The Mysteries of Trebor Mansion:
The Inn on the Haunted Hill

Trebor Mansion was commissioned by David Robinson Straw to be built in 1830 by architect John Monroe, and expanded to 22 rooms in 1836 and 1849, but when the National Historic Registry began certification of the building in 1982, the Board in Washington ran into a little problem with the dates. To put it simply, if the house was built in 1830 (or 1836 or 1849) the building couldn't exist. The three architectural styles used in the construction, Stick, Queen Anne and Jacobean, came onto existence in 1858, 1874 and 1876, respectively. If the building DID exist, it couldn't have been built in 1830. The styles first came to be used in combination in the 1880's, and became known as the premier American style, the Queen Anne Stick Jacobean. But the evidence was overwhelming, and included photographs, and it agreed with the 1830 date. The Board's conclusions were based on Aristotle: When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is the Truth. The building was certified as 1830, with the comment that "the builder must have been an extraordinary man to have built this structure 50 years before its time".

In fact, of course, the man would have had to be far more than extraordinary to have built a house 50 years out of sync. Architectural styles don't evolve in a vacuum. If a house buried in a landslide in 1950 were excavated in 2002 and the archaeologists discovered a CD player in the den, it would attest to considerably more than the extraordinary talents of the house's owner. Yes, the Jacobean style was reminiscent of certain features that enjoyed a mini-vogue for the 22 years ending in 1625 in England. But the connection between those minor similarities and the Jacobean style unveiled at the British Pavilion to the American Centennial in 1876 was the product of a board of distinguished British architects who worked on the designs in complete secrecy for more than three years to impress the former Colonials. And yes, the Stick style was a logical alternative to the post and beam construction that waned with the passing of easily acquired large dimensional lumber, and a logical transition from Gothic to Queen Anne, but it also depended on dozens of other factors that took decades to develop and merge into the new style. And of course, the Queen Anne was a logical outgrowth of the Stick style, but it was also dependent on technological advances in power lathes and planers that made it possible to express the style in wood. To bring oneself to believe that all of these developments were anticipated and all of these not yet existent technologies were compensated for by one man who chose to build his masterpiece in a small town in central Maine is a bit of a stretch.

Unfortunately, all of the other explanations put forward to explain the existence of Trebor Mansion are a bit of a stretch as well. It is undeniable that some people have seen the future; one need only view the canvas of an obscure German painter who depicted the firebombing of Dresden in 1945, the searchlights sweeping the skies, the giant bombers releasing their ghastly cargoes on a city devoured by flames. He painted it in 1925. And of course there is the famous, and true, story of a mediocre novel written by the president of a shipping company about a ship called the Titania, which in the novel sailed from England on its maiden voyage in mid April, struck an iceberg and sank with great loss of life. The novel didn't sell well (few corporate bigwigs have the literary touch, and the story was considered too fantastical). It was published in 1898. The author died a few years later. Apparently no one in the company offices bothered to read the book either! The author was the president of the shipping company that built and launched the Titanic---in 1912.

Did Mr. Monroe "see" the Trebor Mansion, and execute that vision in wood and stone? It seems unlikely. Our "Titania" novelist almost got the name right (my spellchecker assumed I'd spelled it wrong and offered me "Titanic" as a correction), sank the ship in the right week of the right month, and killed the right number of passengers (he put it at 1,500--the estimates of the actual disaster believe about 1,547 died). But he didn't have to build the ship. There's a lot of rivets between the vision and the reality. And our German artist certainly didn't have a clue how to build Flying Fortresses, searchlights or incendiary bombs. But somehow Mr. Monroe managed to build his vision.

There is a photo of the mansion purportedly dating to 1849 showing it to be the same as it is today. Otherwise, of course, the rationalist would say that the house must have been completely rebuilt in the 1880's, effacing almost all traces of its former style, which was probably Greek Revival or Federalist similar to the west wing of the mansion as it appears today. Anyone who thinks that the most prominent piece of architecture in a small town can be transformed under the watchful eyes of its populace without anyone noticing it is welcome to their opinion, but they have obviously never lived in a small town! Besides which, the west wing was added in 1836---six years after the main structure was built.

Small town curiosity aside, there is a sort of conspiracy of silence about the Trebor Mansion in the village. Why the most distinguished piece of architecture in the most prominent setting in the village, housing the largest lodging business in the township and built by the most important family in Guilford barely rates a single mention in the Town's Centennial and Sesquicentennial Books is a mystery. Why the locals avert their gaze is just one more puzzling aspect of Trebor Mansion.

The owners of the mansion over the years have been equally eccentric. The last of the Straws to live in the mansion spent decades in an insane asylum before her death. The last owners to live in the mansion before its renovation in 1976, George and Helen Haley, lived for years in two rooms in the west wing, rarely entering the main house. Vines and undergrowth obscured the front of the house. They had inherited it from the family of a Unitarian pacifist United States Senator from Illinois who purchased the Mansion as a wedding gift---for his mother-in-law! (This must be the most elegant method known for removing an in-law.) When Senator Paul Douglas died, he was cremated and his ashes scattered in a Chicago suburb. The burial site of his wife, a US Congresswoman, is unknown. Local lore has it that Omar Lombard, of the famous inventors Lombard, was involved in the house's construction. He died in 1990 at the age of 101. There is no record anywhere of any architect practicing in Maine or the U.S. named "John Monroe". U.S. President James Monroe left office in 1825 and died July 4th, 1831. It would be a nice nom de plume for someone working in that era that didn't mind a little confusion about his name or his origins.

Victorian Architectural Styles 1860-1910

The Stick Style, popular from about 1860 to 1890, is sometimes considered to be only a High Victorian elaboration of the Gothic Revival style, and/or is considered to be a transitional style between the Gothic Revival and the Queen Anne. Whatever the classification, the style is sufficiently distinct to deserve separate mention.

The single most distinguishing feature of the style is small vertical, horizontal, or diagonal planks placed on top of exterior walls. The style is often associated with houses featuring enormous, overhanging, second-story porches. Houses with additional applied decoration are sometimes called Eastlake, after British furniture designer and arbiter of taste Charles Eastlake. Mr. Eastlake, an English architect wrote "Hints on Household Taste", which was published in America in 1872. He fostered a type of decoration that was best made by turnings on a mechanical lathe (as opposed to the flat fret-sawed gingerbread), and this style was used to varying degrees on Queen Anne buildings.

The next major Victorian house style was the Queen Anne Jacobean, which so utterly dominated Victorian residential architecture 1880 to 1910 that it is now virtually synonymous with the phrase "Victorian house" to much of the public. The Queen Anne Jacobean style, rich and varied in ornamentation and form, was wildly popular after its introduction in America at the 1876 Exposition in Philadelphia. Taking its name from the reign of an eighteenth century English Queen, the style was brought to America by the British government, which displayed several of the houses at the exposition. The Queen Anne style is vaguely related to "Jacobean" architecture. (Jacobean refers to English architecture during 1603-1625.) The Queen Anne style started from this modest beginning and metamorphosed into the beautiful houses we admire today. This style is more original (more "American", if you will) than the Gothic, Italianate, or Second Empire styles, because it is far more dynamic and pushed much further beyond its roots than did the other styles. It is a mystery where the "Queen Anne" name comes from, because the architecture during the reign of the historic Queen Anne (1665 - 1714) has little in common with Jacobean architecture. This style has nothing to do with Queen Anne or the formal Renaissance architecture that was dominant during her reign. It is associated with English architects led by Richard Norman Shaw. As it was interpreted in America, it satisfied the need of the newly rich of the 19th century industrial era for symbols of wealth and success. It became the style for the "Gilded Age". Queen Anne is usually the predominant style in towns that experienced an increase in wealth in the early 1900s. The first true American Queen Anne architecture was H. H. Richardson's William Watts Sherman house built in Newport, R.I. in 1874. This early design has a half-timbered second story.

Queen Anne style houses are composed of a number of parts, including towers, dormers, bay windows, and corbelled chimneys. Wall surfaces such as coursed shingles, clapboards, and inset panels of sawn wooden ornament are combined with irregular rooflines and decorative wrap-around porches. Windows may include small square or diamond panes, stained glass and the more typical 2/2 double-hung sash.

Queen Anne style houses were built throughout the country from roughly 1890 to 1910. The style caught on quickly, in part because woodworking mills could mass-produce turned porch posts, moldings and other trimmings. Queen Annes were eclectic, often asymmetrical with wrap-around porches, turrets, angled roof brackets, and different combinations and applications of exterior building materials.

If any one phrase can describe the elaborate style it's "the more fanciful, the better." The Queen Anne style at its most extreme is characterized by bewildering excess, featuring large projecting bay windows, towers, turrets, porches (often on multiple stories), balconies, stained glass decoration, roof finials and crestings, walls carvings and/or inset panels of stone or terra-cotta, cantilevered upper stories, acres of decorative trim, patterned shingles, belt courses, elaborate brackets, bannisters and spindles -- even the chimneys on Queen Anne houses are spectacularly crafted. This style featured textured surfaces on buildings, including decorative patterns made of wood or stone, and various colors of shingles and slate.