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The family home of the late U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in Newcastle could become a National Historic Landmark. (Photo courtesy National Historic Landmarks Program) |
By J.W. Oliver
The family home of the late U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in Newcastle could become a National Historic Landmark.
A recent application from the nonprofit Frances Perkins Center asks the National Park Service to designate the 478 River Rd. Perkins Homestead a National Historic Landmark.
The 57-acre property on the Damariscotta River includes an 1837 brick house, archaeological sites and a family cemetery.
The property contains three archaeological sites – a 19th-century brickyard, the source of the bricks in the house; the remains of the “old homestead,” an 18th-century residence; and the Perkins Garrison Site, once home to a small fort or garrison over the river.
The homestead is part of the Brick House Historic District, which has been in the National Register of Historic Places since 2009.
The homestead “is nationally significant as the ancestral home and lifelong summer residence of Frances Perkins, U.S. Secretary of Labor (from) 1933-1945, the nation’s first female cabinet secretary and one of the most influential and effective public servants during the New Deal,” according to the application.
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed Perkins secretary of labor during the Great Depression, and Perkins became “the driving force behind many of the New Deal programs on which today’s federal social safety net is based – unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation and Social Security,” according to the application.
The correspondence of Perkins, along with her biographies and other sources, document the house as “a constant in her life and the place she considered her true home,” according to the application. A Washington, D.C. town house where she was a tenant during the 1930s became a National Historic Landmark in 1991.
Perkins is buried in the Glidden Street Cemetery, about 2 1/2 miles away from the homestead.
The Newcastle Board of Selectmen signed a letter of support for the application Nov. 25.
“We are honored to be the ‘hometown’ to this magnificent property and grateful to the family members who have preserved it,” the selectmen said in the letter.
The Frances Perkins Center has a five-year option to purchase the homestead, Newcastle interim Town Administrator Lynn Maloney said. Tomlin Coggeshall, a grandson of Perkins, currently owns the property.
