Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier by Kevin D. Murphy (review)

This deeply researched and highly original volume places the house built by Jonathan Fisher in Blue Hill, Maine, at the center of a rich assessment of preindustrial life on the eastern frontier of the expanding early American republic. At least since the publication of Mary Ellen Chase’s Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768–1847, Fisher has been a well-known figure due to his remarkable productivity as a house designer and builder, furniture- and toolmaker, painter, journal writer, author, Federalist, and Congregational minister.¹ Murphy’s “materialist analysis” (4) treats objects evocatively as “at once constituting and representing social formations” (27). The central tension this study explores is how a deeply conservative individual like Fisher, whose “notion of community … was ultimately rooted in Puritan ideals of the seventeenth century” (2) was at the same time a self-fashioning Enlightenment figure who sought out commercial markets. Murphy finds a paradox at the core of Fisher’s exertions, since “the person most committed to enforcing discipline and order on the community was also the one most devoted to the cultivation of his own identity and to recording his selfhood for posterity” (2). While crafted as an object-centered biography, Murphy’s book also addresses broad theoretical issues involving how cultural forms were deployed to assert order in a society undergoing rapid transformation.

The research for this project began in 1983 with Murphy’s visit to the Fisher house for the museum exhibition From Revolution to Statehood: Maine Towns, Maine People, which preceded his graduate training in American studies and art history and his subsequent academic career in departments of architecture, interdisciplinary graduate studies, and art history. As the eighty images in this handsome book fully attest, this is first and foremost a material culture study, one undertaken by a senior scholar who balances intensive knowledge of Maine objects from the period with wide-ranging geographic, temporal, and conceptual understanding. Murphy skillfully draws on a large body of scholarship, especially the work of historians Stephen A. Marini, Alan S. Taylor, and Laurel T. Ulrich, to advance his own arguments and convincingly explain his subject’s significance beyond the individual and local levels.² For example, an especially strong chapter on household labor wonderfully examines domestic braided hat production. On the one hand, it was emblematic of traditional local socioeconomic interdependence, which sought a basic “competency” to establish the next generation in household life. On the other hand, this mode of frontier household production relied on credit and distant markets via merchants in port towns.

A thorough understanding of early American material culture informs Murphy’s revealing comparisons of objects. Thus, when the author places Fisher’s famed topographical painting A Morning View of Bluehill Village Sept. 1824 alongside other landscapes—such as his View of Dedham, Massachusetts (1796), the overmantel from the Hathaway House in Paris, Maine (1803), Ralph Earl’s Looking East from Denny Hill (1800), William Stoodley Gookin’s The View of Saco Falls (1829), and Charles Codman’s View of Diamond Cove (circa 1830)—the reader gains a new understanding of Fisher’s unique creativity as well as his place within large-scale changes in visual culture. Fisher both contributed to and clearly departed from categories of topographic, folk, neoclassical, and romantic representation. Murphy persuasively explains Fisher as a transitional figure who drew on the values of an entrepreneurial settler with an Enlightenment eye for observation and measurement that included a full Christian commitment to appreciating God’s central role as the creator of sublime nature. The multi-sourced context for understanding Morning View, clearly Fisher’s “masterpiece,” is further enriched by the hyperlocal (and perhaps perplexing) knowledge that this large oil hung in the narrow upstairs hallway of his house in remote frontier Maine.

Murphy argues that in the multitude of items Fisher crafted...