The William Sewall House

BySteve

From Sewall Homestead to Yoga Retreat

The William Sewall House is a Greek Revival-style home that was built in 1865. It is celebrated historically for its deep connection to a young Theodore Roosevelt. Long before his presidency, Roosevelt regularly stayed at the house as a guest of his lifelong friend and wilderness guide, William Wingate Sewall. Today, the home is in the hands of Sewall’s descendant Donna Sewall Davidge, who has operated it as the Sewall House Yoga Retreat since 1997. The retreat has won numerous awards and consistently is listed by media outlets as a top 10 yoga retreat in the United States. The William Sewall House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 12, 1982.

A Founding Family’s Homestead

The Sewall family was among the earliest to settle Island Falls. Levi Sewall arrived in the area in 1842, one of the town’s first settlers, and raised ten children there. His tenth child, William Wingate Sewall, was born in 1845 and grew up to become one of the community’s best-known guides, known simply as “Bill” to those who knew him.

In 1865, at the house’s present location at what is now 1027 Crystal Road, a two-and-a-half-story, wood-frame Greek Revival home was built for the family. It was three bays wide, with a side-gable roof, twin interior chimneys, and a hip-roofed porch wrapping around the front and side of the house. The house was designed by Osgood Pingree and remains, by the National Register’s assessment, a well-preserved example of vernacular Greek Revival architecture in a rural setting. For a period the house also served as Island Falls’ first post office. The mail slot cut into the kitchen door survives to this day.

A Friendship Rooted in the Maine Woods

The house’s national significance rests on its connection to Theodore Roosevelt, who first traveled to Island Falls in September 1878 as a Harvard student. Roosevelt made the trip with a cousin and two friends who had previously vacationed in the Mattawamkeag Lake region under Bill Sewall’s guidance. The group took a train to Mattawamkeag Station, the nearest railroad stop, then covered the remaining 36 miles by buckboard, a horse-drawn open carriage, before spending their first night sleeping in a makeshift bed on the third floor of the Sewall home.

Roosevelt, who suffered from asthma, had been encouraged by friends to seek out the fresh Maine air, and it was here that he developed his enduring friendship with Sewall, forged through their shared love of hunting, hiking, and the outdoors. Roosevelt returned to the house as a guest on a regular basis through 1878, and Sewall would later join Roosevelt out west, working on his Dakota Territory ranching operations in the 1880s.

A Living Family Legacy

Unlike many historic properties that pass out of a founding family’s hands, the Sewall House has remained under Sewall family ownership since it was built. In 1997, Donna Amrita Davidge–William Wingate Sewall’s great-granddaughter, and a yoga instructor who had taught in New York City since the mid-1980s–purchased the homestead from her family and opened it as the Sewall House Yoga Retreat. The retreat offers small, personalized group sessions, vegetarian meals, and access to the same lakes, hiking trails, and woods that drew Roosevelt to the area in teh 1870s.

Under Davidge’s direction, the retreat has drawn national recognition in the wellness travel press. It was named among the Top Ten Yoga Retreats in the U.S. and Canada by Rave Reviews in 2019, ranked the #2 yoga retreat in the country by USA Today’s 10 Best Readers’ Choice awards 2023-2025, and named to Condé Nast Traveler’s Top Ten U.S./Canada yoga retreats list in 2024. In 2026, it was named the #1 best U.S. yoga retreat by The Zoe Report.

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