Lecturer to describe relationship of China trade to coastal mansions

SEARSPORT — The Penobsoct Marine Museum will present a lecture titled, “The China Trade and Merchant Mansions of New England,” by Miriam Butts of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 12. The lecture will be held at the Douglas and Margaret Carver Memorial Gallery on the museum grounds.

The lecture and accompanying slide show will show the rapid rise throughout New England of merchant homes which owed their embellishments, and their very existence, to trade with China. The homes were located along the entire coast of New England in ports from Newport, R.I., to as far north as Columbia Falls. Their interiors reveal wallpapers, furniture, silver and porcelains collected by families caught up in the craze for things Chinese.

The slides also will be used to compare the China trade era with New England’s merchant homes of the Federal Period when harmony, proportion and elegant doorways indentified them as the pace setters of their day. The lecture will set the scene for a better understanding of the New England economy during the years 1784 to 1840, and underscore the importance of merchant risk and entrepreneurship and the civilizing influence of worldwide contacts.

Miriam Butts has been associated with the Museum of Fine Arts since 1950, and is guest instructor. She is a summer resident of Maine, past president and director of the Bustins Island Historical Society and, with her husband Charles, who is vice president of Houghton Mifflin, leads trips to Britain for the English Speaking Union. For the last 11 years she has been a director of Gallery on the Green, Lexington, Mass. She is co-author of “Foreign Devils to Canton, the Story of America’s China Trade” and “From Wharf to Waterfall, the Early Industrialization of America.”

Tickets for the lecture are $3, $1.50 for museum members. Refreshements will be served by Friends of the Penobscot Marine Museum after the lecture.