OPPOSITE POINTS OF VIEW

In my boyhood, two iconic pictures defined the sense of place and history in our community .  The first was a painting, 'A Morning View of Bluehill Village, 1824' by the Reverend Jonathan Fisher, a Yankee polymath who had come here fresh out of Harvard in 1795 to be the first settled minister of the village.  The other was a late 19th century 'Bird's Eye View' lithograph, published, coincidentally, 100 years after Parson Fisher's arrival.

Fisher's painting is a summary of his life and career in the town.  Although Blue Hill, originally New Andover, was settled in 1762 near the tidal falls at what is now South Blue Hill, the young village at the head of the Bay that Fisher later painted had barely existed before his arrival, but for a couple of houses, and grew and developed in those thirty subsequent years. Fisher's journals carefully record his progress on the painting, including traipsing to the Treworgy farm on the next hill (now known  as Greene's Hill, after later owners), with his homemade camera obscura, to make the first sketches in September 1824, and then note progress on the work until its completion in April 1825.  

Parson Fisher's home-made camera obscura

The village spreads out below the hill, quiet in the morning light.  In the foreground a man (Fisher?) drives a snake from this Eden.  There were probably roosters crowing, maybe hammers and saws working on the boats under construction at the edge of the harbor, but we can't hear those sounds.  All is quiet, frozen in time.  

Detail of the Fisher Farm from A Morning View of Blue Hill

The Fisher House from the same perspective today.

Opposite where he sat surveying the scene, on the top horizon, was Fisher's raison d'etre for choosing this perspective: his own farm, with its tidy orchard, and just downhill to the right, the meeting house where he preached, with the parade ground before it. It is a scrupulously honest picture. In the right middle ground is the Baptist meeting house, to which Fisher, a stern Calvinist, had lost much of his flock when it was founded a few years before. In a village near the Eastern Frontier, far removed from the centers of art, this painting was considered a marvel, and was  revered locally long before it found its way into the collection of the Farnsworth Art Museum.  Considered the first true depiction of a Maine coastal scene, it has been published in countless books about American folk art and early 19th century culture.

A late 19th century photograph captures the view originally painted by Fisher

And on the opposite hill, one looks across to the spot (indicated by box) from  which  Fisher painted his view.  The photograph, actually two joined,  is from the series used in the creation of the bird's eye view

The second view was created by an artist using dozens of photographs taken in panoramic perspective, then mechanically re-aligned so as to appear taken from the air--a dozen years before the Wright Brothers would go aloft, and aerial photography become commonplace.  What fascinates and compels me to write about these pictures this morning is that each depicts the view from almost exactly the opposite center of the other--they literally look across to each other. In the bird's eye view, the Treworgy Farm is on the horizon about a third way from the right, and in the Fisher painting, one looks across to the spot that would be directly below the airborne viewer.

Bird's Eye View of Blue Hill, 1896.  For a full-screen version, please click HERE

The village has become quite a different place in the bird's eye view. Fisher's meetinghouse burned in 1842, and was replaced with a new Congregational Church downhill, closer to the center of the village.  The Baptist meeting house has become a church, with a spire echoing that of the Congregationalists.  A main street of stores, with post office and restaurants has grown up at the edge of the harbor.  

The Town Hall, designed by George Clough

A new town hall, designed by the architect son of a local shipbuilder, has just been constructed, Colonial in idea, but its Roman arched frontispiece clearly inspired by the newly popular classical ideas of the great Chicago Exposition of a couple years before.  As with Fisher's painting, a schooner is coming into the harbor, but despite sails, this one has smoke or steam rising from a stack on its deck.  Although Fisher's village still mostly survives, the 20th century is around the corner, and in the foreground is a harbinger of things to come---a big shiny new summer hotel for the newest Maine industry, rusticators.

The hotel, the Blue Hill Inn, was designed by William Ralph Emerson, the Boston architect who practically invented the shingled style of summer architecture favored on the Maine coast, and was the latest marvel of the town, complete with its own electric power plant, and supplanted the boarding houses and modest village hotels of earlier years. The Inn was not a success, and with the removal of a wing, was converted to use as a summer cottage by a new owner, Judge Chauncey Truax of New York, in the early 1900s.  Later, it served as a temporary hospital, and in the early years of the Depression, it went up in flames.

The 21st century is not being kind to the village of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Poor planning, lack of zoning, changing tastes, a little greed, changing economies and myriad other factors are wreaking changes on a scale that is unprecedented in our collective memory.  Change used to be gradual, and somewhat organic (South Street, new home of both roundabout and Dunkin' Donuts, was still a narrow gravel lane as recently as my childhood).  In recent years, the change has come faster, more forcefully, and has been more destructive.  Even as I type this, a rotary is being constructed at the dusty crossroads to the left of the Inn, and a Dunkin Donuts is going up on the inn site, across from the supermarket and Rite Aid drugstore that started the commercial sprawl.  

Bird's eye rendering of the new Dunkin' Donuts

As to the Fisher homestead, it is preserved as a museum, its original orchard replanted a few years ago (for an article about the Fisher Orchard, click HERE.) But, now only a thousand feet from a car wash and a new commerical parking lot with clear development intentions, the Fisher house's integrity and isolation, which lasted for most of the 20th century, is clearly coming to an end as it approaches its 200th anniversary.

On another note, the photograph below, from the George Stevens Academy on-line student paper, 'The Procrastinator', both sums up the local ambivalence about the arrival of Dunkin' Donuts, and on a more personal note, brings the Dilettante up short, for 43 years ago he was the editor of that school's paper, then called 'The Eagle's Nest'.  At that time it was a mimeographed four-sheet (my great contribution was sharper stencil graphics), and the slick advances in technology and content make me feel very, very old indeed.

Photoshop image of Blue Hill Mountain from GSA Procrastinator, credited to William Hilliard

As for Jonathan Fisher, a current exhibit at the Farnsworth Art Museum explores Fisher's ongoing fascination with the natural world in his art and writing, culminating in the book, 'Scripture Animals' (1833).  Click HERE for more.

HOUSE TOUR 1: Parker House

Old houses that have had long family occupancy have an atmosphere and romance that cannot be easily faked. In our town, one such house is Parker House, a landmark which has surveyed the local scene since 1812.  Built for Robert Parker, whose wife Ruth was daughter of Joseph Wood, one of the founders of the town, it is a handsome four-square Federal, amply and well proportioned, with later Colonial Revival enhancements.  This is one of several houses in town that carry the probably apocryphal legend of having been stopped in mid-construction during the war of 1812, when we were briefly British again. The local parson left behind a journal of his days, and whether or not it is true that the other constructions were interrupted,  we know that he continued working on his own new house nearby, for he records hearing the cannons of battle in  Hampden on a warm September afternoon while shingling the roof.

  After a succession of owners in the 19th century, the house was purchased in 1900 by Mrs. Virgil Kline, a descendant of Mrs. Parker's sister Edith Wood Hinckley.  Mrs. Kline, married to the chief attorney for the Rockefeller interests in Cleveland, had had an interesting career as the manager and owner of the Boston Ideal Opera Company, a travelling light opera company that was instrumental in bringing Gilbert and Sullivan performance to America.  Mrs. Kline's own turreted and shingled summer house, 'Ideal Lodge', was just up the road from Parker House.  (For the story of that house, which should be read in conjunction with this post, click HERE:)  

Parker House as it appears today

Parker House as it appeared before the renovations of 1900 (Photograph courtesy of Maine Historic Preservation  Commission)

After a gentle renovation by Mrs.Kline's architect, George Clough of Boston, Parker house acquired new porticos and french door, with a grand balustrade around the eaves, giving the house the proper New England ancestral air that Mrs. Kline, an early collector of local antiques, sought.  The house became the summer home of Mrs. Kline's sister, Mrs. Frederick Augustus Merrill, who furnished the house with family artifacts and antiques collected locally.  In 1916, the property was conveyed to Mrs. Merrill, and has descended to her great-grandson, who has been restoring and improving the house since taking possession, with a sensitive eye to its unique character, while at the same time making it practical for the 21st century, and respecting the gently worn and faded qualities that give the house much of its aristocratic air.  His intelligent and subtle approach gives rebuke to many who have gut renovated similar houses up here (if you want a condo in Greenwich, buy a condo in Greenwich, or build a new house don't strip a beautiful old house of its elegant features and character.  Why be ordinary when you can be special?

Parker House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

After the 1900 renovations, Parker House was almost an ideal of the Colonial Revival movement

The Parlor as it appeared in the early 1900's, with an 1830 Boston made piano  and one of a group of family portraits painted by J. Harvey Young

The interior was little altered in the Clough renovations.  In the hall, the robustly paneled front door and wide sidelights added by Clough give more light and presence to the hall, but the simple Federal moldings and newel post were retained.

The parlor as it appears today, with more of the family portraits by Young.  Dr. Frederick A. Merrill is over the fireplace

The modern chinoiserie wallpaper is a licensed Winterthur design

The wide pine board dado under the chair rail was boldly faux grained, probably in the 1830's or 40's,, to look like Honduran mahogany.    

French doors were added in 1900 to access the new side proticos flanking the parlor and library, giving a more expansive air to the square rooms

In true Colonial Revival fashion, with its strong sentiment for the past, the original  kitchen, with its huge cooking fireplace and bake oven, became the dining room in the 1900 renovations.  A new kitchen was installed in the service wing at rear.

The current owner removed partitions between the dining room, back hall and  a sitting room to make one large room, over 40 feet long, with three exposures.  He broke the length, and masked a difference in ceiling heights, with  antique Doric columns that echo those of the porticoes outside

Looking through to the front room

The ell kitchen was redesigned by the current owner, with a new window over the vintage stove opening  up space.

The upper hall

The brass bed warmer, designed to hold hot coals which would then  be run between the sheets to warm the bed  in earlier times was a favorite decorative accessory for the centrally heated Colonial Revival.   The one seen here to the right of a bedroom fireplace is still in place 100 years later.

A tester bed and printed cotton curtains and hangings, with a William Morris inspired paper, give this room proper Colonial Revival street cred.

Most of the contemporary pictures in this post were taken during a benefit house tour.  Despite the fact that there were 30-50 people wandering through the house at any time, only once did a person get in the photos (followed by so many others that I gave up---never have I seen so many people emerge from one bedroom).

The owner has created this video showing the evolution of the house from 1812-2012.

The vintage photographs are from the collection of the owner, and from other local collections.   Thanks to the owner for permission to post about his interesting house.

INTERMISSION: MAY INTO JUNE, AND TWO PARADES

Everyone has a favorite time of year.  Mine has just ended, and lovely though the months ahead will be, I'm a bit triste at the parting, always too fast, too soon.   Spring is hard won in eastern Maine, but once arrived, it is sweet and delicate.  Suddenly in mid-May, we burst into bloom, and Dilettantes, usually jaded, forget the cares of the world and burst into song.   Against a backdrop of fresh greens come the blossoms---tulips, apple trees, cherries, and above all, lilacs, making old New England villages young again.  At Memorial day comes a parade and bittersweet remembrance.  The lilacs fade, and as quickly are replaced by fields of lupine, making the whole world seem an impressionist landscape.  The air is sweet, and in the ever longer evenings, those fields are alight with fireflies, blurring the horizon between starry sky and meadow. 

A wild apple tree at the edge of my meadow lights up against a passing storm in May

This year, our little village celebrates its 250th anniversary, and floats in the Memorial Day parade marked local pride at the birthday.   That same week, on Friday, the elementary school children held another parade, a happy ode to Spring.  We're a musical town, somewhat famously so, and even the hardest hearted among us on the street that 1st day of June could fail to be delighted as the school band,  a jazz band, and then two steel drum bands marched up Maine Street.  As they reached the stately old Town Hall, they stopped and sang 'Happy Birthday' to the town.

I may sometimes crave other places, other climes, more sophisticated pleasures, but in those sweet, fleeting weeks leading up to summer, there is no other way I want the world to be.

For Memorial Days past, click HERE and HERE

And thanks to Paul for Memorial Day photos, and Laurie for the School Parade