New England Diary

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Frugality and classicism

 

The Nickels-Sortwell House (built in 1807), in Wiscasset, Maine.

"{My grandmother} had been born and brought up in a great, flat-roofed Palladian house with fanflight windows over the doors and yard-wide pumpkin-pine paneling, in the southwest corner of Maine. There she had absorbed simultaneously the frugality and the classicism of Down East New England. She could make soap and translate Horace with equal facility and mordant effect.''

 

-- Robert K. Leavitt, from The Chip on Grandma's Shoulder.