By Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.
Born on an Aroostook County potato farm in Merrill in 1914, Eaton Weatherbee Tarbell (1914-1992) graduated from Bangor High School and attended Deerfield Academy and Bowdoin College. Upon completing Bowdoin in 1937, he enrolled in the Department of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. That year the noted German architect Walter Gropius joined the department as a faculty member and the next year was appointed its chair. Gropius replaced the traditional Beaux Arts curriculum with that of the International Style he had helped to develop in Europe. Between 1937 and 1941, Eaton Tarbell learned the principles of modernism that he employed throughout his career.
After receiving his B.A. from Harvard in 1941, Tarbell worked for engineering firms in Boston and Bangor before opening his office in Bangor in 1944. Over the next forty-four years, Eaton W. Tarbell and Associates designed several thousand projects that included homes, schools, churches, and public, commercial, and industrial buildings. Much of the firm’s work was concentrated in the Bangor area as well as in Eastern and Northern Maine. Tarbell was especially proud of two award winning examples of his work, the Eastern Corporation Guest House (1946) in Brewer and the Merchants National Bank (1974) in Bangor.
Eaton Tarbell was one of the first architects in post-World War II Maine to advocate for the sharp, simple lines of contemporary design. Nowhere was this more evident than in his public schools, which were characterized by single stories, flat roofs, and glass and steel construction. Tarbell was an outspoken critic of the traditional brick Georgian Revival style favored for high school and college buildings, calling it “way behind the times”, “antique”, and “in grandfather’s time.” In a 1956 speech to Maine civil engineers, he used these terms to describe the campuses of Bowdoin, Colby, Bates, and the University of Maine at Orono. By the 1960s, Bowdoin and Colby had abandoned the Georgian for the modern.
Eaton Tarbell was a larger-than-life figure, sporting a signature bow tie and a gruff manner. He was deeply committed to public service, holding the offices of president of the Maine Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, chairman of the Maine Arts Commission, and member of the Bangor Historic Preservation Commission. He was also active in promoting alcohol and drug treatment and prevention in Maine.
Eaton W. Tarbell died in Venice, Florida in 1992. The following year his widow Sallie Tarbell donated his architectural drawings to the Maine Historical Society, where they are essential to telling the story of how modernism came to Maine.