The Brick House

June 21, 2025

Back in 2018 we did a story about our restoration of a ancient sash from an historic house in Hollis Maine. This Spring we’ve been working on another much larger batch from that same venerable home. It seemed like a good moment for a reprise with a few new additions.

The impressive brick Federal home was built in 1820 by Ellis B. Usher; in his time the largest mill owner and lumberman on the Saco River.  In 1812. at the age of 27. Usher married Rebecca Randall of Cape Elizabeth. Maine. She would bare three children, two boys and a girl. Sadly Rebecca would pass away in 1819. She was 27 years old

In 1820, Ellis again married to Rebecca's half sister, Hanna Lane, herself a remarkable women. Besides building a large brick home  the couple would have seven children together. six girls and one boy. Their first child, a girl, born in 1821, they named Rebecca Randall Usher, in honor of Ellis's first wife.

Her father insisted that the girls be educated and free thinking, the same as the boys. Rebecca took to her studies in ernest. After his passing in 1855, with her only living brother, Isaac, moved to Wisconsin, she took over her fathers business activities. During the Civil War she distinguished herself as a volunteer nurse under the supervision of the activist reformer, Dorthea Dix, tending to the injured and sick Maine soldiers. In a letter home she wrote, "I am delighted with hospital life. I feel like a bird in the air or a fish in the sea, as if I have found my native element."

In 1862 a prescient Rebecca wrote of her wartime president, "I am delighted with the President's message: that part relating to emancipation. I think Abraham Lincoln has left his impress on the nineteenth century which will go down to the latest generation making him immortal with Washington."

On her second trip south in 1865, she was stationed in Washington D.C. where she would meet her hero. While there she visited the unfinished capital and attended a reception at the White House where President Lincoln shook her hand saying, "How do you do, dear." In a letter she wrote, "His pictures look just like him. He is not one whit handsomer than the homeliest of them. His coat looked as though he had fallen all away from it and it had a tousled appearance, as if it might have come very recently from Iowa or Maine in a very crowded valise."

On hearing of his assassination just three months later, she penned, "I could not believe it at first, but when the terrible truth was forced upon me, I was almost paralyzed. It seemed as if the sun would never shine again."

After the war she returned to her family home in Hollis where she tended the family business and managed the stately brick residence until her death in 1912.

Enter the progressive educator and author, Kate Douglas Wiggin, a friend of the Usher family who grew up near Hollis. Through the years she was often a guest in the Usher family home. Around the turn of the century, Wiggin, purchased a circa 1797 summer writing retreat nearby which she affectionately dubbed "Quillcote."  It was her longtime friend, the formidable and forward-thinking Rebecca Randall Usher and her brick house, that provided inspiration and two central characters for Wiggin's classic,1903 children's novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

The popular novel was made into a movie in 1917, with silent film pioneer, Mary Pickford, in the lead, and again in 1932 with Cynthia Wilson and Ralph Bellamy co-starring. In 1938, silver screen darling, Shirley Temple, would take on the the role in a musical-comedy adaption.

The novel concludes with the story's heroine, Rebecca Rowena Randall's, memorable exclaim, "God bless Aunt Miranda! God bless the brick house that was! God bless the brick house that is to be!"

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