March 28, 2024
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Patten farm designated as historic place

PATTEN – The cows are gone, and so are the chickens and the pigs. But it only takes a few minutes in the Bradford House Bed & Breakfast to realize that the 163-year-old Bradford Farm is still very much alive.

Actively farmed until the early 1990s, the 16-acre farm was recently named to the National Register of Historic Places as an historic district.

The 2 1/2-story farmhouse built in 1842, together with a massive post-and-beam New England-style barn built two years earlier, and an assortment of other outbuildings, “contains one of the largest intact clusters of agricultural buildings in the Patten area,” wrote Christi A. Mitchell, national register coordinator for the Maine Historical Preservation Commission, in her nomination report to the National Register.

“There are very few historic farms in Maine that retain all of their outbuildings, from the first barn and house to the last,” Mitchell wrote. “[The farm] reveals the spatial micro-climates of production, distribution, storage, shelter, processing and labor that develop on a diversified family farm.”

The words are music to the ears of Stephen and Filena Singer, both in their 50s, who bought the farm in 1998 with the goal of making it a bed and breakfast.

The Bradford House Bed and Breakfast was opened in 1999.

Though the couple resides in Florida for most of the year, Filena grew up in Patten and knew Irene Bradford, who was married to Freeman Bradford. It was Freeman’s father, Ezekial, who purchased the farm in 1893.

The Bradford family held the farm for more than 100 years.

Bradford, a local historian and schoolteacher, died in 1996 at the age of 82.

“Irene always had people here and I knew it was a place we could have a bed and breakfast,” Filena said last week, sitting in the couple’s private living room, which once was the farm’s woodshed. “Everybody that comes here that has any history with this place at all remarks how they have the most wonderful memories of this place,” Filena said.

Although the farm was remarkably intact for its age, it wasn’t without problems. Sills in the barn had to be replaced, as did the roof. Inches of chicken manure had to be scraped from the chicken coop floor, and the wagon shed still needs new doors.

“The first job I had to do was to take off 17 doors [in the house] and plane them because not one would shut,” Stephen said with a laugh.

The couple has maintained the farmhouse much as it was when Irene Bradford lived there. Even “Alice,” the massive Round Oak wood-burning stove that was used for decades to cook meals and heat water, is still in the kitchen.

And, while Stephen admits that the continuing project has been a “money pit,” and the couple has faced many challenges, “God must want us to complete this project,” he said.

When things seem to be at their worst, something suddenly goes right, he said, like a $5,000 grant from the New Century program.

Though it took nearly three years of research and documentation to have the farm considered for historical designation, Filena said the fact that that has been done is a relief to her.

“By being on the National Register, it’s protected,” she said with satisfaction, noting that the farm just a few hundred yards from the village on Main Street can’t be altered or torn down.

“That was my desire,” Filena continued. “I didn’t want someone to come in here and make a pool hall or put up paneling and shag carpet.

“I love this house the way it was,” she said. “I go out to that barn at night and I just marvel.”


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