The Preservation of Castle Tucker

THE PRESERVATION OF

CastleTucker Jane Tucker, the granddaughter of a Wiscasset ship captain, has worked tirelessly to save her ancestral home—the village’s most distinctive—for future generations.

BY REGINA COLE | PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN VANDEN BRINK

JaneTucker is a genuine heroine. Because of the deter-

mination, hard work, and sacrifice of this woman “from away,” a significant portion of the history and culture of coastal Maine is writ large and available to all at Castle Tucker in the village of Wiscasset.

Now 92 and retired, Tucker grew up in California, far from her family’s 200-year-old ancestral homestead. As a young woman, she developed a promising career that took her all over the world; moving to Maine was not part of the plan.

“But it was always understood in our family,” she said, “that at some point someone was going to have to go to Maine to look after my aunt and to take over the house. I was the only single family member, so I began to realize that ‘someone’ probably meant me.”

An impressive house (if a bit confusing as to historic style), Castle Tucker is a huge, rambling structure crowning a prominent hill overlooking the Sheepscot River. It was built as a four-square Federal

by Judge Silas Lee in 1807, when the town was one of the busiest ports east of Boston. Lee’s death in 1814, combined with the stunning effects of the Jefferson Embargo, forced his widow to sell.

The embargo, a response to ongoing French and British acts against the new republic, collateral damage from the Napoleonic Wars, outlawed all foreign trade between 1807 and 1812. Bitterly opposed by New England’s vital shipping industry, the embargo brought activity to an abrupt halt: fleets of merchant ships lay at anchor, shipping chan-

Wiscasset’s Castle Tucker, overlooking the Sheepscot River, was built in 1807 as a four-square Federal home.

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Jane Tucker, who grew up in California, has made a third career out of preserving her family’s homestead, and with it a sizeable slice of coastal Maine history.

The Rococo Revival furniture in the parlor has its original upholstery.

A magnificent floating staircase dominates the entrance hall.

nels silted up. Thriving ports like Salem, Portsmouth, and Wiscasset plunged into poverty, never to fully return to their Federal glory.

In 1858, following a series of owners, Captain Richard Tucker, scion of a Wiscasset shipping family, bought the property for himself and his young bride. To the pedimented three-story house with two-story bows at each end, he added a wing, and, with dramatic panache, encased the façade with a two-story loggia lit by enormous windows. He bought furniture for his growing family in Boston; he hung new paintings and wallpapers on the walls. Locals began to call the big house looming up on the hill “Tucker’s Castle;” the family formalized the appellation by reversing the words.

Eventually, Wiscasset’s economy declined and the Tucker family money dwindled away. The latter was hastened

by Captain Tucker’s unfortunate investments in a passion: new steam technology. Jane Tucker’s aunt, Captain Tucker’s daughter, inherited the property; she rented rooms to summer visitors to try to make ends meet.

In 1957, Jane Tucker moved to Boston to be closer to her aging aunt,

The semi-circular cabinetry around the kitchen sink was built in 1858.

The rug in front was custom braided to fit the space.

Even the billiard table is true to form.

spending her weekends in Wiscasset.

Before that, she had only visited once or twice. After her aunt’s death in 1964, she and her sister inherited the estate, but with a family and home in the west, Tucker’s sister could offer only moral support.

The sisters considered selling the house.

“We hoped the house could be a home for a family with money and taste,” Tucker recalled. “But the offers we got were from someone who wanted to turn it into a nursing home, from a school that would have housed students

Castle Tucker was a rarity: a layered, entirely intact time capsule with original Federal elements, Rococo Revival furniture, and Anglo-Japanese wallpaper. here, and from a gentleman who spent five minutes looking at the house and then carefully paced the property boundaries. He wanted to tear it down and develop the land for house lots.”

Castle Tucker is now owned by Historic New England, which maintains it as a museum.

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None of that seemed appropriate, so Jane Tucker bought out her sister, moved into the house, and devised ways to keep the property intact. In Boston, she had taken courses and attended lectures at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). In Wiscasset, she befriended Maine artist and pioneer historic preservationist Mildred Burrage. She became an active member of the Wiscasset Historical Society and volunteered to document its collection.

What she learned convinced her that Castle Tucker was a rarity: a layered, entirely intact time capsule with original Federal elements, Rococo Revival furniture, Anglo-Japanese wallpaper, and nearly every object ever owned by a frugal family. She came to see that the history of Castle Tucker mirrored the economic history of Maine, with its giddy booms and long periods of slow decline,

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Woven fans speak of the Anglo-Japanese Movement of the 1870s.

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its growing tourist trade and harbors abandoned to rotting sailing ships. A career as an accountant for an engineering firm had taken her to Alaska, Germany, and the Middle East; growing up, she had worked with her astronomer father on a California mountaintop, but now Jane Tucker embarked on a new career: she would see to it that Castle Tucker would become a museum open to the public.

“All by herself,” said Nancy Carlisle, curator at Historic New England (formerly The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities), “she turned this enormous house into a professionally managed property.

She organized the contents in a way that made sense, trained herself to be an incredibly sophisticated historian, and gave tours of the house. What I admire was that she did not do it to glorify family history, like so many who got involved in historic preservation before her. As she researched,

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T H E P R E S E R VAT I O N O F C A S T L E T U C K E R Jane Tucker learned that she was working toward something bigger.

And, she did staggering amounts of manual labor.”

“I actually like to do physical work,” Jane said about her new set of skills.

“Well, there was no other way to get it done, really.”

Early on, Tucker offered the house to SPNEA, which owned several house museums in New England, including the Nickels-Sortwell House, whose elegant facade dominates the main street of Wiscasset. They rejected her gift because she could offer no accompanying endowment to manage the property.

Undeterred, Tucker began to charge admission for house tours and lived with extreme frugality while she slowly nursed a small nest egg until it became an endowment-sized fund. In 1997, she gave the house, its remaining land, and the contents of the interior; her inventory, maintenance, and research documentation; and an endowment to SPNEA.

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“Jane Tucker made a serious commitment to the future,” said Earle G. Shettleworth, Historic Preservation Officer for the State of Maine. “Her approach is a model of responsible stewardship.”

Shettleworth first met Tucker around 1968. “I came to interview Mildred Burrage about the history of Wiscasset,” he recalled. “Jane was in transition and just beginning to develop a sense of ownership and direction. I was a young college student who loved old houses. Even then she had a clear sense of mission. From the beginning, she treated the house with understanding and reverence.”

A few years ago, Jane Tucker moved out of Castle Tucker, knowing that her family home’s future was secure as she had intended. Before she left, a preservation carpenter complimented her on the records she had kept during the long years when she did all the maintenance work herself. They were meticulous, he

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said. They made his job ever so much easier. Jane Tucker, not a woman given to emotional displays, glowed with pleasure. !

Regina Cole is a freelance writer who lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

THE MUSEUM Castle Tucker, 2 Lee Street (at the corner of High and Lee streets), Wiscasset.

207- 882-7169; www.historicnewengland.org A property of Historic New England, the house is open for tours June 1 through October 15, Wednesday through Sunday. Tours take place on the hour from 11:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Docents tell the history of the house and of Wiscasset by focusing on the stories of Jane Tucker and her aunt, Jenny. They note the unusually direct link to the past: Jane Tucker’s grandfather was a preCivil War Wiscasset ship’s captain.

Admission: $5. Historic New England members and Wiscasset residents are admitted free.

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