The Wabanaki, “the People of the First Light,” are the Indigenous Peoples of Wabanakiak, “The Dawnland,” which consists of the places we call Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, Prince Edward Island, Anticosti, Newfoundland, and the southern region of Quebec south of Saint Lawrence River. By archeologists’ accounts, the Wabanaki have been in this region for 13,000 years; oral history tells us that the Wabanaki have been of these lands since creation. Due to disease, war, dispossession, and the genocidal policies enacted by the United States government, the Wabanaki suffered a population decrease of 96% since Europeans’ first contact with Turtle Island (North America.) The many diverse tribes and bands across Wabanakiak have amalgamated into five principal Nations: the Mi’kmaq (derived from the word “Ni’kmaq” meaning “my kin friends,”) Abenaki (derived from “Wabanaki,”) Wolastoqiyik “People of the Beautiful River” (Maliseet), Panawáhpskek “Where the Rocks Widen” (Penobscot,) and Peskotomuhkati “Pollock-Searing People” (Passamaquoddy.)

The land, rivers and waterways have always been integral parts of Wabanaki identity and culture. They connected, fed and sustained the people’s communities. The natural world and its creation are part of Wabanaki celebrations, their rituals, their art and their music, and are at the core of their belief systems.

European wars and political upheaval were the context for more than 150 years of violent conflicts between the Wabanaki and the English (through their colonial government of Massachusetts), a seesaw of long stretches of deadly fighting and periods of uneasy peace. Treaties signed and quickly broken by both sides subjugated the Wabanaki with increasing force. The Wabanaki resisted by raiding homesteads and villages throughout midcoast Maine, killing and capturing colonists. Both sides collected human scalps as trophies. Surviving colonists fled south after periods of raiding but returned in ever-growing numbers each time relative peace returned.

Massachusetts built four forts along the Kennebec River, including Fort Richmond, located at the end of what is now the Dresden/Richmond Bridge and Fort Shirley, built less than a mile from today’s Bowman House. Wabanaki raids on colonists, including one in 1750 on Swan Island just two miles from Dresden, dwindled in number but continued through 1759.

In 1760, the Proprietors paid for prominent Boston architect Gershom Flagg, another Proprietor, to design and oversee the building of the large Pownalborough Courthouse on what had been the site of Fort Shirley. The following year, Flagg designed a home for another Hancock nephew sent north to take care of family business and legal interests, Jonathan Bowman.

After the last raid in 1759, the Wabanaki chose to survive by dispersing throughout the state and continuing their lives, enduring and overcoming centuries of repression and disenfranchisement. Today, four Maine tribes comprise the Wabanaki – the Maliseet, Micmac, Penobscot, and Passamaquoddy. The people live on tribal lands and in towns and cities across the State. Each community has its own tribal government, community schools and cultural center. Each manages its respective lands and natural resources. The Wabanaki culture is alive and well. The People of the First Light will always be an integral part of Maine.

Larger and more imposing than most of the houses nearby, the architectural style of the house is unadorned Georgian. Bowman furnished it with exquisite Chippendale-style furniture, Chinese export porcelain, and imported silver and glassware, creating a world of beauty and elegance far away from the rough reality and challenges of life on the Maine frontier. Receipts show that he continued buying for the house right up to his death.

In 1770, Jonathan Bowman married Mary Lowell Emerson, the widow of a ship captain. The family soon grew to include three sons and a daughter. By then, Bowman was Judge of the Courts and Probate, and a power behind most of what went on in the region. He had also grown his participation in shipping, including owning all or part of at least seven international trading ships.

Although it is difficult to imagine today, the Kennebec River was busy with shipping traffic through the early nineteenth century. Bowman ships carried vast amounts of lumber and salted fish down the Kennebec River to Baltimore and other southern ports, Liverpool, Leith, Glasgow, St. Kitts, and Eustatia. The ships brought back sugar, rum, whiskey, wine, coffee, chocolate, spices, linens, silk, cotton, sewing tools, knives, tobacco, tea, snuff, pipes, books, magazines, and manufactured goods.

Bowman had at least three Black servants, named Cicero, Boston, and Dinah. The documentation for Cicero and Boston suggests that they were both enslaved by Bowman. Cicero appears in accounts of expenses for medical treatment, shoes, and billing for his labor on a ship. He ran away from Bowman in 1775 to go to Cambridge, probably to join the Continental Army. Reuben Colburn, the man who sold Benedict Arnold shoddy bateaux for the ill-fated Quebec venture that same year, was hired to bring Cicero back. Boston appears in accounting of labor hours for ship work, and might be the same Boston who ran away from his owner in Connecticut in 1770 using false papers. Dinah appears in 1787 accounting from Bowman’s first cousin John Hancock for her board in Boston while the Bowmans’ daughter Mary was attending school there.

The Revolutionary War was a bitter civil war in Pownalborough, with roots in religious feuds as well as politics. Bowman and Cushing were descendants of seventeenth-century Puritan immigrants. Both were staunch Congregationalists who did not want the Anglican church in their community. Their former classmate Anglican Rev. Jacob Bailey was controlled by his patron, the wealthy Sylvester Gardiner.

Gardiner made enemies of Thomas and John Hancock when he used fraudulent legal methods to try to claim land they owned. His machinations ensured that Jonathan Bowman would become an even greater foe. Gardiner and Bailey were Tories. Bowman and (now Sheriff) Cushing, both patriots, became leaders of the Committee of Safety. After Bailey refused to read the Declaration of Independence to his congregation, local fighting intensified. Gardiner and Bailey were forced to flee to Canada. Bowman and Cushing remained in positions of power, with their prewar wealth intact.

Sylvester Gardiner wrote the only known contemporary description of Jonathan Bowman, describing him as tall and striking in appearance, with strong features and silver hair. He particularly noted Bowman’s clothing, described as a full black suit with silk stockings and large glittering shoe buckles.

Mary Bowman died in 1785. In 1798, sixty-three-year-old Bowman married thirty-three-year-old Nancy Goodwin, of the neighboring courthouse family. A condolence letter from Bowman to Nancy on the death of her brother Charles in 1790 shows a friendship well before their marriage. Jonathan Bowman died in 1804. Nancy outlived him by fifty-two years, and it is through her family descendants that Bowman furniture, objects, accounts, and correspondence were saved.

In 1950, Bill and Cyrus moved to Maine to help run Margaret Smith Company, a handbag company created by Cyrus’s sister that had become a runaway success. Through Bill’s designs and connections, the handbags became a fashion necessity sold in specialty stores and at Bonwit Teller through the 1970s.

They lived in a c. 1800 house in Damariscotta, Maine, that triggered Bill’s passion for historic preservation. He developed a network of experts in the museum and preservation fields who became trusted consultants and friends. He loved tracking down Bowman and other Maine pieces. In the late 1970s, Bill opened Lilac Cottage Antiques in Wiscasset, which he ran until his death in 2016.

Bill spent more than fifty years buying, collecting, and restoring Bowman House to its elegant eighteenth-century appearance. Just as Jonathan Bowman had done, Bill created a beautiful and sophisticated world tucked away in rural Maine.