History in towns: Wiscasset, Maine

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1998 by William Nathaniel Banks

In 1807, only two years after the completion of the house, Joseph Wood traded it to Moses Carlton [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED],(15) a wealthy shipowner, for a hundred casks of rum, which Wood, who was in straitened circumstances, sold for $12,000. Since Carlton and his wife, Abigail [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], occupied the house for half a century, he was the eponymous owner of what is still known as the Carlton house. The three-story residence begun for Joseph Woods brother, Abiel Wood Jr., on High Street in 1811 has also been attributed to Codd, although it was still unfinished when Codd returned to Boston about 1818.

The most dazzling house attributed to Codd and, indeed, the most extraordinary house in Wiscasset was begun for Captain William Nickels in 1807 on the Main Street lot once occupied by the Kingsbury house. The Nickels-Sortwell house (frontispiece and [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED]) is three stories high with a three-story wing attached to the left rear; and, like all the grand Federal houses of the town, it has a flushboard facade. The center bay has a balustraded one-story portico supported by colonnettes of the composite order. Above the portico is a Palladian window, and, crowning the composition on the third story, a half-round double-arched window has both radiating and oval muntins. Framing the three central bays of the upper two stories are Corinthian pilasters set above an arcaded base. In the entrance hall the spectacular elliptical staircase that rises to the third floor is lit by a shallow dome with a skylight [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED]. The large parlor to the right of the entrance [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED], with a mantel composed of multiple colonnettes, extends the entire width of the house.

Nickels's son, in a letter written in 1858, stated that his father "procured one of the best architects that the State had at that time produced" in his determination to surpass the grandeur of Moses Carltons house [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE I OMITTED].(16) Unfortunately, he failed to name the architect, but Codd is a likely candidate. If the Nickels house, which was completed about 1812, seems a virtual catalogue of Federal motifs applied with a provincial exuberance, it must be said the result is wonderfully successful.

The Nickelses, like the Lees and the Carltons, were famous for their opulent lifestyle. During the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, when American vessels had access to French and English ports, the plutocrats in their mansions on the hill never suspected that the flush times would soon end. It was the Embargo Act of 1807, forbidding commercial intercourse between the United States and foreign countries, followed by the War of 1812, that effectively terminated Wiscasset's two decades of prosperity.

Indelibly fixed in the folklore of the town is a story that seems too fantastic to have been invented. In the halcyon time when nail kegs filled with money from the sale of Moses Carlton's cargoes were pushed uphill in wheelbarrows from his wharf to his mansion on High Street, the arrogant shipowner tossed a gold ring into the Sheepscot River and boasted, "There is as much chance of my dying a poor man as there is of my ever again seeing that ring."(17) A few days later, when boning a fish at his dinner table, he was astonished to find the ring. Shortly thereafter, as a result of the prohibition on trade imposed by the embargo and the war; Carlton was ruined. He finished his life, still in his great house, dependent on the charity of his friends. Richard Hawley Tucker (1791-1867), for whom a brick house was built in 1834 on High Street next door to Carlton's, wrote to acquaintances in Boston, in November 1856,