A Shipping Merchant’s Country Seat

Jonathan Hamilton (1745-1802) was a Berwick, Maine, (then still a part of Massachusetts), native who rose from humble beginnings to become the most prominent merchant in the region by the mid-1780s. Hamilton began his mercantile career selling local fish and timber. During the American Revolution he amassed a fortune through privateering ventures that allowed him to expand his business into shipbuilding, timber harvesting, partial ownership of local mills. He also owned sugar plantations on the island of Tabago, West Indies, from which he imported rum and molasses, and participated in the slave trade.

Hamilton’s base of mercantile activity was centered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he rented wharf space and owned a chandlery shop with his partner Mr. Lord. In 1783 he purchased land at Pipe Stave Landing on the Salmon Falls River in Berwick. An advantageous location for loading and building vessels, the parcel of land already had a long history of local use. In fact, prior to the Hamilton purchase, the site had belonged to David Moore. According to Moore’s 1777 probate inventory, a house, a wharf, and ways for building vessels were present on the property. Moore’s house burned several years before Hamilton purchased the property, but the wharf and ways remained intact for use by the new owner.

A Family Farm

In 1839 Hamilton House was purchased by Aipheus Goodwin and his wife Betsy. The Goodwins were farmers and, as New England’s economy shifted away from shipping and toward agriculture, it was fitting that the town’s landing now became a family farm.

Several generations of the Goodwin family raised sheep and a variety of other crops at Hamilton House. Although the family enjoyed several decades of prosperity, the New England agricultural economy began to suffer from western competition toward the end of the nineteenth century. As a result, the family’s resources diminished and the house fell into disrepair. With growing opportunities for well-paid factory work in South Berwick and surrounding towns, and agriculture on the decline, the Goodwin family decided to sell the farm.

A Colonial Revival Summer Estate

The Goodwins could afford to make few changes during their tenure in the house, making it a preserved example of early architecture. The old-fashioned look of the house endeared it to local author Sarah Orne Jewett, who feared it might be torn down if sold to the wrong buyer. In 1898 Jewett convinced her friend Emily Tyson (shown, left, with Jewett), widow of the president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and her stepdaughter Elise Tyson (later Mrs. Henry G. Vaughan) to purchase the house. The Tysons were part of a new wave of summer residents who were caught up in the Colonial Revival romance of owning country houses which reflected the grace and prosperity of colonial forebears and provided a healthful rural retreat away from the heat and pollution of cities.

The Tysons hired Herbert Browne of the Boston architectural firm Little and Browne to oversee some interior changes and to design additions to the west and east sides of the house. The Tysons also embarked on creating a grand Colonial Revival-style garden at the east side of the house encircled by an elaborate pergola. All major work was completed by 1900. Important additions to the property made in the following decade included murals painted in the parlor and dining room of the house by George Porter Fernald and the construction of a charming garden cottage fitted with interior paneling salvaged from a colonial home in Newington, New Hampshire. Luckily, Elise Tyson was an accomplished amateur photographer whose photographs of interior and garden views provide a rare and wonderful documentation of the early years the ladies spent at the property.

Becoming a Museum

Elise Tyson Vaughan bequeathed Hamilton House and its gardens, outbuildings, and surrounding fields to Historic New England in 1949. She left the adjacent woods to the state of Maine in the name of her late husband, Henry Vaughan. Today the woods have many popular hiking trails and are maintained as Vaughan Woods State Park.

Shortly after Historic New England acquired the property, the garden pergola, which had fallen into disrepair and was nearly destroyed in a hurricane, was removed. The architectural additions made in the Tyson era, including the kitchen wing on the east side of the house and the bedroom and porch on the west, were also removed to reveal the house in a form more closely reflecting Jonathan Hamilton’s occupation. Although we may regret the removal of these architectural elements today, they were, at the time, in keeping with current attitudes toward preservation and restoration to early periods (at the expense of later additions) prevalent in the 1950s.

Reviving the Colonial Revival

In 1987 Historic New England embarked on a project to recapture the Tysons’ Colonial Revival vision of Hamilton House. The bases of the restoration were interior and exterior photographs of the house and gardens taken by Paul Weber for a series of articles published in House Beautiful magazine in 1929. Major garden restoration began in 1992 and continues today.