ROCKLAND, Maine — The birthplace of one of the country’s most renowned poets is up for sale, and an effort is being made to save the landmark.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in 1892 on the southern side of the mirror-image duplex at 198-200 Broadway. Her parents were the first people to live in the duplex, which was built that year.
“This house has a great deal of potential,” said real estate agent Michelle Gifford. “It’s a duplex located in a neighborhood of largely beautiful single-family homes.”
Millay lived at the house for three months before her parents moved to Union. When her parents divorced, she, her siblings and mother moved to Camden.
Millay would become nationally known at the age of 19 with the publishing of the poem “ Renascence.” She went on to become one of the most popular writers of her time and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1923.
The house is for sale for $88,000, but the two-unit building on a third of an acre is in need of significant repairs.
One person who tried to buy the property was Terry Pinto, a great admirer of the poet, who lives across the street.
Pinto said that soon after he moved to Rockland and bought his home in 2001, a person came to his door and asked if he could stand on his doorstep to take a photograph of the Millay birthplace.
When the house came up for sale, Pinto made an offer on it that was rejected. He said he had a contractor inspect the home and determined that the house would need new plumbing, a new heating system, foundation work and cosmetic work. The estimates he received totaled $200,000, not including the purchase price.
“It would be a great thing for the city to to preserve it and restore it,” Pinto said.
He said the city would benefit from publicizing its role in Millay’s life.
“Camden has taken all the credit,” Pinto said.
Gifford agreed that preserving historical properties is important to a community’s economic development.
The Women’s Educational Club placed a plaque on the house in 1935 that designated it as Millay’s birthplace. That was taken down in the 1960s or 1970s when the home’s occupants grew tired of people stopping by and asking to go through the home. That plaque is now in possession of the historical society.
One person leading the effort to save the house is Ann Morris, the curator for the Rockland Historical Society.
Morris said she researched the history of the Millay house and presented the information to the Maine Historic Preservation Commission in hopes of getting the duplex on the National Register of Historic Places. The effort was not successful, however, because she was told by a staff member that generally the location needs to be where the person’s most productive years occurred.
Being on the historic register would make the property eligible for state and federal tax credits to renovate it, said Christi Mitchell, who is a historic preservationist for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. The owner would have to preserve the architecture of the home when performing renovations.
Mitchell said another option for getting the home on the national register would be to document that the home was an example of a historic class of housing.
Morris conducted extensive research this past summer and found that 70 mirror-type duplexes were built in the downtown area of Rockland during that era. The homes were built to house the workers who toiled in the shipyards and for the companies that operated the lime kilns along the shore.
Mitchell said Morris recently provided the state commission with this research. She said she had no timetable for when a decision might be made on whether or when to forward to the National Park Service a request to consider adding the house to the national register.