BY TESS NACELEWICZ

MaineToday Media, Inc.

Rufus Porter invented more than 100 things, including an airship, a walking cane that turned into a chair when you wanted to sit down, and a revolving rifle. He sold the rifle idea to Samuel Colt, who developed it into the famous Colt revolver.

Porter, who was born in 1792 and died in 1884, also founded Scientific American magazine with the aim of helping inventors like himself. But Porter, who grew up in the Bridgton area, was a noted muralist too, and the many folk art murals he painted in homes and inns in Maine and in other New England states are the legacy for which he is best known today.

"During his lifetime, he was never a wealthy man. He lived pretty simply," said Nancy Smoak, project manager of the Rufus Porter Museum and Cultural Heritage Center in Bridgton. "But he left a significant mark with the murals he painted."

Some of Porter's murals, along with other artifacts related to his life, are on display at the museum. His work is among the more than 500 examples of Maine folk art that the Rufus Porter Museum and 10 other Maine museums are featuring this summer as part of a statewide exhibit called the Maine Folk Art Trail.

Porter's murals also are scattered elsewhere in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut. When Smoak gives a talk on the noted muralist on June 23 in Yarmouth, Kim Connell, a local homeowner, plans to attend because she believes she has a Porter mural over her fireplace.

"I plan to learn more about him," said Connell, whose home at 5 W. Main St. is more than 200 years old.

She bought the house three years ago and said the previous owner, who had lived there for decades, said the mural of a rural river landscape was painted by Porter. It isn't signed, but Connell said it appears to be in Porter's style.

Much of Porter's work was unsigned, but Smoak said Porter wrote a detailed account in Scientific American, which he founded in 1845 and sold shortly afterward, of how to paint murals.

"We are able to validate his work," Smoak said. "We know the murals done by him because he told us how to do them." Porter is considered a folk artist, she said, because the beautiful and colorful landscapes he painted were not done simply for art's sake but for utilitarian purposes, Smoak said.

Wallpaper was very expensive at the time, so people who wanted color on their walls would hire muralists such as Porter, she said. The museum on U.S. Route 302 in Bridgton was once a private home with Porter murals in a room and a hall.

Porter was born in Massachusetts, but his family moved to Maine when he was 9. They settled in Pleasant Mountain Gore, now part of Bridgton.

Porter worked at a wide variety of professions, including being a house painter in Portland, and building wind-driven grist mills there. He married twice -- his first wife died -- and had a total of 16 children, although five died in infancy.

He was known not only for his murals but for his miniature paintings -- tiny portraits of people that were popular before the days of photography.

To make the work easier, he invented a portable camera obscura -- a device long used by artists to project an image onto another surface.

The wide variety of his other inventions included clocks, railway signals, churns and washing machines.

When he died, Scientific American wrote that while he did not achieve the fame of Samuel Morse or Thomas Edison, he was a "wonderfully prolific genius" and "one of the best and brightest examples of the versatility of American invention."