Emerson-Wilcox House
Over the more than two hundred and fifty years of its history, the Emerson-Wilcox House has served as a general store, stage tavern, tailor shop, post office, home, and museum. Today it offers a series of twelve period room settings and two galleries spanning the period 1760-1935. The dwelling is a good example of vernacular Georgian architecture of the Piscataqua River region of southern Maine. When built by George Ingraham in 1742 it consisted of a one room deep center chimney house with parlor, hall, and two bedchambers upstairs. In 1760 the next owner, Edward Emerson, moved a circa 1710 house from elsewhere in town and added it to the back of the house, creating the "L" shaped building one sees today. A final addition in 1817 brought the total number of rooms in the house to fifteen.
The Emerson-Wilcox House is furnished with the finest examples of the Museum's collection of 17th, 18th , and early 19th century regional furniture, many items of which are related to the town's early families. Over the many years of its existence, the museum has collected and preserved memorabilia associated with the area's distinguished past. The richness of its local history collections is one of the its major strengths. An overwhelming majority of its holdings have been drawn from the community, and even today important additions continue to come to the collections from local families and individuals.
Thus, as opportunity arose the museum has acquired the tea table of the Reverend Joseph Moody (known locally as "Handkerchief Moody," after whom Hawthorne modeled the central figure in his short story "The Minister's Black Veil"); colonial engineer Samuel Sewall's plans for the first American pile-driven bridge, built at York in 1761; the Pepperrell family black walnut drop leaf dining table and cabriole-leg wing chair, and a rare eighteenth century brass-faced tall clock by Thomas Jackson of neighboring Kittery. In the 1970s Old York acquired a walnut high chest originally owned by Dr. Job Lyman, the town's physician during the Revolutionary period. The museum already owned the doctor's medical instruments, silhouettes and needlework of his children, a portion of his brother's library, and other material associated with his family.
Of special significance is a Spanish foot tea table, considered the best example of its form. Having a long history of local ownership before entering the collection, the tea table was made during the first quarter of the 18th century, probably in southern York County or adjacent New Hampshire. It retains its original Spanish brown painted finish. Two similar examples from the region are now in the collections of Historic Deerfield and Bayou Bend of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Nearby hangs an important portrait of Madame Sarah Plummer Gibbs by colonial portrait artist John Greenwood.
Among silver held by the museum is a tankard made by the Boston silversmith, Benjamin Burt, for Jonathan Sayward (c. 1760). On its handle is the inscription, "I.S.S." for Jonathan and Sarah Mitchell Sayward. According to his diary Sayward gave the vessel to his son-in-law, Nathaniel Barrell, in 1773. Sayward was York's most prominent citizen and its leading Tory during the Revolution. His home was acquired by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and is also open to the public.
Several years after the museum opened two elderly women arrived in town with rather cumbersome suitcases and were directed to Sophia Turner, the Old Gaol's curator. They informed her that their ancestor, Mary Bulman Prentice, had owned the house across from the Emerson-Wilcox House, and they wanted to return a set of crewel embroidered bedhangings she had worked, which they produced from the suitcases and presented to the museum. Like so many of the museum's early acquisitions, the Bulman bedhangings entered the collection because of their association with a famous local resident, in this case Dr. Alexander Bulman, the surgeon for Sir William Pepperrell's Louisburg campaign. The Bulman hangings are the only American crewelwork set to have survived from the 18th century. Textile scholars consider them to be the most important extant examples of 18th century American needlework. Because of thesedistinctions, as well as their vibrant color and remarkable state of preservation, they have always been the jewels of Old York's collection.
Mary Bulman is buried in York's Old Burying Ground, within the shadow of the Emerson-Wilcox House that now displays her famous needlework. According to family tradition she began work on this set of bedhangings in 1745 while her husband served in Pepperrell's Louisburg campaign. Although little is known of her life it is evident that she had some formal education indicated by the Arcadian poem she worked on the valances for this set, Isaac Watt's "Meditation in a Grove," from his Horea Lyricae (1706).
The Emerson-Wilcox House ceramic collections are especially noteworthy. They include examples of virtually every major European export ware for the period 1700 to 1840, ranging from Wincanton tin glazed earthenware to historical Staffordshire dinner services as well as oriental ceramics. The museum also owns the only example of ecclesiastical redware of 18th century New England origin, a communion jug inscribed "For Mr. Nobles's Church in Newbury, 1763." Made by Daniel Bayley, a Newbury, Massachusetts potter, the jug was used to store wine for communion services at the Fifth Congregational Church there. It is one of the earliest dated examples of American redware. Most of the Museum's collections of English wares date from the first quarter of the nineteenth century and were originally owned by York families.