Benjamin Vaughan was a bundle of contradictions. On one hand, he considered himself an educated man of the British Enlightenment, having studied medicine in Edinburgh and chemistry under Antoine Lavoisier. Through his father Samuel, he established friendships with figures like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, even serving as a go-between during negotiations of treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War. 

But he played an active role in enslavement as the heir to vast sugarcane plantations in Jamaica, wealth that enabled him to attain an education and build connections with Anglo-American elites. Vaughan's ties with enslavement led him to loudly defend the Atlantic Slave Trade in his first speech as a Member of Parliament. Several years later, after Black-led revolutions spread across French-controlled colonies, he called for a ban on the trade in a self-interested attempt to prevent enslaved Jamaicans from doing the same.

Vaughan nevertheless somehow reconciled his support of enslavement with more radical politics, and his sympathies for the French Revolution led him to flee Britain, ending up on his brother's land in Hallowell in 1797. He lived as a gentleman farmer for the next forty years, growing potatoes and apples while conducting science experiments and serving as the town's doctor. But even then, he could not completely separate himself from his Jamaican holdings. Although he never returned, enslaved labor provided some income, and Vaughan's son William used Maine's timber to craft barrels that held rum made with Jamaican sugarcane. The Sam Sharp Rebellion of 1831 saw tens of thousands of enslaved Jamaicans rise up against their oppressors. And while the British suppressed the revolt with brutal efficiency, the Jamaicans still burned over one hundred properties--including Vaughan's. He died intestate just a few years later, leaving his family nearly destitute.

But the Vaughans remained on the site, alternating between Hallowell and Boston. Vaughan's great-grandson, William Warren Vaughan, expanded the house to include a music room and established trails and stonework bridges in the woods surrounding the homestead. He and his wife, the artist Ellen Twiselton, embodied the nostalgia of the late-nineteenth-century Colonial Revival. They crafted an imagined version of Benjamin Vaughan's study--including a wall of famous figures who knew their ancestor--and a colorful garden that remains to this day. The house passed through their daughter, Mary Vaughan Marvin, and then through her daughter, Diana Vaughan Marvin Gibson. Diana and her husband established the Homestead as a historic house museum in their wills, and their children have helped transition the space into a public non-profit over the last twenty years.