Portland Street Tour
Rising out of ancient farmland once known simply as “the Plain,” where local militias used to drill upon the fields, Portland Street grew along the old Boston to Portland turnpike. A survey and map of 1805 shows that Portland Street today follows the same path it did 200 years ago, when it carried wagons and stagecoaches.
More remarkable still, almost every house standing on Portland Street a century ago, when author Sarah Orne Jewett lived here, remains today. This website gives us the opportunity to present some of their stories. Dates given here for the construction of local buildings were either provided by property owners or estimated by a 1998 historical survey made for the town of South Berwick. We are always learning more about local history. If you have facts to contribute about South Berwick Village, please contact the Old Berwick Historical Society at info@obhs.net.
Portland Street is almost unchanged since 1877, when this South Berwick map was made by Ruger & Stoner.
Click here to enlarge the map for easier reading
1a - 1774 Sarah Orne Jewett House – 5 Portland Street
Owned by Historic New England, the home of Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909),
author of The Country of the Pointed Firs, Deephaven, and other
novels and stories about Maine, is open June 1 through October 15, Friday
through Sunday, with tours at 11 a.m., noon, 1 p.m., 2 p.m. 3 p.m. and 4
p.m. Admission is $5 (South Berwick residents free).
If the house is closed, visit the grounds, or the library next door, where Jewett lived with her family from 1854-1887.
Sarah Orne Jewett House history
1b 1854 The Jewett-Eastman House – 37 Portland Street
Author Sarah Orne Jewett wrote over 140 stories, novels and poems during
her 33 years here before she moved to the Jewett House next door in 1887.
Her father, Dr. Theodore H. Jewett, built this home for his family in 1854.
Jewett and her two sisters grew up here, and her father, a country doctor
who inspired some of her literary works, practiced medicine from the house.
Today the house contains South Berwick Public Library and is open Monday
and Wednesday 1:00-8:00 pm, Tuesday and Thursday 10:00 am – 5:00 pm,
Friday 1:00 – 5:00 pm, and Saturday 9:00 am – 1:00 pm.
Jewett-Eastman House history
c.1880 – 49 Portland Street
A fine surviving example of early 19th century commercial architecture in
southern Maine, the Odd Fellows Block was built in 1845 to house the fraternal
organization’s meeting hall on the top floor. Sarah Orne Jewett’s
father was the local chapter’s founding member. During South Berwick
Village’s commercial heyday of the mid-1800s, the building contained
a range of business ventures – ranging from stores of Benjamin Nason
and the Jewett family to the law office of Congressman John Noble Goodwin,
from a fish market to a purveyor of marble tombstones. The building now
contains JASS Fitness Machines.
Odd
Fellows Block history
1d c. 1870 –
Engine House – 30 Portland Street
In July 1870, a devastating fire swept the opposite side of Main Street
and destroyed a row of wooden stores where the brick business block now
stands. The town then built a new firehouse for better protection. In those
days, a cistern was maintained as a water source right in Central Square.
Engine House history1e c 1800 - The Currier-Brown Store - 12 Portland Street
The date of this building has not been determined, but there is evidence it could be among the oldest buildings in the village and have belonged to merchant Micajah Currier who died in 1818. Currier left the store to his widowed sister Hannah Brown, and Sarah and Mary Jewett’s generation seem to have referred to it years later as the Brown Store. Thomas Jewett seems to have been in business with Currier briefly before building the Jewett store next door.
1f 1815 - The Old Jewett Store - 10 Portland Street
In 1815, Sarah Orne Jewett’s great uncle, Thomas Jewett, bought this property, and built the Jewett trade store that carried West Indies goods and general merchandise for almost five decades. Thomas Jewett’s business partner and brother was Theodore F. Jewett, Sarah Orne Jewett’s grandfather who lived in the Jewett House until his death in 1860. It is not known how much remains of the original Jewett store. The building was likely altered late in the 1800s, perhaps by Thomas’s son-in-law, John B. Nealley, and grandson Frederick, who operated a harness shop. Today the building contains The Little Hat Company.
1g early 1800s - The John Frost's Store - 4 Portland Street
A map of South Berwick c. 1835 shows that John Frost then occupied a building on this site. Born in 1794, he was the eldest son of Sarah Frost, a widow who had owned the next door Frost Tavern since 1816. He seems to have had a home in a separate house set back from Main Street before Paul Street existed. A map of South Berwick about 1860, when Frost would have been 66, indicates that the post office was then also located in his store. Perhaps when teenage Sarah Orne Jewett first began posting her stories to magazines to be published in the mid-1860s, this was the post office from which she mailed her manuscripts. Today the building contains South Berwick Yoga.
c. 1870 – 40 Portland Street
c. 1890 – 65 Portland Street
c. 1880 – 71 Portland Street
2a c. 1820 - Burleigh House
– 79 Portland Street
Built by the first Congressman to serve this district in Washington, William
Burleigh (1785-1827), the house was also the birthplace of his son, John
Holmes Burleigh (1822-1879), who was elected to his father’s seat
in Congress in 1872 and 1874. A sea captain who sailed the world in the
1840s, the younger Burleigh later owned the Newichawannock Woolen Mills.
The house now contains Berwick Estates.
2f . 1800 & c. 1920 Old Cape & Blacksmith Shop – 85 Portland Street
The small, shingled outbuilding behind this house is identified as a blacksmith shop on a map of 1927, and seems to have been built within that decade. The history of the house itself, much older, has yet to be discovered.
Old Cape & Blacksmith Shop history
c. 1870 – 84 Portland Street
c. 1870 – 88 Portland Street
2b 1798 and 1886 The
Nason-Walker Estate – 99 Portland Street
In 1886, John Francis Walker (1844-1890), treasurer of South Berwick Savings
Bank, built this fine Victorian house on the site of the home of the former
bank president, Benjamin Nason. For 50 years, Nason operated a store in
the Odd Fellows Block and the building that preceded it at the Corner. Nason’s
father, Bartholomew Nason, built the original house in 1798, along with
the barn that still remains on the Nason-Walker property.
2c 1850s – Raynes House and Miss Raynes’ School – 96 Portland Street
In the mid-1800s, most of this side of Portland Street was open farmland,
owned by the Raynes family living in this house. Francis Raynes made and
sold shoes in a business on the site of the gas station near the corner.
Daughter Olive Raynes (b. 1833) taught school for over 60 years, first from
her father’s shoe business and then, from 1861 into the 20th century,
from the Raynes farmhouse. Among her pupils were author Sarah Orne Jewett
and her sisters, as well as generations of children from South Berwick’s
leading families. The house now contains Century 21 real estate.
c. 1880 – 104 Portland Street
2e
- c. 1800 – Jedediah and Jerusha Jenkins House - 105 Portland Street
In 1806, Jedediah Jenkins (1767-1852) married Jerusha Parks (1763-1855). Her brothers owned the Parks Store on Main Street. After their deaths, the house passed to Jerusha’s brother, Samuel Parks, who lived near the store. The property included a garden and a “very superior orchard,” as well as 5 3/4 acres of fields. When Samuel was declared insane at age 72, an auction was held in this house and the property sold. It then became the home of Nicholas Hanson, Jr., the druggist whose shop was in the Business Block, and his wife Lucy.
c. 1870 – 109 Portland Street
c. 1870 – 110 Portland Street
2d 1786 Dr. Nathanael Low House – 117 Portland Street
Dr. Nathanael Low (1740-1808), a physician and astronomer born in Massachusetts,
published Low’s Almanac, one of the publications upon which
citizens of the early United States depended for taverns and stagecoach
schedules as well as astrological information, verse, lore, homilies, and
recipes, and jokes. During Low’s years in this house, when Portland
Street was part of the Boston to Portland turnpike, stagecoaches driving
right past his door followed schedules published in his almanacs.
c. 1880 – 120 Portland Street
c. 1800 –
123 Portland Street
c. 1880 –
128 Portland Street
c. 1850 –
135 Portland Street
c. 1850 –
139 Portland Street
c. 1880 – Davis House -- 150 Portland Street
c. 1880 –
156 Portland Street
c. 1880 –
162 Portland Street
c. 1890 –
170 Portland Street
3a
1803 Northend Cogswell House – 4 Goodwin Street
Northend Cogswell (1762-1828) was a merchant and Revolutionary War veteran
born in Rowley, Massachusetts. His wife Elizabeth was the sister of William
Lambert, living nearby at 194 Portland Street. Among the Cogswell children
who grew up here was Charles Northend Cogswell (1797-1846), an attorney
who served as Maine state senator and representative in the 1830s and 1840s.
c. 1880 – 172 Portland Street
3b Early 1800s Thomas Jewett House – 151 Portland Street
Thomas Jewett (1790-1864) was Sarah Orne Jewett’s great uncle. He
was brother and business partner of Capt. Theodore F. Jewett, helping to
lead their successful shipbuilding and commercial enterprises at Pipe
Stave Landing on the river near the Hamilton House, as well as the Old Jewett
Store at the corner. His wife was Betsey Lord Jewett, a sea captain’s
daughter from Rollinsford, NH. The Jewetts raised seven children here. In
1860, when Thomas Jewett was the last remaining Jewett brother in his generation,
he was said to be the wealthiest man in South Berwick. After his death,
the house became the home of his nephew and son-in-law, Elisha Jewett.
c. 1890 – 165 Portland Street
3i c. 1870 – George H. Yeaton House -- 169 Portland Street
In the early 20 th century, this was the home of George H. Yeaton (1852-1942). He was a Rollinsford native but also attended Berwick Academy. He became a breeder of Ayreshire cattle on a beautiful farm that still stands off Route 4 in Rollinsford near the Hiram Roberts Grange, which he helped found.
George H. Yeaton House history
3c c. 1800 – Elisha and Sally Jewett House -- 176 Portland Street
Thought to have been built as early as the 1700s, the house at the corner of Portland Street and Agamenticus Road was in the 1850s and 1860s home to two Sarah Orne Jewetts who were relatives of the author by the same name.
Elisha and Sally Jewett House history
3h c. 1808 -- Parks-Harding House – 184 Portland Street
County probate records suggest this house was built about 1808 by Jacob Heard (1771 - 1844), who lived here with his wife and had several children. From 1814 to 1833, it was the home of merchant Thomas Boylston Parks (1789-1861), who was associated with the nearby Baptist Church and the Parks Store on Main Street . The house then passed to the family of Capt. Samuel Harding (c. 1780 - 1844), a sea captain. The Hardings, also Baptists, owned the house until 1865.
3d c. 1800 -- William Lambert House – 194 Portland Street
Dartmouth-educated William Lambert, born in Rowley, Massachusetts in 1772,
practiced law and was considered to be a “worthy citizen of the town”
while living in the house through 1811. His granddaughter, years later,
was engaged to John Wilkes Booth at the time of the Lincoln assassination.
The house meanwhile belonged to Reverend Ebenezer Little Boyd, a Baptist
preacher in the early 1800s. In 1852, it passed to the ownership of Dennis
Ferguson, who operated a tannery across the street. By 1931 it was Purity
Hospital and then South Berwick Maternity Hospital until the late 1940s.
Many South Berwick residents of today were born in the tiny upstairs “birthing
room.”
c. 1870 – 204 Portland Street
c. 1870 – 214 Portland Street
3e 1842 Schoolhouse No. 5 – 12 Agamenticus Road
Built in 1842 on this site near the intersection of Portland Street and
Agamenticus Road, Schoolhouse No. 5 was designed by a building committee
that included Portland Street neighbors (and parents) Benjamin Nason and
Francis Raynes. When first built, the structure had two entrance doors for
the boys and girls. It is now a private home.
Read a Jewett story with a scene from an old one-room schoolhouse.
3f 1790 Butler House – 14 Agamenticus Road
One of the first settlers to farm on the Plains, as today’s South
Berwick Village was once known, was Thomas Butler, born in 1674. About 1790,
his descendants built the Butler House still standing near the intersection
of Portland Street and Agamenticus Road.
3g Soldiers’ Monument – Portland Street and Agamenticus Road
On this site in the late 1700s stood the Meeting House of the Plains, a Baptist Church where town meetings were held for decades. It still appeared on a map of the 1860s as the town house. In 1898, the town approved the Soldiers' Monument to be placed on the site, and here annual Memorial Day gatherings recalled the sacrifices of the Civil War. The small park here was originally known as Jewett Park after the family of Sarah Orne Jewett, as family members lived nearby. For over 100 years the monument has been the scene of tributes to South Berwick veterans of all wars.
Read
a Jewett story about Civil War veterans.
c. 1800 – 31 Agamenticus Road
Thank you for touring historic Portland Street in the village of South Berwick, Maine!
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