Maine’s coastal towns and river villages are dotted with hundreds of faded — but still grand — houses where 19th century commercial ship captains lived when they came ashore. It’s estimated that Searsport, alone, supplied the growing nation with 300, or a full 10 percent, of all skippers in the days of sail.
One such historic home, a little further Down East in Pembroke, is now on the market for just shy of $140,000. It was once home to the captain of the Frank A. Palmer, thought to be the largest four-masted schooner ever built. The captain also once challenged Harry Houdini to try and get out of a bag he proposed to sew up with special sailor stitches.
The house, at 137 Old County Road, was built in 1820 and is the former residence of Capt. Elliott C. Gardner, a native of the town. According to the real estate listing, the clapboard house boasts two full bathrooms, three bedrooms and 3,139 square feet of living space. It also has a large, two-story detached barn and sits on a one-acre corner lot.
The listing states Gardner was captain of the Thomas W. Lawson, the largest non-motor assisted sailing ship ever built. While that could not be immediately confirmed, a search of historic records and newspaper accounts show Gardner was definitely the first skipper of the Bath-built Palmer, which was briefly the largest floating ship of its kind when launched in 1897, at just over 274 feet long, with a capacity of over 300 tons.
On July 12 that year, Bangor’s Daily Whig and Courier newspaper reported on Gardner and his ship’s arrival in town with a load of coal from Virginia, bound for the Maine Central Railroad and the Katahdin Pulp and Paper Mill in Lincoln.
“She is very big but handsomely proportioned,” the paper reported, adding that Gardner “lives in West Pembroke.”
The Palmer wasn’t destined for a long life: five years later, during a record cold snap in 1902, it sank while delivering a load of coal from Virginia to New England, after accidentally colliding with another ship also making a delivery. Only 15 of the combined 21 sailors on both schooners managed to get into a lifeboat. Of those, four died from exposure and a fifth by suicide, jumping overboard into the frigid waters.
The Palmer and the other ship, the Louise B. Crary, are now wrecked inside the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, off limits to divers and treasure hunters.
Gardiner, however, had moved on to another ship by that time and, luckily, was not on board when disaster struck.
He shows up in Maine newspaper accounts again in 1907. In January that year, he and two other captains issued a joint challenge to then-famous escape artist Harry Houdini.
The captains wanted Houdini to let them sew him into a canvas bag, and then see if he could get out without ripping the stitches. As with all sailors in those days, the captains knew how to sew in order to mend sails and reckoned they’d notice if the famous man had tampered with their stitches.
There’s no record of Houdini responding to the challenge.
By 1920, Gardner had retired from the sea and was, presumably, living in the Pembroke house now for sale. According to the Feb. 4 edition of the Bangor Daily News, he’d taken a job as an inspector at a Machias shipyard.
Gardner died in 1927, just shy of turning 60. He’s buried in Pembroke’s Forest Hill Cemetery. Gardner was divorced and father to at least one daughter.
