The Little Brick House, Belfast, Maine 3905

The Little Brick House, Belfast, Maine 3905

The Little Brick House, Belfast, Maine , on Northport Avenue. The Wayside Tea House was built in 1832 by Charles Treadwell. In 1930, The Texas Company purchased the property with the intent of demolishing the structure and replacing it with a Texaco gasoline station. In an effort to rescue one of the many structures being overrun by gasoline stations, Louise Brewster had The Wayside Tea House at the corner of High & Miller Streets moved. Everyone said it could not be moved but Mrs. Brewster found a man named O'Connell in Brewer who said that he could move the house, and he did. During the summer of 1930, over a period of several weeks, the house was slowly rolled down High Street by a horse-drawn winch to its final resting place on Northport Avenue, more than a mile south of its original location. Narration of the event by Phil Rackliffe: "I think it was six or eight weeks that the house was in the middle of the street. We used to go down at night - this was the early '30s and there wasn't that much traffic - to see how far the house had progressed. What they did was hook up a deadman. There was a white horse that walked around the deadman and pulled the house up the street. the house had to be kept perfectly level because Mr. O'Connell said if it wasn't, it would completely collapse. Rumor had it that he had set a tumbler of water on one of the mantelpieces and said if we spill a drop, we've lost the house. The house remained perfectly level until they got to about Peach Street, where there was a little incline. they jacked up the house and built a runway out of railroad ties so it could continue perfectly level. Some days the house would move three feet, some days six feet but it was quite awhile in the middle of the street. They had another problem when they got to the lot where it now sits because it was being installed on the opposite side of the street and had to be completely turned around. Anyway, there was a great relief that the house was saved, not salvaged, but saved."