If walls could talk … Bangor family’s historic home to be featured in TV program

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The Kent-Cutting Double House has long been one of Bangor’s more unique homes.

The 1833 structure soon will be known to all of America, as its story will air Sunday on “If These Walls Could Talk” on the cable channel Home and Garden TV.

That series, which airs at 10 p.m. on HGTV, shares lore and intrigue from houses rich in history. Many of the featured places have housed famous characters, while others are the sites of significant historical events. Some of the selected are simply filled with good stories or were home to everyday folks with colorful pasts.

The Kent-Cutting house certainly has a history. In the book “Greek Revival America” by Roger G. Kennedy, it was called “the most interesting double house in the Greek Revival style in the nation.”

It was designed by famed architect Charles G. Bryant and built for two lawyers, Edward Kent and Jonas Cutting. Kent went on to became governor of Maine and consul to Brazil, while Cutting became Chief Justice of the Maine Supreme Court.

The two young law partners were married to sisters, which may explain the connecting door on the first floor between the two halves of the double house.

The house, on the corner of Penobscot and Pine streets, has two faces as well. The side facing Penobscot Street was built in a grand Greek Revival style, with a bayed facade of recesses, columns, and even a pilastered loggia. At this time, Bryant still did his own wood carving.

But the back end of the house, facing Pine Street, is actually an earlier Cape Cod house, which had been relocated to the site. Creating a home in such a way had allowed two lawyers with ambition but not the means to make a statement.

“They believed in making a strong first impression,” Jean Deighan, the Kent-Cutting Double House’s current owner, said with a smirk. “Don’t they sound like lawyers?”

Deighan, herself a lawyer, comes into the house’s history a little later. After Kent and Cutting, the building was later owned by William S. Sawtelle, who perhaps saved the structure during the Bangor fire of 1911 by positioning men with buckets on the roof, ready to put out any sparks.

After the Sawtelles left, the building became subdivided into apartments and office space. Deighan’s father bought the property in the early ’50s and ran his dental practice from there. He was careful with the alterations that he made to it.

“My father agreed to let it be put on the National Register,” Deighan said. “He was always sensitive to the history of the house.”

Her father moved his practice to a new, modern building in the ’70s. After a number of occupants, Deighan and her husband, Glen Porter, bought the building in 1979.

“We were two young attorneys without two nickels to rub together,” Deighan recalled. “Glen’s whole monthly paycheck went to pay the oil bill.”

After 45 years of the building being broken into smaller pieces, the couple began pulling it back together. As each of their two children came along, they’d take back another apartment. Today, the 48 Penobscot St. address is where the family resides, while 50 Penobscot is the home of Deighan Associates.

While Deighan cautioned that you can never complete a historic home, “it’s pretty far down the line to what we would like it to be.”

So when the call came in June from the Greater Bangor Chamber of Commerce, which had been contacted by the show’s producers looking for houses, Deighan was ready, sort of.

“Candy Guerrette called from the Chamber looking for houses,” she said. “She said, ‘I know your walls talk.’ She and Sheila Pechinski and Martha Dudman, who I’m in Noontime Rotary with, all conspired against me. So I agreed, somewhat reluctantly.”

Deighan had already agreed to take part in the Bangor Museum and Center for History’s Historic House Dinner and the St. John’s Episcopal Church’s Home for the Holidays tour, so she figured, “If I’m going to wallpaper those last few spots, and shine it up, I may as well bunch it all together.”

Deighan e-mailed an application to the producers. She got the word two weeks before the film crew’s visit.

“We had to push hard to get ready for those people,” she said. “It was a scramble.”

Nor was everyone in the family sold on the idea.

“My son felt very invaded by this,” she recalled. “I told him that if you’re lucky enough to live in a house like this, that makes people curious, then you have an obligation to share it.”

The photographer and producer from High Noon Productions arrived at 9 a.m. and left at 7 p.m. on Aug 10, the first day of a planned family vacation.

“They would ask us an open-ended question, and when we would start to run down, they’d ask another,” Deighan said. “It was clear they had a formula, focusing on history and an artifact.”

“The team was very professional,” Porter added. “They had it together and focused.”

The artifact in Deighan and Porter’s case was a 1929 Moses Greenleaf map of Maine, which they had discovered in between walls during their renovations. The map, which had been covered in plaster dust, had been restored and hung in their map room.

At one point in the show, Deighan models some hats which had belonged to an earlier resident, which the couple had found in their garage.

“By the time I put the hat on, we’d been doing this for seven or eight hours, so I just didn’t care,” Deighan said.

Those nine hours of film ended up being boiled down into a seven-minute segment.

So how does the couple feel about the experience after viewing the finished product?

“I thought it was pretty good, an intriguing approach to the history of our house,” Porter said.

“It’s a beautiful house, and it should be shared,” Deighan added. “So I’m glad we did it.”

The Kent-Cutting Double House segment will be shown from about 10:10 to 10:17 p.m. Sunday. Another segment, on the Brewer home of Paul Norton and Scott Hamilton, will air on a date to be announced.