When famed disabilities advocate and author Helen Keller sought a quieter and more simplistic life, she purchased a historic home on Middle Bay at Brunswick’s Pennellville in the summer of 1909. Her arrival in Brunswick made headlines throughout the state of Maine, yet her time here is barely remembered.

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. An illness before her 2nd birthday, “possibly meningitis” rendered young Helen blind and deaf, yet her disability only made her stronger and very well known.

By June 1904, Helen Keller had graduated “Cum Laude” from Radcliff College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making her “the first deaf and blind person to receive a college degree.” Keller’s fame arose as she became an advocate “for women’s suffrage, labor rights, and persons with disabilities.”

By 1908, ceaseless requests for interviews and public appearances, along with an overwhelmingly large amount of correspondence, began to impede on her ability to work, and Helen sought a quieter and simpler place to live free from distractions.

That summer, Dr. John Macy, the husband of Helen’s teacher and companion — Anne Sullivan — came to Brunswick to meet with local merchant and real estate entrepreneur W.F. McFadden to close on the purchase of one of Brunswick’s most historic homes overlooking Casco Bay.

Known as “Linden Grove Farm,” at 292 Pennellville Road, the house “was an ideal place for literary work” and — among other endeavors — 29-year-old Helen Keller was planning “to write a nature study.”

The “large old-fashioned house” was built by shipbuilder Charles Pennell in 1839 and was located on “10 acres … with 17 rooms and a large barn.” And the home had “two large front rooms,” one of which would be “converted into a study for Miss Keller.”

The property also enjoyed “large shade trees” and commanding views overlooking Casco Bay’s “White’s, Birch, Whaleboat, and Eagle Islands.” The home was described as “one of the finest seashore estates” in all of Maine.

The men of the Pennell family were shipwrights, going back nearly 200 years, when this area of Pennellville was Brunswick’s burgeoning center of shipbuilding, employing just under a thousand shipyard workers during its heyday, when commonly known as “Pennellville.”

Pennellville also served as a major shipping center for Brunswick, “before the railroads came to town.” Ships “laden with cotton for the mills” arrived from southern ports and “lumber, ice, bricks, box shooks, staves” were shipped from Brunswick to points world-wide.

“About 90 tall-ships … brigs, barks, sloops and schooners, were built” in the Pennellville shipyards and “were crafted from white oaks found in the Brunswick Plains.”

In 1874, the “last Pennell Brothers ship to launch” at Pennellville was “the Benjamin Sewall … a stout ship … considered one of the finest of the majestic square riggers that once sailed the oceans.” At her launch “General Joshua Chamberlain joined the occasion to speak.”

For Keller, her time at Linden Grove Farm was predicated on her need for “leisure and seclusion.” Keller and Sullivan spent a great deal of time replying to correspondence and working on manuscripts and articles for publication.

And it is possible that her “nature study” at Pennellville evolved into Keller’s poem “The Song of the Stonewall,” which was published in 1910. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about Pennellville.

For many years, Keller travelled through Maine to visit friends “at Dresden … Lewiston … and in Bath.” She even visited Joshua Chamberlain’s home and later inscribed a copy of one her books “to my dear enemy, General Chamberlain.”

Keller gave many lectures in Maine over the course of her lifetime, most notably in Portland, Lewiston, Gardiner and at Bath in 1913. And she later visited with Gardiner native and American poet laureate Laura Richards in March 1939.

Before Keller had moved to Pennellville — and while she was just 10 years old — a Bath-built “three-masted schooner … the Helen Keller” was launched in her honor on July 31, 1890, at the George Hawley Shipyard in Bath. The ship was 122 feet long and over 30 feet wide, weighing more than 245 tons.

For two years, Keller occupied the historic Linden Grove Farm at Pennellville with Anne and her husband before Keller purchased a “home on the marsh” at Forest Hills in Queens, New York, in 1916.

Today, the house once known as “Linden Grove Farm” still looks much as it did in Keller’s time at Pennellville. And though most traces of the Pennellville shipyards have disappeared, this “great estate” overlooking Casco Bay still represents the grand history of a bygone era in Brunswick shipbuilding.

And the memory of one of the greatest women in American history — who once called the shores of Pennellville her home — still survives within the pages of our Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.