The Magee House History
In 1831, John Magee brought his new wife, Arabella Stewart,
from Maryland back to Bath and built a handsome brick house on the large corner
lot where the road from Cameron joins West Morris Street. Set well back from
either roadway, the house has two full floors that are elevated nearly a
half-story above ground level. An old print of the residence of John Magee shows
the house with a cupola and wide-bracketed eaves. In that picture, it has a
delicatefront entrance porch with upturned roof corners, almost Oriental in
appearance.
When you enter the house from the front,
you go into a central room that opens into rooms on either side. On the right
side is a large room extending to the full depth of the house. It has two
fireplaces along the outside wall. The hallway which goes only about two-thirds
of the way through the house is separated from this room by only two columns.
Opposite this long room, across the hallway, is a room that is about the same
length as the hall. Here there are leaded-glass windows between the room and the
hallway. There may have been similiar windows on the other side at one time. The
open and the glassed interior partitions allow light fron the side rooms into
the hall that would have been very dark otherwise. The whole front part of the
downstairs is light and pleasant. The house looks to have been planned for
entertaining.
During some work to strengthen floors upstairs
during the library's tenure in the building, two large pulleys were discovered
built into a pocket space inside a partition just above the middle of the long
downstairs parlor. It is speculated that these pulleys may have been used to
raise a partition from between two smaller parlors to combine them into a single
large room. The Magees may have wanted more open space when they had many
guests. There is a smaller room in the back corner on the south side of the
house that is thought to have been a dining room. Between it and the back hall,
where the stairs are, is a dumb waiter. This must have been used to bring food
from the kitchen in the basement to the dining table. In this room at present is
a large oil painting of four of the Magee children with a smiling servant
boy peering through the doorway. The door frame is recognizable as that of the
door opening into the back hall.