The Nickels-Sortwell House: Fortune Built, Fortune Lost

Captain William Nickels built this Federal-style mansion in Wiscasset in eighteen oh seven at the height of his prosperity. Standing three stories with an elaborate elliptical fanlight and a Palladian window on the second floor, it was one of the grandest houses in Maine, and Nickels could look from its windows at twelve of his own ships moored in the Sheepscot River. Then Thomas Jefferson signed the Embargo Act.

Wiscasset's port collapsed almost overnight. Nickels lost his ships, his income, and eventually the house. It served as a hotel for much of the nineteenth century, until a wealthy Cambridge industrialist named Alvin Sortwell bought it as a summer home in eighteen ninety-nine and restored it to its original grandeur.

The Sortwell family gave the house to Historic New England in nineteen fifty-eight. Nickels was ruined by the Embargo and then the War of eighteen twelve, and he died in eighteen fifteen. The house operated as a hotel from eighteen twenty to nineteen hundred.

After the Sortwells bought it in eighteen ninety-nine, they redecorated it in the Colonial Revival style, added a solarium, and built the present entry portico with four Corinthian columns, replacing a broad hotel-era porch. The garden between the house and carriage house was designed by Charles Eliot the Second of the Olmsted Brothers firm. Inside, a free-standing spiral staircase rises from a semi-oval front hall.

Alvin Sortwell's daughter Frances left the property in nineteen fifty-eight to what is now Historic New England, and you can tour it in season right on Main Street, which is United States Highway One. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy and remains one of the finest surviving examples of Adamesque Federal architecture in the country.