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The Early Architecture of Bowdoin College and Brunswick, Maine
William D. Shipman
William D. Shipman's survey of the buildings that shaped one of Maine's oldest college towns is the kind of local study that quietly becomes indispensable. First issued in 1973 and revised in 1985, it walks through the Federal and Greek Revival houses of Brunswick and the early campus of Bowdoin College, tracing how a coastal Maine town built itself in brick and clapboard. Shipman, a Bowdoin economist by trade and a preservationist by devotion, writes with the affection of someone who knew these streets intimately; the Maine Historic Preservation Commission gave the original an award in 1974. It is a modest paperback, but a reliable one — the sort of book historians and homeowners alike still reach for when they want to know who built what, and when.
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The author
William D. Shipman spent his career as a professor of economics at Bowdoin College, but his lasting local legacy is as a historian of the town he lived in. A committed preservationist, he turned a scholar's patience toward the houses and public buildings of Brunswick, and the original 1973 edition of this study earned a special award from the Maine Historic Preservation Commission the following year.
The book
The book catalogs the early architecture of both Bowdoin's campus and the surrounding town, concentrating on the Federal and Greek Revival period when Brunswick was coming into its own as a mill and college community. Shipman pairs description with history, explaining not just what the buildings look like but who commissioned them and why they took the forms they did. This revised 1985 edition updated the original for a new generation of readers.
How it has aged
Local architectural studies can date quickly, but this one has held up as a reference precisely because it is careful and specific. It remains cited by the Pejepscot Historical Society and others writing about Brunswick's built heritage, and for anyone tracing the story of a particular house or campus landmark, it is still a natural first stop.
For more context
Readers drawn to New England town-and-gown history will find natural companions in Patricia McGraw Anderson's later The Architecture of Bowdoin College and in the Pejepscot Historical Society's ongoing work on Brunswick's past.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- William D. Shipman
- Year
- 1985
- ISBN
- None
- Format
- Paperback
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine
Places