192 State Street
Augusta, ME 04332
Phone: 207-287-2301
www.blainehouse.org
“Dirigo—I lead”
— THE MOTTO OF THE STATE OF MAINE
As the official residence of the Governor of Maine, Blaine House is both a home and a house museum. It was built in 1833 for Captain James Hall. Some thirty years later, it was bought by James Gillespie Blaine (1830–1893). Blaine successively served as a US Congressman, Speaker of the House, US Senator, and Secretary of State. In 1884 he won the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States but narrowly lost to Grover Cleveland. Blaine bought this house as a gift to his wife while serving in the Maine House of Representatives. They had the house enlarged, adding a mirror-image wing identical to the original house. Some interior walls were removed to enlarge the rooms to accommodate large parties. In 1919 Blaine’s daughter Harriet Blaine Beal (1871–1958) gifted it to the people of Maine. Noted Maine architect John Calvin Stevens (1855–1940) remodeled the house with another addition. Today it is a rambling white building, its two hipped roofs crowned with Italianate cupolas. Stevens had designed more than one thousand houses and public buildings in Maine, and his fortes were the Colonial Revival and Shingle styles. After Stevens’s work was done in 1921, Blaine House became the Executive Mansion.
A tour of Blaine House covers the blue and gold State Reception Room, which reflects the colors of Maine’s flag. The mantels are Italian marble, and there are several oil paintings depicting Maine scenes. The State Dining Room has a green and silver color scheme, a reference to Maine’s trees and lakes. The sterling silver service was salvaged from the battleship Maine which was sunk in Havana harbor in 1898, signaling the start of the Spanish-American War.
Secretary Blaine’s study has the desk and chair he used while he was a Senator. Abraham Lincoln was President when fellow Republican James G. Blaine was in the House of Representatives, and there are three Lincoln connections in the study. The first is the wallpaper. Chosen by Blaine, it replicates the paper in Lincoln’s White House study. Over the mantel there is an engraving of the President. And on the desk there is a card that was presented to Blaine and signed “A. Lincoln.”
The Sun Room occupies the former site of an open porch. The Family Dining Room is lit by a Waterford crystal chandelier, and a door from this room leads to the Governor’s Garden, originally designed by the Olmsted brothers in 1929 (see page 64).