The McIntire Garrison and Cider House
by Jonathan Tucker

– Building Ages and Family Context

In November 2023, selected timbers in the McIntire Garrison and its barn (the “cider house”) were cored and analyzed by historic consultant William A. Flynt.  From these cores, using dendrochronological analysis, the age of the timbers used to build the two structures was established.  The science of dendrochronology uses observed historical patterns of tree growth rings in different regions to closely determine the age of a wood frame building or other structure made from wood harvested in that same region.

The Garrison

According to the dendrochronological analyses, the timbers used by Micum’s eldest son John McIntire in the construction of the garrison were obtained from white pine and oak trees felled in York, Maine in the winter of 1712-1713.  Ordinarily, such timbers would have been seasoned for a year or more before being used, to prevent splitting and twisting.  Under ordinary circumstances a building using timbers harvested in 1712-1713 would not have been erected until 1714-1715.

In the case of the McIntire garrison, there were extenuating circumstances that make it likely that the cut timbers were rushed into construction as soon as they were available.   First, John McIntire and his wife Susannah Young had a growing family.  They already had five children, and would have three more in the coming years (their children were born 1707, 1709, 1711, 1712, 1714, 1717, and 1721).  They needed a secure home in which to raise them.

 
Secondly, they needed a secure, FORTIFIED home in which to raise their children safely.  For almost all of John McIntire’s life (1677-1771), the Scotland District of York was a frontier war zone.  When he was 15, John had lost his maternal grandparents, John and Phebe Pierce, in the 1692 Candlemas Massacre during King William’s War (1689-1697).  Two years later, in 1694, fellow Scottish prisoner Daniel Livingstone and a boy who was with him were killed in Scotland District by an Abenaki raiding party.

Queen Anne’s War began in 1702.  In April 1711, neighbors Joseph Junkins and Daniel Dill Jr. were attacked by a raiding party while fishing in a pond in Scotland District.  Daniel was killed on site.  Badly wounded, Joseph managed to make his way back to his family’s garrison to give warning, but died 10 hours later.  In 1713, when the timbers for John’s garrison were cut, Queen Anne’s War (1702-1713) had been underway for nine years.  So John McIntire’s urgent need to quickly erect a secure, defensible home for his family likely foreshortened the normal seasoning time for construction timbers.  The garrison’s construction may have begun as early as the spring or summer of 1713.

This verified dating of 1713 makes the McIntire Garrison currently the oldest residential structure in the state of Maine, being approximately 311 years old as of this writing.

McIntire families occupied the garrison and farmed the nearby fields for the rest of the turbulent and violent 18^th century.  Drummer’s War, conducted in northern Maine, lasted from 1722 to 1725.   King George’s War lasted from 1740 to 1748.  The French and Indian War lasted from 1754 to 1763.   John McIntire died in 1771.  The Revolutionary War then began in 1775 and lasted through 1783.

Samuel McIntire-Sarah Came – John McIntire’s youngest son Samuel McIntire (1721-1801) inherited the farm and the Garrison.  Earlier, in 1744, during King George’s War, Samuel married Sarah Came.  Sarah had been educated in Boston.  The Cames were a well-to-do York family and Sarah’s father, Samuel Came, was wealthy enough to own and then bequeath African slaves to family members.  Samuel and Sarah had five children and occupied the Garrison and farm throughout the Revolutionary War.  Samuel McIntire died in 1801.

Jeremiah McIntire-Eunice Kingsbury – Samuel McIntire’s first child, Jeremiah McIntire (1745-1821), inherited the farm and the Garrison.  During the Revolutionary War, Jeremiah had served in Captain William Spinney’s company, Colonel Cogswell’s regiment.  In 1798, Jeremiah married Eunice Kingsbury.  Together, they raised ten children in the Garrison, of whom eight survived to adulthood.  Four of their children married and produced children.  It is possible that, given the size of their family, Jeremiah and Eunice were also responsible for acquiring another, smaller house and attaching it on the west side of the Garrison to serve as a western addition.  Jeremiah and Eunice shepherded their family through the War of 1812.  It was during Jeremiah’s tenure that the adjacent cider house appeared.

The Cider House

Members of the McIntire/Davis family refer to the barn immediately south of the Garrison as the “cider house.”  Most New England farm families in the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s cultivated orchards, harvested apples and other tree fruit, and produced cider (fermented hard cider) for both homestead use and as a commodity to sell.

Dendrochronological analysis of white pine and oak timbers used in the construction of the cider house indicated that its timbers were cut in 1806-1807.  It is likely that the barn structure itself was raised no sooner than 1808, which means that it was built during the farm tenure of Jeremiah McIntire and his wife Eunice Kingsbury.  As of this writing in 2024, the cider house is approximately 216 years old.

John McIntire-Eleanor Junkins – When Jeremiah McIntire died in 1821, his eighth child, John McIntire (1812-1875), inherited the Garrison and the farm.  In 1839, John married Eleanor Junkins in neighboring Eliot, Maine.  John served as a major in the Maine state militia, and, through farming and land ownership, became one of the richest men in York County.  John and Eleanor had one child, John Randolph McIntire, born 1844.  John’s aunt, Sarah McIntire (daughter of Jeremiah and Eunice), continued to live in the Garrison and was its last permanent resident.  She died in 1875, the same year her nephew John died.    After 1875, the Garrison sat empty for some decades, possibly being used for farm storage.

John Randolph McIntire-Helen Gertrude McIntire – John Randolph McIntire (1844-1913) married Helen Gertrude McIntire in 1865.  Helen was a distant cousin and descendant of Micum on her own.  It is likely that John Randolph built the Federal farmhouse immediately east of the Garrison on the former site of the Maxwell garrison as a new farm residence in the early 1870s, after he married Helen.  They had four children, two of whom married, and one of whom (Malcolm) himself had children, including Mary (Bragdon) Davis.

Photographs from the 1890s, during John Randolph’s ownership, show the interior of the kitchen in the Garrison’s western addition.  By that time the addition had significantly deteriorated, along with the rest of the Garrison.  Sometime in the early 1900s, John Randolph permitted an older carpenter—who kept being stranded by snow drifts in his small home at the end of a nearby road—to live in the Garrison in exchange for the man undertaking modest repairs.  It may have been as a result of that work and conversations with the carpenter that John Randolph decided to undertake a more comprehensive “restoration” of the decaying Garrison in 1909-1911.

That work included, at minimum, removal of the western addition, replacement of the exterior cladding, roof, and many windows and doors, rebuilding of portions of the foundation, and reconstruction of the central chimney and fireplaces.  The interior of the Garrison was renovated, providing a “stage set” appearance of a farmhouse interior with Victorian touches (see the picture on p. 124 of the Red Book).  John Randolph also likely made modernizing improvements to the McIntire cemetery south and east of the garrison.  John Randolph McIntire passed in 1913, and the McIntire properties, including the farm, garrison, and cider house, were inherited by his and Helen’s third child, Malcolm McIntire.

Malcolm McIntire-Marion Augusta Bragdon – In 1902, Malcolm McIntire  (1876-1934) married Marion Augusta Bragdon.  Malcolm and Marion had four children.  After Malcolm was killed in an automobile accident in 1934, the McIntire Garrison was for a time held by his son John Randolph McIntire II, and was then transferred to John’s sister Susan Alice McIntire.  Upon Alice’s death, she bequeathed the Garrison and associated property to her niece Mary Bragdon McIntire, Malcolm’s youngest daughter.

Mary Bragdon McIntire-Robert Marshall Davis – In 1936, Mary Bragdon McIntire  (1915-2004) married Robert Marshall Davis.  They had three children—Robert Malcolm McIntire, Daniel Bryant McIntire, and James McIntire.  Mary sold most of the extensive remaining McIntire farm and forest lands to the York Land Trust, in the process creating a permanently preserved landscape in the form of the Smelt Brook Preserve (300 acres), as well as the Highland Farm Preserve (91 acres), and the McIntire Highlands Preserve (458 acres).  Prior to her death in 2004, Mary established a trust consisting of her three sons to hold and care for the property that included the lot of the Garrison.  Earlier this year, the Davis Trust sold the lot on which the McIntire Garrison, cider house, and renovated small carriage house are located to the Old York Historical Society.

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Beginning with its construction in 1713, the McIntire Garrison was used, maintained, and renovated almost continually as part of the ongoing McIntire family farm operation.  The cider house joined the farm operation in 1807-1808.  Thanks to the ongoing stewardship of the Davis family, these remarkable historic buildings and their unique surrounding landscape have been preserved for posterity.