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The Henry & Sarah Fitts Tallman House
by Robin A. S. Haynes
A white sentinel stands high on a hill, looking down on the city of Bath and the Kennebec River. The cupola suggests to the observer that there are great views to be had from on high. The wraparound porch invites stopping to consider the day. The crisp moldings and defining decorative elements tempt one to contemplate the sophisticated design that must surely continue inside. The Henry and Sarah Fitts Tallman House on High near North Street is a collection of opportunities to get lost in the different perspectives that make architectural history and historic preservation fascinating fields. This carefully preserved and maintained home is an exercise in the geometry of Greek Revival, a lesson in changing building technology, and a story of people – fortune and adversity. This article only hints at the historical and architectural wealth of this home.
The place to begin is with the structure’s stunning physical appearance. The hallmark of the Greek-Revival style rests in its combination of simple, strong massing and subtle detailing, all largely derived from classical antecedents in the Mediterranean. The architectural fashion owes its popularity to many intersecting trends in American history – the popularity of classical culture in education of the early nineteenth century, the identification with Greece as the birthplace of democracy, the sympathy of a new nation with the Greeks fighting their own war of independence from Turkey, the desire to impose a human order on the chaotic cultural landscape of the new republic, and the new and growing availability of pattern books that illustrated the ways and means of seeing, understanding, and reproducing Greek-Revival elements. These architectural elements have stamped an indelible mark on Bath’s landscape. Coinciding with the heyday of wooden shipbuilding in the city and its greatest period of growth, many wanted to build in the current mode. The style’s characteristic adaptability becomes of particular importance in places like Bath where the Tallman house and the William D. and Eleanor R. Crooker House on South Street stand cheek to jowl with much simpler interpretations such as the William and Hepzibah Winslow House, a gablefronter on Middle near Union. Here is a fashion that allowed people to pick and choose the amount of detailing that they preferred and could afford.
The two-story Tallman house suggests that at some point someone could afford a wonderful assortment of detailing. Its application demonstrates a designer with a sensitive eye to repetition. On the front façade of the main block, the tripartite arrangement of sidelights and front door echoes in the upper stories with the three sections of both the central second-floor window and the cupola windows. Fluted columns support the wraparound porch, the corners of the main structure, and the tripartite elements just mentioned. Bull’s-eye corner blocks accent the window frames inside and out. A double set of paired chimneys rise from the hipped roof, standing like soldiers on guard around the cupola. The sharp lines and intersections of the entablature and column capitals, especially the abacus [that uppermost section of the capital, often a plain, square slab] demonstrate the beauty of shadow lines and profiles when painted completely in the classic white of the style. The building celebrates the man-made imposition of rationality and geometry onto the irregular rocky Maine landscape. To show the depth of that mathematical order, just listen to a few lines from one of the most popular of pattern books, Asher Benjamin’s The American Builder’s Companion of 1827:
To draw the Doric Order. Divide the whole height into sixty-five equal parts, six of which are the diameter of the column, just above the base; the column, including base and capital, is nine diameters high; the entablature is one diameter and fifty-two minutes high.
The interior is full of similar delights, and some surprises. The most public rooms, the pair of double parlors on either side of a central hall, possess the most elaborate detailing. The parlor openings are foreshadowed by the arched opening, complete with fanlight transom, from the central front hall into the latter portions of the house. The graceful curving stairs made popular during the Federal style of architecture begin with the tight curl of the newel post and pull the eye and the visitor upward even into the curving flight that accesses the cupola. But the glorious light and proportion of the triple-sash windows draw one into the parlors. Here each set of formal rooms is divided by a tripartite arcade of arched openings whose arrangement again echoes the arrangement on the front façade. Their pocket doors, unusually, do not slide into the wall, but through the magic of counterbalances rise into the wall partitions of the second floor where small openings still allow access to the workings. The north pair of parlors feature handsome fireplaces with black-marble surrounds. The Ionic volutes in black seem contemporary in their simplicity and strength. The south parlors are complemented by white-marble mantels that repeat the lines of many Greek-Revival doorways—simple pilasters and a lintel anchored by a central raised panel. To quote once again from Benjamin Asher:
Ornaments should neither be too frugally employed, nor distributed with too much profusion; their value will increase, in proportion to the judgment and discretion shown in their application.
So it appears that discretion and judgment ruled here. Accordingly, the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) under a continuing program of the National Park Service has documented the house.
While it is possible to continue at length about the architectural detailing of this home, other opportunities would be missed to discuss more homely and important aspects of this structure. Some remnants of earlier technology tantalize the viewer with reminders of the way life used to be. For example, a beehive oven remains in the room behind the current kitchen, as do adjoining set kettles. Set kettles are well explained in Joyce Bibber’s A Home for Everyman: The Greek Revival and Maine Domestic Architecture. These were, in her opinion, a “common local variation of [Count] Rumford’s ideas.” Rumford, a Massachusetts native who fled America in the early days of the Revolution, is the individual whose investigation of heat and its efficient production modified the shape of fireplaces. Rumford like his well-known contemporary in research, Benjamin Franklin, is part of a central American tradition of invention. Rumford’s work and publications also considered the design of roasters and boilers as extensions of the fireplace masonry that would then create various cavities for different sorts of cooking. Asher Benjamin’s pattern books illustrated these innovations by Rumford as well as the proper technique for drawing the underlying ellipse for a graceful set of stairs. Bibber notes that although Rumford conceived of these “boilers” and accompanying fireboxes as accessories for the cook, the inhabitants of Maine more often placed these kettles in rooms adjacent to the kitchen at a height that suggests that the resulting hot water was used for laundry rather than food preparation. The survival of these evocative artifacts from a long-gone technology is rare and should be treasured as dearly as those remarkable rising doors. While possibly a part of the original house, the set kettles are more likely a result of the reworking of the house about 1842.
That reworking is part of the troublesome and still somewhat mysterious history of this house, long considered largely the product of Henry Tallman’s changing financial status. And that is partially true, but to try and begin at the beginning . . . At this time, deed research seems to indicate that Hezekiah Wyman first bought land in this area in 1820 for $120.00 from Labon and Mary Loring. The descriptions of neighboring parcels bought from Luke and Thomas Lambard indicate that by 1825 Wyman and his wife Deborah French Smith Wyman had built a home on the original lot.* This larger assemblage of property was probably over ten acres reaching from the Philbrook Farm to the North Commons where the athletic fields now stand. This was not the only land that Wyman owned; there was for example, the “Commercial House” at “Wyman’s Corner” —Washington and Centre Streets where Wyman’s mercantile establishment stood. The pages and pages of property transactions in the assorted deed indices suggest that land speculation and financial arrangements, i.e. the offering of mortgages, presented Wyman with lucrative opportunities. His will of 1827, being of “feeble body and sound mind and memory” anticipated his death by only a few months. The details of Wyman’s estate are instructive and intriguing.
He leaves bequests in the total amount of $3200.00 to assorted relatives – children by his wife’s first marriage and those of his siblings, by and large. Some are to receive their money in two or three years after his death, with interest. Others are to wait ten. His “beloved” wife is left half of his total estate after all debts and estate expenses are settled. And the remainder is to go to the town of Bath for charitable purposes, helping not just the local “industrious poor,” but also those of neighboring communities. Not wishing to endorse extravagance, no one is to receive more than $12.00 a month. What has happened to the “Wyman Charity Fund?” The probate inventory indicates a substantial estate, totaling $31,762.27. Just considering the inflation factor, that figure translates to holdings valued over $500,000 today. If the increased value of land were part of the equation – well, what would ten acres of Bath real estate be worth today? The assorted financial notes and mortgages of others he held at his death took over three pages to list. The range of goods held at the store is a story in and of itself for another day. Under the real estate portion of the inventory, his home lot, “Mansion house and barn” were assessed at $1800.00. The town valuation for the widow in coming years calculates the property to be worth $2200. While this is not the highest assessment in town, it is a sizeable figure for the day. The 1832 map of Bath shows a footprint very close to that of the present-day house, suggesting that the bulk of the structure was in place by the mid-1820s. Deborah Wyman remains in the “mansion house” on High Street until 1842 when she sells it to Henry Tallman and he mortgages the property to her for $2400.
Henry Tallman, born in Bath in 1806, was the ninth child of Peleg Tallman and his wife Eleanor Clark. He went off to Boston at the age of twelve, for boarding school. He attended Bowdoin College for two years, not graduating. Others in attendance at that time included Longfellow and Hawthorne. He studied law at Harvard but didn’t finish the program there either. He was admitted to the bar in 1833, the same year he married Sarah Fitts. She was his father’s choice of possible mates for Henry according to the 1935 Tallman family history by William Emery. Peleg reportedly said that he would leave him a half-million dollars if he married this daughter of a respected local family. Henry practiced law and acted as the County Attorney for Lincoln County for a few years. Then Peleg Tallman died in 1841 and indeed, left his son a fortune. Emery estimates the amount at only $250,000.00 or so. If that number is in 1841 dollars, it is over 4 million dollars today. Even if Emery is quoting a 1935 equivalency, it is still over 3 million. It was widely thought that Tallman was the wealthiest man of his age – 35 years—in Bath. That seems likely at these numbers.
With this money came opportunities to spend it, so Henry and Sarah Tallman bought the Wyman mansion and refurbished the home to their new financial status in life. The Bath Daily Times of January 15, 1915 reported that they added the piazza, the cupola, and a remarkable garden from which a ginkgo still survives, and remodeled the interior. Certainly the pocket doors, possibly the striking mantels in black and white, the large triple-sash windows, and other elaborations date from this reworking. But it seems possible and even likely that the basic hipped-roof rectangular block of Federal proportions and rear ell were constructed for the Wymans.
Even discounting for the subjective nature of a family history, Tallman comes across as a kind and gentle man, intelligent, respected as an orator and upstanding lawyer. Evidently among his skills was not any sense of business acumen. By 1849 the fortune was largely gone, inconceivably gone in eight years. His friends tried to help the family with their three children by seeing that Tallman was appointed Attorney General of Maine for a few years. The establishment of another law firm by Tallman and two partners followed. Then in 1856 Sarah dies at the age of forty-eight. One wonders if the financial embarrassment was too much for the daughter of the respected Bath family that Peleg sought for his son.
The following year Henry sells a large portion of his property, including the Greek-Revival mansion for $16,000 to Henry Richardson, a resident of Boston. Taxes assess the value of the house lot and structures alone, at $7500 that same year. Tallman and his brand-new wife Elizabeth Wilkinson, eighteen years his junior and clearly his choice now, travel to Texas considering a move, but return to Bath and move to another structure on the outskirts of the property. They reside in a small home at the corner of North and Oak Grove, thought to be the gardener’s quarters originally. William Emery records that Elizabeth wrote that they had no money and no maid. She was required to do all of her own housework, but found it didn’t matter, that they were content with each other. The happy-ever-after ending happened after all. In his later years Tallman became a judge, serving for sixteen years. He also underwent a religious conversion that convinced him of the importance of the temperance movement. He and Elizabeth had two children of their own. Dying in 1885 at the age of 79, he suffered with a cancer of the lower lip in his last weeks. Emery’s history marks that he always wore a handkerchief over his lower face in public during those days – an odd dissonant echo of his classmate Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil.
Richardson owns the house and property for only seven years, selling off a large chunk in the intervening time. In 1864, a time of depressed real estate prices in Bath, he and his wife Frances sell the Wyman-Tallman house to William F. Moses for $7300. Moses was a son of William Vaughn Moses, a tinsmith who came to Bath with his brother Oliver just as Hezekiah Wyman is assembling this large parcel on High Street. They eventually create a shipbuilding concern that does quite well. In later years the brothers dissolve their partnership and each establishes another firm with their sons. William Freeman Moses buys this home three months before his marriage to his second wife Frances Larrabee takes place in October. Here too may be the happy ending of second marriages like the Tallmans since they spend all of their married life here. And like Hezekiah Wyman, the Moses are interested in philanthropy. Fanny Moses acted as an early trustee of the Orphan’s Home and the Old Ladies’ Home. Moses’ daughter left money to both the high school and the library. Frances Larrabee Moses dies in 1910; William F. Moses in 1916 after living over fifty years in the house on the hill.
The house still stands as a witness, looking down on Bath and the Kennebec River, testifying to the importance of the Greek-Revival style both in a booming town and a young nation seeking a cultural identity. The high sentry speaks of the technological changes and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century in its surviving “modernizations.” The wooden and glass spectator sees the rise and fall of family fortunes, the fall and rise of families themselves. Just one house in Bath can be a book in itself, leading into the complexities and ironies of life and culture in the city, or even the nation. Just one beautiful house can be a world of history.
Volume six of Samuel Melcher’s account books document that Melcher, a notable master builder of Brunswick, and his various apprentices did work for Hezekiah Wyman in April and September of 1821. There are specifics of:
setting 14 panes of glass, needing 25 feet of Joists, 7 pieces
of timber 21 feet long, 2 pairs of hinges, and a little more.
Clearly not enough to indicate the construction of an entire house, these jottings may refer to an expansion or remodeling of the house or store, Insufficient details mean that this will remain frustratingly unanswered.
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© Copyright 2001 Sagadahoc Preservation Inc.
