Antique Maine homes with land, do you have any?
Yes we do if that is the property listing you are searching for, have in your heart to secure. What is it about older homes, with yesteryear charm? Often the lifestyle the Maine real estate buyer is after matches the older home, not a shoe box ranch with 5-3-1 room count.
The older Maine homes were castles, monsters.
Served a long of purposes, all lovingly built, crafted into their design. If in town, lots of space for entertaining. 3rd floors wide open and for dancing. Formal parlors, dining rooms, extra areas for company.
You ate at home, did not go out every Friday and Saturday night. Everyone took turns opening up their Maine homes to others.
You did not run the roads. Or your job was working on the farm. And a collection of buildings came along in the set that went with the antique Maine home with land.
Because to put that land to work, you needed a place for the equipment to manage it. The planters, cultivators and hoes, harvesters, parts, supplies, storage areas all extras.
Way back the place for the tack, harnesses, linaments for the horse pair that worked the field land. The spot to keep the grain for Bessie the milk cow, a chicken house for those cock a doodle doos, hen egg layers.
The antique homes in Maine had sleeping porches for hot summer nights. To get through the heat that Mainer’s don’t need or do well in when the red in the thermometer climbs too high. And when everyone heads to the Maine lake after chores for relief. To take a dip. Watch another one of a kind sunset.
Sometimes the term antique homes can make you think Paul Revere, old southern plantations places with big columns along the open porch out front of the house. But in Northern Maine, we are relatively young. Explored late and settled first by Native Americans. But not more than a handful. So antique homes in Northern Maine can mean 1880 and up, not back in the 1700’s or earlier like places in Southern New England housing stock.
Remember, Maine only became a state, was part of Massachusetts until 1820. What is it about the older homes in Maine, when you are lucky enough to get a healthy dose of acreage surrounding, wrapping around the places?
It’s the features you don’t find in new homes in a subdivision.
It is the butler’s pantry of cherry wood and leaded beveled glass in the Queen Anne Victorian with the turret and wrap around porch.
The wainscoted summer extra farm house kitchens for canning and putting up tasty veggies, fruits for the root cellar storage along with the potatoes. The other produce needed to survive. To ease through a Maine winter until spring planting of the garden or back forty acres. It’s summer haying but the small square bails. Replaced more and more with the 1200 pound heavy weights that look like huge Rolo candy pieces.
The rear stairsway in the Maine farm homes to the quarters where the hired hand, farm workers slept in the back shed chamber. To work their room and board.
Or the parents moved to so the younger farmer generation could utilize the main home to start populating, filling the space with kids. Their grandchildren. While like in the Walton’s the older folks stepped aside, had already done that and now inhabited the rear apartment area. Often this area cottage feel, addition a another whole house. Simple living on a Maine farm with the antique home, with land, all those buildings comes with hard work but the lifestyle so rewarding.
My Mom grew up in a family of eleven, a dairy farm in Hodgdon Maine and I remember as a little kid the rear portion of that farm house was like that described above.
Another home addition, wing for a specific purpose. To move the generations around. The younger couple just married destined to run the farm someday being the occupants in the smaller rear portion of the house.
Until the changing of the guard. Usually because of space needed for the growing family in junior’s case. Declining health, aging on the part of the parents.
And because Mom and Dad did not use, or need all the area of the front end of the antique Maine farm home. So they “moved over”, shuffled to the back. To make way for the next generation taking the reins on the spread of land in the country.
I’m Maine Broker Andrew Mooers, ME REALTOR
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com | MOOERS REALTY 69 North St Houlton ME 04730