A Passion For Victoriana
Millionaire master mechanic Donald king is re-creating a 19th-century rural village at Newfield in York County.
I remember the toy villages that went with Lionel trains. The rich kids on the block always had one, and they set it up at Christmas. I envied them that---not the train but the little town with its small pine trees dusted with snow, the mirror lakes and ponds, the tiny wooden houses with miniature doors that opened and closed, the diminutive church, and the elfin railroad crossing guard who appeared cheerfully from his building when you pressed a button.
Newfield, just off Route 11 in Maine's York County, brings back those memories. In its center is Willowbrook, named after a small stream and pond encircled by seven acres of clipped lawns and groomed paths [ actually, the brook is names Chellis Brook and the pond is known as the Mill Pond ]. In this small village stand thirty-one freshly painted structures furnished with 18,000 nineteenth-century artifacts, all of them carefully collected from within a hundred miles of Newfield, and all of them faithfully restored. No crab grass grows on the emerald lawns; no graffiti mars the little schoolhouse blackboard. Everything is scrubbed and polished, and each morning when the American flag is raised and the "Star Spangled Banner," is played through the loudspeaker, one is carried back to a time of simple patriotism and to what we now know to be lost forever, even in rural Maine.
The re-creation of a tiny village cost its owner more than anything in a Neiman-Marcus catalog---more than 2 million, and it is not yet completed. it belongs to Donald King, a sixty-four-year-old man with the enthusiasm of a gifted, industrious boy. His voice is rumbly, his language explicit, and no setbacks, one feels, will separate his broad shoulders from the wheel. "I'm no purist," he says. "This isn't a museum. It's an entertainment," although he's quick to add that it's the largest "man's museum" in the country.
However designated, Willowbrook at Newfield is the only nineteenth-century restoration of its kind in the country, and it attracts, despite minimal advertising, thousands of visitors during its season, May to October. Moreover, it is one of the few projects of its magnitude to be entirely financed by private funds. Don King disdains, with something close to contempt, the federal monies that are available for such enterprises. "Why should taxpayers pay for my fun?" he asks. "besides, I can't take it with me, so I might as well put some of it right here." The $14,000 that Willowbrook made last year is a meager return on King's investment. he doesn't care.
He won't raise his admission fee ($3.00 for adults and $1.50 for youngsters over six is half that charged by Sturbridge Village, for example) and he won't skimp on the restoration of any artifacts that enhance the authenticity of his little village. The 1886 [ 1894] carousel currently undergoing refurbishing, horse by horse, with special tools made to re-create the fine carving that had been scabbed and thickened by layers of paint, will take three years before it can be set into place at Willowbrook; by then it will have cost a quarter of a million dollars. Some of the artisans doing the work are local people trained by King.
"I respect a man who can work with his hands," says King, himself a master mechanic." And i like to take something made a hundred years ago and bring it back to its early glory."
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Donald King was not born to wealth, nor was he formally educated, beyond high school. Like most self-made men, he is endowed with tenacity and self-confidence. He describes with a grin how, during the Depression he succeeded in getting his first job in New York. Presenting himself at R.H. Macy's department store, he was told that there were no jobs available.
"It seems incredible to me," he recalls saying, "that the largest department store in the world wouldn't have any jobs."
"I'm sorry, " said the lady in charge of hiring.
"Well, I don't have anything else to do, so I'll just sit here until a job turns up."
"I don't know when that will be."
"Then that makes two of us," he replied.
And Donald King sat in Macy's employment office until he was given a job. Later, still self-confident and refusing to take "No" for an answer, he married the woman who hired him. His wife, pan, says that she
made the job for him because she knew a good thing when she saw it and wasn't about to let it get away.
Although he stayed with Macy's for ten years, eventually working in an executive capacity, Don King was not a man to work for other people very long. With a large appetite for acquiring skills, he undertook jobs that eventually qualified him as a master mechanic in an engineering company; from there he moved into the copper tubing industry; and then, sensing the needs of the future, he entered the expanding world of the oil industry and worked as a salesman for a Texas company. "I believe in learning everything from the bottom up," he says. In March, 1951, he started his own company, Lubrication Engineers, now based in Fort worth, Texas, which produces special oils for servicing of atomic submarines, truck fleets, and the like.
He puts on a suit and tie when he flies to Fort Worth every ninety days for a board meeting of his company (he is executive vice president of Lubrication Engineers, which employs 500 people), and he puts on a suit and tie every Sunday in Newfield when he attends church. But at Willowbrook, where he is often and not unhappily mistaken for one of the maintenance crew, Don King wears wrinkled chinos and drives a Datsun pickup truck. his Rolls Royce, which he has driven only ninety miles in the past three years, stands in a closed garage.
An avid hunter, King first came to Newfield in 1965 when he purchased land and buildings in order to set up a hunting lodge. The lodge is still there, ornamented with mounted deer heads and sportsmen's photographs, overlooking a pond and willows. At the time, he did not realize that the property he had purchased constituted , in essence, a town. Newfield, once prosperous, with a population of close to 2,000 in the 1880s, had fallen victim to changing times; blacksmiths, no longer needed, abandoned their forges. Then in 1947, the
coup de grace, a raging fire that destroyed thousands of acres in York County and other parts of Maine. Newfield was in the path.
When Don King arrived, the population was less than 100, as it is today. "When I bought land and buildings so as to have a place for hunting," King explains, "I didn't know I'd bought part of a town until one day a local person stopped by and asked. 'Why did you buy the center of town?"
"I looked around the derelict town and said, "Beats hell outa me."
"When the lady said I nshould do something with it, I decided she was right."
So the construction and reconstruction of Willowbrook began the next year, 1968, and the seven-acre village within a town was opened to the public in the spring of 1970. Since then it has continued to grow. King and his craftsmen work through the winter (("Summer's when I relax," he says, "and winter is work"), preparing new buildings and restoring artifacts. A maverick King might be, but he does nothing halfway.
Two renovated houses are fine examples of lifestyles in the Victorian era. One old homestead had been the residence and office of Dr. Isaac Trafton, for many years a respected but hardly affluent member of the Newfield community. Here the visitor can see how a modest country life was lived: the drab physicians office, the oil lamps in the parlor, the family kitchen, the tin bathtub. On the parlor wall is a portrait of Dr. Trafton's wife, unbendingly dour as she sat for a daguerreotype. But the house suggests memories of happy times, too, its upstairs nursery filled with nineteenth-century toys.
Through his insights, energy, and taste, Don King has managed to combine elements in willowbrook that widely reflect attitudes in the 1800s. There are visible evidences of merriment and even occasional hints of ribaldry; pervasive overtones of theology; and glum reminders that death was a frequent visitor. "The house may be wee but the welcome is big," reads a cheerful sampler in one bedchamber; "Sweet Rest in Heaven," another promises, but only to the virtuous, one suspects.
Across the road from the Trafton homestead is the Durgin house, the last large dwelling spared from the 1947 fire. More spacious and elegant than its neighbor across the street, it had once been an inn and bedchambers for travelers have been refurbished. Furnishings are graceful, even extravagant, with the dining table set for a many course meal, and one can almost fee the dim presence of guests in fine silks. buy again, a momento mori: the front door is unusually wide "so that coffins could be carried through, King points out.
The huge Durgin barns now house displays of old crafts, and in one loft are period carriages and sleighs; in the barn cellars are collections of early farm machinery including equipment ranging from a huge snow roller to the little treadmill on which a bored goat once plotted to churn butter.
In the sprawling complex that surrounds the old Trafton house, visitors can see the Fenderson Schoolhouse, a replica of the one built in South Parsonsfield in 1810 [1839]. A photograph of Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington hangs on the wall, and a chart indicates that the metric system was taught to our grandparents too. The school-bell rope is there for the pulling, and not a child goes through the schoolhouse without giving it a tug. King confesses that he has had to stifle the sound of the bell just a little for his own peace of mind.
Offering evidence of nineteenth-century trades are a barbershop, a print shop, a photographer's emporium, the Silas P. Hardy bicycle shop, and a toy shop carrying Hill's Alphabet Blocks and a Put-Together Puzzle Book. If Life was more simple a century ago and possessions harder to come by, human needs seem remarkably unchanged. the vast ballroom above Willowbrook's country store echoes with memories of dancing, music, flirtations. Military memorabilia on display recall that sons have always been hostage to wars, their loss a grief to family and friends. But then a collection of old bicycles cheerfully brings to mind the adolescent "Look, Ma! no hands! a boast that must have sounded as proudly a hundred years ago as it does today.
Displays of carpentry tools, early farm machinery, heating equipment, gas and steam engines (a "man's museum," indeed), restored carriages and sleighs, and the last horse drawn hearse of Newfield all command the attention and marveling interest of visitors. There is something to divert every generation, and a restaurant and ice cream parlor on the grounds provide welcome respite for exhausted nostalgia buffs.
Donald King, in his handyman garb, watches the visitors touring his village. He especially enjoys the reactions of the elderly, for willowbrook provides so many direct links with their remembered past.
"You mean," a boy asks his grandmother, who is looking at a collection of early washing machines, "that you had one like
that old contraption?"
"Do you really
remember those?" another asks his octogenarian great-aunt who is looking fondly at an ancient sewing machine.
Wicker baby carriages. Chamber pots. Clothing with bustles. Glass milk bottles. Early baseball bats---and the lathes on which they were made. A tiny tricycle which, an old gentleman recalls, was known as a velocipede.
For Donald King it has not been an urge to live in a far-gone time that has impelled him to restore Willowbrook at his own expense. he had done it out of love for Maine and a respect for some virtues of the past: hard physical work, meticulous craftsmanship with its precise attention to detail, that seem sadly lacking in today's plasticized society. but his own hard-earned fortune that made possible Willowbrook's creation is a twentieth century one, coming as it did from great advances in technology. The Newfield home of King and his wife is a century-old farmhouse which, apart from a few fine antiques, makes no concessions to the past. An enclosed pale blue pool, and the sternly functional leather furniture arranged near a huge fireplace, are far removes from the old swimming hole and the scratchy horsehair of Victorian parlors.
Nor is Donald King's demeanor a relic of another more reticent age. Bluff, free spoken, a dynamo of energy, he speaks of his enterprise with offhand modesty. "I don't want to be King of anything," he says, and means it. His justifiable pride rests wholly in the painstaking re-creation of a forgotten way of life, its simple industries and crafts, its crude domestic inventions once presumed to have lightened the householder's burdens. Pride there, yes, but greater is his anticipation of projects lying ahead: a broom making shop, a canoe factory, a horse-drawn ice wagon, a cooperage....Will any of the old trades practiced in rural Maine in the 1800s be omitted, one wonders? And before the thought is raised the answer is at hand: Not if donald King has anything to do with Willowbrook at Newfield.
