Just back from a long weekend in Wiscasset, Maine with family, lots of eating and drinking, house-hunting, and pumpkins. My stepson is working at an oyster farm in the region so we’re going to midcoast Maine pretty regularly, and this Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day weekend was of course a good opportunity to escape Witch City. We stayed in a lovely house in Wiscasset, one of Maine’s prettiest towns, and made regular trips up Route One to Damariascotta, which was holding its annual Pumpkinfest, complete with Pumpkin Queen, Pumpkin Drop, Pumpkin Derby, Pumpkin Regatta, and a main street embellished with large embellished and carved Pumpkins.

Wiscasset houses & shopping & Damariascotta pumpkins.

I worked at Historic New England’s Phillips House in Salem on Saturday and visited Historic New England’s Nickels-Sortwell House in Wiscasset on Sunday. It certainly has been an HNE summer for me! We spent so much time with the pumpkin festivities in Damariascotta that I turned up at Nickels-Sortwell at 3:00 pm: the last tour of the day on the last day of their season! Bad form on my part, and I apologized profusely, but of course my guide was  completely gracious and welcoming and eager to show off the house. Historic New England has two houses in Wiscasset: the very dramatic Castle Tucker and the very……..strident Nickels-Sortwell, and I had never been to the latter so I was thrilled to be able to squeeze it in this weekend. I always look at history and houses through a comparative Salem prism, and this was not difficult to do regarding the Phillips and Nickels-Sortwell Houses: both are Federal constructions which evolved into a Victorianized rooming house/hotel and then were restored with Colonial Revival inspiration by wealthy Yankee families.

I learned a lot about the house and the families who lived in it on my tour, but after we said our goodbyes I was still puzzled by the assertion of my guide that in the year of the house’s construction, 1807, “Wiscasset was the busiest port north of Boston.” Of course I couldn’t stop myself from contesting that statement: I think Salem was? Certainly Portsmouth and Portland were busier? She responded that she wasn’t sure but that was a pretty standard Wiscasset claim. And she’s right: I looked at all the the Wiscasset tourist and historical information on the web and there it was, again and again: Wiscasset was the busiest port north of Boston, Wiscasset was the busiest port east of Boston in 1807, the year of the Jefferson Embargo Act. This is clearly not true in terms of tonnage or voyages, but I’m wondering if “busiest” means something else? Shipbuilding and other maritime industries AND customs revenues? HELP early American maritime historians!