Samuel Harwood Blake was born in Hartford, a small town in Oxford County in 1807, the son of a well-to-do farmer.
He graduated from Bowdoin College in the class of 1827 and studied law in Buckfield, Portland and New Haven before opening up a law office in Bangor in 1831.
An ardent Democrat he was elected to the Maine Senate in 1840 and 1842, serving as President in the latter year.
In 1848 he served for one year as Attorney General of the State of Maine and in 1854 he ran for Congress against Israel Washburn, one of the founders of the infant Republican Party.
The issue of slavery in the territories, and "Bleeding Kansas" in particular, turned five of Maine’s six Congressional seats over to the Republicans that year and for all practical purposes ended Samual Blake’s political career.
Following the outbreak of the Civil War, he, like many other Maine Democrats, joined the Republican Party in support of the preservation of the Union.
Following the death of his brother, William A. Blake, he assumed the presidency of the Merchants National Bank of Bangor, spending most of his time managing a rather substantial fortune that he and his brother had built up in a lifetime of shrewd investments.
Both Samuel and William were powerful, calculating, conservative and secretive men, traits not uncommon among those who survived and prospered in the nineteenth century Bangor.
On returning from a trip to the South in 1887 Samuel Blake, then eighty years old, caught pneumonia and died in Boston. He left no children and the entire estate was left to his nephew.