FARMINGTON – The former home of some of Farmington’s most prominent families will be reassembled in Canaan by the contractor who took it apart to make way for the University of Maine at Farmington’s new education center.
According to local historian and attorney Paul Mills, the Greek Revival/Cape Cod style home, built around 1848, was owned by his family for 67 years. Sumner Mills, Paul’s grandfather, bought the house in 1917. Paul Mills and his siblings, Rep. Janet Mills, D-Farmington, Sen. Peter Mills, R-Cornville, and Dr. Dora Anne Mills, director of the state Bureau of Health, were raised there.
The college purchased the property in 1984.
Moody’s Antique Building Wrecking was dismantling the house on a recent hot summer day.
Company owner Walter Moody said he will reassemble the house on the property in Canaan and live in it.
Paul Mills watched wistfully as Moody removed 12-inch-wide pine floor boards from the first floor. They were sold to a local furniture-maker at $5.50 a foot, he said.
“It’s fantastic,” contractor Moody said of the Mills home. “It’s such a unique building with no rot and in perfect condition. I’ve never seen a building in such good shape,” he added.
“It’s harder to take apart than it was to build,” he joked as he sweated over a pry bar.
“I’ll have to come up and see it,” said Mills, whose face lit up when Moody told him the house is staying in Maine.
It seems fitting that the new education center should be located in this spot.
A Congregational minister, Rowland Howard, lived in the house in the 1860s. Howard’s Civil War hero brother, Gen. O.O. Howard, founded Howard University in Washington, D.C., according to Mills’ historical summary of the house.
And one of the most influential residents of the Mills’ former home was Charles C. Rounds, an early principal and president of Farmington State Normal School, which became Farmington State Teachers College and then the University of Maine at Farmington. Rounds resided there from 1870 to 1917 and of all local educators was “the best known nationally,” Richard P. Mallett wrote in “Two Centuries of Farmington Schools.” He was president of the college from 1868 to 1883.
Another construction project has unearthed some other historic treasures.
Just up Lincoln Street from the Mills home site, workers installing new sewer lines dug up parts from a Model A Ford and “hundreds of old bottles,” wastewater Superintendent Steve Moore.
In his office at the treatment plant, Moore has one of those old bottles and the remnant of an old leather shoe found there. The bottle was corked and still contained an unidentifiable liquid that smelled “musty and old,” he said.
Also found there was a pot of facial cream with fingerprints of its former owner in it.
“Those fingers who did that, they’re probably dust now,” Moore said. “I think it’s awful interesting.”
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