Parker House

About this property

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 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. 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. 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. 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.). 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. (It can be seen at Holt House, the Society's headquarters, built by Stephen Holt and his wife Edith, youngest of the Parker daughters). There was also the inevitable spinning wheel, a Peters family heirloom, still in the house but now banished upstairs.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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