History in houses: Woodlawn in Ellsworth, Maine

Woodlawn, a splendid house in the neoclassical style, was built in the 1820s on a commanding site on Bridge Hill, overlooking the town of Ellsworth, Maine, and the Union River. The elaborate furnishings reflect the tastes of two men--the builder John Black, a self-made potentate, and his grandson George Nixon Black Jr., a wealthy aesthete and collector.

Little is known of John Black's background. He was born in Whitehaven, England, on July 31, 1781, and while still in his teens was employed as a clerk by Hope and Company, a London banking house with close ties to the affluent Baring family. In 1797, when Black was sixteen, the Hopes and Barings sent him to the United States, and in the District of Maine, then owned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the young Englishman came to play an increasingly significant role in land speculation and high finance.

In the early 1790s General Henry Knox (1760-1806), George Washington's secretary of war, had acquired some three million acres in the District of Maine. However, he was unable to meet the payments he owed to the Massachusetts Land Committee and appealed for help to his friend William Bingham (1752-1804), a wealthy Philadelphian. In 1793 Bingham assumed obligation for the payments and signed an agreement with Massachusetts for the transfer of title to the tract. In 1796 the twenty-one-year-old Alexander Baring (1774-1848), acting on behalf of the Barings and Hopes of London, arrived in Philadelphia and negotiated the purchase of a million of Bingham's three million acres.

It was the following year that John Black came from London for a brief stay in Philadelphia, where he was employed by a financial house that was a correspondent of the Barings. Alexander Baring kept an eye on him, and in December 1797 he wrote to London:

He appears to be a very steady young man.... He writes a good hand and may superintend the counting house work with a little instruction.... If Black behaves well we may be able to place him very comfortably sometime hence. (1)

In the spring of 1798 Baring sent Black to Gouldsborough on the northeast coast of Maine to represent the Baring and Hope interests and assist Bingham's agent General David Cobb (1748-1830), who had been an aide to General Washington during the Revolution.

Before the war, when Cobb had been a student at Harvard, he frequented the Blue Anchor tavern in Cambridge, where he became infatuated with the tavern keeper's daughter, Eleanor Bradish (1748-1818). A precipitate marriage legitimized the birth of their first child, and Eleanor subsequently bore Cobb ten more children. In 1795 Cobb moved his large family from Taunton, Massachusetts, to Gouldsborough, where he built a "comfortable" (2) house with funds provided by Bingham.

When John Black arrived in Gouldsborough he moved into General Cobb's house, and four years later, in 1802, he married Mary Cobb (1776-1851), the only one of Cobb's five daughters who was unwed. Hard-working, shrewd, and ambitious, Black assumed many of his father-in-law's duties. Realizing that Maine's prosperity was contingent not on farming, as Bingham and Cobb had hoped, but on lumbering, he aggressively promoted the lumber industry. In 1810 he moved to Ellsworth, some twenty-three miles west of Gouldsborough to become the local agent for the Bingham holdings.

A mercantile business and shipping interests, as well as lumbering, made Black a wealthy man. In 1820, the year that Maine became a state, General Cobb retired to Taunton, Massachusetts, to spend his remaining years in the house on the green he had inherited from his father. Black became the general agent for all the Bingham and Baring lands in Maine.

In the mid-1820s he built Woodlawn, and in 1827 the family moved into their spacious new house (see P1.II). In Maine, Woodlawn's only rival for domestic splendor was Montpelier, the handsome Federal style house that Cobb's friend the extravagant and gluttonous General Knox had built in 1795 in Thomaston and where he choked on a chicken bone and died in October 1806.

Woodlawn is brick, a building material rarely used in early nineteenth-century Maine where lumber was so plentiful. The two-story central mass is crowned by a low hipped roof with four large windows in each story of the principal facade, which is flanked by two almost identical one-story wings. The entrance door (Pl. IV) is an inconspicuous feature of the south wing. A design source for Woodlawn was the plate from Asher Benjamin's American Builder's Companion shown in Figure 1. (3)

The builder of the house is thought to have been Seth Tisdale (1803-1875) of Taunton, who came to Ellsworth as a house joiner in 1823. He would almost certainly have been known to General Cobb, who may have recommended him to his son-in-law. In any event, the builder made significant changes to Benjamin's design. Most notable is a one-story porch that extends the length of the central block, its roof supported by five slender columns with Ionic capitals. The roof is adorned with an ornamental balustrade, as are the roofs of the central block and the wings. Unlike the Benjamin design, the windows on each story of the central block extend to floor level, so that on a fine day one has easy access to the porch from the parlor and dining room.