John Calvin Stevens - Life and Career

Life and Career

He was the son of Maria Wingate and Leander Stevens, a cabinet maker and builder of fancy carriages. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, but at the age of two moved with his family to Portland, Maine.

Stevens wanted to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but lacked the money to attend. Instead, he apprenticed in the Portland office of architect Francis H. Fassett, who in 1880 made him a junior partner to open the firm's new Boston office. Another architect working in the same building was William Ralph Emerson, whose historicist aesthetic in the Queen Anne Style had a profound effect on him.

In 1877, he married Martha Louise Waldron, who bore him four children. Stevens opened his own office at Portland in 1884. In 1888 he formed a partnership with Albert Winslow Cobb, who wrote the text and Stevens provided the illustrations for an early study of the Shingle Style: Examples of American Domestic Architecture (1889). Some sources list the firm as Cobb & Stevens, and others as Stevens & Cobb, but the partnership was dissolved in 1891. His son, John Howard Stevens, became an architect and joined the father's firm in 1898. The son became a full partner in 1904, and the firm was renamed Stevens Architects.

His most-acclaimed early house — the James Hopkins Smith house in Falmouth Foreside, Maine (1886) — was featured in George William Sheldon's influential Artistic Country Seats (1886–87):

"The architect of Mr. Smith's house ... has struck out for himself, with due regard for the spirit and meaning of classic works, but without subservience to their details. Effect has been sought by strength of mass and simplicity of form. ...t is natural, in the highest and best sense of the word."

In the comprehensive survey The Shingle Style (1955), Vincent Scully described the Smith house as "the pièce de résistance in Sheldon," "a more sweeping and coherent version of Stevens' own house," and "Stevens' masterpiece in this kind of design." The architectural historian also praised "his powerful alterations for the Poland Springs House, a summer hotel."

Houses designed by him can be found along the Maine coast, as well as in Portland (particularly the city's elegant West End) and its suburbs. He also designed public libraries, municipal buildings, grand hotels and churches. He designed nine buildings for the campus of Hebron Academy, and the Psi Upsilon Fraternity House on the Bowdoin College campus.

In one of his rare non-Maine commissions, he created a master plan for, and designed a chapel and at least six barracks buildings at the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers ("Southern Branch") in Hampton, Virginia.

He was also a landscape painter who belonged to the "Brushians," a Portland group which went on weekend painting outings, and exhibited his work with the Boston Art Club, the Portland Society of Art and others. An oil painting by Stevens, Delano Park, Cape Elizabeth (1904), is in the collection of Blaine House, the Maine governor's official residence.

He was an avid art collector. A painting he donated, Afternoon Fog by Winslow Homer, was adjudged in 1914 as the most valuable work of art in the collection of the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Art Museum, today's Portland Museum of Art.

In 1889, Stevens was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. He died in 1940, and is buried in Portland's Evergreen Cemetery.

In recognition of his over 300 buildings on the Portland peninsula, with dozens more in the surrounding neighborhoods and islands, the city declared October 8, 2009 to be John Calvin Stevens Day. The ceremony included a Congressional Record of Recognition presented by the office of Senator Olympia Snowe.