Built c. 1816 and substantially updated in the Colonial Revival style in 1900 to a design by George Albert Clough, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2004 for its architectural significance.

Prior to designation the present owner altered the interior using a device Clough's more famous contemporary John Calvin Stevens had employed when remodeling the Federal Elias Thomas House in Portland, Maine, combining two downstairs rooms and marking the transition with a screen of columns and pilasters.

The story of workmen on the roof hearing the guns at Castine signaling the commencement of the War of 1812, dropping everything in their haste to join the fight then returning to pick up rusty tools where they lay is surely apocryphal, being just the sort of tale conjured up at the time to romanticize the patriotic spirit of early Americans.

Yet with Civil War era anti-draft riots and lynchings of free blacks by protestors vivid in the memory of many living in 1900, being less remote in time than the Vietnam War and Watergate are to us, such stories may have had particular meaning to New Englanders[10] steeped in the traditions of Abolitionism and military service: Mrs. Merrill's elder brother had fought under Grant[11] and she was proud to be descended from Nehemiah Hinckley, Edith Wood's husband, a Blue Hill soldier who walked home from West Point after the Revolution.

Inspired by the House and Garden Movement,[12] in the fashion of the day Mrs. Merrill kept a Jersey cow and laying hens, unthinkable on Parker Point where the family had previously summered.

She also cultivated gladiolus in her garden, entering them at the annual Blue Hill Fair,[13] and, in the spirit of agricultural improvement then abroad in the land, engaged Frederick Vernon Coville, the developer of the modern Highbush Blueberry, to plant a number of his early cultivars on the property.

Illustrating close family ties to its grander neighbor, Barncastle, Parker House had on view memorabilia including scrapbooks, portraits and photographs belonging to Barncastle's builder, Effie Hinckley Ober Kline,[14] founder of the Boston Ideal Opera Company, Washington, D.C. real estate investor and patron of the arts in Cleveland, and her husband Virgil, John D. Rockefeller's private lawyer,[15] friend and mentor of Charles W. Chesnutt and advisor to James A Garfield.