 So anyway, thank you so much for coming. My name is Hillary Bassett, and I'm the executive director at Greater Portland Landmarks. And it's so great to see all of you here today, and people who live in the neighborhood. And Rick Scala's brought many people who are connected with this area. He's one of our docents. And so it's great to see you all here today. As you know, Greater Portland Landmarks' mission is to preserve and revitalize Greater Portland's remarkable legacy of historic buildings, neighborhoods, landscapes, and parks. And I just want to do a quick preview of things that are coming up. This is one of four neighborhoods' talks that we've been doing this fall. It's the third in a series. And the next one, there will be another one next week on Thursday, October 25th, in the nascent corner area at St. Ansgar's Church, Lutheran Church, which is also a very interesting older building as well. So it's a 1950s mid-century church. We are also very active in advocacy for historic preservation, as you may know. And one of the big projects we're working on currently is to work in partnership with the Munger Hill Neighborhood Organization, the city of Portland, to put together a detailed survey of portions of the Munger Hill Neighborhood so that we have more knowledge about those buildings in that area for, hopefully, we're hoping for potential, there might be a potential historic district up there, yet to be determined through a public process. And then we're also doing a strategic research process. Some of you have been part of it. There's an online survey. I encourage all of you to take that survey. Just give us your feedback about how greater Portland landmarks can be more effective and helpful to you as Portland residents. There is a clipboard in the back of the room. If we don't have your contact information yet, please feel free to sign up. We'll send your emails and keep you posted on the programming that we're doing for the public. And I also want to mention a few things that are also available tonight. The Four Walks Through Portland is a new project that we've just finished. It's Four Walks Through downtown Portland areas, Western Promenade, Oldport, State Street area, India Street area, which highlight 10 buildings in the neighborhood but also give you kind of interesting tidbits about how the neighborhood developed and also the architectural details. So that's hot off the press at a very reasonable price of $7.95. And then the Deering Book, for those of you who are interested in local history and architecture, Greater Portland Landmarks published this back in 2010. And it's a great overview of the neighborhoods that aren't downtown and aren't islands. So it gives the story of the many, many small towns and areas that then ultimately became the Portland that we know today. Lots of great illustrations and stories. So that's available also tonight if you're interested. I'd like to say thank you to a few folks tonight. First of all, the Main Historic Preservation Commission gave us a grant to do a lot of this research. So we had four interns from graduate programs in historic preservation who came to Portland for 10 weeks. And they did the research that's the basis for tonight's talk. And then for the church, St. Peter's Episcopal Church was a terrific craftsman building with a great, wonderful stained glass window. And Tom Ainsworth is here somewhere. Yay, Tom. Tom is very active in the church and can tell you a little bit more about its history and background. And then also to recognize our staff, of course, Julie Larry, who's your speaker. Chloe Martin, who is also here helping out. Our speaker tonight is Julie Larry. Julie is our director of advocacy at Greater Portland Landmarks. She is trained as an architect at Tulane University in New Orleans. And but she has come with many, many years of experience, not only running her own architecture firm, but also doing extensive survey work and research in architectural history. So I'm always excited to hear what Julie has discovered about various neighborhoods of Portland. Thank you, Hillary. And thank you everyone for coming out this evening. I appreciate it. Maybe I'll turn just a little so I can make sure while we're looking at them. So thank you. The city of Portland has become increasingly popular place to live, work, and visit. And much of that we believe can be attributed to its historic buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes. Outside of designated local historic districts in Portland, much of the historic architecture, especially in areas off the peninsula, has not been fully researched or documented. And because of trends of providing greater density and growth in some of these neighborhoods off the peninsula, in the last three years, Greater Portland Landmarks has conducted surveys of architectural resources along Stevens Avenue, Forest Avenue, and in the Oakdale and Deering Highlands neighborhoods in Portland. This summer, we continued that earlier survey work with surveys in East Deering, Nason's Corner, Morrill's Corner, and on Peaks Island. You may have seen this summer our four interns out in the neighborhood. This is them out and about in the East Deering. They documented each building in the survey area with a photograph and recorded information about its materials and history. This map shows the locations of the buildings that were surveyed this summer in East Deering. All of the results of this summer's work can be found online in a database maintained by the Main Historic Preservation Commission and available to look at to anybody with a wireless connection in a laptop or a computer or a phone. It's called the CARMA map system. It's CARMA with a C, and each building or structure that is documented can be viewed by clicking on individual monopoly type houses. You can see all the little greenhouses there. And areas shaded in purple or pink, that big area down there, those are National Register historic districts. So that's the Baxter Boulevard area. You may see, if you go online, there are some red buildings which are individual buildings that are individually listed on the National Register and yellow buildings which have been determined eligible for listing. The green buildings that you see here are all the ones that we did this summer and they've not yet been determined if they would be potentially landmarks or historic district. The work in the East Deering neighborhood is, as Hilary mentioned, is grant funded and that, in part, that grant funding needs to be wrapped up by the end of the year. So all of the information currently is still in a draft form and will have this wrapped up by the end of the year. And if you want to know when that's done, just give us your contact information and we can let you know when all of that is completed. So if you go to the next slide. When you select one of the little monopoly houses, you can view a survey form for the building. Our final survey report will include a written description of the historic context of the entire neighborhood and then it will be illustrated with maps and photographs and then once all of this work is done, it will be available statewide, both in our office through the karma system at the state's office and hopefully we'll be able to get a copy to the city of Portland as well. When this is completed at the end of the year, we'll let the neighborhood organization know as well and so those of you who are connected through the neighborhood org or through our email will be able to know when the reports are complete and you can go online and view the final forms. Next slide. East Deering is a fairly large neighborhood as you can see in this yellow area outlined on the map but we needed to focus our work on a smaller area. So we focused in the area that's shown in the red cloud there. We decided to focus our initial survey in the East Deering neighborhood around the area where there were the earliest concentrations of buildings and because of some anticipated city planning. Our survey work is in part being completed in advance of significant city efforts to comprehensively rezone the city and to enact policies to boost growth in specific areas. Under its 2017 comprehensive plan, Portland is prioritizing 14 node areas and some transportation corridors for potential rezoning and development efforts. East Deering is one of the nodes identified by the city's evaluation. You can see that blue node right over here by the water. So this summer I mentioned we focused on a number of areas, six areas, identified in the comp plan for rezoning and development. Morals Corner, East Deering, Deering Highlands, Boulevard Park, Nason's Corner, and Peaks Island. For those of you who don't know, Boulevard Park is a small neighborhood just off Baxter Boulevard near the Hannaford store behind where Palmer Springs is and Nason's Corner is the intersection of Brighton Avenue and Capistic Street and that's where we'll be meeting next Thursday. Looking at the City of Portland zoning map, we wanted to be sure to document all of the business zones in the East Deering neighborhood as well as buildings along Washington Avenue because Washington Avenue is one of the corridors that was identified by the city in the comp plan. This is the area that the city will likely be reevaluating in the coming years as they do their city-wide recode. The longer out term, the long term outcome of this survey project we hope is that through sharing the information we have assembled with you and with the neighborhood groups that will help increase awareness of and the need to protect unique historic areas and buildings, whether through the creation of local historic districts or landmarks or within other city land use policies. So tonight I'll tell you just briefly a little bit how we go about doing this historic resource survey, if we go to the next slide. One of the first things we did was we took that area that we had zoomed in on as the area of focus for the survey this summer and we looked at the era of construction of properties within the area using assessor data and other sources. And what we found is that the majority of buildings were built 1890s to around 1920. The buildings in red were built around 1900 to 1920. And then the other large grouping of residences were actually built after 1968. In the historic preservation world we look at 50 years as the cutoff for historic. So 50 years ago today was 1968. And you can see those are the cream colored so they're very hard to see on this map. They don't stick out as much but those are a lot of the later construction projects and that's mainly seaside nursing home wash is a Washington gardens, the front street development and some of the commercial buildings right as you come off 295. As Hilary mentioned the Deering Book has been a great resource for us having that work done is a very general history. What we're trying to get down to is some more specific history about each building but this is a great starting point for a lot of our research. We know that one of the largest employers in East Deering in the 19th century was the ship building industry. East Deering's waterfront was home to several ship building yards including the Merrill Yard which closed in 1866, the Kelly Yard which closed around the same time, the R. Lewis Company Yard which closed in 1880 and the Russell Ship Yard which closed in 1891 but then reopened again during World War I. It was reopened by Frank Rumory who was a local contractor who built many of the car dealership buildings along Forest Avenue right around the same World War I period. This is a painting from around that time when the shipyard was reopened and you can see in the back the Trestle Bridge going off by the B&M bean factory in the background of this image. This map of the area in 1871 depicts the small grouping of dwellings that was located near the intersection of Aranda and Main Street. Main Street is now Washington Avenue. It shows the location of three of the shipyards off Water and Winslow Street down here in the lower right-hand corner. The larger scaled map on the left-hand side of the image shows the location of the Marine Hospital at Martin's Point which operated 1859 to 1952 as a home for sick and disabled seamen. We also gathered information on the development of various subdivisions that form part of the E-steering. Recorded land plans, especially those for subdivisions, are helpful in identifying when streets were first planned and laid out. And you can see that much of the land development in this area occurred between 1890 and 1912. And this was in part driven by a couple of factors. In 1895, the streetcar line from Woodford's Corner via Luntz Corner, which is the corner of Ocean and Washington Avenue, was electrified. Then that same year, a new line was built connecting Portland's east end across Tukey's Bridge with E-steering on in Tefalmouth. In 1901 and 1902, the Grand Trunk Railroad Yards Roundhouse was built off Presum Scott Street, providing employment for folks who lived in the neighborhood. And then a few years later in 1913, Burnham and Morrill moved their canning plant from Franklin Street near the waterfront in Portland's Oldport to Water Street in E-steering. Their new plan allowed the company to expand and have direct water and rail access for their products included their canned beans, fish flakes, and fish chowders. The facility was designed by George Burnham, an MIT trained architect who also designed additions to the porches building on Congress Street and the Cumberland County Courthouse. This is an historic advertisement for B&M's fish flakes and it also, the bottom of the image, depicts their new facility on Water Street. We used a wide variety of historic maps in our research including the 1884 Main State Atlas which shows some of the shipyards and the early location of the Presum Scott Primary School on Presum Scott Street and the Grand Trunk Cemetery. We also used a 20th century map that really shows the expansion and development of the neighborhood. And this is the Richards map of 1914. This has footprints of all of the buildings in the neighborhood at that time. You can see near the top of the image in the bright red, that's the roundhouse and some of the Grand Trunk yard buildings. And then if we go to the next slide, we used a lot of historic aerial images that we could find. The Portland Public Works archive is incredibly helpful in creating a timeline for street development and this is one of their series of aerial images taken in 1940 that's in their collection. And if we go out a little bit, you can see the area, there's a large section of the neighborhood that was still water in the 1940s. I highlighted here in blue called Hanson's Creek. And if we overlay that on the next image with that 1914 map, we can see that the area occupied by Hanson's Creek eventually became part of the Front Street Housing operated by the Portland Housing Authority and the Seaside Nursing Home. We used some additional maps that provide more detail of buildings in the neighborhood like this 1896 Sanborn map. And then a little bit later, this is an 1850s Sanborn map. This is a detail of the Berman Moral Canning Facility on Water Street. Just flip through these quickly. These go through some of the different subdivisions. You can see the houses as they're built out. Their little garages are all marked. This goes all the way out to Washington Avenue to Canco Road and documents all of those. We also gathered historic images, drawings, paintings, and postcards of the neighborhood. This image is Tukey's Bridge in 1845 picking some, and it shows some dwellings on the right-hand side of the image. That were located just off Water Street. This is Baxter Boulevard under construction in 1904. In the next few images, I've matched up some historic images as closely as possible with Google Street images, which will be shown in the lower right. The Boulevard first opened in 1917. Here's the commercial center of the neighborhood with a streetcar coming down Washington Avenue. This is looking from Kitter Street towards downtown and towards Veranda Street about 1913. This is the Garfield Building, which you can see has lost its historic tower. This is the corner of Veranda and Washington. This is looking out Veranda Street, the Garfield Building on the right in both images. So that was in the corner of Veranda and Maine. And that was Veranda and Maine before, before Deering became a part of Portland. And then it became Washington Avenue, so 1899. This is out on Veranda Street near the intersection of Sherwood. This image is taken a little bit further along on Veranda Street. This is actually taken about where the overpass for 295 crosses Veranda Street. The bungalow that you can see in the upper left of the older image is no longer there. Here's the Iron Bridge, Tukey's Bridge, sometimes in the early 20th century. It was built in 1898, replaced in 1960. We know that mid 20th century transportation projects had an enormous effect on the neighborhood. Here's an image of the construction of the planned route one overpass. Note that the large apartment building that the arrow is pointing at is an excellent landmark in some of the following images to kind of zero in on. That's an existing building that's still there today. This is looking towards the on ramp to 295 at Washington and Veranda. Okay. Here's some completed images, 1955 of the overpass. This is another one in the lower right. You can see just part of the B&M factory. And here's some for I-295 construction in this upper center of the image. You can see where the fill was going in to cross the cove. That cove is in the front of the image. You can see all of the houses that are gonna have to come out pretty easily in this image. Here's the construction of the overpass on Veranda Street about 1960. This is the construction of Tukey's Bridge in 1960. The Department of Transportation has some cool archival images that we were able to access and use. Here's another one of their images. This is the Washington Street off ramp over 295 under construction. In addition to some of the commercial properties, we know that the neighborhood had some very important religious buildings, including the one that we're in. But this one here is the Methodist Church in East Deering. They held their first services in 1883 and then organized as a church in 1889. They began building this church structure here in 1907. The Washington Avenue Methodist Church was dedicated in 1909 a few years later. The church was eventually raised in a vestry kitchen and two other rooms were added underneath sometime between 1912 and 1915. And here's the church that we're in today, St. Peter's Church. The church first met in a hall that was located at 510 Washington Avenue until 1918 when the cornerstone of this church was laid. One of the best sources of information on historic buildings in Portland is the City of Portland Tax Assessment Photos. These are photos taken of all of the tax-paying buildings in the city, so no churches or schools are in this collection. These have all been digitized and are available online through the main historical society's website. It's called the Main Memory Network. We were able for nearly all of the pre-1924 properties we surveyed to compare the historic look of the building with its current appearance. It helped us to document a construction date and find an early if not the earliest owner. In the next part of the presentation, I'll be showing what I'm calling before images, those in the 1924 images, and the after images of... Or the images today of these houses and buildings that we surveyed this summer. So this is Veranda Street. You can see that this stick-style building has retained a great deal of its original work on the porch and in the upper dormer. It's another building on Veranda Street, built about 1870 around the same time as the previous house. It's lost, it's Ellen Barn, but it still has its great. We call those verge boards, the trim in the gable end of the building. This is a bit of an earlier houses. It's one of the earlier houses that we surveyed. This is 54 to 56 Veranda Street, built about 1855. These two buildings were built right around the same time. They're very similar. They still look fairly similar today, built about 1880. This is a house on Baxter Boulevard and the picture from 1922 was not taken from the Boulevard. It was taken from the access behind the building and our photo today was taken from the Boulevard. So it's a little bit of a different look. But you can see that the details around the porch are still the same. Quite close by is this great building. This is visible in some of the Baxter Boulevard constructions. We call that a clip hip up on the roof there. It can also be called a jerkin head roof. So it's really easy to identify this one. It has a great prominence in a lot of the early photos. This is on Galvin Street, 1896. So even though some of the siding has a replacement windows have been put in, a lot of these buildings still retain a lot of their original features. Here's a little bungalow from 1915 on, I'm going to say, Isley Street. So correct me if that's not how you see it. Does that sound OK? Another bungalow from around the same time, about 1914. Another one. This one still has its great stained glass window as you go up onto the porch. We move over to Sherwood Street. This is about 1902. We have, of course, a number of triple decors in the neighborhood. This is on Sherwood Street. A great building still has its front porch. A lot of these triple decors tend to lose their front porches because maintenance of them just becomes a problem. This is a great one that retains it. Even though it's been vinyl sided, these were fairly simple vernacular buildings. Usually didn't have too much detail, so they still look remarkably similar. Great little building on Sherwood Street. Built about 1864. This is pre-Civil War. Great indented front porch. This is one of the interns, more favorite buildings in the neighborhood. They love the detail on this bay. The bay was initially hidden in the tree. One of the things that's always difficult as we're doing our survey work is trying to work around telephone poles and work around trees. And they had the same problem in 1924. Another triple decker, double triple decker, 1910. Part of this was to think about how neighborhoods changed and the density and what impact the streetcars had on the neighborhood. Certainly, when initially the initial streetcar, you had to go down Ocean Avenue, out Forest Avenue, and into town, that major commute to work by streetcar a lot longer. But once in 1895, once the line from Falmouth went through Easteering and right on into downtown Portland, it made this area a much more valuable place and easy to commute to place. And so we see a lot of people who'd lived downtown, whether in Bayside or on Munjoy Hill, start to move out to Easteering. And there was obviously a great need for housing and triple deckers provide a dense form of housing. Whoops, you can go ahead, sorry. This great building, which had a storefront and this beautiful projecting bays, which is still there on Washington Avenue, about 1896. Bottos Bakery Building, which was built around, the initial building was built around 1914 and then added on to over time. Another little bungalow. It's amazing, I think one of the differences in this neighborhood that we saw compared to some of the other neighborhoods we surveyed this summer was the difference in scale. You could have a fairly large building right next to a fairly small building, like this little bungalow here on Washington Avenue built about 1921. With some beautiful, large Queen Anne homes, like this one on Washington Avenue. This is a fairly late date for the Queen Anne period, but this and it's in its sister building right next to our really stunning buildings. Here's the other building. This is one of my favorites, these projecting gables. I think they're so much fun. This is 604 Washington Avenue. You can see that it, initially it used to have one, the projecting bay used to have a bracket that looked like it was holding it up. Those were probably taken off around the time the vinyl siding went up. Another great Queen Anne building. Before this vinyl sided, you can see it used to have some trim work in the gable ends that's now gone, but these great bays and dormers are still there. Another very nice triple decker. In this case, this is one where it has lost its front series of balconies. It really does make a difference on those houses. This is a bungalow that you can see the front porch has been enclosed. This one was under construction at the time of the image. A gambrel roof. We don't see too many of those in the neighborhood. There are a couple of those, but not a lot of them. Gambrel roof houses, this one from 1922. So it's just a few years old. You can see the great garage just to the right of the house. Another large house, essentially, very similar to what it looked like. The porch details have been slightly altered. So we did about 60 buildings in the neighborhood. You know, we know that there's a lot more to do here. We were trying to be judicious with our time this summer. We had a lot of areas that we wanted to survey. So as I mentioned earlier, all of this information, this is currently in draft form, but will be finalized by the end of the year. This is the link where you can go to see all of the information as well as our website. And if you have any questions about specific buildings, maybe some that I didn't show here tonight, my email address is right down there. Please feel free to email me and I can send you whatever information if you happen to be living in this area of the neighborhood or have some information you wanna share with us. That's always great as well. But I can get you specific information on a house that you live in or perhaps grew up in or whatever the case may be. And as Hilary and reminded us, we have one more meeting at Nason's Corner, where we'll talk a little bit about the development of that area. Around the same time as East Deering developed, again in large part because of the street car network, they started developing from an area of farmland around 1895, really picking up around First World War, the development of that neighborhood. So again, thank you to St. Peter's Episcopal Church, to the East Deering Neighborhood Association, to everyone who stopped and talked to the interns this summer and shared their stories of growing up in the neighborhood, offered them lemonade. They really appreciated that on hot days. And to all of our funders who contributed to this project, we thank everyone. Next slide. Thank you. I can take a few questions or share stories, whatever. Go ahead. So what year did the trolleys stop running? Oh, yes, the question is, what year did the trolleys stop running? The trolleys, I don't know specifically this line, the trolleys starting to be replaced by buses in the 1930s. Yes, sir. One of those pictures you showed a sort of like, deep purple area, just like in that code, and those sort of lighter purple areas that sort of slices him a little bit off of Baxter Boulevard. You said, yeah, right there, where it was, not the purple, but the one right above it. I think you said those sort of historic districts. I wasn't sure what you were saying about that. Yeah. What are the implications? No, okay, so what happens with the state and the boundaries of a historic district? They do it by four corners. They draw a polygon with four corners. They don't actually follow the curve of Baxter Boulevard. So if you actually draw, I don't know what the distance is off the center line of the road for the depth of the historic district, but it follows the curve. It doesn't actually cover all of those homes there. But what it does mean is that those homes are within 100 feet of a historic district, and the city does review alterations to properties within 100 feet of a historic district. That's true wherever you are in the city. I heard that the historic district site at this point is Baxter Boulevard. The historic district is Baxter Boulevard. So if you're within 100 feet, that things that you would do on that side of the building would be reviewed as they're viewed from the historic district. Yes, sir. Yeah, the picture that you showed that said those houses would be easy to take out when 295 was being put in. Well, I don't think it's easy, but yeah. Well, no, but you showed the bottom section of 295 heading out to Falmouth. Right. And then you showed the dirt area that went across the water. Yes. Well, we used to play baseball on that dirt area during the construction. The construction guys would actually come out during the day, talk about safety and stuff. They would drop a blade of a bulldozer and they would literally give us a field that made out of dirt packed down that we would play baseball. And the dirt pile that they used to take from used to be a homerun. And at first, little guys could hit homeruns. And then at the end, when they got about 250 to 300 feet back, only the bigger kids were able to launch the ball in. And then the sad day came when they told us that it was time for them to put the final touches on it and they were gonna black top it through. So we, because we lived in the Woodworth Street, Hawthorne Street area, off of Miranda Street. And that was... One of my favorite stories of that is one of the big guys hit a homerun and it went into one of the dump trucks that was leaving. And the next day, the guy came and returned the ball. But one thing you might wanna know is when they took those houses, they sold them back to the owners if they wished for one dollar, but they had to move them. And many, his house, my house, they infilled in our neighborhood with some of those houses. I'd love to catch up with you and find out what numbers those were because that's not really recorded anywhere. Okay. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. We'd probably show you many houses. We'd prefer drive when it's light up. We remember watching them being moved, actually. One specifically coming across that was right next to it, ended up right next door to my house, filled in a big gully, they put a house, the house is still there on Wordsworth Street, but they moved it from over on Woody Street when they were cutting 295 to there, yeah. I love thriftiness. Okay. And that's a good outcome. Yes, man. How often are the parameters of East Deering? What are the parameters of East Deering? So, this has become a hot topic in the city lately. The city used to have this map of the neighborhood which is where one of my images came from. I snagged that map before it went away. The city recently took down their neighborhood maps. I don't really know the exact reason why, but let's see, that one right there. But this was the parameters of what the city considered East Deering. So, from the Falmouth town line along Ocean Avenue, basically to Payson Park to Tukey's Bridge. And I think what, in part, one of the reason they may have taken this down was that there are some neighborhoods like the Woodford Corner neighborhood where the corner itself is actually part of four neighborhoods. And it was really difficult for those neighborhood groups to focus on the center itself as a place to revitalize. And there was a lot of concern about those neighbors wanting places they could walk to, to have a coffee shop, to go to dinner. And so, you had four groups advocating. And maybe all four groups didn't want to advocate for a better neighborhood center. So, I think, in part, that may be what this city took down, this map. But it certainly was handy. And I think part of it has to do with school district, which school district you're in and which political council district you're in, some of the lines. But I think it was fairly arbitrary in some cases. This had been on the city's website up until a couple months ago. Yes, ma'am. So, you said that Deering became part of Portland. Do you know when that was, and it was still in town? Do you know other times? Yeah, Deering was... So, this whole area was called Falmouth, initially. And then Portland Peninsula broke off from that. And then Westbrook, what we think of Westbrook today, which was actually called Sakurapa back then, that's the area where the mills were along the river. And Stroudwater and this section of Deering all struck off and became the town of Westbrook. And then because the Sakurapa area was really focused on industry and mills and this part of Westbrook that we're in right now was really more a residential community for Portland, there was a lot of tension between the two. And so Deering separated from Westbrook and became the town of Deering. Then a few years later, they became the city of Deering. And then in 1899, you know, Portland was losing a lot of people who were moving out to Deering. They were moving on up and out to the burbs. And they were losing a lot of voters and they were losing a lot of their tax base. And they wanted the people back. And so there was a referendum, a vote. And the city of Portland voted to annex Deering. Deering voted not to be annexed. And the state legislature said, we're gonna let Portland annex you over your objections. And Deering became part of Portland in 1899. And part of the, but it's amazing to me that it's been over a hundred years and we still call it Deering. You're talking about Deering? No, I'm talking about everything off the peninsula. So Stroudwater, the USM area was part of Portland. The Deering Oaks and the USM area was part of Portland. But then Stroudwater, Woodford's Brighton Avenue, Rosemont, Riverside, East Deering, North Deering. That was all the part, that was all the town and then city of Deering. And then that became part of Portland. And previous to that, all of that was the town of Westbrook? Yeah, you were part of Westbrook. So when we're doing some of our research, like particularly looking for schools, the city of Westbrook built a number of the early primary schools. There was a, there was a, Woodford's area really took off right around the time that Deering was separating from Westbrook. And so a few years before that the city of Westbrook knew that they needed to build new schools and they had put up a new school and then it became a Deering school. So sometimes when we're doing research, it's interesting because if you're looking to try to track somebody back, you have to look that perhaps they were living in Portland, perhaps they lived in Deering or perhaps they lived in Westbrook. So it can make for challenging research, trying to do some of that. So Westbrook was huge and it lost a lot of its land? Westbrook did lose a lot of its land. Yeah, there was an initial plan that was floated before the city annexation happened. That was just going to take from basically the neighborhood around Batcove from like Forest Avenue to Batcove, all around Batcove from Ocean Avenue to the Cove and then all of East Deering. Initially, that was the first area that Portland wanted to take and that never went forward and then about 10 or 15 years later, there was a movement to take the whole part of Deering. Anybody else? Yes, ma'am. Is this available online? It's being taped tonight by the main media, is it? Portland Media Center, sorry, they just changed the name from CTN, may I know who it was that? We have a web page on their site of all of the talks that we do so you can go there and look at that. Yes, ma'am. Is Backstable Alive part of the original land coastline of Batcove or is Backstable Alive filled in? There's been some fill, yeah. Some of it was more like salt marsh fields and then so, but when the road was put in, they had to do some filling so there's some cool images of that happening in the early part of the 20th century. It first opened, Mayor Baxter got to take the first ceremonial ride around the new boulevard 1917. And then the area that was Hanson's Creek, that's part of the East Deering neighborhood where Seaside is and where the Front Street housing project is, that's all fill as well. Anything else? Yes, ma'am. Were there not a number of streams and rivers, small rivers that were emptying into Backcove? Yes. All around the Backworth Street and all in that area, I heard that there were a number of them. Yeah, some of the earlier maps show those and those as tends to happen, they get put into drainage ditches and then they get put into culverts and we tend to find them later on when we have like sinkholes in the street and things like that. But yeah, a lot of those still exist. Fallbrook was one of the biggest ones that ran into Backcove and there's still a Fallbrook. I think it's a storm and sewer outlet into Fallbrook. They still, sometimes you see that coming up on the city's public works. So some of those names of Brooks and Streams still exist, just is in a very different manner. Yes, sir. Well, another unfortunate part of that neighborhood was because we were so close to the Presumscart River in the 19, I think, early 60s. I don't remember exactly when. But the pollution was so bad that it peeled the paint off of all of our houses. Oh my God. And they actually, one of the local TV stations came and interviewed all of our mothers because literally the paint went off the houses. It was so bad. So we have some excuses. I can't. I just read somewhere when I was prepping for this talk, that Presumscart was the most polluted river in Maine at that time. Well, they used to be a slaughterhouse on Presumscart street and now it's straight piped right down next to our house. So we could tell when they were working because the river turned red. So they had to go to the river. So they had to go to the river. So they had to go to the river. So they had to go to the river. They had to go to the river. They had to go to the river during breath. Yeah. They called it Bloody River. Bloody River. Yeah. Yeah. Those was initially, it was part of the stockyards for the Grand Trunk Railroad and the Portland Rendering Company. Yeah. When we were coming home from camp and I can't remember the name of the street, but we literally would stop at a bridge. I hate to say this. My dad would say dump the trash. I would get out of the car and throw a bag of trash over into the Presumscart. Just throw it into the river. I know I'm probably not going to get kudos for that from anyone, but it's just the way it was back then. He was your dad. He made you do it. Yeah, right. But it was, that's the way it was back then. There were no rigs at all about any of that stuff. Yeah. It was crazy. Yeah. Most of the houses straight piped right into the streams. Yeah. Yeah, the sewage. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me. That happened all throughout Maine. It still does in some places. They're working diligently to fix that along the coast. Yes, ma'am. So when you research at this point, you just look at photographs and compare to the older ones. You don't have any other info on homes. Some of them, I was wondering, like those bungalows always look like those seers. Yeah. And I wondered if they were. Okay, so the question is, how much information did we collect? We collected photographs and we compared them to the 1924 photos. We've tried to pin a construction date and an early owner, if not the first owner. That's a much easier thing to do for the 1920s, type bungalows and the four squares and some of the triple-deckers. Some of the earlier houses involved some research. One of the things that we found when we, a couple of years ago when we were doing research in a neighborhood just off of USM, off Brighton Avenue, was that that developer, when he did that subdivision, utilized a number of seers kid houses and some of the other companies that were producing kid houses and had utilized plans that came from catalogs at the time to build some of those houses. So we've started doing some research on that. And so we do flag those as we go through neighborhoods and we look at some of the houses that are going up. So certainly the bungalows, but also that there's a little blue house right across the street here from the church when I was looking at that tonight. Ooh, I think that could be one too. It's really difficult to do without an interior investigation of these buildings because I'll be politic about it. Some of the kid manufacturers stole building plans or slightly altered building plans that were available from catalogs and vice versa. So you can't always tell unless you go inside the house and can find evidence. And then a lot of people, a lot of the developers in Portland would simply, you know, they would look at a drawing or look at an image and they would copy it for themselves and then replicate that and make it one of their own. So it can be challenging to determine that. I've done a talk on kid houses and I don't know, that one's not online, is it? Is that one online? Okay, that one's online too, on the website. And one of the ways you can do that if you happen to live in one of those bungalows is if you look in your basement, if you have an exposed framing or in your attic, many of the companies would either stamp the pieces of wood, the framing pieces. And so you might see in the rafter, you might see R07. That was the seventh rafter. So it might say R07 north, you know, so it was on the north side of the house or something like that. So if you see stamped or sometimes it's harder because this doesn't last as long. Some of them had paper tags that went on each piece of the framing. So you can look for those as well. That's one way you can tell in a house. I just was able to go in a Sears kid house in South Portland earlier this week, which was quite fun to do. They had the stamped lumber in that house. That house has pretty much never been altered since it came out and was built. It's pretty amazing. Yes, ma'am. Recently, Earth Shuttleworth gave a talk at the McKinnon's Hall about the architect of McKinnon's Hall. And what we learned, if we didn't know that previously, was that often the architect was also the builder. I've wandered quite a bit with the area that I live in, in Sakarapa. And many of the houses that are on my street look nearly identical. They certainly were designed by the same architect, if not built by the same company. When did that go out of fashion for residential, just regular old builders? Not builders like the guy who built the mechanics hall. Just average builders. To use an architect? No. When did it go out of fashion for the architect to be the builder? In the Portland area, I can't think of too many. There was a family, the Cunningham family. They built, in part, Portland High School. They worked on Union Station. One of the brothers was an architect, and the rest of the family were contractors, they had a masonry company. So that was kind of like a full service thing. They did everything. Then they also worked with architects on some of their bigger projects as well. I can't think of anybody that I know, but this certainly still happens today. There are some architects here in Portland currently that develop and help build their own projects. So it's never really gone out of fashion, I wouldn't say. But I think what we've seen for the most part in some of these neighborhoods is builders using plans. And that's very old. They were building plans in the turn of the 19th century, in the 1800s. There were building plans that were coming out of England being sent over here. People were using them to build some of the grand federal houses that we think of, some of the very early houses. And that continued right to this day. You can still buy plans from catalogs. And in some of the neighborhoods, particularly in Westbrook, there are examples where a lot of that was built for the mill housing. And you would have either the mill would help come in and finance some of that, or you would just have people coming in on speculation and building housing because they knew it was going to fill up because people needed housing, those workers in the mills. That's true in most of the mill communities in Maine. You see that kind of thing happening. Anything where there was kind of a factory town that happened throughout the country. Especially the Sears houses and some of the other manufacturers of kit homes, they sold to some of the big companies, particularly during the war years. They were selling housing to people who were setting up ammunitions factory towns across the country. And so there are whole towns that are made up of kit houses. Yeah. Anybody else? Yes, ma'am. And what was the big mill? You think it's pretty much a mill community, but was BNM a big... Oh, well I was talking about Westbrook in this particular case, the S.D. Warren mill. That's a primary livelihood to get a sense of. In Easteering? Yeah, it was the rail yard and BNM. And then of course it was fairly easy. There were a lot of people who were clerks or other business people that worked downtown and so they could quite quickly get to downtown over Tukey's Bridge fairly easily and quickly once that rail line went in in 1895. Prior to that was a lot of farming. There was some agricultural area. It's hard to think of it like that. When you're doing your research and you are looking at old records, do you see the inception of the house land on the land in the bees? Do you ever see evidence of the architects of the village? So the question is when we're looking for the development of a house, do we ever find the architects? Architects are hard to find unless you have a blueprint. What we do find are the developer's names. And then sometimes you can tie that developer to somebody. You might be able to do that. But we know... And it was interesting looking at the names of developers of some of the subdivisions here in East Deering. They're the same guys who were developing real estate off Brighton Avenue in the Nation's Corner area in the Deering Coyle Park area by Woodford's Corner. It was the same guys all over town buying land. And amazingly enough, some of these guys weren't even Portland realtors. They were coming out from Boston and New York and developing land. Portland was hot at the turn of the century. There are a couple of people who... Particularly this gentleman called Jacob Wilbur, who was originally from New Gloucester. He was a real estate developer in Boston. He lived in Brookline. But he developed a number of subdivisions in the very early part of the 20th century. He died in 1917 or 1919. And his focus was really on building housing that the average person could afford. And so he had his own loan and payment plans that he offered. He came from fairly humble beginnings. His dad was just a farmer in New Gloucester. And he built a massive empire doing that, a real estate empire. And founded this resort community in Florida off his earnings that's still there. Wilbur by the sea. It's near Daytona Beach. So some of these guys... There were definitely some local real estate developers who were building speculation. Some of them, sometimes they would just sell a lot. Sometimes they would build a house on the lot and then sell that. So it's a real mix. And even within a subdivision, you see them selling some lots and then putting housing up on some lots and selling it. Yes, ma'am. Do you have any information on the original Payson house that was estate that was in Payson Park? No. That wasn't a focus of what we were looking at this summer. It was probably something in the daring book about that. Anybody else? All right. Well, thank you very much.