In 1798 a merchant named Bartholomew Nason (c. 1757-1822) brought his family here from Boston. In those days, Portland Street was coming into its own as part of the Boston to Portland Turnpike, with stagecoaches carrying the mail and travelers moving overland for the first time throughout the new United States. Bartholomew Nason built a house at today’s 99 Portland Street, at a time when most of the road was surrounded by open countryside.

In the 1880s the Nason house was moved to Silver Street, Rollinsford, NH, where it can still be seen. The original Nason barn is on Portland Street site in South Berwick.

Farther up Portland Street at the Main Street corner, where roads to Boston, Portland and Berwick all met, Nason recognized a great commercial location on the current site of the Odd Fellows Building. He opened a store with his son, Benjamin, who had been 10 years old when his family moved to Maine. Their store can be seen on a South Berwick Village map of about 1835.

When South Berwick was incorporated as a separate town in 1814, Bartholomew Nason was on the committee and was made a town official.

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When young Benjamin Nason (1788-1875) grew up, he continued his father’s business and operated the Nason store at the Corner for 50 years. He may have built the Odd Fellows Building in 1845. Like many of South Berwick’s leading citizens of the day, his business pursuits ranged far from the Village, but he also contributed to the community’s welfare. According to the History of York County published in 1880, Nason built a sawmill, engaged in lumbering, and owned interest in ships sailing out of Portsmouth. A faithful member of the First Church of Berwick at the time of its move to the Village from Brattle Street, he was responsible for the construction of the new Main Street meeting house in 1826, now the First Parish Federated Church. In 1842 he was on the committee in charge of erecting the new Portland Street school that came to be known as Schoolhouse No. 5.

Benjamin Nason’s married Olivia Hubbard (1794-1885), daughter of lawyer Dudley Hubbard, who built the Hayes House on Academy Street. They lost two of their sons in the Civil War, Augustus killed in the battle of the Wilderness, and Charles in the naval service.

Nason was known as “a temperate man in the strictest sense of the word,” according to the History of York County. “In his early days, when intoxicating liquors were in almost universal use,” says the account, “he was a total abstinence man.”

Nason became a director of South Berwick National Bank, which had been built in 1823 on Main Street near today’s Central School. In 1858 he was made president, holding the post for the last two decades of his life.

Nason’s successor at the bank was John Francis Walker (1844-1890), who also became treasurer of South Berwick Savings Bank. Under Walker’s leadership, a new bank was built in 1883.

After the death of Nason’s widow Olivia in 1885, Walker acquired the Nason homestead.

The Walkers removed the Nason house, kept the barn, and in 1886 built the present Victorian home, where his wife lived until 1934. Walker had married Mary Lizzie (Elizabeth) Hobbs, a South Berwick woman who had attended Berwick Academy at the same time as Sarah Orne Jewett. Now neighbors on Portland Street, the Walkers were friends with the Jewett sisters for the rest of their lives. One of the Walkers’ daughters married Frank Marshall of York, whose grand Marshall House hotel was on the site of the present-day Stage Neck Inn.

Today the home still contains the Walkers’ crystal chandeliers, hand-carved fireplace mantel, and crown molding. Stained glass adorns the front hall, and the front and rear porches retain their original copper roofs. The dining room has walls were hand painted by muralist George MacLean in 1958.

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