Historic landmark in Bangor ready for new stewards

loading...

BANGOR – Old Maine houses often are named for the family that lived there last or longest. The original owners of most of a town’s stately historic homes are remembered only by history buffs and recorders of deeds. For the next generation at least, the red house on West Broadway in Bangor will certainly be Stephen King’s house – the name of the lumber baron who built it all but forgotten.

Consequently, the big house for sale atop Thomas Hill in Bangor is not known locally as the Joseph W. Low house. Today, it is the McEvoy house – the place Dr. Charles and Mary “Whit” Whittemore McEvoy, along with their four children, called home for almost 50 years.

For nearly a half-century, it was a bustling center of activity and activism, often full of music and visiting musicians, as well as politicians. The clay tennis court is a rare site in New England, but it was still being used last summer – women playing during the mornings, men in the early evenings.

The roots of the Penobscot Paddle and Chowder Society, the League of Women Voters of Maine, the Maine Democratic Party – to name but a few – can be traced to the 22-room McEvoy house.

It sits next to the Standpipe water tower, one of Bangor’s best-known landmarks. The house has been called “the best example of Italianate architecture in the United States” and offers a spectacular view of downtown Bangor, Brewer and beyond.

In the later 1980s, the house was featured in Down East magazine, and on a house tour sponsored by the Bangor Historical Society. It also is listed on the National Historic Registry.

“Our family has enjoyed its tenancy and stewardship here,” said Barbara McEvoy Bentley, the oldest of the four McEvoy children, during a recent tour of the house. “None of us lives in Bangor, so we’d like to find a new family who will live here and take over that stewardship for the next 50 years.”

Mary “Whit” McEvoy died last October at the age of 84 at home, surrounded by her three daughters. Charles McEvoy, a surgeon and former medical director at Eastern Maine Medical Center, died in 1989. The couple purchased the Low mansion, then considered to be a white elephant on the Bangor housing market, for $17,000 in 1956. The current asking price is $625,000.

Low, a wealthy native of Frankfort with interests in timberland, bought the land on Bangor’s highest point from Thomas Dwinel in 1856 with the intention of developing it as a residential district, according to material prepared by the Bangor Historical Society. Low’s subdivision failed to materialize, but he hired Boston architect Harvey Graves to design his home.

A Bowdoinham native, Graves designed at least two churches in the Queen City – the Union Street Methodist Church, now Grace United Methodist Church; and the Free Will Baptist Church, now the Essex Street Baptist Church. It was apparently through church connections that Low found Graves.

The octagonal cupola with plate-glass sash, like those formerly in Graves’ Bangor church towers, is a distinguishing feature of the McEvoy house. It can be reached through a trap door by way of a winding staircase.

Graves’ cupola, a modification of the widow’s walks familiar along the coast and inland waterways, was imitated by several other Bangor homeowners.

These days, trees obscure a view of the Bangor waterfront, and the water tower blocks a distant glimpse of Mount Katahdin – always a sore point with Whit McEvoy, who served on the Baxter State Park Advisory Committee.

Bentley remembered overnights with friends spent in the cupola, and a time when loose panes of glass allowed her and her friends to slide down the roof over the main section of the house to a flat roof over an addition, where they would sunbathe.

Low sold the house to in 1877 to Samuel R. Prentiss, who is credited with making some important alterations to the house, such as furnishing the library with wallpaper, oak furniture and bookcases.

Between 1886 and 1890, Prentiss added the William de Morgan tiles, which depict Aesop’s fables, around the fireplace, and a gas-electric chandelier a few years later. Bentley said that her father spent many happy hours in the room at the front of the house reading and listening to opera.

Prentiss eventually left Maine for California, but made one Western modification to his home before moving permanently. He had part of the long side porch, or piazza, enclosed at the turn of the century. He also built a two-story, four-window bay addition that included one of the first sun parlors in Maine.

The first night the McEvoys spent in the house, the entire family, including the baby, slept in sleeping bags rolled out on the window-seat cushions that were pulled onto the floor of the room.

“When our parents showed us where we were moving,” recalled Bentley, “we said, ‘Oh, no! We’re moving into the ghost house.’ We’d lived in a small house nearby and all the neighborhood kids called this the ghost house. … There was nothing in the living room but a piano and a pingpong table. Compared to the tiny house we’d moved from, this house was immense.”

Even by today’s standards, the house is very large. It has seven bedrooms, including those in the main house and the ones in the former servants quarters, a 16-by-27-foot living room, a dining room, library, sun parlor, kitchen (never modernized but with a functioning icebox), full basement, tennis court and three-story attached barn.

In the attic are a walk-in, cedar-lined storage closet and a game room with a slate snooker table – similar to a pool table, but with four pockets instead of six. The same pingpong table that once graced the living room now stands in the immaculate basement.

There are 52 storm windows and screens, and a numbered chart designed by Dr. McEvoy to keep track of them, along with extra slate pieces, brick, and everything necessary to repair the clay court. In the main house and the ell are eight fireplaces, seven working and one decorative.

“Dad used to keep the thermostat at 65 degrees and keep all the fireplaces going,” said Bentley. “Mom and Dad, along with us kids, did most of the work. A few years ago, she installed a new sink by herself. … I used to get up early and shovel the driveway before school, and I carried pipes out of the basement when Dad redid the plumbing.”

On a tour of her childhood home, Bentley referred to many of the rooms by descriptive names the family had given them.

“Nobody’s room” is a small room next to her parents’ bedroom where she and siblings would sleep when they were sick. The “curved wall room” is the first bedroom in the ell from the main house. The “big living room” and the “little living room” are what the original owner most likely called the parlor and sitting room.

The only fake fireplace is in her brother “Peter’s room,” and was installed by a previous owner whose daughter was jealous of her siblings who all had working fireplaces in their rooms. Next door is “Barbara’s room.” Outside the window is the Standpipe, and, after her mother had said, “Lights out,” her oldest daughter would go to the window and continue reading by the lights atop the water tower.

Like many American families, Bentley, a former teacher, and her siblings are scattered in distant places they now call home. Peter McEvoy is an entomologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Elizabeth McEvoy Ruksznis is a veterinarian in Dover-Foxcroft, and Gretchen McEvoy lives in Mexico City with her husband, Felix Aguilar.

Once the house is sold, Bentley is determined to continue at least one family tradition. Each year, the four McEvoy children and eight grandchildren plan to hike the seven miles to Russell Pond Campgrounds and spend a week together in Baxter State Park. The reservations for this summer already have been made.

For information on the McEvoy house, contact Walter Musson at Prudential Singleton Real Estate in Bangor.