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It’s a Friday in early September, and Audrey Wolfe, the collections and education manager for the Freeport Historical Society (FHS), has just opened the side door to the Pettengill farmhouse, an early nineteenth-century salt box that is a rarity even in a state chock-full of history-laden homes. It’s been a few weeks since the building last hosted visitors, and Wolfe wants to set expectations before our group is welcomed inside. After she pushes the big door open, Wolfe pokes her head inside and laughs.

“It’s a little musty at the moment,” she says, turning around to face the group. “So, I think we’ll just wait for it to air out.” Then, to set the scene just a bit more, she adds, “It also doesn’t hurt to know your pests, because we may very well see a few.”

Accompanying Wolfe is FHS’s executive director, Eric C. Smith. Together they are leading a private tour of the farmhouse that includes me and a pair of longtime ���ϳԹ�������վ educators: Tess Chakkalakal, an associate professor of Africana studies and English whose many books on American literature include an upcoming biography of the nineteenth-century Black writer Charles W. Chestnutt; and Brock Clarke, a widely published essayist and novelist and the College's A. Leroy Greason Professor of English. The two also host the podcast series Dead Writers, an entertaining boots-on-the-ground look at the houses of famous American authors, from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Made in partnership with Maine Public Radio, the show debuted its inaugural seven half-hour episodes this summer, and plans are in the works to produce a second season.

The Pettengill farmhouse hasn’t housed a writer on their list and so isn’t slated for the podcast, but Chakkalakal’s and Clarke’s interest in the property stems in part from the home’s proximity, personally and geographically, to ���ϳԹ�������վ. Various owners have had direct ties to the College, and over the last half century FHS’s stewardship has opened it to the public, making it a favorite for anyone up for the ten-minute drive from Brunswick.

The appeal is obvious: Spread out over 140 acres, this retired saltwater farm is a scene of open pastures, hiking trails, old apple trees, even older stone walls, and a landscape that drops down to the tidal Harraseeket River.

At the center of the property is its circa 1810 farmhouse, a simple and small white-clapboard building whose front door gazes out at land that leads to the sea. Tours are limited, and those expecting to find something out of Old Sturbridge Village are greeted with something else. Like a little must and maybe some pests.

“What you’re going to find,” explains Smith as we wait outside the doors, “is a scene that reflects the choices that have been made by others who lived in the house. We are just the inheritors of those choices. Part of what we’re showing is not any one time frame, because different families lived in this house and used it differently. And so we refer to it as a study house, because you can see the different layers of that living.”

Wolfe then steps into the house and motions for us to follow her. “I think it’s ready for us to come in.”

The story of Pettengill Farm begins in the late 1790s, when brothers Aaron and Joseph Lufkin began buying property along the Harraseeket. Aaron—whose namesake nephew was an early graduate of the Medical School of Maine, a part of ���ϳԹ�������վ for more than a century—bought out his brother in 1801 and built the current house nine years later. But not long after its completion, Aaron fell ill and died, and over the next half century, the farm passed through the hands of several different owners.

In 1877, Charles Henry Pettengill, a farmer and former sea captain, bought the house and merged the surrounding land with adjacent properties he’d spent the previous two decades acquiring. Eventually, the farm came under the ownership of Charles’s son Wallace Pettengill, who with his wife, Adelaide, raised three children—Ethel, Frank, and Mildred (“Millie”)—on the property.

The oldest, Ethel, died when she was a teenager. For Frank and Millie, neither of whom ever married, Pettengill Farm became the only home they ever really knew. The two inherited the homestead from their parents in 1925, and for the next four decades lived in much the same way as their predecessors did. While the world around them embraced the modern conveniences that came with the advent of electricity and refrigeration, the Pettengills hauled water from a well more than one hundred feet from the kitchen, lit their home with kerosene lamps, and made use of an outdoor latrine. Their livelihood was made possible by an increasingly diminished dairy operation that produced milk and butter.

A lifeline of sorts came in 1955, when preservationists Lawrence and Eleanor Houston Smith, longtime friends of the Pettengills and founders of Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment—a sustainable coastal farm in Freeport—purchased the property with a lease-back arrangement for Frank and Millie. At a time when large seaside tracts were being chopped up into smaller house lots and lavish second homes, Pettengill Farm represented something that was quickly fading from Maine’s southern coastal landscape, and the wealthy Smiths were committed to preserving what remained. Even after Frank died, just a year later, Millie continued on at the farm until 1965, when declining health forced her to move in with family up north.

“It was finally determined that it was just too much for her to live here, when she was found one winter morning camping in the kitchen area, huddled around a kerosene lamp and the teapot frozen to the stove,” says Wolfe of Millie, who died in 1981 at the age of ninety-eight.

The simplicity of Millie’s domestic life is evident throughout the house. Wolfe and Smith lead us through the kitchen area, which consists largely of a sink, the remnants of a milk separator, and a butter churner, and into a front room framed by peeling wallpaper, exposed ceiling lathe, and worn linoleum that overlays a portion of the home’s battered wide floorboards. Above, someone has scratched “Buck Was Here” into the ceiling plaster in large letters.

“I’m trying to imagine this person as a ���ϳԹ�������վ student who had to mark his territory in the ceiling,” jokes Clarke. “If you were to break into a house, would you really want to advertise you were here?”

Chakkalakal shakes her head. “No, I would not,” she says.

Over the next minute, the professors banter about Buck and his possible intentions. Their riffing is easy and free flowing, a pair of curious minds well-seasoned in the art of keeping the attention of a classroom. Not unlike the homes they visit for their podcast, the Pettengill farmhouse greets its visitors with a sensory overload, and I ask Clarke and Chakkalakal how they process their observations of the houses they visit.

“For me, it’s about taking notice of the things that don’t belong,” says Clarke. “Like that graffiti from Buck. You don’t come into a place like this and think, I’m in it for the graffiti.”

“What is so compelling for me is imagining its owners,” says Chakkalakal. “Here, we’ve heard the history of the Pettengill family, their social status and isolation and how much pleasure they took from reading in their rooms, by the stove, in the rocking chair, on the little spring bed in the attic. You can still feel the presence of active imaginations. That’s true in all the places we go, but so strongly here.”

Chakkalakal is also intrigued by the condition of the place. “I’m looking at the history of the house and the decision you guys came to of not restoring it to any one period but to, you know, just let it rot,” she says.

Wolfe laughs. “I call it arrested decay.”

“But it’s kind of aspirational, too,” Chakkalakal continues. “Like, this is what would happen if you just let yourself go to the point where you just wouldn’t fall apart any further. The decisions around that are really interesting.”

The driveway into Pettengill Farm runs about a half mile and is gated at the entrance, which means most visitors to the property have to arrive on foot or bike. But the time it takes to cover that distance is part of the experience. There’s an almost meditative quality to the journey. For much of it you’re surrounded by forest. It’s off the grid. There are no power lines running above you; big hardwoods are your companions. It can feel as though you are stepping away from the world. Maybe you are.

And then the pathway bends to the left, and the landscape opens up to a wide expanse of pastures. In the distance, perfectly sited to face the water, sits the farmhouse. It’s not uncommon to have the property to yourself, even on a prime summer day, and amid the quiet and all that open land it can be startling to think that the buzz of Freeport’s downtown scene is just two miles away.

“The choice the Freeport Historical Society made in the early eighties in agreement with the town was also to essentially stop vehicular traffic into the farm,” says Smith. “And that creates this sort of transitional phase of leaving your vehicle and leaving the pavement behind to make your journey here. There’s some tension around that, because it does limit access and accessibility. But some of that is also a choice that we’ve made toward the preservation of the property. At the same time, it’s open 365 days a year, dawn to dusk, and there’s no charge. As long as you’re willing to put the effort in to come down the road, it’s open.”

What gives the Pettengill farmhouse its particular sheen is that it’s not a polished tourist experience. The surrounding grounds aren’t manicured with prim gardens and lavish lawns. The apple trees have been allowed to grow into old age, while big conifers have grown in front of the water views. There are no reenactors to showcase the lives lived here, no regular guides to explain the place. Scattered around the grounds are a few placards and signs that explain a little of the farm’s history, but to visit the property is to experience the landscape that the Pettengills inhabited. Here is the cedar tree Millie planted from a sapling she dug up on an island in Casco Bay; there is that lilac that Frank placed near the back of the house by request of his sister. These are the fields they worked; this is the driveway Millie walked nearly every day to go into town. It feels less like a history lesson and more like a retreat into what came before.

“This has been a part of the community now for nearly fifty years, and I think what that’s created is a real sense of ownership by the community for this farm,” says Smith. “You see people out here with their dogs, you see parents out here with their kids. They can see the house, and they can see that cedar tree Millie planted years ago and have their own connection to the last person who lived here.”

“Study houses are paradoxes,” writes historian Howard Mansfield in his 2000 book The Same Ax, Twice. “Preserving a house by not preserving it. The house exists in all its contradictions. …No one has attempted any resolution. The house has not been dressed up as 1676 or 1870 or any one year or period. Rather, the house speaks in the mingled, confusing voices of years of habitation—changes, additions, ceilings raised, walls moved, doors nailed shut and opened again. Rooms painted green, then black, then red and yellow. Time is the hero in this house.…Life flowed through here and like a glacier left its marks upon wood and plaster.”

There is beauty, in other words, in the simple passage of life. And there are unexpected treasures to discover. Wolfe and Smith lead us upstairs to a trio of bedrooms whose views look toward the water. In two of the rooms reside maybe the most unusual findings in the house: a series of maritime-themed sketches in the wall plaster that historians believe date back to the early 1800s. A folk art known as “sgraffito,” the drawings are remarkably detailed, including a few that accurately depict some of the three-masted frigates from the War of 1812. There are also other scenes—of a sailor shooting a large sea bird from one ship and of monstrous sea creatures below the decks of another. They are intricate and thoughtful, no doubt the product of hours of imagination put to work.

Both Chakkalakal and Clarke are taken aback by the art and the mysterious stories that may have spawned their creation. Were they the result of tales of grandeur that had traveled to this farm? Had Maine’s proximity to the war as a shipbuilding center heightened the presence of the battles in the young minds who lived in this house? Did the drawings simply emanate from a natural human desire to dream about a bigger, more adventurous world?

Clarke points to one of the simpler sketches. It appears to be a tombstone with the number seven on it. He chuckles. “This reminds me of when your kids are in elementary school, and you go into their classroom and you see the drawings of all the kids,” he says. “Some are quite remarkable, and then there is your kid’s drawing, and it’s like that.”

Chakkalakal laughs and nods in agreement. Beyond a shared dry wit and a command of language, the strength of their podcast partnership is a result of their differing appreciations for history. Clarke, whose 2007 novel, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, in which the homes of several famous authors are set on fire, isn’t one to fawn over the ties between a writer’s work and their home. You want to know their writing, he says, go study their writing. “It’s not that I think preserving these old homes is foolish,” he tells me. “But visiting them has always seemed kind of school trip-ish to me. What I care about more are the people who care about those places and their stories. The people who work there and make it their life, that’s fascinating.”

Chakkalakal, meanwhile, oversaw ���ϳԹ�������վ’s restoration of the Brunswick house where Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the early 1850s. She packs an appreciation for writers’ homes that gives weight to the legacy of what was created there without overlooking their sometimes touristy standing. It’s why she playfully refers to them as “the Disneyland of literature.”

In the upstairs bedroom Chakkalakal lingers at the sgraffito. “We wouldn’t feature this house as an episode on our show,” she says. “But maybe we should place more value on this kind of art, the kind of art people make when they’re at home, because it’s not always appreciated or celebrated in the same way. You look at what’s here, and it’s a reminder that art can be made by anyone.”

It’s also a reminder of their fragility. Its creators, whoever they were, most likely never imagined that strangers would marvel at their drawings two centuries later. That they’d be analyzed and studied by art historians. Or that any sort of value would be associated with them. In homes across New England, more often than not, these unexpected creations were lost. Updates and renovations spelled their demise. Even Millie Pettengill, the person who may have loved this farmhouse more than anyone, didn’t necessarily assign much meaning to the sgraffito on the plaster. For years, she had the drawings covered by wallpaper. But then that wallpaper began to peel, and a whole new chapter of the home’s past revealed itself to FHS. In not pegging the house to a particular point in history, FHS has been able to explore more of what its history means.

As we move through the small upstairs rooms, Clarke takes stock of the largely empty spaces. There is little furniture or much at all in the way of things that would reinforce the story of the generations of families that lived here.

“Is there ever a temptation to bring in stuff that wasn’t here as a way to tell visitors that this might have been in the home during a certain time period?” he asks.

“Oh, is there ever,” says Wolfe. She laughs.

“But it raises a lot of interpretative questions and requires you to make a lot of interpretative choices about what those objects are and who they represent. In keeping the home the way it is, our interpretative choice is to show the farm’s entire history rather than just a part of it.”

By today's standards, the Pettengill farmhouse is tiny. There are only six rooms, and a tour of the building takes at most an hour. It’s also isolated and remote, and at first blush leads to the conclusion that its occupants were confined to what was immediately in front of them.

But that’s not really true. Millie had a huge capacity for learning. Her walks into town always included a stop at the library; she was a noted amateur geologist, whose rock collection is still on display in the front entry; and her extensive diaries and photographs of the farm detail a curiosity about a slice of life that was very much connected to the larger world around her.

Maybe that curiosity was embedded in her in part by the house itself. Like any old Maine seaside home, the orientation of the Pettengill farmhouse is to the water. There’s a practicality to that, of course: When it was built, there was no driveway through the woods. Arrival to the property would have come via the Harraseeket River and the Atlantic just beyond.

And through the windows of that small house came a glimpse at a world that extended far beyond the farm’s shores. It must have felt grand and magical, says Smith. “As you sit in these little rooms and look out there, the world must have seemed very big outside,” he says.

“What could be waiting for you when you leave that room? There were all these possibilities. Life was not confined to some screen that you held in your hand, but something larger, just outside your door.”

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Ian Aldrich is the deputy editor at Yankee Magazine in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Greta Rybus is a freelance photojournalist based in Portland, Maine. Find her work at .

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This story first appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of ���ϳԹ�������վ Magazine. Manage your subscription and see other stories from the magazine on the ���ϳԹ�������վ Magazine website.