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John was born on June 13, 1820 at Brompton Falls, Quebec, Canada. He was the son of Gardner Stevens and Deborah (Harrington). At the age of fifteen, after the family had gone back to Vermont, Stevens joined an elder brother at White Oak Springs, Wisconsin.
Pursuing lead-mining ventures, Stevens found himself at Galena where he joined the militia called out to repress the Winnebago Indians. It was then that he met Governor Dodge who later was influential in securing for him a captain's commission in the quartermaster's department of the army on the outbreak of the Mexican War.
He served through the war, and resigned in 1848 to return to Texas where he had preempted some land. He was turned from this course by John Catlin, former secretary of Wisconsin Territory, who told him of a new territory to be organized about the Falls of St. Anthony. This region, said Catlin, "was well known to be the best climate in the world for such invalids" as Stevens who had come back from Mexico with "serious lung difficulties".
The following spring Stevens was in St. Paul where Franklin Steele, sutler at Fort Snelling, employed him to help in his store. Steele advised Stevens to squat on land on the west bank of the Mississippi at the Falls where the latter obtained 160 acres.
In the course of the next few years Stevens plotted his land and sold lots to newcomers, but as the settlement grew he turned over to Steele the remainder of his holdings, realizing but a very modest sum for what was to become the business district of Minneapolis. Ever a pioneer he obtained, in 1855, forty-five acres in Glencoe, McLeod County, which had just been opened to settlement. Here, among other enterprises, he edited the Glencoe Register from 1857 to 1863.
As brigadier-general of militia he took an important part in the suppression of the Indian uprising during the last months of 1862, being for a time in charge of a long strip of the frontier.
In September 1863 he was one of the commissioners to take the Minnesota soldier vote in the southern department, and, shortly afterward, he settled once more in Minneapolis where he lived for the remainder of his life. He edited such papers as the Farmers' Tribune, Farmer and Gardner, and Farm, Stock, and Home.
Stevens took no very active part in the politics of his day, although he was a member of the first state legislature, 1857-58, and that of 1876; he was state senator in 1859-60, but declined to contest a similar position in 1877 with Charles A. Pillsbury.
He died in 1900.
John Harrington Stevens attained the rank of colonel in the U. S. Army, and was involved in the Mexican-American War. He served in the Minnesota House of Representatives in 1857–1858 and the Minnesota Senate in 1859–1860. For many years was president of the Minnesota State Agricultural Society. In 1890 he published his Personal Recollections of Minnesota and Its People, a mine of information about early Minneapolis.
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He engaged in various occupations, but his interest lay chiefly in the promotion of agriculture and was keenly interested in the agricultural department of the University of Minnesota.
He was a member of the State Agricultural Society.
While a good enough business man in a routine way, he apparently lacked that quality which many of his contemporaries utilized to build up a fortune through the exploitation of a new country, or else he was genuinely indifferent to the acquisition of great wealth, for he died a comparatively poor man.
He built a cottage, destined to be the first dwelling in the city of Minneapolis, in the autumn of 1849, and brought to it his bride, Frances Helen Miller, of Westmoreland, New York, to whom he had been married on May 1, 1850. They had six children.
