William H. Beebe House (1880)

The house at 540 Main Street in Portland was built c. 1880. According to Doris Sherrow, the house’s first owner, William H. Beebe, was a quarryman, although shortly before his death he purchased newspaper printing machinery. He may be the same William H. Beebe listed in the Middletown and Portland Directory for 1886-7 as a “molder bds.” In the early twentieth century, the property was used as a gas station. Frederick Haines ran the garage in the nineteen teens and twenties and George Bot in the 1930s. On the south front lawn, two concrete tracks, with the space between now filled in, are remnants of the garage’s old grease pit.