Colonial Revival Period(s) & The Micum McIntire Clan
by Jonathan Tucker
The First Colonial Revival Period
Beginning in the 1790s and continuing into the 1820s and 1830s, the Founders of the United States began to die off, along with thousands of local participants in the Revolutionary War. This led to a widespread revival of patriotic interest in the early history in the country. Many people began to write down the stories of their patriot forefathers and mothers that had been handed down, and to write family genealogies. Several family histories, including those of the Preble family of York, were written in York, Maine during that time, and they include stories about early McIntires.
The Second Colonial Revival Period
A second, equally intense wave of this same nostalgia for the past—the Colonial Revival movement—began in the 1870s, as a reaction to the carnage and ugliness of the Civil War, increased urbanization and industrialization, immigration by new, unfamiliar peoples, and the accompanying changes in everyday life. People looked back with yearning to earlier, seemingly simpler agrarian times through a thick golden haze of nostalgia.
This second time around, the Colonial Revival movement took on architectural as well as antiquarian and historical characteristics. Architects designing homes and public buildings began to harken back to early colonial, Federal, and Georgian styles, and people once again focused intently on their history and on preserving historic structures and places. Many (many) communities commissioned the writing of their official histories during this period. The second Colonial Revival movement lasted from the 1870s into the 1940s.
For both periods, York, Maine was one of the epicenters of the Colonial Revival movement. In part this was because York was close to the coast, was a summer resort community (when people had time to explore their heritage), and was readily accessible from urban centers further south. York also had an unusually large number of surviving early colonial structures, and a lot of very compelling history. For instance, as a young circuit-riding lawyer, Founder John Adams used to try cases at the York Village Meetinghouse. History lay thick on the ground in York—it still does.
Organized efforts were made in York during the second period to research, preserve, and in some cases artfully reuse surviving early structures like the McIntire Garrison. Older photographs show that the Garrison, which had acquired a western addition over the years, was ‘restored’ in 1909-1910 with removal of the addition, repairs to the structure, exterior, and interior (including the addition of 19th century wallpaper), and a stage-setting of antique furniture and household items placed to mimic imagined frontier living conditions of a genteel, domesticated sort.
Amateur History
Local Colonial Revival efforts to document and preserve local history and historic structures generated widespread enthusiasm that created its own challenges. Very few of those involved were professionally trained as scholars or as historians—a profession which only began to develop during this period. The science of historic research and preservation was in its infancy. As a consequence, a great deal of published local history was either made up out of stitched-together isolated pieces of documentation, or invented from whole cloth, or documented stories were embellished to the point of being nearly unrecognizable tales of heroes and villains. Everyone naturally wanted to assume that their own ancestors had conducted their lives motivated by only the noblest and most heroic intentions—a legacy that would reflect well on themselves.
Further, the majority of the storytelling descendants were members of the dominant white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, or were at least Caucasian. Those folks needed the men and women in their histories, and particularly people of different races, to conform to the norms and sensibilities they knew—the norms in place at the time the histories were being written, rather than reflecting the more plausible but much rougher, morally ambiguous, and less romantic norms in place when their ancestors’ histories had actually occurred. As a result, using surviving histories published before or during the Colonial Revival periods to understand our past requires both gratitude for all the work done, and caution about the worldviews of those who did and recorded the work. It requires a lot of double-checking, sifting, and ground-truthing against newer information, and more accurate understandings of history.
Professional History
Fortunately, balancing the flood of amateur efforts during the second Colonial Revival were the professional historical preservation activities of the National Park Service. These date from the Depression-era 1930s, when New Deal federal spending on professions like historical research and preservation was a way to bring people back to work. In 1936-37, the National Park Service commissioned a study of historic buildings throughout the nation, including New England. This included the McIntire Garrison and its surroundings.
The first Historic Americans Buildings survey (narrative) for the McIntire Garrison conducted in 1936 by the National Parks Service can be found here:
http://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/habshaer/me/me0000/me0083/data/me0083data.pdf.
The survey narrative includes the usual mix of real and imagined history, a legacy with which we struggle to this day.
Site and architectural drawings and surveys from that effort can now be found on the Library of Congress site and accessed via this link:
The Micum McIntire Clan
In the early 20th century, many of the descendants of the original Scottish prisoners of war still lived in New England. The descendants of Micum McIntire were among the inheritors of that Scottish heritage, and the McIntires in particular had always been a notable presence in York, Maine and the surrounding communities.
So, in 1917, a group of Micum McIntire’s descendants organized and gathered for a reunion, and took a group photograph in front of the south face of the McIntire/Maxwell Garrison. The organization of this gathering and subsequent communication between descendants led to formation of the Micum McIntire Clan, which in 1973 became the Micum McIntire Clan Association, which has held a reunion every summer since, with the exception of a three year hiatus during WWII.
Genealogies
During this period, more than one family historian worked on a genealogy of Micum’s descendants.
The Big Black Book
In 1939, the Micum McIntire Clan paid for publication and printing of the first McIntire genealogy, “The McIntire Family: Descendants of Micum Mecantire of York, County, Maine,” compiled by Harry Alexander Davis, of Washington, D.C. (born in Alabama). He had begun the work in 1928. Copies of this genealogy—a large format book with a black cover—can be obtained online, including as CD-ROMs.
The Red Book
In 1940, near the end of the Colonial Revival period, the first edition of the second McIntire genealogy, “Descendants of Micum McIntire,” was published by Robert Harry McIntire of Maryland. It is a document that Association members have come to know as the “Red Book.” A second updated and much more complete edition was published in 1983 (see Bibliography), and serves as the definitive genealogy of Micum McIntire’s descendants.
Robert Harry McIntire also compiled three other “Red Books”—a 1941 genealogy of the descendants of Micum’s brother Philip McIntire, a genealogy of Robert Harry McIntire’s own McIntire family line, and a genealogy of William McIntire, an Ulster Scot who emigrated to New England in the 1720s. All can be found in libraries and online.
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The McIntire-Davis & Turner Families
Special note and endless gratitude needs to be extended from the members of the Micum McIntire Clan Association and Micum’s descendants everywhere to the members of the McIntire-Davis and Turner families of York. It was the McIntire-Davis family who, having descended in an unbroken line from Micum’s eldest son John McIntire, retained and expanded ownership of McIntire properties in the Scotland District section of York.
It was the McIntire-Davis family that in 1910 restored and preserved the Maxwell/McIntire Garrison—said to be the oldest surviving residential building in the state of Maine—and has maintained and cared for the building and its homestead site ever since.
It was the McIntire-Davis family that in 1917 organized a summer reunion and began the process of organizing the Micum McIntire Clan as an organization. It was their family and their cousins the Turners who participated in, served as officers for, and helped to keep the Micum McIntire Clan Association running as an organization that has held annual summer reunions ever since.
Land & Property Conservation
Beginning in 1999, the core of McIntire lands in Scotland District have successively been preserved through grants of conservation easements and purchases from the McIntire-Davis family:
Smelt Brook Preserve – The 292 acres between the Garrison and the water meadows and upper meanders of the York River, proceeding west up the north side of the river, were transferred to the Town of York and are now owned and managed as the Smelt Brook Preserve by the York Land Trust
McIntire Highlands Preserve – The 300 acres of woodland on the south slopes of Mount Agamenticus were preserved through a conservation easement donated to the Town of York by Mary McIntire Davis. That property, too, was acquired and is managed by the York Land Trust as the McIntire Highlands Preserve.
Rachel Carson Wildlife Refugue – In 2017, a 90 acre property west of Kingsbury Lane north of Cider Hill Road (Rte. 91) was acquired by the Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge, working in concert with the York Land Trust.
Maxwell-McIntire Garrison – As of this writing, the McIntire-Davis family continues to own and maintain the Maxwell-McIntire Garrison building and its immediately surrounding 2.2 acre homestead lot.
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The heritage of Micum McIntire belongs to all of his descendants. But each one of us owes an eternal debt to the McIntire-Davis and Turner families for their stewardship and preservation of that heritage.
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