 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here. We are very excited to have this room full of people coming to your Earl Shuttleworth. Do what will, as it always is, be an amazing lecture. So welcome to the ballroom at Canucks Hall. How many people are in this room for the first time tonight? Yes! So please come back over and over again. My name is Pam Plum. I'm president of the Board of Directors here at Maine Charitable Mechanic Association. The builder and continuous owner of Mechanics Hall, and we are very excited to have Earl here, our preeminent architectural historian in the state of Maine, and by the way, an advisory board member for Maine Charitable Mechanic Association. And we are putting this on and Earl has offered this to us so that we could put it on so that we could begin a campaign to raise $50,000 to support our first ever Executive Director. First ever since 1815 Executive Director. And it's really a critical thing to help us make the next steps forward in our organization to continue the restoration of the hall and to provide sort of operational stability for the organization, which has been all volunteer run up to this point. Tonight we have, although there are a few seats empty still, a sold out event. And that is thanks to our many sponsors who were here this evening, to whom we're very grateful, our patrons that are here tonight and our attendees. Thank you all for making this evening such a success. I particularly want to thank our event chairs, Paul and Dotto Stevens, who are right here, who have taken this on. They deserve all of that. They have done a spectacular job. This event has been more successful than we ever dreamed it could be, thanks to that energy and to the whole committee. And the committee, by the way, is listed in your program. And I recommend all of those folks for a big thank you. We also want to thank our sponsors, our patrons, and our community support people who have community organizations that have helped us promote this. And those are also listed in your program. So there'll be a test at the end to see if you can remember all of these people. So I'm really going to ask, it's my great pleasure to ask Paul Stevens, who ran this whole show, to put it all together, to come and introduce Earl. He has known Earl even longer than I have known Earl, and I think he's the perfect person to do it. I had the pleasure of meeting Paul at the very beginning of our time in Portland when I went to work for Greater Portland Landmarks and Paul was already up to his eyeballs in Greater Portland Landmarks and actually had the courage to buy for his own home the house right next door to the Howe House, which was considered a pioneers effort at the time that Landmarks bought that building. So Paul, the floor is yours. Thanks, Pam. I couldn't have done this without an awful lot of support from a lot of the people in this room. Many of my friends and, all right, thank you, Frazier. Another volunteer we couldn't have done without Frazier, but it's really a pleasure to see all of my friends and colleagues here tonight who helped us support this organization. I'm going to do something a little different tonight because I've introduced Earl so many times. And this is kind of, you know, one of those things that usually begins, this person needs no introduction. And so I guess the first question I would ask is how many of you here know Earl Shelterworth and how many know a little bit about him? Well, that's almost everybody. So what I could stop here, but let's see how much you know. So who knows where he graduated from high school in 1966? Speak up. Dearing high school. That's correct. And this is a harder question. Who was his favorite teacher and his history mentor in high school? Dale, Elizabeth Ring, you're absolutely right, Dale. So also, did you know that he's a graduate of Colby, has a master's from BU, an honorary degree from Bowdoin, and an honorary degree from Mecca, right across the street. He gave his first lecture in 1964 to the Portland College Club at Mrs. Edith Sills House on Bowdoin Street. So that was quite a long time ago, given the fact that he graduated from high school in 1966. So, but, so now who can guess how many lectures Earl has given since? Let's try and see if anybody can come up with that number. Anybody want to guess, Pam? 2000 plus? Anybody else? 2500? Going once? Going twice? Okay, I think I have it on fairly good knowledge that tonight is 2002. These lectures were almost all in addition to his job as the State Historic Preservation Officer and the Director of the Main Historic Preservation Commission, offices which he held for over 40 years and he's still the State Historian. That's longer than any other State Director has served in the country. Do you know how many buildings were nominated to the National Historic Register during his tenure? All right, anybody else? That's a pretty low number. Anybody else going to come up with a number? You guys are all way, way short. 1600. That is a lot of buildings on the National Historic Register and this is a really easy one. What well-known preservation organization did he help found? And that was when he was in high school. So what famous main architect does he know more about than any other person? You're right, John Calvin Stevens. And you may not know that he was a good friend of my dad and co-authored a book on my great grandfather, one of many, many books that Earl has written. So it's a real pleasure to introduce Earl, who's been my friend since we first shared a podium speaking to students at King Middle School in 1966. I was astonished at how much more he knew about Portland architecture than I did because I thought I was pretty smart because I was fairly, fairly new out of college. But over these years, how many long time, he has been my go-to person for his knowledge of main historic buildings throughout my architectural career. And it gives me a great deal of pleasure to introduce my friend, Earl. Well, thank you very much both Pam and Paul. And I really want to thank you both as well as Dodo Stevens. And also David Clough, who is here tonight, photographer from the Rockland area who actually donated many of the wonderful period, new current photographs as opposed to period photographs in the talk tonight. I just have a couple caveats. One, if you just check your cell phones, you know you do this now every time you go to the movie theater, just to make sure that they're off. If you were before a legislative committee in Augusta, it would be a five dollar fine if your cell phone went off during the hearing. And you know, I'm sure that the main child mechanics would be glad to make a little side money tonight on your transgressions. But it would be nice not to have your phone go off. Secondly, I'm just going to ask that everyone hold any questions or comments that you have until after the lecture. And then I'm happy to take a few minutes to try and answer any questions that you have. So we'll get started. So tonight as advertised, we're going to be concentrating on Thomas J. Sparrow. Thomas J. Sparrow is not your household main or Portland architect, but he is a very important figure in both main and Portland architecture in that as far as Portland is concerned, he's probably the first person who actually declared himself to be a full time architect. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was common that the buildings that were being built were both designed and constructed by a master. And in fact, with someone as talented as Alexander Parris during his brief period in Portland in the early 1800s, he was always both a designer and a house right as well. He built the buildings that he designed. However, beginning in the second quarter of the 19th century, you have the emergence of the American architectural profession. And this makes its way to Maine with Bangor in the 1830s, the great boom town of the lumber industry with a man named Charles G. Bryant and another named Charles H. Pond. And then about 1840, we have in Portland our first full-time architect. And in the midst of his long career, he worked about 25 years here in Portland, he designs the Mechanics Hall and becomes a very important factor in the organization. So in any case, this is really the premise that we work under tonight. I want to just go into a little bit of the background of the Cheryl Mechanics before we start, and I'll touch on this as we go through. Some have already alluded to the fact that this is a very old organization. It was founded in 1815, five years before Maine Statehood, and it could very well be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, continuous organizations in Maine today. The organization was created at a time when there was really no safety net, and the concern was that mechanics, mechanics of all kinds, whether you were making barrels or whether you were carving fenestration or whatever you were doing in the field on a day-to-day basis, you had nothing to fall back on. And if something happened, so you died, so you were injured on the job, and one of the main purposes of the mechanics was to provide that organizational, fraternal safety net for its members. Another very important goal from the very beginning was education, and that's still very much a part of what we do here today, and that is from the very early days there was an apprentice library, the opportunity when there weren't public libraries for young men to read books on their particular trade and gain in knowledge and gain in skill and accruity, and that was another great purpose. A third purpose really was to just bring people together, and this was really why the hall was created between 1857 and 1859. It was very popular in the 19th century for organizations, particularly fraternal organizations like the Masons or the Odd Fellows or whatever, to create a meeting hall so that there was a place to gather and a place to exchange ideas and a place to enjoy entertainment. And what we have to remember about this building is that in 1859 when it opened, there was no radio, there was no television, there were no movies, there was no internet, there was no Twitter or anything, and so it was very common for people to create these beautiful big halls for various entertainments, for plays, for traveling shows, for lectures, and whatever. And they're very rare today, and this is what makes the hall that we're in today so special because it's a rare survivor of that 19th century phenomenon of the meeting hall. So these are just three basic precepts of the organization. So now let's turn to Thomas J. Sparrow who we've been looking at here, this very earnest gentleman. The original photograph for this is on the landing, the staircase landing. And he was born in Portland in 1805, son of Jonathan and Eleanor Sparrow. His father was a woodturner. Between 1831 and the mid-1830s, young Thomas was involved in manufacturing organs. By 1837 he had become a joiner, that is a tradesman specializing in interior finish. In 1838 his name appears in a list of workmen on the Great Merchants Exchange, and we'll see that building in a moment. And by 1841 he lists himself in the Portland Directory as an architect. We believe that probably he staked that territory out about a year before. And for the next 25 years he is one of the major architects in Portland. During the Great Fire of July 4th, 1866, he lost the contents of his architectural office. So we have virtually no architectural plans or office records surviving. And this was not unusual. Francis Fassett and George M. Harding and other architects lost their offices as well. He however resumed his practice with the help of a young assistant. But by July 1867 he had suffered a stroke and went to live with his brother William in Brownville up in Northern Maine, where he died in 1870. When word of his death reached Portland, the flag on this building, Mechanics Hall, was lowered to half-mast in his honor. And he was buried in the family plot in Stroudwater. So we're looking first at Portland from Cape Elizabeth in 1832. 1832 is an important year for Portland because it's the year that it becomes the first incorporated city in Maine. Two years later, 1834, Bangor joins Portland. The population is about 12,500. And this is the wonderful fold-out lithographic plate looking from what is now South Portland to Portland from the first edition of William Willis' history. And this is the period when Thomas J. Sparrow first enters the workforce. And we first find his name first as a wood, pardon me, as a maker of organs and then as a joiner. Now we're looking at what is probably the earliest photograph of Portland. This is a view of Middle Street, looking down Middle Street, about 1844, taken by the local photographer George M. Howe. This is a daguerreotype owned by Maine Historical. And you can see that Portland, this was Main Street, Portland. And what a modest group of buildings this is. These little brick and wooden shops, old houses that were built just after the revolution and even one or two had survived the fire that occurred at the time of the revolution. But looming over this entire view is this massive granite Greek revival building called the Merchants Exchange. This was designed by Richard Bond from Boston, and it was probably one of the most ambitious Greek revival public buildings built in New England in the 1830s and 40s. And we find in the records that Thomas J. Sparrow was a workman on this project. This building had a very short life. It was burned in 1854 and in fact nothing in this photograph survived the great fire of 1866. So this is totally removing the veil of time and looking back at a view of everything that is gone. Now we move to 1855 in contrast to the view of 1832 of Portland. And we now find that Portland has increased in population to 27,500. Not a little bit in thanks to a fairly sizable Irish immigration in the 1840s and 50s. This is the great Smith Brothers view of Portland again from what is now South Portland with the ship launching in the foreground. And you can see already the peninsula is becoming very well developed and very populous. This is the city 11 years before the center of the city is destroyed by the great fire. That this is the city in which Thomas J. Sparrow does most of his work in the 1840s, 50s, and 60s. The earliest building that we know by him is this rather fascinating double house that he designed for William and John Sparrow, his brothers, at Winter and Pine Streets built in 1849. And it has a rather gothic touch to it with the very peaked gables on the facade. It's a house which is interesting both architecturally and also both brothers were engineers at the Portland Company, which was a brand new organization created in the mid-1840s to build the steam engines and the rolling stock for what became the Grand Trunk Railway, the great connection between Portland and Montreal. And it was a great economic driver for decades in Portland's life. And so you find that Sparrow's two brothers are engineers at the Portland Company. And then about five years later, William H. Stevenson builds a similar double house at State and Spring Streets, 1854. He is a cashier in the Mechanics Bank. This building is like the one we showed a few moments ago, still very much with us. And it basically is the same plan, the same form as the William and John Sparrow house, but it's a little more elaborate, a little larger in scale. And it's very eclectic. There's Greek Revival trim on the windows. There's Italianate trim on the corners. And there's a very gothic peak to the roof. And here is that building today. And relatively recently it's been restored and it's looking very well. Now, in addition to houses in Portland, we're looking at houses first in our talk, he also worked outside of the city. And again, because of the lack of records, we don't know a lot of what he did. But we do have a very clear record on this beautiful two-and-a-half-story house in Yarmouth, the Captain Reuben Merrill house of 1858. This is on West Main Street. Captain Reuben Merrill was a sea captain. Of course, Yarmouth had many sea captains, a very active port. And in 1858 the captain had crewed enough fortune to build this really quite splendid house. This is an early photograph of the house where you see the L and the barn, the barn no longer survives. And this is the house today. It's actually the headquarters of Main Preservation, very appropriately. And it remains in the family ownership. It's now in the fourth generation of the Merrill family. I would say that generally speaking, you'd characterize it as Italianate. The trim over the windows is maybe very simple, horizontal Greek revival. But the doorway is clearly Italianate with the brackets supporting the little balustrade. And there's that very pronounced overhang with the brackets that's characteristic of the Italianate. It's a beautiful house, still largely intact. In fact, if you visit Main Preservation offices today, you will find Captain Merrill and his wife staring down at you out of period portraits. So they've never really left. Now we're turning to churches that we know by Thomas J. Sparrow. And this is a long lost building. This is the Pine Street Methodist Church. If you go just one in from Pine Street, you'll find even today a kind of a little parking lot there. And this is where that church stood right at the beginning of Pine Street. Totally Greek revival in its style. Trim over the windows, the triangular pediment in the roof, the octagonal tower, all very characteristic. And in many ways, this reminds one of dozens, if not even more, little country churches all through Main built in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. But here we find it in an urban setting by Thomas J. Sparrow. And this building lasted only till the 1870s. It was torn down and replaced by a brick building, which in turn was torn down. You'll see a very close similarity to the tower on the Pine Street Methodist Church, to the tower on the third congregational church, which is in the foreground. This is a photograph taken in 1865 from the City Hall tower. The City Hall at that time was where our City Hall is now, and we're looking up toward Manjoy Hill on the left, and we're looking out to the harbor on the right. And the church in the foreground, the third congregational church, was a remodeling project of Thomas J. Sparrow in 1847-48. It was destroyed in the Great Fire. Thomas J. Sparrow was apparently very much in demand for remodeling churches. Of course, the whole church culture was a very important force in America at the time. And here we're looking at St. Paul's Church of 182, an Episcopal Church that stood on Pearl Street. And this little building was designed by one of its parishioners, Dr. Shirley Ewing. In 1839, the St. Paul's Episcopal Parish merged into the St. Stephen's Parish, and St. Stephen's took ownership of the building. And then in 1856, they turned to Thomas J. Sparrow to greatly enlarge and remodel what was a lovely sort of classical little federal chapel into this very elaborate Gothic revival church. This is a painting of the church on Pearl Street. And here is a wood engraving of the church in the 1850s, a very elaborate façade. And I think you might say that this was kind of an Italian or a Lombardesque Gothic, because there's quite a bit of arches, arch motif used in the windows, but also the Gothic spires as well. And then amazingly, we have, for a building that was destroyed in the Great Fire, we have interior photographs of this building taken on Christmas Day in 1860. And we're looking toward the pulpit, and then we're looking toward the choir and the organ. So as with many of the buildings we've already encountered, Sparrow's work was destroyed in the Great Fire. And so in any case, this is a stereo view, you can get a sense of it from there, stereo view of what was left of the façade of that very elaborate St. Stephen's Church on Pearl Street. And then we're looking up again north toward Montjoy Hill, and you can see the profile of the observatory in the background. And this is a side view of the ruins of that building. So you can get a sense that all the side windows were all arched as well. It was really a major makeover of a much smaller, earlier building. Now we're going back to another early photograph of Middle Street before the Great Fire, and we're now merging into commercial buildings. The building, one in from the left, is the Barber Block, which is one of the first commercial buildings that we know that Sparrow designed. The Barber Block was built on Middle Street in 1851. This photograph dates from 1863, and it was built by a poor and Joe's who were merchants, and they also rented to a man named Furnal, who was a merchant tailor. What's particularly interesting about this building, there are two factors. One is that the first story is the first building in Portland to use a cast iron front. And there's a record that Mr. Joe's, who was a real estate developer, and Thomas Sparrow actually went to Portland, pardon me, to New York City to one of the great foundries there that was making cast iron fronts, and looked at their wares and ordered this front. And I have a feeling also that the gothic trim over the windows may be cast iron as well, the repeating trim, and then way up there on the top, you see that monitor. That monitor is really very similar in style to what you find on the roof of the Mechanics Hall. Here is a head-on view from an old wood engraving. It's off a billhead from Mr. Furnal, and the building actually has been quite simplified by the wood engraver. It doesn't have quite the elegance that it does in the old photograph, but you get a sense of it anyway. Another of the great buildings, commercial buildings that Thomas J. Sparrow was involved in was Muzzy's Row. This was built by John Muzzy, who was a merchant and real estate developer. He, by the way, was the father of Margot Jane Muzzy Sweat, who gave us the original Sweat gallery for the art museum. And in Muzzy's Row, which is this long building to the right, very similar in style to the Barber Block, cast iron front, these repeating gothic headers on the windows. And here we're looking up Middle Street, and in the background is the old City Hall, where the Soldiers' Monument is now, and even further over is just a glimpse of the old Preble House. This is a view from the 1850s. And again, both the Barber Block and the Muzzy Block were destroyed in a fire. But now, finally, mercifully, we get to two buildings that are still standing, commercial buildings, because Commercial Street was not destroyed in the Great Fire. Commercial Street, of course, was created by the city about 1850 as this grand scheme to rebuild the waterfront and make it ready for the railroad age, because what was happening was the Grand Trunk Railway was coming in from the north from Canada, and railroads were coming in from the south from Boston and Portsmouth. And so there needed to be a place for all of the goods, large warehouses needed to be built. And also, some of us are old enough to remember the railroad tracks in the street, in Commercial Street. And indeed, that was very much a part of it, is that the railroad cars, the freight cars would literally go along the street and empty their goods into these great warehouses. This is a view from the late 19th century, and it shows us two of Sparrow's warehouse buildings. The one on the left is the Brooks Block, and then just count over Brooks Block, the wooden building, the building from the 1880s, and then the molten block. The molten block is the other block by Sparrow on Commercial Street that survives today. It's entirely possible that he did some other of these great blocks, but we just don't have the documentation. Here's an old wooden graving of the Brooks Block. The Brooks Block was built in 1853. It was a very handsome building, very simple in many ways, continuing the Greek revival tradition, but with Italianate trim on the sides and this wonderful fenestration for a cornice in brickwork at the top of the building. And this is the 1924 Portland tax photograph of the building. It was still largely intact from 1853 when this photo was taken in 1924. And here is the building today, and this is, of course, what's happened to many of the buildings in the old port. There have been some additions as part of the reflection of the vitality of the old port and the growth of the old port, and so we have the Brooks Block at the left here with its quite recent contemporary addition. But look how handsome this is with the beautiful granite first story, the big openings, the granite coins on the corner, the fenestration for the cornice, and then shifting over to the far right of this photograph, we see the building we'll be looking at in a moment, the molten block. Here's a close-up of the Brooks Block. Now this is the molten block as it appeared originally. This is a circa 1900 photograph, and it's very interesting to see that before it had that major addition of several stories in the early 20th century that it had this lovely hip roof and this side triangular pediment. But in many ways it's the same theory as the Brooks Block with the first story done in granite, the granite coins on the corners, the fenestration is virtually identical. And here's the building today. As you see, it got a few additions in the early 20th century. Moving on to other commercial buildings, ones that do not survive. If we go, if we start at the right in this 1865 view of Middle Street, we start at the right, we then go to the building with the dormers, then go to the building with the arch windows, and then the big building next to that is the Evans Block from 1863, very handsome Italianate block with probably a sandstone or brownstone facade, as best we can tell from the old photographs. And there's another view of it, Italianate in feeling. And then we turn to the Sturtevant Block. We're standing at Middle and Exchange streets in 1865. At the right, where Post Office Park is now, is the custom house that replaced the merchants exchange. In the background is a city hall that stood only from about 1860 till it was destroyed in the fire. And then if you go up one, two, three, you can barely see it, but it's just sort of on it, just on the side, you can see the facade of the Sturtevant Block, which was designed by Sparrow about 1865. This is the same view about 10 years later after the rebuilding. And what we have is now the old Post Office at the right that took the place of the custom house, a new city hall on the site. And then if you go up just one building in from the building on the corner, you will see a new Sturtevant Block rebuilt after the fire in 1866. And this is the photograph of it today. And from all that we can gather, this building was a virtual duplicate of the building that Sparrow built for the Sturtevant family in 1865. And they liked it so much that and even though he lost his plans in the fire, he was able to just reconstruct virtually the same building for them. Now we turn to an interesting aspect of Thomas J. Sparrow's practice, one that we don't often think of in terms of architects, and that is cemetery monuments. But of course, architects have designed cemetery monuments and tombs all through history. And some of the great American architects of the 19th and early 20th century did tombs. Here we're looking at a very early photograph of the western cemetery. This is probably no later than 1860. The western cemetery was established around 1830 to take care of the overflow of the eastern cemetery. And by the time this photograph was taken 30 years later, it itself was overflowing. And already the city had established cemetery in South Portland for a city and evergreen what was then out in Westbrook. But here we have this wonderful early photograph from about 1860. And why I'm showing this to you is that one of the prominent monuments in the western cemetery, as early as that photograph, and if you look carefully you can pick it out, but even today with the western cemetery is the monument of master Henry Jackson. Master Henry Jackson was a school teacher who taught in a little school on the corner of Spring and Oak Streets for 25 years. He was beloved by his pupils. And when he died in 1850, they raised the money to erect the largest monument in western cemetery to him. Now how many teachers can you say of that? And it is there today. It's a classical obelisk with a very nice marble inscription, and then there's a carved inscription as well. And then at the other end of the city, the eastern cemetery was still being used into the late 19th century, although sparingly, is the monument for a minister. This is the monument of the Reverend William I. Reese in eastern cemetery erected in 1860 from designs by Thomas J. Sparrow. He is noted as the pastor of the first universalist church who founded the Widows Wood Society. And that was one of these organizations. There were so many of these in the days before the safety net to help people who were in need. And this was to provide widows with wood in the winter. Now Sparrow was involved in two for want of better terms public buildings in the 1850s, which have some similarities. The first of these was the Cumberland County Jail. How many of you remember the Cumberland County Jail? Yeah, just a few of us. It was a very intimidating structure. It was built in 1858, 5758. And this is the first illustration we know of it from William Willis' handbook of Portland, or guidebook of Portland from 1859. This is based on a sketch, and then it becomes a wood engraving. But here's the photograph. Very much Italianate in style. The central part of the structure was a combination of administrative space and also, believe it or not, in those days in the 19th century, the jailer and his family lived at the jail. And so indeed this center brick section with the granite trim was that combination of purposes. And then the actual jail cells were in the wings on either side. Note the very elaborate, rusticated, ashler treatment of these wings in granite with the great elongated windows with the coins, arch coins around them, very similar to what we'll see in the Mechanics Hall. And of course the buildings are virtually contemporary. Now the jail did survive the great fire. We're looking from the observatory. The street immediately in the front of us is Congress Street. The street just over the burned area is Cumberland Avenue. And way down there in the lower right on Monroe Street is the county jail that just barely escaped the fire. And of course was used for more than a hundred years later. Now when Thomas J. Sparrow was approached in 1857 to design the Mechanics Hall, there were already some precedents, some ideas, some designs that he might fall back on. And one of them that I think was influential to him was Charles K. Kirby's plan for the new Boston Public Library on Tremont Street. The Kirby brothers, James and Charles, had come from Worcester in the late 1840s and they worked in Portland only into the early 1850s and they went to Boston. And then Kirby got this major commission to do the library. And if you look at the arches on the facade and if you look at the monitored cupola on the top, these are motifs that we find in Mechanics Hall. This is the earliest view that we know of of Mechanics Hall. It also appears in Willis's handbook of Portland, 1859, again probably based upon a sketch or maybe upon an early photograph. And here we see the building after its immediate completion in 1859 with the arched windows on the facade, the wonderful monitor roof that goes the entire length of the roof, and the great side arch windows. Here is a more precise, perhaps more architecturally correct, very early wood engraving, which also dates from 1859 and was published in Belu's pictorial drawing room companion. And so you really get a sense now of the elegant granite facade, the brick on the side with the arch windows, and the monitor roof. And here's a little later view of the building from Edward L. Wells, Portland in vicinity from 1876. And already we have Carter Brothers jewelers in the corner, longtime clients of that space. This is an interesting photograph showing the Congress Street perspective of the building, looking from really from west to east, in which all of these small one-story wooden commercial buildings, they're all buildings that are torn down in 1881 for the big JB Brown commercial block that is built in 1882, 1883. But this is the way the street looked, and in that case, it really gives you a sense of how Mechanics Hall in its early years just loomed above other buildings. This is a wonderful view pretty early on, probably from around the 1870s. We're standing in the middle of Congress Street. The front of the hall is in view at the left, those little commercial buildings, some of them are there at the left. And a number of larger commercial buildings have built beyond. The old city hall is there right of center with its columns. Here's another view. This is a stereo view showing how really striking this building was and the great scale that it had, the other buildings immediately to the right, the Russell block, and then the two buildings that were owned by JB Brown. And there's a very similar view. And here's a view from the opposite vantage point with the Russell carriage and slay factory nestled right up next to Mechanics Hall. And here is Carter Brothers with some really quite nifty kind of Gothic pointed arch drapes over the windows. Carter Brothers, fine watches, jewelry, silverware, under Mechanics Hall, Congress and Casco Streets, Portland watches and jewelry carefully repaired. And this was typical of these schemes when large fraternal halls or organizational halls were built to always have commercial space for rental purposes on the first floor to help with the income for maintaining the building. Now just a sideline, but Mechanics Hall was finished in 1859. And in 1860, another organization, the Portland Atheneum, builds the first public library in Portland on Union Street. And a little known architect named Charles Goodell designs that. It's built in 1860, lasts only 60 years, destroyed by the fire. But again, you can see the influence of Mechanics Hall with the arch motif and particularly the three arch windows and the use of the rustication. Now we're just going to enjoy this building for a few moments. These are photos along with our other contemporary photographs that have been taken by David Kloff and we're very grateful for them. This is the building today at the corner of Congress and Casco Streets, still largely intact from the time that it was completed in 1859. Let me just give you one bit of period flavor here. Can't have a lecture without period flavor. This is from the eastern Argus of October 23rd, 1857, the cornerstone laying. I'm not going to sing this hymn, but I will read it to you. But it does kind of capture what the Mechanics were and still are about. Here a temple let us raise, fitting for thy use and praise, long honored trinity, labor, art and charity, labor, art, charity. Whether sons of toil may turn, resting from this to learn, that of God's they honored be, who in living honor thee. Here may science stay to teach, wisdom utter golden speech, pleasure join with usefulness, love alleviate distress, working out the perfect plan by which all the race of man shall confess thy trinity, labor, art and charity. Here is now of course a view, if you think back a few moments ago, just immediately to the right for most of the history of the building was the Russell block and now we have the main savings bank plaza. For those who don't know the story, I should probably just, this is the preservation story in the talk. Simply that I joined the main Charles Mechanics in 1971. I had to wait two or three years. In those days there was a waiting list and you had to be recommended by someone else who was already a member. At that point the ceiling was 500 members and then a year or two later it was lifted to 600 members and it was about that time in the early 70s that the main savings bank wanted to build its great plaza and they hired a noted architect from the Boston area, Pietro Baluski. Mr. Baluski came to Portland and he looked at the site because there were several old Victorian commercial buildings there and he said, I must have the whole site. I must have the whole block to build my building on. And so the bank came to the Mechanics and I remember the meeting and fortunately reason prevailed and it actually prevailed for very pragmatic reasons. Yes we were aware of the great history and architecture of this building but the decision not to sell to the bank and not to fall to the pressure of Mr. Baluski was simply that where would we go? This building has been our home for so long and this building is the center of our activities and our identity. What would we be without this building? And so fortunately the decision was made to reject the offer and the building is still very much with us today and there have been other peaks and valleys as well in the history of the organization but always reason has prevailed and the organization has risen to the occasion. Here is a head on view and then these wonderful carvings. This is the arm of labor or the arm and hammer. It's not the hand and sickle. It's the hand and hammer. There we go. David's great photograph of this even with the sinnows in this arm. And then to honor two figures from antiquity carved in the keystones of the facade were Vulcan the god of fire and Archimedes the great ancient mathematician and scientist and then over the entrance mechanics apostrophe hall. So as we end our story of Thomas J. Sparrow it is a kind of poignant ending. I've already mentioned that within a year after the great fire he suffered a serious stroke. His one of his brothers that was William had become the superintendent of the Slate quarries in Brownville way up in northern Maine and this is Brownville in about 1870. So it was quite a shock to go from from Portland to Brownville. However and there are the quarries that his brother managed. However his brother had a wonderful house in in Brownville and one wonders if if Thomas because this house predated Thomas's stroke if this might have been a Thomas Sparrow design. In any case it's sort of combination of Greek revival and and Italian eight with a little brackets on the cornice but it is entirely sheath in slate shingles and to this day it is known as the slate house in Brownville and it's on the national register as such. So we end where we began with Thomas J. Sparrow and hopefully we have a little widened appreciation of his life and his work. I want to do another quick reading as I end from the eastern August February 1859. This was when the building was being dedicated a tribute to the architect of the building. We have no need to speak of his praises. We have only to look about us to see them. Now that's very much based upon Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in in St. Paul's Cathedral. We have only to look about him to look about us to see them. He has proven that although one swallow cannot make a summer, one sparrow can create a form of beauty which shall give delight in all times and all seasons. Thank you. The question is that many of the buildings that were destroyed in the fire were built of brick and granite rather than wood. The problem was that the fire got such a powerful start. It started down at the corner of around high and commercial streets. It hit J.B. Brown's great sugar factory which was eight feet, pardon me, eight stories tall and it just ignited it like a great bomb. Then the fire was like a great sheet of fire. The buildings could not withstand the fire. There was the old custom house that was built in the 1850s was supposed to be a fireproof building. It was built of stone on the outside and a lot of use of cast iron on the inside. The walls withstood the fire but when the government architects came to examine it they said it's just too badly damaged. We can't reuse the walls. It was a massive conflagration. Have you commented on some of the historic uses of the building during the Civil War? Yes. The question is comment on the historic uses of the building. One of the most famous chapters is when the city burns, the great fire, among the buildings as you saw was the city hall that was destroyed. So this became the de facto city hall until the new city hall was reconstituted about 1868. So for a couple years this is where city government was conducted because there were so few large buildings that had survived the fire. I'm seeing Herb Adams back there. Herb, can you tell us the Civil War significance? The very top of the building that you have referenced as the monitor is where the troops that gathered from Maine by train 24-7 would be marched up from the waterfront to the top and it is there they were fed by in that Celestory that is still there. The stove is there. Everything is there except the gas lights and even the place where the ceiling is patched where the men marched up the stairs two in the morning bearing their muskets whacked the ceiling. The musket barrel marks are still there. Thank you. And for those of you who know Herb, Herb among other things is a rare orator from the 19th century who knows how to project his voice. And there was nothing that I enjoyed more when I was in my Augusta days of monitoring the legislature than hearing Herb in debate. No one else really had a chance. Herb. Any other questions? Yes. I'm interested in the processing described where we went from an architect who had to play a role in building the building that he or she designed to the architect as a totally independent from the builder. What did we gain from that transition and what did we lose? Well, I think ultimately we gained because the architectural profession began to develop in that second quarter of the 19th century. And by 1857 we had a national architectural organization. The American Institute of Architects is still there. And it was and then of course that led to professional organization to professional education in the late beginning after the civil war. And it granted it was the development of a specialization but it also meant that that specialization could rise up the quality of what was designed and also be more assured of the stability of what was designed as well. And I think those were, you know, that professionalism was a gradual but important evolution. And Sparrow and a few other people were in the cutting edge of that. Yes. Sparrow, you take a joiner, a wood joiner, and it designs a building like this, but what did you learn? How did you learn to get there in history without falling down? Well, I think what happened, there was a lot of self-education in those days. There were many books on architecture, on structure, and also, you know, one learned through apprenticeships and one learned through reading and one also learned through observation. I mean, this was a period where people began to travel. They would go to Boston, they would go to New York, and we don't know. He might actually have had the opportunity to train with someone in Boston and New York. We've just never found that out. Other early architects in Maine did. Fassett, who's a well-known architect in Portland, trained in both Boston and New York in the 1840s. So it was a combination probably of many factors, Peter. But ultimately, here we are, and the building's still standing. Yes, John? I remember correctly, Sparrow died very shortly after the fire. I'm sorry? Sparrow died very shortly after the fire, unlike the next year. No, no, he had his stroke within a year of the fire, 1867. And then he went up to live in Brownville with his brother and then died there in 1867. I'm just wondering, what might speculate to this brilliant man, saw so many of his creations destroyed in the fire? I'm wondering if that started the demise of his talent? Well, I've often thought the same thing. And also, the other issue may have been, and again, we can only speculate. It's dangerous to speculate. But we can only speculate also that not only the shock of the fire and losing his office, but also the fact that he probably had tremendous pressure upon him to help rebuild the city. And the rest is history.