High Street is on the crest of a hill overlooking the bay.

In the years preceding the Revolution, the town, still officially called Pownalborough, grew and prospered. The ancient forests in the vicinity of the Sheepscot River provided abundant oak, spruce, and white pine for export as well as for supplying timber to the local shipyards and for the houses of the merchants and shipbuilders, which, while not grand, were substantial, practical, and aesthetically pleasing.

The so-called Lilac Cottage [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VIII OMITTED] is typical of the small, one-story houses that were ubiquitous in colonial New England. It was built for Benjamin Colby probably about the time of his marriage in 1770, and he sold it in 1789 to one John Adams, mariner, for fifty pounds. The house has five bays, with a simple rectangular light above the entrance door, and a steeply pitched roof. The towering center chimney is supported in the cellar by stone piers carrying joists of white oak. This massive arch is twelve feet long and ten feet, eight inches wide.

The oldest documented dwelling in town is the two-story house built in 1763 for Colonel John Kingsbury on the corner of Main and Federal Streets [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED]. The rather stark facade features a pleasing doorway with narrow sidelights flanked by slender pilasters.

In July 1764 the townspeople voted to raise a hundred pounds to build "a

House for the Public worship of God,"(6) and the following month Colonel Kingsbury sailed in his own packet to Boston to purchase materials for the construction of what would be the towns first meetinghouse. On the voyage he was stricken with encephalitis lethargica, and he died in Boston Harbor on August 22. After many delays, the meetinghouse, set at the top of the common where the First Congregational Church [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED] now stands, was completed in 1767. About 1795 Captain William Nickels purchased the Kingsbury house and, in 1807, moved it to its present location at the corner of Federal and Washington Streets in order to build his magnificent house (frontispiece and [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES VII, IX, AND X OMITTED]) on the Main Street lot.

The fortunes of Wiscasset have fluctuated as dramatically as the weather. After some years of prosperity, the Revolution inflicted great hardship on townspeople who were dependent on trade for their livelihood. In 1780 the patriot Timothy Parsons (b. 1748) wrote compassionately if solecistically:

The distress of the people in this place is Very Great...well harry Men are brought to Meare Skeletons being hardly Able to Crawl Abouts; Sum have dyed, A number of others Lay helpless for want of proper Sustenance; and a general indolent Stupor Seems to Attend them.(7)

After the Revolution the townspeople industriously, and successfully, labored to restore their fortunes, and the 1790s and early 1800s were the time of Wiscasset's greatest affluence. There were thriving shipyards, ropewalks, and sail lofts; and ships sailed from Wiscasset to the West Indies with lumber to trade for sugar, molasses, and rum, and to such foreign ports as Liverpool, Copenhagen, and Saint Petersburg. There were clockmakers and silversmiths to cater to the tastes of the newly rich shipowners and sea captains, and milliners and dressmakers provided finery for their wives - although some of the ladies chose to import their frocks from New York City. Describing this happy time, the lawyer and litterateur John Hannibal Sheppard (1789-1873) wrote:

Wiscasset was a very gay and extravagant place.... Large dinner parties, frequent balls, rides, water excursions were given...and no place was richer or gayer of its size in the whole United States.(8)

It seems that profligate behavior, perhaps a concomitant of wealth, was not uncommon. In a novel set in Wiscasset, J. Emerson Smith (1835-1881), a son of Samuel E. Smith, a three-time governor of Maine, wrote that Wiscasset "at that time, had all the facilities for a young man's mining himself,"(9) and earlier the Reverend Alden Bradford (17651843), writing about the town in 1801, asserted: "More persons die of consumption, than of any other disease. And this is most probably owing to the too frequent use of spirit and tea."(10)

However detrimental the effects of overindulgence in spirit and tea may have been, it was during this period of conspicuous extravagance that the local nabobs built the handsomest houses in Wiscasset. The greatest architectural enthusiast was Judge Silas Lee, who had at least four houses built. A graduate of Harvard College and a successful lawyer, he was appointed the United States attorney for the District of Maine by President Thomas Jefferson. Noted for his gentlemanly manners and lavish hospitality, it was said that he indulged his passion for building houses beyond his needs or means.

In 1792 Judge Lee had an elegant classical house built on High Street [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XI OMITTED], the street which, according to the historian William Davis Patterson, is "from an architectural point of view...the most interesting in Maine."(11) The Lee-Payson-Smith house is distinguished by Ionic pilasters at each end of the facade and a beautifully proportioned semicircular portico supported by Ionic columns. The siding of the facade is made up of closely fitted matched boards that create a smoother surface than the overlapping clapboards of earlier houses, while both ends of the house are brick. In the interior, the stairway, mantels, and cornices are expertly carved, perhaps by a ship's carpenter. The well-designed arches with elaborate Ionic pilasters framing two of the windows in the parlor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XII OMITTED] recall the window treatments in colonial houses in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

In 1807 Silas Lee sold the house to General David Payson (1759-1831) and moved into the even larger house built for him at the southern end of High Street [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. After Payson's death what is now known as the Lee-Payson-Smith house was converted into a tavern called the Bunch of Grapes, and dancing lessons were given in the parlor. In 1836 Samuel E. Smith bought the house and restored it to a private residence. It still belongs to his descendants.

In 1804 and 1805 Joseph Trakham Wood, a son of General Abiel Wood (1744-1811) and a brother of Abiel Wood Jr. (1772-1834) - both of whom had notable houses built in Wiscasset - raised one of the most imposing mansions on High Street [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED]. In Wiscasset's palmiest years Wood was a high-living beau, characterized as "a jester and bon vivant."(12) When he was seventeen, in a letter to a cousin, he defended his fickle nature:

You are no doubt sensible that young minds are easily ensnared by Beauty & are ever fond of some new object, this is certainly the way of the world & why should I not be one of the class.(13)

The design and construction of Woods house is attributed to Nicholas Codd (c. 1754-1824), a carpenter who emigrated from Ireland to Boston about 1795.(14) By the early 1800s Codd was building stylish houses for the well-to-do merchants in the vicinity of Damariscotta and Wiscasset. Of the three houses in Wiscasset that have been attributed to Codd, largely on stylistic grounds, the Wood house has the most pronounced affinity to Codd's documented work. In 1803 and 1804 Codd built an impressive residence in Damariscotta Mills for James Kavanaugh (1756-1828), who was also an Irish emigrant. This house and the house built for Wood a year later are strikingly similar in design and architectural detail. Both are two stories high and have flushboard facades with fluted pilasters at each end (Doric at Kavanaugh's house, Corinthian at Wood's), Palladian windows above the entrances, and octagonal cupolas set on low-pitched hipped roofs. Originally Woods house, like Kavanaugh's, had a semicircular portico and a balustrade around the roof. In the entrance hall of Woods house a graceful elliptical stair ascends two flights to the cupola.

In 1807, only two years after the completion of the house, Joseph Wood traded it to Moses Carlton [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED],(15) a wealthy shipowner, for a hundred casks of rum, which Wood, who was in straitened circumstances, sold for $12,000. Since Carlton and his wife, Abigail [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], occupied the house for half a century, he was the eponymous owner of what is still known as the Carlton house. The three-story residence begun for Joseph Woods brother, Abiel Wood Jr., on High Street in 1811 has also been attributed to Codd, although it was still unfinished when Codd returned to Boston about 1818.

The most dazzling house attributed to Codd and, indeed, the most extraordinary house in Wiscasset was begun for Captain William Nickels in 1807 on the Main Street lot once occupied by the Kingsbury house. The Nickels-Sortwell house (frontispiece and [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED]) is three stories high with a three-story wing attached to the left rear; and, like all the grand Federal houses of the town, it has a flushboard facade. The center bay has a balustraded one-story portico supported by colonnettes of the composite order. Above the portico is a Palladian window, and, crowning the composition on the third story, a half-round double-arched window has both radiating and oval muntins. Framing the three central bays of the upper two stories are Corinthian pilasters set above an arcaded base. In the entrance hall the spectacular elliptical staircase that rises to the third floor is lit by a shallow dome with a skylight [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED]. The large parlor to the right of the entrance [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED], with a mantel composed of multiple colonnettes, extends the entire width of the house.

Nickels's son, in a letter written in 1858, stated that his father "procured one of the best architects that the State had at that time produced" in his determination to surpass the grandeur of Moses Carltons house [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED].(16) Unfortunately, he failed to name the architect, but Codd is a likely candidate. If the Nickels house, which was completed about 1812, seems a virtual catalogue of Federal motifs applied with a provincial exuberance, it must be said the result is wonderfully successful.

The Nickelses, like the Lees and the Carltons, were famous for their opulent lifestyle. During the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, when American vessels had access to French and English ports, the plutocrats in their mansions on the hill never suspected that the flush times would soon end. It was the Embargo Act of 1807, forbidding commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign countries, followed by the War of 1812, that effectively terminated Wiscasset's two decades of prosperity.

Indelibly fixed in the folklore of the town is a story that seems too fantastic to have been invented. In the halcyon time when nail kegs filled with money from the sale of Moses Carlton's cargoes were pushed uphill in wheelbarrows from his wharf to his mansion on High Street, the arrogant shipowner tossed a gold ring into the Sheepscot River and boasted, "There is as much chance of my dying a poor man as there is of my ever again seeing that ring."(17) A few days later, when boning a fish at his dinner table, he was astonished to find the ring. Shortly thereafter, as a result of the prohibition on trade imposed by the embargo and the war; Carlton was ruined. He finished his life, still in his great house, dependent on the charity of his friends. Richard Hawley Tucker (1791-1867), for whom a brick house was built in 1834 on High Street next door to Carlton's, wrote to acquaintances in Boston, in November 1856,

on a very painful subject, Viz the almost utter destitution of our respected and venerable friends, Moses Carlton & Lady, who are without the most common necessaries of life, being entirely bare of all edibles and fuel save what the neighbors furnish.(18)

After Abigail Carlton died in December, Tucker wrote his son that "Mr. Carlton takes her death very hard indeed, at times it seems as if his heart would brake."(19) It is said that until Moses Carlton died, on January 5, 1857, one month after his wife, he was still wearing the stock and knee breeches of a Regency dandy.

In 1807, some months before the ruinous Embargo Act was passed in December, the town raised $6,000 for a new jail to replace the inadequate wooden jail that had been built in 1795 on what is now Washington Street. The site chosen was a bluff on Federal Street overlooking the bay, and the cornerstone was laid on August 1, 1809. When the jail was finished two years later, the total cost, including a barn and a wooden jailer's house, was approximately $22,600.(20) The four-square edifice, constructed of large granite blocks from the Edgecomb quarry across the river, has two floors and an attic, and its gray, somber aspect dramatically evokes its awful function [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIII OMITTED]. On each of the two floors there are three cells on both sides of a narrow corridor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XVI OMITTED], making a total of twelve cells, while the attic was arranged to accommodate debtors, women, and prisoners who were ill or deranged. The cells have massive iron doors with huge locks and grated windows without glass, and the only source of heat was a single wood-burning stove on each floor. The cells were equipped with wooden bedsteads, straw-filled bed sacks with bolsters, filth tubs, and buckets of lime. There were no concessions to comfort.

Although them were occasionally burglars and murderers, most of the prisoners were vagrants, drunks, and sailors who deserted their ships. Some of them scratched graffiti on the whitewashed walls of their cells. One sailor sketched a three-masted, full-rigged clipper ship with remarkable verisimilitude - a drawing that has survived for more than a century [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XV OMITTED]. Another culprit, probably also a sailor, inscribed a lachrymose poem, now barely legible, that ends with the lines: "And still he owns where ere his footsteps roam/Life's dearest blessings center all at home."

In 1839, after the jailer's frame house burned, an attractive brick residence for the jailer and his family, in late Federal style, was built adjacent to the jail. The proximity of the jailer's snug parlor [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIV OMITTED] as well as the tantalizing glimpse, through the barred windows, of distant blue hills beyond the river must have exacerbated the prisoners' misery.

News of the treaty with Britain that ended the war reached Wiscasset in February 1815, and in the ensuing decade the town resumed the business of lumbering and shipbuilding and, with its customary resilience, reestablished itself as a flourishing port. In 1824 the austerely beautiful Lincoln County Courthouse [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED] was erected at the north end of High Street, near the meetinghouse, on a site that commands the common and the town. The fireproof brick edifice replaced a makeshift frame courthouse at the lower end of the common that had served the county since 1798. The builder of the new courthouse was Tileston Cushing, a Boston housewright who had moved to Bath, Maine, after the War of 1812. The unornamented sides of the rectangular, two-story structure, measuring sixty-eight feet, have six bays each, while the handsome facade, with three bays, measures forty-four feet. The central entrance bay is semicircular with a brick half dome above a granite impost course. The windows flanking the entrance are enclosed by shallow piers with granite impost blocks supporting broad arches, and a square window in the pediment is framed by a shallow arch that echoes the entrance arch. The courthouse is crowned by an octagonal wooden belfry with an ogee-shaped roof. The cost of the courthouse, including $127.08 for rum and other spirits, was $10, 843.09.(21)

It appears that Cushing's inspiration for the Wiscasset courthouse was the plan and elevation for the considerably more elaborate courthouse shown in Plate 42 of The American Builder's Companion by Asher Benjamin and Daniel Raynerd.(22) One of Cushing's preliminary sketches, in the archives of the courthouse, shows pilasters on the second story beneath the pediment (which were eliminated in the final plan). They also appear in Benjamin's drawing. Except for a reduction in the scale of the building in Cushing's sketch, the two elevations are remarkably similar.

In the twenty or so years before the Civil War, Wiscasset's economic seesaw was gratifyingly elevated. Not only were a number of commodious new houses built, including an octagonal brick house on Federal Street, but several well-heeled gentlemen purchased old houses and, at considerable expense, "improved" them in high Victorian style. In 1858 a son of Moses Carlton's neighbor Richard Hawley Tucker, Richard Holbrook Tucker, who was a sea captain, merchant, and inventor, bought the house built for Silas Lee at the south end of High Street for $2,500 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. The large brick house, originally in the Federal style, has the unusual feature of prominent rounded wings or bays at both ends and has always had a Scottish aura. According to tradition the house was designed by Robert Stewart, a local man who is believed to have studied architecture in Scotland. A Tucker family legend has it that in the 1870s a Scottish servant, visiting with her mistress, remarked that the house resembled a Scottish castle, and subsequently the Lee-Tucker house has been known as Castle Tucker.

Shortly after acquiring the house, Tucker, whose family had made a tidy fortune in the cotton trade in South Carolina, carpeted and papered the rooms in the latest fashion and commissioned skillful trompe-l'oeil decorations for the halls. His most dramatic alteration was to encase the entire facade in an immense loggia that was probably inspired by the houses he had visited on his frequent sojourns in Charleston. However, unlike the Charleston prototypes, the porches at Castle Tucker were sealed with brick and glass for protection against the inclement Maine winters [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED].

Although at one time Tucker was dealing in lumber and coal, operating the largest brickyard in the county, and mining gold in Nova Scotia, he suffered severe financial reverses in the 1880s. To supplement the family's income, his wife Mary (1841-1922) translated French novels and took in summer boarders. After Tucker's death his descendants managed, with some sacrifices, to maintain the property, and in 1997 the present occupant, Jane S. Tucker, a granddaughter of Richard Holbrook Tucker, generously presented Castle Tucker to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities as a house museum.(23)

Conspicuous modifications to another stately house were made by the multitalented Alexander Johnston Jr., whose diaries reflect his humor and charm as well as his erudition. A shipbuilder, architect, horticulturist, amateur astronomer, and gourmet, he purchased the Carlton house in October 1858, soon after Moses Carlton's death, for $2,000, and immediately proceeded to move it some twenty-five feet to the north. In his zeal to modernize the house, he removed the portico and extended the entire center bay four feet beyond the main wall, joined the two windows on both sides of the entrance in projecting bays surmounted by heavy lintels and balustrades, and made other cosmetic changes, which from the purist's point of view coarsened the refinements of the Federal style [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].

Johnston and his wife occupied the Carlton house for almost twenty-four years. Eventually, in what seems to have been a Wiscasset tradition, he lost his fortune, and in June 1882 he reluctantly sold the house and rented the smaller brick house next door from the heirs of Richard Hawley Tucker. On June 14 he commented in his diary. 'Weather very favorable for our Hegira. The Tucker house is fast getting to look like somebody's home. Things grow cheerful inside and out." However, on June 16 he complained: "the doors are horrid - all swing outwards and are very ungain and clumsy to handle." Johnston lived in the Tucker house for eight years before his death in 1890, and like Moses Carlton and Richard Tucker he died a poor man. The present owner of the Carlton house, Logan Luke, acquired it in 1984 and, with sensitivity to the original architect's intent, restored much of its early nineteenth-century elegance [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED].

Certainly Wiscasset cherishes its past, and the town has retained, to a large degree, its nineteenth-century aspect. The First Congregational Church, which was dedicated in July 1909 [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED], is essentially a duplicate of the 1840 church that replaced the first meetinghouse. The 1840 building burned to the ground in December 1907. The new church occupies the exact site of the first meetinghouse on the crest of the common.

When Daniel Webster, despite his misgivings about the climate, visited Wiscasset for several days in October 1835,24 he must surely have been charmed by its arcadian setting and architectural panache. Actually, pace Webster, the weather is not infrequently benign. On December 31, 1875, Alexander Johnston wrote in his diary:

1 The Papers of Daniel Webster, vol. 3, 1830-1834, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1977), p. 85.

2 The manuscript diary is in the Wiscasset Public Library, Wiscasset, Maine. The sixteen volumes cover the years 1875-1890.

3 Quoted in Fannie S. Chase, Wiscasset in Pownalborough (Wiscasset Public Library, Wiscasset, Maine, 1967), p. 6.

4 Quoted ibid., p. 38.

5 Quoted ibid., p. 64.

6 Quoted ibid., p. 175.

7 Quoted ibid., p. 245.

8 Quoted in Isabel Erskine Brewster, Recollections (Concord, New Hampshire, n.d.), p. 116.

9 Quoted in Oakridge Smith, An Old-time Story (Boston, 1875), p. 330.

10 Quoted in Chase, Wiscasset in Pownalborough, p. 82.

11 Wiscasset, Maine, white Pine Series, vol. 12, no. 6 (Russell Whitehead, New York, 1926), p. 4.

12 William Davis Patterson, Wiscasset in Early Days: Historical Notes Pertaining to the old Town on the Sheepscot River (Printer Times Company, Bath, Maine, 1929), p. 31.

13 Quoted ibid., p. 29.

14 The biographical material about Codd is taken from Arthur J. Gerrier, "Nicholas Codd" in A Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Maine, vol. 6 (Maine Citizens for Historic Preservation, Portland, Maine, 1991), n.p.

15 Carlton's name is sometimes spelled Carleton.

16 Quoted in Genier, "Nicholas Codd."

17 Quoted in Chase, Wiscasset in Pownalborough, p. 273.

18 Letter to Mr. and Mrs. William T. Glidden in Special Collections, Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine.

19 Letter to Richard Hawley Tucker Jr., December 7, 1856, in Special Collections, Bowdoin College.

20 Prescott Currier, The Jails of Lincoln County 1761-1913 (Lincoln County Historical Association, Wiscasset, Maine, 1992), pp. 151-152.

21 Chase, Wiscasset in Pownalborough, p. 95.

22 (Boston, 1806), p. 63.

23 For more about Castle Tucker, see ANTIQUES July 1997, pp. 38, 40.

24 Papers of Daniel Webster vol. 4, 1835-1839, ed. Charles M. Wiltse and Harold D. Moser (1980), pp. 55-56.

WILLIAM NATHANIEL BANKS writes frequently about historic towns and houses and nineteenth-century artists.

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