History in houses: Woodlawn in Ellsworth, Maine

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by William Nathaniel Banks

Henry returned to Ellsworth in 1834, but his behavior was always erratic. The year after his father's death in 1856 he was committed to the Maine Insane Hospital, where he died many years later.

Mary Black died in 1851, and thirteen months later John Black married

Frances Wood (see Pl. III), a niece of Mary's and the widow of one of his business associates. In 1853 John, who was almost blind, transferred control of the family enterprises to his son George Nixon. After John's death in October 1856, George and his family moved from their house on Main Street into Woodlawn, where they lived for a few years with his stepmother until sometime in the 1860s, when George moved to Boston, returning only occasionally to Ellsworth. When Frances Wood Black died in 1974, George came into possession of Woodlawn. At his death in 1880, it was inherited by his son George Nixon Black Jr. (1842-1928).

George Black Jr. had entered Harvard in the class of 1864. However, trouble with his eyes obliged him to leave college after his freshman year, and in the fall of 1865 he sailed for Europe to spend a year in extensive travel. A lifelong bachelor, he maintained a house at 57 Beacon Street in Boston, and in 1882 he commissioned the prestigious Boston architects Robert Swain Peabody (1845-1917) and John Goddard Stearns Jr. (1843-1917) to build a shingle style "cottage" called Kragsyde in Manchester, Massachusetts. The architectural historian Vincent Scully has called the house a masterpiece and stated that the two architects "never again...created house of such quality." (7)

Gorge Black Jr. took immense pride in his grandfather John Black's achievements and in his great-grandfather General Cobb's exploits during the American Revolution. George Black Jr. came of age when fairs held to raise money for soldiers wounded in the Civil War featured so-called New England kitchens. Inaccurate and idealized as they were, these kitchens stimulated the burgeoning interest in antiques of the colonial period. The Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia also exhibited a New England kitchen "furnished with a mix of old tables, cradles, Windsor chairs, and a spinning wheel." (8) George Black Jr. virtually duplicated this kitchen, on a smaller scale, in the north wing of Woodlawn (Pl. X). His preference for the colonial revival reflected the taste of his era, inspired by books like Irving Whitall Lyon's Colonial Furniture of New England (1891) and Esther Singleton's Furniture of Our Forefathers (1901). Indeed, until the mid-twentieth century most collectors disdained Amenrican decorative art s of the classical period for being too nouveau and gaudy It is riot surprising then that at Woodlawn Black mixed windsor chairs, an eighteenth-century drop-leaf table, a spinning wheel, Queen Anne side chairs, eighteenth-century high chests and dressing tables, and a seventeenth-century blanket chest with his grandfather's mid-1820s furnishings. His bias is evident in his description of the architecture and decor of Woodlawn: "The furniture of the house is mostly Queen Anne and Georgian periods," (9) eliminating from his account his grandfather's classical objects. Fortunately, whatever his opinion of them, he left most of them in situ.