Wiscasset Academy, fondly called “the Red Brick Schoolhouse,” has stood on the corner of Hodge and Warren streets since 1807.

For many years, the diminutive two-story building has served as home to the Maine Art Gallery. It’s undergone a number of restorations, inside and out, over the last 200 years, but looks much the same as when it was first constructed. 

Like the Lincoln County Courthouse, the academy was made from bricks fired here in Wiscasset along the shores of the Sheepscot River. The granite used in the foundation and steps came from a quarry in nearby Edgecomb. The building was erected when Maine was still part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was charted originally as the Wiscasset Academical Association following a petition by a group of community-minded citizens to the General Court.

Over the years, a number of eminent citizens got their early education there, including the Honorable Samuel Emerson Smith. He later graduated from Harvard University, practiced law in Wiscasset and served as Maine’s governor from 1831 to 1834. Smith is interred in the family plot in Evergreen Cemetery off Hodge Street, just a block away from where he learned his ABCs.

The academy’s last headmaster was Fredrick Adolphus Sawyer who later moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Following the Civil War, Sawyer became a U.S. Senator serving during the Reconstruction period. On the night of April 14, 1865, he was attending Ford's Theater in Washington D.C. and witnessed the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.   

The academy building continued to be used as a school until 1923. After that it was used as a gathering place for the community, kind of a mini civic center. There’s no record of a town meeting ever having been held here, although historical information compiled by William D. Patterson in the 1930s states the academy building served as a polling place.

It was also home to the Bradford-Sortwell-Post 54 American Legion that was formed after World War I.  Wiscasset’s Boy and Girl Scouts met there too, along with the Masons, Lincoln Lodge #3.

Jean Sutter, 91, of Route 218 has many memories of the old academy she calls the Red Brick Schoolhouse. She recalls volunteering to roll bandages there for the American Red Cross during World War II.

Mrs. Sutter and other Wiscasset residents also trained there to become civil defense “aircraft spotters.” They took turns manning a U.S. Army Air Force Observation Tower on Langdon Road where they watched the sky for enemy aircraft. The building was reopened as a school at the close of the war.

“Both of my children, Susan and David, attended school there with kids that lived in-town. Kindergarten, first and second grades were taught there,” she said. Mrs. Sutter’s nephew, William Sutter of Federal Street, was a student there in the late 1940s. The thing he remembers most is the daily, mile-long trek he and his brother would make to the schoolhouse.

“Our home was at the corner of the West Alna Road and Route 218. Back then nobody thought anything about letting their 6-year-old walk to school — even if it was a mile,” he said.

When the school department started running school buses, Sutter’s home was considered too close to town. “We still had to walk!” Sutter also recalls chilly winter days and the noon bell ringing when his teacher Miss Florence Plumstead served steaming bowls of tomato soup to the kids.

Selectman Judy Shea Flanagan attended kindergarten there and was a classmate of the Sutters.

“I think there was maybe 25 or 30 kids when I went to school there in 1954 or ’55. We were the last class that went there because the following year the new wing opened at the Middle School.”

Flanagan said kindergarten class was held on the first floor. She remembers two teachers, Mrs. York and Mrs. Merry, who sat on a raised platform at the front of the class and didn’t put up with any fooling around in the classroom. The first and second grades were on the second floor that doubled as the cafeteria, she continued. “The lunch tables folded up into the wall and I remember there being a really small kitchen.”

Flanagan’s older brother, Chuck Shea, said the academy reopened in 1946. “My kindergarten class was the first one after it reopened and my sister Judy’s was the last,” he told the newspaper.

He said Miss Plumstead, his teacher, was well-liked and greatly respected in town. “Some people say she was the best teacher Wiscasset ever had.”

Shea became a teacher and taught math and coached basketball and baseball at Wiscasset High School for many years before retiring.                           

Since 1957, the town has allowed The Maine Art Gallery, Inc. to lease the building. For a number of years, the gallery shared the building with the Lincoln County Historical Association; lectures were held on the second floor.

The town continues to rent the building for $1 per year, payable in advance upon the signing of the lease. The gallery’s lease runs for a period of five years and was last renewed Dec. 2, 2014.