A Place To Call Home

The Harrison House on
Chapman Street as it looks today.

Anyone who lives in an old house can tell you that there are stories in every corner of that home. We are simply caretakers of old homes – owning them within a long line of homeowners both in the past and the future.

For a family that really never had their own home, the Harrisons would spend years dreaming of the perfect home. Fosdick Beach Harrison came from a long and prestigious line of Harrisons that dated back to Thomas Harrison a settler of Branford, Connecticut from 1645. The men in the family had a history of being in the clergy, and when Fosdick Harrison was born in 1862 he would be destined to follow.

Born in Bethlehem, Connecticut, Harrison Attended preparatory school at the Williston Seminary in Easthampton, Mass, and later attended nearby Amherst College. His early life was spent in the pursuit of knowledge. At Amherst, Harrison distinguished himself and excelled in sports and religious studies. Fellow classmates remarked “that he took a vigorous part in the scrimmages.” One story tells of a broken leg caused by a frivolous jump “out of the chapel window.” Completing his educational pursuits at Yale Divinity School, he was ordained a Congregational minister in 1894.

The life of a young minister is built around service. And, during Harrison’s life he would move dozens of times. In 1904, marrying Estelle Potter of Worcester, Massachusetts they began to build a family. Potter, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer and prominent politician was well established in the community. The life that she embarked on with Fosdick would be without any roots or place to truly call home. In fact, their first child (also named Fosdick) was born in Brantford, Ontario while his father was serving a ministry there.

The family would grow, but always in another town in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Places like Palmer, East Bridgewater, Townsend, Somers, Southington, Woodstock, and New Haven were part of a long line of places the Harrisons lived over the years. Finally in 1935, at age 73, completing a stint in nearby Dover, Mass., Fosdick Harrison decided to settle down in Canton. Along with his wife and four children, the Harrisons would build an ideal place to call home.

The story goes that Estelle had inherited some money and with that small purse they could find a site for a dream home. Caroline Harrison, one of the daughters was a newspaper editor and writer, and she shared the story with American Home Magazine in 1937. “We felt a tragic insecurity in moving from one parish to the another, no home of our own, no improvements we might make lasting,” writes young Caroline. And so in the spring of 1935 they found an old barn at 145 Chapman Street into which they would pour their dreams.

Photo from American Home Magazine,
1937, featuring an interior
view of the Harrison House.

The barn sat in a meadow on the Southerly side of the road and was a rambling building that included the small addition of an ell that folklore suggests was the schoolroom that Henry David Thoreau taught in when he was in Canton in 1835 – 1836. The story is that the Sumner family acquired portions of the old schoolhouse and added the room onto the barn out of nostalgia. Measuring 58’ by 38’ feet the building had seen better days. Built in 1862, it was equipped with “ample horse stalls, carriage rooms, and a hay loft.”

The barn had something that only the Harrisons could see – a future as their new home. Massive grey oak beams from trees that grew in Canton several hundred years ago made for strong bones. The patina of age was a found object, and the Harrisons began work on July 4, 1935.

Estelle asked her brother for assistance and Lincoln Potter travelled up from Chevy Chase, Maryland to supervise the project. Potter had a head for these things and quickly established a plan that called for the complete dismantling of the barn and transforming the parts into a stunning new home. On the existing foundation of the barn, Potter – along with the entire Harrison family completely dismantled the building and rebuilt it entirely. Serving as architect, contractor, and builder, Potter would recycle the old building to be reborn as a spacious country manse.

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Liz and George Parker are fixtures in Canton, but moving to Canton in 1979 from the upper west side of New York City was more than a shock to their system. George had taken a position in Boston with Merideth & Grew and a family member suggested he look at a house at 203 Chapman Street. The world between New York City and Canton could not have been more foreign, but soon, Canton would be their true home. “We loved that first house, but it abutted seven neighbors,” explained Parker. The names of the abutters flow fast from Parker’s tongue, “Lesieur, Nolan, Coady, Ladow, and Seaman, all connected to our lot– it was a funny little property.” The Parkers decided they might move. In 1991, Liz and George were walking their dog through their neighborhood on Chapman Street and they saw the ghost of the Harrison house.

As Liz explains it, the old Harrison House was “a little creepy.” After the last Harrison moved out, the property – all 14 acres of it went to a developer who eventually declared bankruptcy and the abandoned house became owned by Workingman’s Bank. The slate roof had leaks and the house had been quite damaged. The ivy was growing into the house. The Parker’s envisioned its greatness. Within months the wreck was theirs and they began the process of bringing it back to life. Unknowingly, the Parkers had purchased a most amazing home.

In the weeks and months that followed that July 4^th in 1936, the first owners, the Harrisons recycled that old barn and built an amazingly comfortable modern building that was years ahead of its time. Almost all of the building was recycled. Every harness peg, manger rail, post and beam – all reused in the Harrison’s first true home. The interior hardware was fashioned from old tools that once hung in the barn. A clevis from a plow and sections of a harrow become hinges and handles. The bricks for the exterior came from an old car barn, every door had been hanging somewhere else in some other home that was demolished but salvaged by the Harrisons.

The centerpiece of the house was the hearth. As Caroline writes, “for a family twenty-two years without a hearth fire, this huge fireplace is a constant delight. Uncle Lincoln found in New Hampshire an old chimney from a house built before 1776, and he faced the fireplace with its bricks. He built the fireplace and chimney himself, making a shelf for a coffee pot, and an oven fed from underneath in which roast beef and baked beans have been successfully cooked. The barn’s trap door is the source of the handle on the oven’s lid, and a wagon supplied the hinges on the slanted tobacco cupboard cut in the paneling above the mantel.” 

That fireplace is where the Harrison’s would gather every New Years Eve and build a roaring blaze, the next morning the hot embers would be swept into a small firebox heating an oven where the First Day stew would be heated. A tradition that meant so much to a family that had never had a real home.

There were many joys in the home of the retired minister. Soon after completion, in 1937, the elder retired minister officiated at the marriage of his son, Fosdick, who became a prominent Boston real-estate attorney.  Moving out of the new house, the young attorney started his family in the adjacent farmhouse that abuts the homestead. Fosdick P. Harrison would serve Canton as an auxiliary firefighter during World War II.

The clergyman would only enjoy his home for four years, four months and eighteen days. On February 29, 1940 Reverend Fosdick Harrison died in the house that he loved so much and was buried back in Connecticut. Less than four months later his grandchild was born with a congenital heart defect and was buried with him in June.

Estelle died four years later in 1945 leaving her children to grow up in the house that they had built. As each child moved on, the lines began to fade and time took its toll. If Liz and George Parker had failed to see the history in the crumbling plaster and the vine covered bedrooms it was likely that the story would have ended in a teardown.

Take heart though, for folks that have a passion for old homes can hear the history and the stories in the walls. Passed to the next generation the Harrison House is an amazing gift for future homeowners. Liz loves this house, there was that one defining glorious day, when she awoke early and the sun blazed into the living room and the color from the autumn maple leaves cast a brilliant blaze of gold across the oak floors that once were walked upon by Henry David Thoreau himself, and it took her breath away.  Now this is a home.

When asked whether she ever thinks of leaving the house, Liz gets a bit misty during her answer, “sometimes we wonder, neither of us want to leave this house… as long as we have our health and our faculties we stay. But in the end we are just caretakers.” And, they have taken good care of the Harrison House.

Hatfield's Colors

The impressionist artist, Joseph Hatfield
in his Canton studio on Beaumont Street in 1895.

The colors were beautiful, and the descriptions evoked romantic painting in sunlit galleries.  Carmine, Alizaran Crimson, Rose Madder, Aureolin Yellow, Ox-Gall, and Smalt. In a small factory off of Beaumont Street some of the world’s best modern paints were developed and perfected by Joseph Henry Hatfield.  

J.H. Hatfield was a prolific and extremely talented artist that travelled the world, yet called Canton his home. Born near Kingston, Ontario in 1863, Hatfield was one of America’s most prolific and well-known artists in the nineteenth century.  Like many young artists of the time, he would find his influences in France. Studying at the Academie Julian in Paris in 1889-1890, Hatfield would hone his skills by working under Benjamin Constant, Henri Doucet, and Jules Lefebvre.

Hatfield returned to America in 1892, joining a growing group of expatriates who introduced Impressionism to a receptive audience at the turn of the last century. Hatfield was in the company of such artists as Whistle, Hassam, Sargent and Cassatt. In his early work he explored landscapes, figures and plein-air style. And his work at the Paris Salon of 1891 was critical to his success as an artist.

The Paris Salons were annual exhibitions of contemporary art, which were in essence a setting for the serious exploration of modern themes and imagery focused upon artists, critics, patrons and dealers. Through the acceptance at the Salons, an American artist would gain renown and an impact upon the art-world.

As Hatfield himself described it, he was not very successful at first. “I was completely discouraged. I said to myself, you old fool, you can’t paint anymore than a cow, you ought to give it up.” Packing away his sketch material, Hatfield decided to become a farmer. A few days into his malaise, he saw a “wonderful great cloud in the sky.” Hatfield exclaimed, “I’ve got to paint that cloud,” and ran to his studio to gather brushes and paint. In a sunlit meadow in an idyllic part of Canton, Hatfield labored for two hours in a state of frenzy, and through the afternoon he completed his work. Arriving home, he covered the painting and only returned to look at it the next day. As he told the story, “I went in trembling and turned it around where I could see it.” Hatfield had once again convinced himself he could paint.

The story illustrates the passion and the questions that coursed through the artist. A sensitive soul who “was responsive to the beauty down to his fingertips.” A writer described Hatfield as someone that “loved nature, not in her grand and cosmic aspects, but in her quiet moments of joy. He loved little pools of water in the woods where light flickers down through the leaves and throws patterns upon the lily pads.”

If you want to see the full embodiment of Hatfield’s work, a trip to the Canton Public Library is in order. There are two paintings that demonstrate the yin and yang - the shadow and light of Hatfield’s artistry – and they hang in the Augustus Hemenway Reading Room here in Canton. First and foremost, Hatfield was known as a painter of figures. In the late nineteen hundreds at a single exhibition of the Art Club of Boston, Hatfield exhibited one hundred and forty canvases, primarily of children. The painting at the Canton Public Library hanging over the fireplace is not a child, but instead a very elderly man by the name of Captain Thomas Conroy, of Easton, Mass. Painted around 1892, the 35-by-45 inch portrait looks across the room at another Hatfield painting. Tucked in the right-hand corner is “Fowl Meadow” and it is a gloriously somber snow scene that captures the winter light in an extraordinary way. It was said in his obituary, “he painted landscapes because he had to, because of the inner urge to capture one of nature’s moods and express it.”

Hatfield moved to Canton prior to 1895 and was likely inspired by the beauty of this rural landscape. “Fowl Meadow” certainly gives us insight into his passion for the place he called home. And collectors were just as passionate for his work; in fact there were at one time dozens of Hatfield paintings hanging inside Canton homes. Eugene Williams who lived on Pleasant Street had more than twelve “Hatfields” in his house. The Williams family, connected by marriage to the Draper family was quite close to Hatfield. And the paintings the two families collected were pure Canton; Pecunit Brook, Cemetery Pond, and Blue Hill from “Wetherbee”. 

Helping Mama by Joseph Hatfield.
(Courtesy of the Canton Historical Society.)  

It was, however, his portraits of children that were his hallmark. “He loved little children as he loved nature for their unconscious beauty, for their changing enthusiasms, for their responsiveness emotionally to their environment, whether of people or place.”  There is a wonderful painting that was exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1894 that captures Hatfield’s love of children. The oil on canvas shows a little girl standing in an art studio painting her own stick figure drawing on top of a study of birches. It turns out, the little girl was Hatfield’s daughter Doris, and indeed the incident happened as drawn in the portrait. “Sprawled across the freshly painted canvas, in brown ochre, was one of those nondescript line drawings that children call men, and with a cheerful helping, expression on her face the child was ruining the work.”

Hatfield quietly picked up a sketchpad, “and drew the mischievous little girl, with her quaint little knot and bright smiling face.” Hatfield was well into his drawing “when the little culprit became aware that she was the subject,” turning toward her father “with child-like confidence of approval she smiled and said: Helping Papa!” And so a masterwork was created. Helping Papa would eventually be owned by the Ricker Family of Poland Springs, Maine – the founders of Poland Spring Water.

In 1892, Hatfield produced a series of drawings to illustrate Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Victorian American tale of a woman undergoing a “rest cure” for depression entitled “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Between 1891 and 1893, Hatfield was a prolific artist supplying illustrations to the New England Magazine, the first publisher of Gillman’s story of mental derangement. It turns out that illustrating for magazines was extremely lucrative, and Hatfield would join the ranks of artists like Winslow Homer and dabble in commercially illustrating magazine articles while building a career in art.

In 1903, Hatfield ceased painting as a result of becoming increasingly aware that his early work was turning dark with age. The problem was that the pigments in the paints were failing, and he feared that most of the contemporary art would be forever lost to imperfect paints. Hatfield turned his attention to chemistry and began to grind his own colors. The experiment began with twenty-five cents of the finest yellow dry pigment obtainable. The Hatfield formula called for the purest of oils and fine marble grinding stones. At the time, pure dry colors were only made in Europe, and Hatfield turned to England, France and Germany to procure pigments for his paints that would create a “palette of pure permanent colors.”

In the basement of his house in Canton, Hatfield began producing the finest artists colors in America. Within a few years he contracted to build a 45-foot building behind his house near the Canton Junction. At the height of his business he largely gave up his love of painting and devoted the last twenty years of his life to the manufacture of pure colors. It is said that chemists questioned his claims of purity, but analysis in laboratories here and in Europe proved that Hatfield’s paints were 100% pure and would stand the test of time.

Joseph Hatfield at Third Cliff,
Scituate, Mass. 1918 (Courtesy of the Canton Historical Society.)

Giving up his art, for science was reportedly quite difficult for this man. He “withdrew from the world, his name heard less and less in art circles,” only his closest friends realizing “the extent and value of his service to his contemporaries.” So, whether you have seen Hatfield’s paintings or not, it is likely that you have seen his paint. In museums all over the world hang paintings by famous artists that used Hatfield’s paint to insure the freshness of their original work.

Hatfield’s obituary ran in the Canton paper in January 1928, at the age of sixty-five, Joseph H. Hatfield died here at his home. “Those who knew Mr. Hatfield intimately, knew also the depth of his spiritual nature, his tremendous interest in metaphysical problems, his eager search for the ideal philosophy of life. In his fine art of loving came a fine art of living which is an art more difficult than the life of a painter.”