Castle Tucker was Silas Lee’s dream house, on land he spent 15 years piecing together from “teeny” properties he bought up, owner Historic New England’s Midcoast Maine Site Manager Peggy Konitzky said.

So why is it not Castle Lee? Showing Boothbay Register/Wiscasset Newspaper around, Konitzky explained, for one thing, Lee called it Elm Lawn, for all the elms, which later died. The current name dates to early 20th century, when Jenny Tucker, daughter of Captain Richard and Mollie Tucker, was trying to attract paying guests in the summer. She heard a local call it Tucker Castle. “And she’s like, ‘Oh! I can use this!’ and she switches the words around and starts referring to it as Castle Tucker. So it was a marketing idea.”

Konitzy explained, Richard Tucker was elderly by then, and Mollie, 26 years younger than he, was the daughter of a Gardiner hotelier and she decided to start taking paying guests. Jenny, who worked for a New York import-export firm, added to the home’s decor a number of Japanese touches, “when everything Japanese was the height of fashion,” Konitzky said.  

Tucker family belongings are all around, from the papier-mâché cat in the kitchen, to the carriages in the barn and the stickers a Tucker son put all around. Konitzky still finds more of those stickers he placed.

Castle Tucker is a mix of architectural styles – Federal with the square core, the rounded bow ends, “not so much,” Konitzky noted, laughing.

“Unfortunately, we’ve never been able to find a collection of Silas Lee papers, so we really don’t know why he made the choices he did.” She said Lee was in Congress when Thomas Jefferson (Monticello) and Christopher Gore (Gore Place) were. “So in that context, you can see where (Lee) might have gotten the idea.”

Some windows were bricked up in the 1850s, when entrepreneur Franklin Clark owned the home and, by then, the original, central chimney system was starting to fail, Konitzky said. So Clark moved the chimneys to the outside of the home’s bow ends, “which was a bad decision on so many levels: It made all the rooms of the house dark,” and the chimneys lost so much heat to the outside, I honestly don’t think the Tuckers could have been warm in this house, ever.”

Clark was having all sorts of work done on the home, but was having money troubles, maybe because at the same time, he and his son were building another eventual Wiscasset landmark, The Ledges, she said. The bank foreclosed on Clark’s house, and Captain Richard Tucker “got a really good deal,” Konitzky said. He and wife Mollie moved in in 1858, moved the entrance from the Sheepscot River side to the street side and added a piazza and a barn, which still has the family’s carriages. The parts the Tuckers added to the home were Victorian.