Captain Enoch Remick House
About This Tour
The Captain Enoch Remick House features a two-story stair hall and a second-floor chamber with fanciful, floor-to-ceiling murals painted by John Avery.
Exterior view of the Captain Enoch Remick House, which is open to the public as part of the Remick Country Doctor Museum & Farm.
The Remick House
The Captain Enoch Remick House was built ca. 1808 in Tamworth, New Hampshire. In 1779, Enoch Remick (1730-1800), a shipwright from Kittery, Maine, purchased 200 acres of land from David Chapman. Enoch Remick later sold part of this land to his son John Remick (1763-1849), and it was likely John who built the oldest portions of the extant house on this site sometime between 1805-12. When John moved to Industry, Maine in 1812 he sold the property to Samuel Edgel, who then sold it to William Edgel in 1816. By the 1820s, the house was back in the Remick family under
the ownership of John’s son, Captain Enoch Remick (1798-1879). Captain Remick enlarged and updated the house, and it was during his ownership that the murals were most likely painted. In 1996 the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Captain Enoch Remick House.
The Remick family ran prosperous farms and quickly became prominent citizens of Tamworth, New Hampshire. Captain Enoch Remick even hosted town meetings on the third floor of this house from 1830-52. The house also operated as an inn during this time, providing a stopover point on the Center Harbor-Conway, New Hampshire stage line. The property was farmed by six generations of the Remick family, the last two of which also served as doctors to the local rural population. In 1996, the house became part of the Remick Country Doctor Museum & Farm, an organization dedicated to telling the story of country doctors.​
The house’s architecture includes both Federal and Greek Revival elements. Initially, the Remick House was built as a Federal house sometime around 1808, as illustrated by the simple and refined sidelights and narrow pilasters framing the entry doors on the long side of the house. An original louvered fan remains over this entrance, and a Palladian window — an element common in “high” style Federal houses — embellishes the gable-end wall. Around 1830, the low-pitched roof was replaced with a taller, pedimented, front-facing gable roof, a key feature in Greek Revival houses. The bold corner pilasters were likely added then as well. The family continued to update the house with the addition of a porch in the late nineteenth century.
The gable end of the Remick House is finished with Greek Revival details including bold rake cornices, a full return cornice, and a window under an entablature. From this side, the livable third floor is evident.
When a first floor room became the doctor’s office, a medicine cupboard was placed in front of this muraled wall. A stagecoach or carriage pulled by four horses shows up as though it is framed by the shelves. The detail is a wonderful relief after the dizzying rows of bushes in the adjoining front hall.
This section of the medicine room wall, now hidden behind early twentieth-century cabinets, includes a scene with a bridge and a house.
It is believed that the wall murals in the Remick House were painted after the 1830 renovations. The murals covered the first and second floor walls of the primary stair hall, a first-floor room known as the “medicine room,” and an upstairs bedroom. While the medicine room is not seen on this virtual tour, as most of the murals in that space are now hidden by later cabinetry, it is important to note that the murals in this room include the typical Avery School motif of fingerprint grapes. The medicine room also exhibits some of the painter’s impressive skill, as he used a fine brush to paint spokes in the carriage wheels and detail the passengers in the coach interior.
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The entirety of the stair hall is muraled, even the difficult-to-paint places such as the alcove underneath the stairway and the wall along the stair itself. The murals in the stair hall illustrate the strong horizontality typically found in Avery School murals, with almost no vertical elements, except for a few trees decorating narrow wall surfaces in the lower hall.
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​Upon entering the bedchamber, there is a noticeable shift, with floor-to-ceiling trees in the foreground of the mural. Notice how these tall trees often frame the architectural elements of the room, demonstrating the great intention and care the artist used when designing the room’s murals.
About the Art
In the lower entrance hall, the wall under the stairs is painted with converging rows of bushes. The effect is almost dizzying. The band of trees at the baseboard grounds your eye at the base of the wall. Note the delicate black curlicues above the trees to the right of the door frame.
Bedchamber fireplace surrounded by puzzle piece background mural with Avery’s telltale trees and horizontal bushes above the mantel. Note the yellow appearance of the walls due to an application of shellac or varnish to the paintings in an effort to protect them.
About the Artist
Although the murals are not signed, there are many motifs typically associated with the muralist John Avery (1790-1871), who painted walls all over New Hampshire. Mural painting was not Avery’s only way of making money. An 1849 mercantile union directory and the 1850 census list him as a cabinetmaker and furniture manufacturer.
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It is also common to see additional painted finishes in interiors with Avery School murals — a testament to the Avery family of painters’ skills as decorative artists. For example, it appears that the Averys were also skilled in both graining and marbleizing — painted finishes that recreate the natural colors and patterns of wood and marble, respectively. The Captain Enoch Remick House retains Avery School graining on many of its wooden surfaces throughout the house, such as the stair risers and treads, and a marbleized floor on the third floor of the house.
Houses with murals often had doors and other woodwork grained to imitate a different wood. There is only supposition to believe the same decorators who painted the murals also did the graining. This particular type of graining is found in several locations muraled by Avery.