Z = Zebulon Smith House

Congratulations to everyone for making it through our Challenges. Don’t forget to give me your best guesses as to which two I will visit of all the places I posted about – a free book is the prize!

The Zebulon Smith House was built in 1832, by silversmith, jeweler and watchmaker Zebulon Smith. It is one of the earliest known temple style Greek Revival houses in Maine. The style, inspired by ancient Greek architecture, gained popularity in the late 18th century in England and spread to the United States in the early 19th century. It peaked in Maine from the 1830s to the 1860s. The architect of this house is unknown.

Zebulon Smith house

I found an aerial view of the house, and it is currently nestled among parking lots and car dealerships, businesses and the waterfront park, a final vestige and reminder that in downtown Bangor there were residential streets near the waterfront. This sole remaining house embodies the neighborhood’s gracious past. The house has four bedrooms, a dining room, a living room, two sitting rooms and a small kitchen in the ell. There are nine fireplaces, with slate mantels downstairs and wooden mantels in the bedrooms.

The house looks much as it did in photographs from the early 20th century. The portico retains its original lunette (half moon) window, and the Ionic pillars still stand. It has been painted red for many years, a curiously inappropriate color for a house inspired by Greek temples. The current owners suspect it was originally white. I searched for quite a while to find other pictures of this house but was stymied!

James and Elizabeth Buckley bought the house in 1919 and it has been lived in by their descendants ever since, despite the fact the neighborhood was changing, with stately homes on the block either turned into apartments or demolished to make way for businesses. The father of the current owner, Eugenia Franco, held out, and after he died, her mother had no desire to move. Mrs. Franco and her husband consider themselves the keepers of the home, which was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

I’m giving a huge sigh of relief, along with a little sadness, at having come to the end of this year’s A-Z Challenge. I hope anyone who visited my blog enjoyed posts about Maine as much as I liked writing them!

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