Freeman Hardin, Joiner/Builder
George Stevens House, late 1870’s view, showing original decorative fence and actual side door, depicted with fan in morning view
George Stevens was the town’s leading citizen in the early 19th century, mill owner, ship owner, landlord, store owner, a founder of the Baptist Church which broke away from Jonathan Fisher’s Congregational Church in 1817. Very little business took place in Blue Hill without Stevens’ financial participation. Fittingly, his house on a knoll in the center of the new village was the grandest and most expensively fitted out in town, with a fan leaded fan doorway, handsome mantels, deep windows with interior folding shutters, elegant decorative eaves cornice, tall chimneys, and a high posted decorative fence in front. Even the cellar was finer than usual, with brick arches supporting the chimneys, fitted granite walls, and flagstones paving the earthen floor. Construction commenced before the war of 1812, and was suspended while the British occupied the peninsula. During a renovation in the 70’s, a baseboard removed from an upper rear bedroom was discovered to have been signed in pencil “Freeman Hardin, joiner, April 19, 1814”. Hardin was a leading carpenter/joiner in Blue Hill in the early 19th century, and the right hand parlor of the Stevens house displays the same interior door and window trim, reeded with corner block, that Hardin created for his own more modest cape style house further up the street.
Interestingly, this is the only house in Morning View with which Fisher took liberties in his portrayal. While every other house in the painting is pictured in correct perspective, Fisher has shown the elegant fanlight door that actually fronts Union Street in the location of the side door, so that it faces the viewer. It is tempting to speculate that Fisher, despite his not always harmonious relations with Squire Stevens, was impressed enough by this doorway, the first of its kind in Blue Hill, that he wished it to ornament his painting.
The fanlight has had other travels besides Fisher’s capricious re-location
for artistic license. In the late 19th century, George Stevens Academy,
which had inherited the house, replaced the original leaded glass fanlight and
sidelights with a more fashionable late Victorian porch and double door. The
sidelights and fan were saved by Judge Chase, who incorporated sidelights in
the front door of his Greek Revival home four houses up Union Street from the
Stevens House. The fan languished in the Chase barn until the 1950’s,
when under the initiative of local historians Annie Clough, and Roland Howard,
the savior of the Fisher House, who arranged to have it returned to the Stevens
House. The sidelights, however, remain to this day at the Chase House.