Parker House is an historic house at 185 South Street in Blue Hill, Maine. Built c. 1816 and substantially updated in the Colonial Revival style in 1900 to a design by George Albert Clough, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 for its architectural significance.
Parker House was constructed for Robert Parker and his wife Ruth, a daughter of Blue Hill founder Joseph Wood, in 1816 (or possibly in 1812), on an upland portion of the Parker family land grants of which Parker Point[2] was also part. After passing to other owners including Frederick Fisher, grandson of Blue Hill's first settled minister Jonathan Fisher, the house was remodeled in 1900 by George A. Clough for Mrs. Frederick Augustus Merrill, a resident of Boston descended from Ruth Parker's sister, Edith Wood Hinckley, the first child of early settlers to be born in Blue Hill.[3]
Parker House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places both for the quality of its original features and for changes made by Clough in the Colonial Revival spirit. The house contains much original woodwork including several fine fireplaces; Clough's contributions included Tuscan-columned porches and the addition of a (now removed) wrap-around veranda and balustrades on the roofs. Prior to designation the present owner altered the interior using a device Clough's more famous contemporary John Calvin Stevens had employed when remodeling the Federal Elias Thomas House in Portland, Maine, combining two downstairs rooms and marking the transition with a screen of columns and pilasters.[4]
The classical mode of the Colonial Revival was considered an advancement in taste over the earlier, more rustic Shingle Style, but at this period - especially after 1893, the year of the Columbian Exposition - the style began to have associations with retrograde social politics, specifically nativism.[5] Under pressure from below by the growing political influence of recent immigrants and from above by the social dominance of Gilded Age nouveaux riches, old families around the dawn of the 20th century tended to insist somewhat on their gentility, and often chose to imbue a sense of family history into the design and decoration of their houses.
The Merrills were no exception. They filled Parker House with oil portraits by family friend J. Harvey Young, (the one of Mrs. Merrill's mother Mary Peters Hinckley Ober painted posthumously), and with antiques with family provenance, a few wrested from local cousins, creating for themselves a kind of ersatz ancestral home. (It seems clear this had long been their intention: their daughters Edith and Ruth, born in the 1880s, shared the names of two of Joseph Wood's.[6]). Among such acquisitions was a table which came up from Beverly with Joseph Wood, later given to the Blue Hill Historical Society by Mrs. Merrill's granddaughter, Betty Darling Bates.[7] (It can be seen at Holt House, the Society's headquarters,[8] built by Stephen Holt and his wife Edith, youngest of the Parker daughters).[9] There was also the inevitable spinning wheel, a Peters family heirloom, still in the house but now banished upstairs.
This sense of created history extended to legends concerning the house's construction, traditionally assumed to be complete before 1813. (This would have had to be the case for the tale of Joseph Wood dying in the house to be true). The story of workmen on the roof hearing the guns at Castine signaling the commencement of the War of 1812, dropping everything in their haste to join the fight then returning to pick up rusty tools where they lay is surely apocryphal, being just the sort of tale conjured up at the time to romanticize the patriotic spirit of early Americans.
Yet with Civil War era anti-draft riots and lynchings of free blacks by protestors vivid in the memory of many living in 1900, being less remote in time than the Vietnam War and Watergate are to us, such stories may have had particular meaning to New Englanders[10] steeped in the traditions of Abolitionism and military service: Mrs. Merrill's elder brother had fought under Grant[11] and she was proud to be descended from Nehemiah Hinckley, Edith Wood's husband, a Blue Hill soldier who walked home from West Point after the Revolution.
Interior view, c. 1900
As remodeled, Parker House was emphatically a summer home - Clough's French windows were not designed to keep out winter chills - but was also conceived as a place in the country. Inspired by the House and Garden Movement,[12] in the fashion of the day Mrs. Merrill kept a Jersey cow and laying hens, unthinkable on Parker Point where the family had previously summered. She also cultivated gladiolus in her garden, entering them at the annual Blue Hill Fair,[13] and, in the spirit of agricultural improvement then abroad in the land, engaged Frederick Vernon Coville, the developer of the modern Highbush Blueberry, to plant a number of his early cultivars on the property. (His services did not come cheap. According to her granddaughter's recollections, Mrs. Merrill would sometimes say to guests to whom she served any, "Did you enjoy the berries? They cost me a nickel apiece.") Fashionable too were her artistic pursuits. The house contains two oil still-lives and a set of hand-painted Limoges china as well as examples of her needlepoint.
Although a golfer, Mrs. Merrill's husband was also artistically inclined. A letter preserved at the house from his patient and former professor at Harvard, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. thanks Dr. Merrill for the gift of a hand-turned hub, presented as a token of Holmes's famous remark about Boston. Dr. Merrill crafted several of the picture frames in the house including one inscribed as being made of wood from the Boston Old Elm on the Common, "Boston's Oldest Inhabitant" as it was known until it blew down in a gale in 1876. The Merrills' younger daughter Ruth followed suit, graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her thesis project, a self-portrait, still hangs in the house.
Now entering its third century, Parker House and its collections are sufficiently restored to have been included in a recent charity house tour. Illustrating close family ties to its grander neighbor, Barncastle, Parker House had on view memorabilia including scrapbooks, portraits and photographs belonging to Barncastle's builder, Effie Hinckley Ober Kline,[14] founder of the Boston Ideal Opera Company, Washington, D.C. real estate investor and patron of the arts in Cleveland, and her husband Virgil, John D. Rockefeller's private lawyer,[15] friend and mentor of Charles W. Chesnutt and advisor to James A Garfield. Visitors were invited to examine the portrait collection to see if they could determine which pair, badly damaged by vandals in the 1940s, have received expert restoration in recent years.
Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country homes, public parks, botanic gardens, college campuses, and the White House. Only a few of her major works survive: Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden on Mount Desert, Maine, the restored Farm House Garden in Bar Harbor, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, and elements of the campuses of Princeton, Yale, and Occidental.
Brunswick is a town in Cumberland County, Maine, United States. The population was 21,756 at the 2020 United States Census. Part of the Portland-South Portland-Biddeford metropolitan area, Brunswick is home to Bowdoin College, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, the Peary–MacMillan Arctic Museum, and the Maine State Music Theatre. It was formerly home to the U.S. Naval Air Station Brunswick, which was permanently closed on May 31, 2011, and has since been partially released to redevelopment as "Brunswick Landing".
The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory in Milton, Massachusetts is the foremost structure associated with the history of weather observations in the United States. Located atop Great Blue Hill about 10 miles south of Boston, Massachusetts, it is home to the oldest continuous weather record in North America, and was the location of the earliest kite soundings of the atmosphere in North America in the 1890s, as well as the development of the radiosonde in the 1930s.
Breakheart Reservation is a public recreation area covering 652 acres (264 ha) in the towns of Saugus and Wakefield, Massachusetts. The reservation features a hardwood forest, two freshwater lakes, a winding stretch of the Saugus River, and scenic views of Boston and rural New England from rocky hilltops. The park is managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation.
Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr. was an American architect and nephew of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
"Barncastle", also known as Kline Cottage, is a historic house, now an inn and restaurant, at 125 South Street in Blue Hill, Maine, United States. It is one of the earliest and largest summer cottages in Blue Hill, and remains one of its most visible and idiosyncratic. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and originally called "Ideal Lodge" after the Boston Ideal Opera Company founded by its builder, Effie Hinckley Ober, the house was finished in 1884 to a design by George Asa Clough, Blue Hill native and noted Boston architect, Effie's childhood friend.
The Squire Earick House is the oldest known wood-frame house in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, built in 1812 in the Portland area of the city, which was then a town all its own. It has had many owners and a complicated history.
Blue Hill is a town in Hancock County, Maine, United States. The population was 2,792 at the 2020 census. It is home to the Blue Hill Public Library, Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, George Stevens Academy, the Blue Hill Harbor School, The Bay School, New Surry Theatre, Kneisel Hall, Bagaduce Music Lending Library, the Kollegewidgwok Yacht Club, the Shaw Institute, and the Blue Hill Country Club. A community on Blue Hill Bay, the town is the site of the annual Blue Hill Fair.
William Lawrence Bottomley, was an American architect in twentieth-century New York City; Middleburg, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. He was known for his Colonial Revival designs of residential buildings in the United States and many of his commissions are situated in highly aspirational locations, including Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia.
George Albert Clough was an architect working in Boston in the late 19th-century. He designed the Suffolk County Courthouse in Pemberton Square, and numerous other buildings in the city and around New England. Clough served as the first City Architect of Boston from 1876 to 1883.
The Captain Reuben Merrill House is an historic house at 233 West Main Street in Yarmouth, Maine. Built in 1858, it is one of the town's largest and most elaborate 19th-century houses, and is one of three known surviving works of Portland architect Thomas J. Sparrow. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974. It is now home to Maine Preservation, a statewide architectural preservation organization.
Susanna Paine, also known as Susannah and Susan, was an American portrait artist in New England in the 19th century. She published poetry, a Christmas hymn, a novel, and an autobiography entitled Roses and Thorns, or Recollections of an Artist.
Clarence L. Smith (1894–1951) was an American architect.
The Lovejoy and Merrill-Nowlan Houses are two large, adjacent houses built in the 1800s in the Courthouse Hill Historic District in Janesville, Wisconsin. The Lovejoy house is in a rather eclectic Queen Anne style; Merrill-Nowlan is Georgian Revival. They were separate single-family homes with independent histories until both were owned by the YWCA in the 1970s. In 1980, they were added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The Blue Hill Historic District encompasses the historic village center of the town of Blue Hill, Maine. The village, established in 1762, is a well-preserved collection of buildings, many of them built before 1840. Most of the older buildings are residential in character; the modest collection of commercial and civic buildings were mostly built between 1880 and 1940. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
The Buck Memorial Library is the public library of Bucksport, Maine. It is located at 47 Maine Street in the center of the town, in an architecturally distinguished Gothic Revival stone structure designed by George A. Clough and built in 1887. The building was a gift from the family of Richard Buck, a descendant of Bucksport founder Jonathan Buck, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987.
The Ward Hinckley House is a historic house in Blue Hill, Maine. Built in 1916 for Otis Ward Hinckley, a Chicago businessman with roots in Blue Hill, it is one of only two documented examples of the Prairie School of architecture in the state of Maine. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
The Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum is located at 109 Main Street, in the White Memorial Building, in Houlton, Maine. The museum was founded in 1937, after the building, a handsome 1903 Colonial Revival house, was donated to the town by the White family. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The Houlton Museum's collections include artefacts and documents from Ricker Classical Institute and Ricker College; the photography collection of E. B. White; militaria and domestic objects; and art from the Houlton POW camp from WWII.
Minerva Cozens Kline Brooks was a supporter of the women's suffrage movement in the United States and was active in the arts scene in Cleveland, helping to form the Cleveland Play House in 1915. She taught dance at the Noyes School of Rhythm in Cleveland.
Effie Hinckley Ober Kline was an American opera manager and booking agent. She founded the Boston Ideal Opera Company in 1879.
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