Inn · Bucksport, Maine · Built c. 1783; tavern 1820; enlarged c. 1850
Jed Prouty Tavern
Listed on the National Register as Jed Prouty Tavern and Inn
A long three-story clapboard hotel on Bucksport's Main Street above the Penobscot, grown from Asa Peabody's house of about 1783 into a stage-route tavern in 1820 and enlarged in Greek Revival dress around 1850.
History
The oldest part of the building is the house Asa Peabody put up about 1783 in the river town then known as Buckstown. It was lived in by the families of Deacon Darling and Colonel Skinner before a man named Sparhawk bought it in 1820 to keep a public house. Sparhawk replaced the hipped roof with a gable and probably added the Federal doorway and some of the moldings that survive in the east half. Bucksport lay on the stage road between Bangor and the old coastal town of Castine, and a series of landlords kept the tavern busy through the following decades.
About 1850 Daniel Robinson bought the property, named it the Robinson House, and gave it most of its present form, extending it westward and adding a third story with Greek Revival trim. The hotel register is said to carry the signatures of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison and John Tyler, along with Daniel Webster and Jefferson Davis. The name Jed Prouty came later, borrowed from a popular stage play that used the building as a setting. When the Maine Historic Preservation Commission nominated it in 1985, it called the building the largest surviving early-nineteenth-century hotel in eastern Maine, and it was listed on the National Register in 1986. In the 1990s it was refitted with elevators and sprinklers as an elder-care residence, and after an auction in 2011 it continued in that use.
“Bucksport was situated on the stage route between Bangor and important coastal town Castine.”
Architecture
The main block is a wood-framed, clapboarded building three and a half stories high and eight bays long under a gable roof, with corner pilasters and a full entablature with cornice returns in the Greek Revival manner. A one-story veranda runs the full width of the Main Street front; its wooden columns were later replaced in aluminum. The two front doors record the building's two phases: one is a Greek Revival trabeated entrance with sidelights and transom, and the other, in the older east section, is a Federal doorway with pilasters and a lunette. Inside, both a Federal and a Greek Revival staircase survive, along with period door and window casings and wainscot. A one-story west addition and a second story on the rear wing date from the mid-twentieth century.
What to look for
- Two different front doors, one Federal and one Greek Revival
- Full-width columned veranda on Main Street
- Corner pilasters and returned cornice
- View across the Penobscot toward Fort Knox
Setting
The building stands on the north side of Main Street in the center of Bucksport, between Central and Federal Streets, looking across the road to the Penobscot River. Its neighbors are late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century shops, houses and public buildings, with residential streets climbing the hill behind. Fort Knox and the Penobscot Narrows Bridge are visible across the river to the south.
Timeline
- c. 1783Asa Peabody builds a house on the site
- 1820Sparhawk buys it and opens a tavern
- c. 1850Daniel Robinson enlarges it as the Robinson House
- 1986Listed on the National Register
- 1990sConverted to an elder-care residence
- 2011Sold at auction
Where sources differ
- The presidential signatures in the hotel register are reported in local histories; the nomination does not reproduce them.
- When the Jed Prouty name was adopted is unclear: the 1985 nomination says "the early part of the century," which Wikipedia reads as the early 1800s.
- The exact National Register listing date is not legible in the nomination.
