There are plenty of historic houses in Maine. There’s the Montpelier estate in Thomaston, where Gen. Henry Knox lived. (He became the first secretary of war in President George Washington’s cabinet.) Today’s building is a replica built in 1929; the original was built in 1794.
Then there’s the Sarah Orne Jewett House in South Berwick where the writer was born and lived. Also in South Berwick is the Hamilton House — built for shipping merchant Jonathan Hamilton, overlooking Salmon Falls River.
But the most famous of all, according to the home design site HouseBeautiful, is probably not just one of this state’s, but the nation’s, most well-known historic houses. Of course it’s the Olson House in Cushing.
This is the place where Andrew Wyeth painted the famous “Christina’s World” in 1948, which is now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The home, meanwhile, is owned by the Farnsworth Art Museum, which describes how Wyeth’s “series of drawings, watercolors and tempera paintings featuring Christina Olson, her brother Alvaro and the house itself, occupied Wyeth from 1939 through 1968.”
HouseBeautiful gave the Victoria Mansion in Portland an honorable mention. Built as a summer home for Ruggles Sylvester Morse, a luxury hotel proprietor, its website says it “is widely recognized as the most important expression of the Italian villa style in American domestic architecture.”
What is your favorite historic home in Maine?