For sale: Former vice president’s home up for grabs in Bangor

BANGOR – What do you call a vice president’s house with three parlors, six bedrooms, 3 1/2 baths, marble mantelpieces, a mansard roof and a mother-in-law apartment?

A historic bargain at $449,000.

The home at the corner of Fifth and Hammond streets where Abraham Lincoln’s first vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, lived and perhaps died is being sold by the Bangor Theological Seminary.

Built in 1851, the house is on the National Register of Historic Places. In 1933, Hamlin’s heirs gave the house to the seminary, which has used it as a home for its presidents for more than 70 years.

A week before Thanksgiving, the Rev. William Imes, president of the seminary, moved across town to 782 Broadway into what is now the seminary’s President’s House. That farmhouse was owned by Margaret Colpitts Coffin, who died there on Jan. 30, 2005, at age 93.

The theology school had left its historic campus bordered by Union and Hammond streets in September 2005 and moved to the Husson College campus. Although his new home is not as close to his office as the Hamlin house was, Imes is less than a mile from the seminary’s new home.

Imes said Thursday the decision to put the house on the market was the result of “both a push and a pull.”

“The pull was that Connie [Coffin] Carter, who inherited the home from her mother, offered it to the seminary at a price we couldn’t refuse,” he said. “She grew up there, but it is zoned for commercial use. She didn’t want to sell it so that it could be torn down.

“The push,” Imes said, “was that the Hannibal Hamlin house is a big house that was way more than we needed for a residence for the president. It was an honor to own it, but maintaining it was a challenge. We’d like to get out of the challenge business.”

Hamlin served as President Abraham Lincoln’s vice president during Lincoln’s first term. He also served in the Maine House of Representatives, the U.S. House and Senate, and as governor of Maine.

Part of the challenge of owning a home on the historic registry is that every repair and upgrade must conform to specific standards. In addition to maintaining a structure that is more than 150 years old, complying with those standards is expensive, Imes said.

Imes declined to say exactly how much the seminary paid for the Coffin home, but said that it was about half the market value. The five-bedroom, 21/2-bath home and property is assessed by the city of Bangor at $209,500 for property tax purposes.

“The Coffin house is a classic, old Maine farmhouse with a Cape in front that faces the road and a back house,” Imes said. “It’s considerably less house than the Hamlin house, but it’s not a small house.”

He said that the seminary spent about $50,000 on renovations to the Coffin house that included installation of new windows, new kitchen appliances, tearing up carpets and linoleum so the hardware floors could be refinished and pulling down old wallpaper and painting. Imes said the seminary also cut down many of the trees that hid the house from Route 15.

The Coffin family owned much of the land now on the corner of Broadway and Husson Avenue. It sold a portion of the land several decades ago to Ross Manor. The new home of the seminary president is the first house on Broadway after Ross Manor.

The first official functions at Imes’ new home will be held later this month when he hosts the annual holiday luncheons for faculty and students.

Imes was the first seminary president in nearly 20 years to live in the Hamlin house when he took the job in 2001. The two previous presidents, the Rev. Ansley Coe Throckmorton and the Rev. Malcolm L. Warford, lived in homes that they owned privately.

“I valued my time in the Hamlin home as an opportunity to live in his house, but it was a lot like living in a museum,” Imes said. “There were three rooms we almost never used.

“I will miss the view,” he continued. “There is a most spectacular view of the city from the Hamlin house, but there’s a nice view from our new house. We can see the hills beyond Bangor very nicely from here.”