By Alessa Wylie

Perez Burham House — Perez Burnham House

One of Maine’s most accomplished architects of the early 20th century was George Burnham (1875 – 1931) of Portland. Born in Portland, he received his professional training from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He briefly worked in Boston before moving to New York City to become a partner in the firm of Tryon, Brown & Burnham. He designed a number of houses on Long Island before developing typhoid and pneumonia and moving back to Portland in 1902. Back in Portland, he designed a house for his father Perez Burnham on the Western Prom, and the Somerset Apartments on Congress Street for Henry Rines.

In 1904 Burnham beat out eight other architects from Portland and Massachusetts, including John Calvin Stevens, Frederick Tompson, and Francis Fassett, to win the competition to design the Cumberland County Courthouse. The deciding factor for him to be chosen over these other established architects seems to have been the fact that his design achieved the right balance of architectural grandeur at a reasonable cost. According to newspaper accounts at the time, other designs were favored but would have been more expensive. The courthouse construction kept Burnham busy from 1905 until its completion in 1909. He did, however, work on smaller projects including design of the B.H. Bartol Library in Freeport in 1905. In 1910 he designed the Stanley Pullen Memorial Horse Trough just down from the Courthouse on Federal Street.

In 1909 Burnham took on E. Leander Higgins, a fellow M.I.T. graduate, who became a partner in 1912. Together they designed plans for houses and factories. The houses they designed were large, spacious and comfortably laid out. In 1912 he built a semi-detached double house at the corner of Carroll and Chadwick Streets, and lived in one of the houses for two years before designing a house and one for his mother next door in Falmouth Foreside.

In 1913 Burham and Higgins designed two large factories in two quite different settings. The Burnham & Morrill Plant, with its highly visible location, highlighted the more ornamental aspects of the building by contrasting the concrete, brick and glass of the exterior. The building immediately became a local landmark and remains one today.

The Portland Shoe Manufacturing Company, on the other hand, was located on Pearl Street in a dense urban setting. The building was tall and narrow following the latest architectural trend of simplicity of design. In both buildings the architects chose to emphasize the building materials used in their structures rather than applied decorations.

By 1917, Burnham & Higgins was one of the leading architectural firms in Maine designing for individuals and businesses, but when the U.S. entered World War I, George Burnham enrolled in the Army’s Officer’s Candidate School where he thought his engineering skills could be put to good use. While in training in Kentucky he became seriously ill and had to take a medical discharge. By 1919 he retired to his home in Falmouth Foreside. His final work in the 1920s was a remodel of a friend’s house in Yarmouth. In his final years Burnham experienced severe mental depression and took his own life in April, 1931.

George Burnham and his partner, E. Leander Higgins, designed both residential and commercial buildings and created several exceptional examples of early 20th century architecture in the Portland area that remain local landmarks today.

Source: Maine Historic Preservation Commission’s Biographical Dictionary of Architects in Maine.