Maine has one of the nation’s older housing stocks, so it should come as no surprise that many homes for sale have long and storied histories.

We rounded up four homes on the market right now from South Berwick to Machias that were built centuries ago. They’re largely on the pricier side, which reflects both the high median sale price of Maine homes right now and the cost of renovating historic properties. Even ones that are less expensive to buy will need renovation to restore them to their former glory.

“There’s a lot less people out there looking for older homes than there are people looking for newer or modern homes,” Brandon Elsemore, a real estate agent with Keller Williams based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, said. “People get a little scared … thinking they’re inheriting 250-year-old problems.”

A former hotel and brewery in Machias, $350,000

This historic property in Machias, known as the Clark Perry House, is an ornate home built in 1868 for Perry, who was one of the largest property owners in town at that time. His home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its unique architecture, described in its nomination form as “a well-preserved example of the Italianate style” in a remote region.

Since Perry’s death in 1888, the home has served as a hotel, and in more recent years was a brewery and bar. The property is on a 1-acre in-town lot and has undergone a beautiful exterior renovation effort, but renovation work is needed to restore its 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom residential section, Deanna Newman, the property’s listing agent said.

An old Army hospital on Great Diamond Island, $250,000

The city of Portland is looking for a residential developer to breathe new life into an old army hospital it has owned since 2019 on Great Diamond Island. The vacant property was the hospital for Fort McKinley on the island.

The sprawling hospital complex was constructed in 1903 and staffed by a medical detachment unit and the Army Nursing Corps up until 1947. It’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places and once included an operating room, dentists’ office and kitchen, according to the Fort McKinley museum.

The property was supposed to be sold to a developer who wanted to turn it into condos earlier this year, but that deal fell through, Sara Reynolds, the property’s listing agent, said. That is why it’s back on the market.

This 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom farmhouse for sale in the western Maine town of Harrison was built in 1850, listing agent Pam Sessions said, and for a number of years was owned by a local hotel.

The Hotel Harrison was built in 1906 and could accommodate 100 guests, Martha Denison of the Harrison Historical Society, said. The men who built and operated the hotel acquired this home on Naples Road at the same time and used it as a residence to accommodate the hotel’s manager and any extra guests, Denison said. When the hotel closed in 1964, the home was returned to private ownership.

The property includes water views, a right of way to a shared waterfront and dock on Long Lake, a barn and garden beds, Sessions, an agent with Bearfoot Realty, said. Parts of the second floor are unfinished and would need restoring.

The South Berwick home of a prolific Maine judge, $975,000

This 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home in South Berwick was built in the late 1770s by Benjamin Chadbourne, a local judge and Massachusetts congressman credited with founding Berwick Academy, the oldest school in Maine.

His ancestors were heavy-hitters, too. Chadbourne’s great-grandfather, Humphrey, was a wealthy Englishman who inked one of the oldest deeds in U.S. history by buying property from a tribal chief, according to the Old Berwick Historical Society. Benjamin Chadbourne’s father, William, constructed one of the first water-powered sawmills in North America.

The Chadbournes have owned the property since and had a professional historic restoration company come in and painstakingly renovate the property in the 1990s. But the youngest generation of the family are no longer local and cannot care for it, Elsemore said.

“This is the first time the property has been on the market in its 250-year history,” Elsemore, the property’s listing agent, said. “It’s definitely beautifully cared for.”

The home includes plenty of historic accents, a barn that serves as a garage and antique shop, and a well-manicured garden area.

“Despite its age, it’s in great shape,” Elsemore said.

Snowfall is nothing new in Maine, but usually it’s white.

The east Maine town of Rumford experienced a rare weather event Tuesday in the form of brown snow, town officials confirmed on Facebook. A malfunction at a paper mill caused the release of spent black liquor, which sparked the bizarre coloring.

Officials warned residents not to touch the substance after initially saying some of the snow measured a pH level of 10, making the substance an alkali and a skin irritant. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection later tested the tan colored snow and found pH levels of “8 or lower,” the city said.

Black liquor is a by-product of the paper production process, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Photos captured the brown-looking snow spread across an open sports field.

The town said the mill has agreed to cover costs of third party testing of the snow.

Is the brown snow safe?

Although brown snow in Rumford, Maine is considered non-toxic, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection recommend avoiding contact with skin.

“We are confident that the public safety concerns are minimal at this time. In the meantime out of an abundance of caution please avoid ingesting or direct skin contact with the brown snow,” Rumford officials wrote on Facebook.

Town officials planned to notify the local school district inform children not to play with the brown snow, and recommended pet owners keep their animals away from it as well.

A rainy Wednesday in Rumford was expected to flush the substance off the ground and resident’s homes, the town’s Facebook page wrote. Any concerns relating to the brown snow can be addressed at the town manager’s office.

The Maine board that oversees doctors has cleared a surgeon from MaineGeneral Medical Center in Augusta of nearly every allegation of unprofessional behavior against him, closing an inquiry into the doctor’s conduct that has largely centered on his treatment of women.

The Maine Board of Licensure in Medicine, which is primarily made up of doctors, voted on Tuesday that Dr. Ian Reight had only violated one of the 16 counts against him. It found that he had acted unethically when he made an inappropriate sexual comment in front of a nurse who had also been his patient, prompting her to find a different physician.

The board imposed a year-long term of probation on his Maine license that will require him to pay up to $3,000 toward the cost of the disciplinary hearing. He will also be required to continue to meet with a professional mentor, something he said he has been doing since becoming aware of the extensive board complaint against him.

His coaching appeared to factor into the board’s reluctance to impose harsher disciplinary sanctions. One board member, Gregory Jamison, asked if the board had to call the discipline “probation” at all because it sounded too “pejorative.”

Reight, who has denied the allegations against him and continued to defend himself in testimony on Tuesday, will have the opportunity to appeal the decision when it becomes final during the board’s next meeting.

However, Reight plans to leave his position at MaineGeneral soon and does not plan to practice in Maine, he said. The press coverage of his conduct and the complaint against him “has done a pretty good job at making sure I can’t do that,” he said Tuesday.

Reight was the subject of an investigation by the Bangor Daily News in 2022 that found he rose to a leadership position at MaineGeneral despite at least five women submitting complaints about him to hospital officials. He stepped down as president of medical staff and the hospital’s board of directors in November 2022, shortly after publication.

Several of Reight’s former colleagues complained to the licensing board, which began holding an adjudicatory hearing this summer, into whether to discipline the doctor, an action that could have involved anything from a reprimand to revoking his license to practice in Maine. The hearing was held over individual days each month.

The original complaint included 15 counts related to sexual harassment, bullying and demeaning behavior, and concerns about patient safety. In August, the board dropped the patient safety counts.

Then, last month, the board added an additional count against Reight when a former social worker at the hospital brought forward allegations after reading about the hearing in a news story. That count ended up being the only allegation of unethical misconduct that the board found violated professional licensing rules.

During a hearing in November, the social worker testified that she saw Reight crawl on the floor toward a nurse until he was near her crotch in 2016; then he described how long he could hold his breath. The social worker reported what she saw to hospital officials.

The nurse, who also testified last month, said she had been embarrassed and did not report the incident because she was already dealing with the stress of a breast cancer diagnosis. In addition to working together, Reight had also been her surgeon. The nurse described how he called her later to ask if she had reported him. She then switched to a different surgeon for her medical care.

Members of the board noted on Tuesday that, unlike some of the other allegations against Reight, he did not deny that he made the comment, and it had a clear negative impact on the nurse. The board found he violated “a standard of professional behavior” that was likely to “interfere with the delivery of care.”

“I think this was a serious violation professionally,” said board member Dr. Renee Fay-LeBlanc. “I don’t think Dr. Reight intended that. I think he’s been honest and has problems with boundaries and thinks he’s being funny, but I think this is pretty significant.”

Reight addressed the allegation for the first time during his testimony on Tuesday. While he denied ever crawling on the floor, he characterized the comment as a joke made in poor taste with a person he considered a friend who enjoyed “salty” banter. He did not mean to upset her and expressed dismay at the offense he caused, he said.

Reight, 52, spent much of his testimony on Tuesday expressing regret for how he hadn’t learned to separate personal and professional boundaries. He struggled to do so at MaineGeneral when the social dynamics within his tight-knit surgery group began to break down and grew “toxic” in March 2020, he said.

But he denied specific allegations related to demeaning or inappropriate comments he made to colleagues or about patients, claiming he was not a person who would speak that way. For instance, he said he did not compare someone’s appearance to that of a chemo patient, noting his own mother’s battle with cancer. He also did not speak to a female colleague in a disparaging way when he expressed concerns about her qualifications to perform a job during a surgery.

He described his unlikely path to medicine that began with a difficult childhood in the Washington D.C. area, dropping out of high school and becoming a firefighter and emergency medical technician. He never truly shed the “firehouse” camaraderie that blurred the lines between personal and professional relationships — something he realized was a “theme” among complaints, he said.

Reight has since attended professional development courses, he said. He has also met regularly with a therapist and with two doctors who served as professional mentors, one of whom recently defended him before the board. One of the most helpful lessons he took from those meetings is a greater understanding of women’s perceptions, he said.

“It helped me have empathy,” Reight told the board.

Board members credited that work when discussing the terms of his probation on Tuesday. They also asked him why he took those steps if he denied any wrongdoing.

The surgeon said he took advantage of the opportunities for self-improvement.

“In surgery, you’re always trying to make someone better, and I wanted to be better,” he said.

Fighting back tears, he said the allegations against him in the 2021 board complaint  “were horrifying to me” and made him question who he was as a person and a surgeon.

He called the public airing of those complaints, both in the BDN and in the public disciplinary hearings, “devastating.”