Architecture & Landscape database

By Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.

George Millard Coombs (1851-1909) was born in Brunswick in 1851. His father John M. Coombs was a farmer and a shipbuilder, who probably taught his son carpentry. George Coombs learned drafting from Boston architect Frederick Hamilton. At the age of twenty in 1872, Coombs entered the office of Lewiston architect Charles F. Douglas as a draftsman. Douglas’s office proved a good training ground for Coombs. However, the opportunity was short-lived, for Douglas moved his practice to Philadelphia in 1874. Anticipating the change, Coombs formed a partnership with another young architect, Charles H. Kimball of Portland.

The firm of Kimball and Coombs lasted only a year. In July 1875, George M. Coombs joined the experienced Lewiston architect and engineer William H. Stevens to establish the partnership of Stevens and Coombs. Between 1875 and 1880 the two men received seventy-five commissions for houses, churches, schools, business blocks, and factories. Most of this work was in the Lewiston-Auburn area.

After Stevens’ death in 1880, Coombs continued to practice architecture on his own. For the next sixteen years, he worked without a partner, relying on himself and such talented draftsmen as Elmer I. Thomas, William R. Miller, Eugene J. Gibbs, and Harry C. Wilkinson. Between 1880 and 1896, Coombs significantly expanded the reach of his firm to create a statewide practice capable of competing for any major project in Maine. During this period, the office handled four hundred commissions in fifty Maine communities across the state.

In 1896, George M. Coombs invited his two most experienced draftsmen to form the partnership of Coombs, Gibbs and Wilkinson. Born in Lewiston in 1869, Eugene J. Gibbs joined Coombs’s staff in 1888, shortly after graduating from Edward Little High School in Auburn. Two years Gibbs’ junior, Harry C. Wilkinson was born in Cornish in 1871, grew up in Lewiston, and graduated from Lewiston High School. At the age of twenty in 1891, Wilkinson began working for Coombs and quickly demonstrated an extraordinary talent for architectural rendering. Three years later this skill won him an appointment as a draftsman for the Supervising Architect of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.

With the departure of Harry Wilkinson in 1899, the firm became known as Coombs and Gibbs. George Coombs’ younger son Harry Stevens Coombs entered the office upon graduation from Bowdoin College in 1901. His older son Frederick Hamilton Coombs joined the firm in 1908 after studying architecture at Harvard and working as a structural and bridge engineer in New York.

George M. Coombs’s thirty-seven-year career as an architect ended with his death in 1909 at the age of fifty-eight. The Lewiston Evening Journal paid him the following tribute:

He was a delightful companion, had a strict sense of integrity and justice, was most honorable in all his business dealings, knew how to get along with everyone, and was a first-class businessman as well as architect.

Following George M. Coombs’s passing, the firm of Coombs and Gibbs underwent a series of changes as son Harry S. Coombs positioned himself to continue his father’s legacy. After practicing on his own from 1913 to 1928, Harry Coombs formed a partnership with his nephew Alonzo J. Harriman, paving the way for the architectural firm in Auburn known today as Harriman.