The Sedgley Homestead: Maine's Oldest Farm in Place

A short distance from Route One in York, Maine, a small cluster of colonial-era buildings sits on a rise above the fields, essentially as it has been since the early seventeen hundreds. The John Sedgley Homestead is, as best as historians can determine, the oldest colonial homestead in Maine that remains on its original site, in its original setting, with its original outbuildings still standing.

Jonathan Sedgley came to York from England sometime around seventeen ten, a young turner by trade. In January of seventeen fourteen he married Elizabeth Adams, the daughter of a prominent York family, and her father gave the young couple the plot of land where this farm still stands. Sedgley built the original cape house on the property around seventeen fifteen and expanded it into a larger six-room, two-story center-chimney colonial around seventeen twenty as his family grew.

York itself has a claim to being the first chartered English city in America, chartered in sixteen forty-two. The town sits at the mouth of the York River, and in its colonial years it was a fishing and farming settlement on the outermost edge of the English-speaking world. French and Abenaki raids were a living memory in the early seventeen hundreds; the Sedgley family built their farm on ground that had been contested within living memory when Jonathan arrived.

What makes this property remarkable is simple duration. Most colonial New England farmsteads were modified beyond recognition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, absorbed into larger holdings, demolished for suburban development, or moved to museum campuses. The Sedgley homestead was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-six precisely because it had escaped all of that. The cape, the farmhouse, the carriage house, the stable, and two additional outbuildings remain on the same York County ground where Jonathan Sedgley first broke soil more than three hundred years ago.