Architecture & Landscape database

By Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.

Born in Boston in 1855, John Calvin Stevens (1855-1940) moved with his family to Portland as a child in 1857. Upon graduating from Portland High School in 1873, he entered the office of Francis H. Fassett, the city’s leading architect. Stevens rose within seven years from office boy to become Fassett’s junior partner in 1880. That year the young architect opened a branch office of the firm in Boston to oversee the construction of the Hotel Pemberton at Nantasket Beach. His eighteen months in Boston were critical to his professional growth, for he was exposed to the work of H.H. Richardson and developed friendships with such influential designers as William R. Emerson and Robert S. Peabody.

John Calvin Stevens returned to Portland in 1882 and left Francis Fassett two years later to establish his own practice. Except for a brief partnership between 1888 and 1891 with Emerson’s former assistant, Albert Winslow Cobb, Stevens operated a closely knit family office until his death in 1940. Younger brother Henry Wingate Stevens served as his chief draughtsman for forty-six years. Son John Howard Stevens became his partner in 1904, and grandson John Calvin Stevens II joined the firm in 1933.

During a sixty-year period from 1880 to 1940, John Calvin Stevens designed or altered more than three hundred domestic, religious, public, commercial, and industrial structures on the Portland peninsula and another one hundred in the Deering area. He also worked throughout Maine and received commissions from other parts of the country.

Stevens was best known for his domestic architecture. After brief period of employing the decorative Queen Anne style in the early 1880s, he joined a generation of talented young architects in developing the Shingle Style, which was based on the use of New England vernacular forms and native materials such as wood shingles and local stone. While Stevens continued to work in the Shingle Style into the twentieth century, the more formal Colonial Revival style came to dominate his work. Both the Shingle Style and the Colonial Revival are represented in the designs for homes that he and Albert Winslow Cobb illustrated in their influential 1889 book “Examples of American Domestic Architecture.”

John Calvin Stevens is one of the best documented figures in Maine architectural history. After Stevens’ death, his firm was continued by his son and grandson. In 1973 John Calvin Stevens II presented the Maine Historical Society with the Stevens Collection, which is comprised of plans, blueprints, renderings, drawings, sketch books, photograph albums, scrapbooks, and specifications. The Society also owns the Stevens architectural library, which was donated by Paul S. Stevens, the architect’s great grandson. In addition to “Examples of American Domestic Architecture”, Stevens’ work is documented in the 1990 book “John Calvin Stevens: Domestic Architecture, 1890 – 1940” by John Calvin Stevens II and Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., “John Calvin Stevens on the Portland Peninsula (2003), and “A Geographical List of the Work of John Calvin Stevens” (2018), both by Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr.