Parlor Set With Deep Maine Connections Returns Home
In early 2025, the Maine State Museum received a donation of a remarkable parlor set with an even more remarkable family story.
The set, consisting of a parlor sofa, side chair, and table, came to the museum from Gail Bingham of Louisville, Kentucky. Four generations of her family had cared for the set, which had been given to her great-grandmother, Sarah Dixon, as a wedding present by her employer, Mrs. Harriet Stanwood Blaine. Harriet’s husband, James Blaine, was a prominent national politician, serving as Speaker of the House, a Republican candidate for President, and U.S. Senator from Maine. The Blaine House is now the home of Maine’s governors.
Sarah Dixon (1855-1928) was born free in Virginia to John Dixon, an enslaved man, and Sallie Dixon, who had been emancipated by 1851. It is not clear why or when Sarah arrived in Augusta, but she had likely been working for the Blaines for some time before they gave her the parlor set on the occasion of her marriage to Henry Edward Taylor (1832-1893), a local African American hostler.
The parlor set (which will be featured in the exhibit At Home in Maine) was actually three pieces of furniture of different eras that the Blaines had owned and used in the Blaine House between the 1850s and the 1870s. The Blaine’s gift to Sarah and her husband represents a long tradition of prosperous families handing down household furnishings to favored servants.
Sarah, Henry, and their family lived on Child Street, a few houses away from the Blaine family. There, the parlor set held a prominent place in their small home. When the Taylor family moved to Illinois around 1912, the parlor set went with them. It passed through their son, George’s (1888-1969) family when he settled in Indianapolis and then went with his daughter, Rebecca Taylor Bingham (1928-2023) to Louisville, Kentucky, where she and her family made their home.
Through all this time, the Taylor family kept the story of the parlor set alive. Rebecca Taylor Bingham brought her children to Augusta on vacations into the 1980s. They took tours of the Blaine House and reflected on Sarah Dixon Taylor’s work there. When Rebecca Bingham died, her daughter, the donor, knew the parlor set needed to come “home.”
And come home it did. The set will soon be exhibited in the museum’s At Home in Maine exhibit where it will preserve a chapter of African American history in Augusta and show how material culture can weave together the stories of one family through generations of change.
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