<\/p>\n
Many of our listeners, especially women, are familiar with the Blaine House at Augusta, where a long succession of governors’ wives have entertained numerous groups of clubs and organizations. However, I suspect too many Maine people know little about the origin and development of that mansion, which has long been the official residence of our governors.<\/p>\n
The house was given to the State as its gubernatorial mansion in 1918 by Harriet Blaine Beale, in memory of her son, Walker Blaine Beale, killed in World War I. The wife of James G. Blaine, Maine’s leading public figure in the last quarter of the 19th century, had inherited the house on Mr. Blaine’s death. When she died in 1903, the estate was left in quarter shares to her son James G. Blaine, Jr., and her two daughters, Margaret Blaine Damrosch and Harriet Blaine Beale, and one eighth share each to her grandsons, James Blaine Coppinger and Walker Blaine Coppinger.<\/p>\n
Walker Beale, born in 1896, received on his 25th birthday in 1917, five-eighths of the ownership of the house. On Walker’s death in the war, that interest went to his mother, who, as we have said, already owned one-fourth. She bought from relatives the remaining one-eighth, and thus became the sole owner. She then gave it all to the State.<\/p>\n
The Blaine House stands on part of Lot 5 of the original survey of old Hallowell, made by Nathan Winslow in 1761. That was before the northern part of Hallowell became the separate town of Augusta. The lot was, under grant from the Proprietors of the Kennebec Purchase, first owned by William Vassal, of the family for whom the town of Vassalboro was named. Vassal presented the land to a niece in Nova Scotia, who sold it to Abraham Page of Hallowell. For the sum of 600 Spanish milled dollars, Page sold the place to Matthew Haywood of Easton, Mass., in 1780. Twenty years later, just as the new century began, Haywood sold the southern half of the lot to James Child of Augusta. That piece of land was described as “between the river and the county road from Augusta to Hallowell.” The deed gave Child the right of fishing along the right bank of the river.<\/p>\n
James Child was a prosperous tanner, who bought skins from farmers over a wide area around Augusta. In 1830, he sold a part of this land to James Hall of Bath. It was a plot 9 rods north and south and 10 rods east and west, making it approximately 150 by 200 feet. The deed placed this piece on the west side of the road leading from Augusta across Capitol Hill to Hallowell. From its survey in 1761 until Hall’s purchase of the small part in 1830, no building had been erected on the land. But in 1833 Hall built a square, two-story, frame house. It had a high roof and two large chimneys, and a colonnaded porch. On the first floor were a sitting room, dining room, reception room, kitchen and pantry. On the second floor were four bedrooms. In 1838, Hall added a low-roofed ell.<\/p>\n
In 1850, James G. Blaine, a native of Pennsylvania, married Harriet Stanwood, daughter of an Augusta wool merchant. Blaine, a graduate of Washington College, was teaching mathematics at an institute in Kentucky when he met Harriet, a teacher in a nearby seminary for girls. In 1853, the wool man, Jacob Stanwood, Blaine’s Augusta father-in-law, persuaded John Dow, principal owner of the Kennebec Journal, to invite Blaine to come to Augusta and edit that paper. That is how James G. Blaine came to Maine and brought Harriet back home. For the rest of his life, though he was to spend much time in Washington, Augusta was the legal residence of James G. Blaine.<\/p>\n
From 1854 to 1862, the Blaine’s lived in the Stanwood home at 22 Green Street. It was one of Augusta’s earliest duplex houses, of which the Blaines occupied the east half.<\/p>\n
Blaine had been editing the Kennebec Journal for only four years when he entered upon what was to be a long and distinguished political career. He was elected to the Maine House of Representatives in 1858 and became its Speaker in 1859. Before he died he would be Representative to Congress, Speaker of the National House of Representatives, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State under two presidents, and Republican nominee for President of the U.S. For thirty years, he was indisputably Maine’s Mr. Republican, the dispenser of large amounts of federal patronage in the state.<\/p>\n
When he was first elected to Congress in 1862, Blaine decided he should have in Augusta a home of his own, rather than continue to live in his father-in-law’s house. On November 20, 1862, he received for $5,000 a deed to the James Hall house and lot, the deed containing the words “the land together with the mansion house.”<\/p>\n
James Blaine gave the house to his wife on her birthday in 1862, and into it they moved with their three children. Immediately, he enlarged the building. Attached to the end of the ell, he built a replica of the main house, with a south entry that led into Blaine’s study on the right, and a billiard room to the left. Before this Blaine renovation, a person entering the front door of the main house saw two connecting rooms to the left of the entrance hall. They were called the front and back parlors. On the right of the hall were two similar rooms called sitting room and dining room. On the south side of the main house, Blaine put an addition with long windows, as a conservatory, and he removed the partition between sitting and dining rooms to make a very large dining room in which to give dinners for distinguished guests.<\/p>\n
The new replica addition had, besides study and billiard rooms, other living and bedrooms. In the ell were kitchens, serving rooms, and service entrance. On both the new and old parts Blaine placed handsome cupolas. The spacious backyard had apple trees and a vegetable garden. In the big stable were half a dozen horses and ponies.<\/p>\n
When, in 1918, the State of Maine received deed to the property, the Legislature authorized Governor Milliken and his Council to make such alterations as appeared to them to be needed, and furnish the house suitably for an executive mansion, in which would live Governor Billiken and his successors while in office.<\/p>\n
Chosen to design the renovation was Maine’s leading architect of that time, John Calvin Stevens. It took a year to finish the work, but the Millikens finally took occupancy in January, 1920. We can thus say in 1975 that the Blaine house has been lived in by the families of Maine governors for 55 years.<\/p>\n
The total cost of renovation and furnishings, for the place that had initially cost Blaine $5,000, came to $185,000. Renovation was indeed extensive. The old ell, built lower than the main house, had its roof raised so that from front of the old house to rear of the Blaine replica was one straight rooftop. The old, brown outside paint was replaced by white, with green shutters. A new wing was added to the rear.<\/p>\n
Any visitor who knew the old house and then came into the renovated structure through the front door found the front hall virtually unchanged, except the floor and stairs were now of polished oak. Just inside the door was a handsome mahogany clock. On the wall opposite the stairs, was a bronze tablet commemorating Walker Blaine Beale, in whose memory the house had been given to the State. The walls were colored buff, and on the hall floor was a red carpet. The front and back parlors had seen the petition between them removed, as Blaine had done with the rooms on the opposite side of the hall, and in their place was a large reception room. The big dining room was now called the State Dining Room. Its table seated 40 persons at dinner. The old house now had four upstairs guest rooms.<\/p>\n
John Calvin Stevens was that kind of architect who valued function as much as he did appearance. Into the kitchen he built a walk-in refrigerator with a coil for manufacturing ice. That was long before the common use of electric refrigerators and their ice cubes. For central heating, there was a huge steam boiler, while two gas heaters supplied hot water. Stevens was also one of the first Maine architects to use home insulation. He put two thicknesses of heavy paper, padded with eelgrass, between clapboards and wall, and another layer behind laths and plaster.<\/p>\n
In June, 1920, the Blaine House was opened to citizens of Augusta, 1200 of whom responded. Ices and fancy cakes were served in the State Dining Room.<\/p>\n
Since 1920, many other changes have been made to the Blaine House, but none so extreme as that which opened it for all of Maine’s governors. Two governors have died in that house: Frederick Parkhurst in 1921, and Clinton Clauson in 1960.<\/p>\n
Long before it became the gubernatorial mansion the Blaine house saw many distinguished visitors. In Blaine’s own day, it frequently entertained three noted Maine statemen: Hannibal Hamlin, Eugene Hale, and Nelson Dingley. From out of the state to visit Blaine came Senators Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, and Whitelaw Reid of New York. General Ulysses Grant paid two visits to the house when Blaine was its occupant. He came in 1873, when he was Commanding General of the U.S. Army, and again in 1879 as President of the U.S. On the latter visit, his reason for coming to Maine was to speak at the opening of the European and North American RR, from Bangor to St. John, N.B.<\/p>\n
When Blaine was the Republican nominee for President in 1884, the old house saw a flood of visitors. Most notable were General Logan, Blaine’s running mate for Vice President; John Hardesin of Missouri, National Republican Chairman; John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary; William Pitt Fessenden and Chief Justice Fuller.<\/p>\n
While Milliken was governor, he entertained in the Blaine House General Pershing, Commander of the U.S. Expeditionary Force in World War I, Governor Calvin Coolidge of Mass., who would soon be the nation’s president; and the renowned Senator Henry Cabot Lodge.<\/p>\n
Remembered for his generous gift to the state, most notably the huge tract of land that encompasses Mt. Katadin, is Governor Percival Baxter. During his bachelor tenancy of Blaine House, he entertained Coolidge, then Vice President of the U.S., and the governors of Mass., Conn., and Penn.<\/p>\n
When Ralph Owen Brewster was governor, visitors included the Chief Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, the woman governor of Wyoming, Nellie Taylor Ross, the governors of eleven states, Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Cyrus Curtis, the publisher.<\/p>\n
Governor Louis Brann’s guests included figures from the world of sports and entertainment: Rudy Vallee, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Hax Schmeling and Primo Carnera. But he also entertained Amelia Earhart and Wiley Post, Elizabeth Arden and Jim Curley.<\/p>\n
As the years went by, other notables to sign the Blaine House register were President Herbert Hoover, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Taft, Harold Stassen, Marjorie Mills, Senators Margaret Smith and Edmund Muskie, Bette Davis and Gary Merrill, United Nation’s luminary Ralph Bunche, Billy Graham and Hedda Hopper, and Patrice Munsel of the Metropolitan Opera.<\/p>\n
The information for this broadcast came from many sources, but chiefly from Draper Huset’s book entitled simply “The Blaine House”.<\/p>\n
Year: 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Read the script for “Little Talks” program #1067, Broadcast on December 7, 1975<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":405,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42942,35296],"tags":[],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}