Built 1871 (1871) Opened 1871 Architectural style Italianate architecture | NRHP Reference # 82000775 Area 1,200 m² Added to NRHP 19 February 1982 | |
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Location Main St., Kingman, Maine | ||
The Romanzo Kingman House is a historic house on Main Street (Maine State Route 170) in Kingman, Maine. Built in 1871, it is the unincorporated community's most sophisticated example of 19th-century architecture. It was built for Romanzo Kingman, the area's namesake and owner of a locally important tannery. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.
Description and history
The Kingman House is located on Main Street in the rural town center of Kingman, an unincorporated community in southeastern Penobscot County. It is two stories in height, with a hip roof, central chimney, and clapboard siding. Its main facade, facing southwest, is three bays wide, with the entrance in the left bay, sheltered by a portico support by square posts and pilasters. It has a denticulated cornice and a low balustrade on the sides. First floor windows are crowned by gabled pediments with consoles, while the second floor windows have flat pediments with consoles. A two-story ell extends northeast from the main block, joining the house to a carriage barn.
Romanzo Kingman and Francis Shaw established a tannery in Kingman in the 1860s, which was billed for a time as one of the largest in the nation. The tannery was a major local industry until it was destroyed in a massive explosion in the 1920s. Kingman and Shaw, both bachelors at the time, built this house, the only house of architectural distinction in the small community, in 1871-72. Kingman left the area a few years later to open a second tannery in Wisconsin; when the community incorporated as a plantation, it was named in his honor.