BRUNSWICK

Renovations to the Stowe House, a home Harriet Beecher Stowe and her family rented in the 1850s while she penned the anti-slavery novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” will restore historic elements of 1855 to “bring it back to life,” according to project architect Nancy Barba.

Since the Brunswick Village Review Board approved of the project back in February, Bowdoin College, who owns the house, began renovating the building for faculty office space use. The original building, which the college has owned since 2001, was constructed by master builder Samuel Melcher in 1806.

After Stowe left, in 1855, a new owner made major renovations to the house and “changed basically everything that had been here when Harriet was here,” accord- ing to Barba.

“Every surface was changed so that pretty much everything that Harriet had seen and touched was covered over or obliterated,” she said, “so what you see today are mostly details from 1855 — post Harriet.”

One of first major alterations made to the house was a raised roof, changing its hip roof to a gable roof.

The building underwent another significant change in 1946 when Mary Baxter White transformed the house into an inn and used the barn as a restaurant, a popular business that thrived for 40 years.

Barba said the only remains of Stowe’s original house is a tiny scrap of wallpaper found behind a fireplace in a room that White had used as the inn’s gift shop.

By stripping back some of the layers of the house, Barba said there have been some unpleasant discoveries, including charred ceiling on the first floor — the result of an unknown fire.

“They opened up the ceiling and found that there had been a fire here that nobody knew about,” she said. “(We) knew about the fire on the upper floors, but not here — they had just covered it all over.”

Photographs and other physical evidence of the house helped the college decide to restore the building to 1855, even though it was a couple years after Stowe’s residency.

“We’re not stripping it back to her time period because we don’t have enough evidence,” Barba said. “We analyzed what time period everything came from, and the final decision was to try to bring back to as close as 1855 as we could in the areas that made sense.”

Organizations like the Brunswick Village Review Board, Maine Historical Society, Maine Historic Preservation, Pejepscot Historical Society, as well as local residents, have all weighed in on the renovation process, and Barba said the overall response from the community has been “very positive.”

Currently, work has been done to separate the barn from the house, and other future changes include recreating the building’s porch and constructing a main entrance on the side of the house, leaving the front door as an exit.

Bowdoin’s dorm buildings located behind the Stowe House, built in the 1940s, will remain untouched.

According to project superintendent Ken Hough, the house has already been under construction for six weeks and is expected to open in September.

dkim@timesrecord.com

ORGANIZATIONS like the Brunswick Village Review Board, Maine Historical Society, Maine Historic Preservation, Pejepscot Historical Society, as well as local residents, have all weighed in on the renovation process.