The Bowman House

We were vacationing in midcoast Maine last week so I took the opportunity to visit Historic New England’s newest property, the Bowman House, with a few friends. We also saw the nearby Pownalborough Court House, which is one of the most extraordinary Colonial buildings I have ever encountered. The Bowman House is in Dresden, right on what was a very busy Kennebec River short at the time of its construction in the mid-eighteenth century. Now it sits amongst tranquil rolling lawn: this photograph is of the rear, of course; the front entrance looks upon the River.

The house is a very high-style Georgian construction, the type you see built in shipbuilding centers. It has a very charming air about it, partially provided by the architecture, but also by the restoration and decoration, which was the work of Bill Waters, who worked and lived in the house for decades. He died in 2016, after having donated the house to Historic New England with the qualification of lifetime tenure. So even though this house was built in 1762 for Joshua Bowman, a judge with Hancock connections, it really felt like Bill Water’s 21st century Georgian house: his personality shined through both his preservation efforts and his possessions. Since I’ve been working for Historic New England myself this summer, I’ve been thinking about the differences between the work of a tour guide and a professor, and one major one is that the work of the former is a lot more personal: you’re talking to and with smaller groups about more intimate stories rather than trends, causes and consequences. Historic New England’s interpretion focuses on the people who lived in its houses as much as their architectural history, and “Bill’s house” is a great example. (Although our guide did introduce us to local master builder Gershom Flagg, who built both the Bowman House and the Pownalborough Courthouses, and now I am obsessed!) Bill Waters came to the house through the Burrage sisters, Mildred and Madeleine, notable artists and world travelers who moved to Wiscasset in 1962 and became interested in the region’s historic architecture. In 1961 they purchased the Bowman House, and sold it to Waters several years later, and he and his life partner Cyrus Pinkham began their life’s (house) work. 

Bill Waters with Bowman descendant Florence Bixby and the Burrage Sisters in 1968 (Maine Historical Society), and more recently.

So let’s go into the house, shall we? You enter through a single-story sun room which was likely a nineteenth-century addition (the house served as the office for an ice-supply business in the later 19th century) and then into the kitchen and a series of first-floor parlors and dining room adjoining a spacious central hallway—wonderful reproduction wallpapers throughout, including the pillar-and-arch paper that I think is also in Hamilton House? Throughout his tenure, Waters worked to bring as many period-appropriate and/or Bowen furnishings into the house, and everything seems perfect and very colorful, but also very, very livable.

There are several spaces in which he seems like he just stepped away…….like the bar (above) and lots of whimsy, like the feathers on his canopy bed (below). Artful assembly throughout, and very special mirrors!

We exited through the sunroom, a very comfortable space which reveals Waters’ appreciation of trade signs (as well as his southern roots, represented by a small image of General Robert E. Lee) and then drove down the road to the Courthouse: wow! Photographs don’t quite represent the scale of this 1761 building.