William Oliver Stevens, the Harwood Sisters, and Annapolis

Part of Cathleen H. Farr Lecture Series

Among the more colorful residents of the Hammond-Harwood House over the years was William Oliver Stevens, who rented a wing from the Harwood sisters in 1904-1905. A recently hired instructor of English at the Naval Academy, Stevens was to play a lively role in Annapolis culture and politics over the next twenty years. He published and illustrated satirical alphabets on Maryland social mores; he wrote the first naval textbooks on sea power; he became an authoritative commentator on naval affairs; and he and his wife, Claudia Mason Stevens, were leaders of the city’s suffrage movement. This talk will provide an overview of Stevens’s career and its explosive conclusion as well as examine his recollections of Lucy and Hester Anne Harwood in Annapolis, Anne Arundel’s Town, his 1937 retrospective look at the city he for many years was happy to call home.

Dr. Michael P. Parker, a professor emeritus of English at the United State Naval Academy, has written widely on seventeenth-century poetry and Annapolis and local history.