Migdalia Mass felt like Auburn’s William A. Robinson House had been waiting just for her: its pitched gables, its smokey-gray board-and-batten siding, its ornate tower, with 16 gargoyles shaped into brackets and carved onto trim. She and her husband, Joseph, were living in Washington State when they bought the 1874 Gothic Revival, sight unseen, after viewing an online listing. “This is the house I’ve wanted since I was a little kid — all the nooks and crannies, the preserved pocket doors, the height,” says Migdalia, who, growing up in Puerto Rico and New York, dreamed of becoming a vampire and counted Halloween as her favorite holiday. Later, she worked for the Army — in mortuary affairs. Before closing on the home, she says, “I was thinking about all the Halloween dinner parties I’d host. And I didn’t even know about the gargoyles yet.”

Now, the Hollywood-level horror props she’s been amassing for decades have a proper resting place. During the last week of September, the Masses unleash the lot into every room in their home: 21 skeletons; 16 animatronic mannequins that scream, cackle, and warn of impending doom; nine life-size witches; two dozen skulls; a hunchbacked zombie-butler named James; a haunted dollhouse; a wooden casket; a half gallon of fake blood to be poured into goblets and splattered on props; innumerable creepy crawlies; glowing orbs; strobe lights; and, for the annual dinner party, a rubber corpse whose open chest cavity is stuffed with pork ribs charred by Migdalia.

Mass’s friend Tizz Crowley often joins her, donning period garb for events at the Androscoggin Historical Society. Crowley’s “Civil War widow” dress (top) enhances Mass’s morbid decorating vibe. Plus, Mass says, “She blends in with my witches.”

“I don’t plan,” Migdalia says. “I may have a general idea, but mostly I let things talk to me.” In years past, she has staged a Victorian funeral in the parlor with a corpse wrapped in a bloody blanket in the casket, hosted a wedding reception in the living room with zombies cutting into a “rotting” black cake (“They’re a beautiful couple. The guy kind of looks like Johnny Depp”), and installed a glowing ghost bride engulfed in swirling mist from a fog machine in the tower. She doctors her plastic skeletons with paint, synthetic skin, and a blowtorch to make them look freshly decomposed, builds cages for skeletons out of old screen doors, and creates “hocus pocus books” with plastic eyeballs protruding from faux-leather-bound tomes. Recently, she had a mason who was repairing the foundation in the home’s attached barn embed plastic bones in the mortar and a skeleton beneath the floorboards. “One day, someone will find him, and it’ll be my after-life joke,” Migdalia says.

The Masses do not open their home to the public, but they welcome trick-or-treaters. (Although the deadly makeup Migdalia wears has made some of them run in fear.) “Even if no one comes to the door, I still love it; I do it for me,” she says. “It’s fun, unless you’re my cousin. My husband puts up a camcorder when she visits. She cries, she screams, she swears. I used to force her to play funeral with me when we were kids, so she shows up already sweating, even when it’s like 10 degrees outside.”

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When the Young family showed up at the foot of Mount Megunticook in 1777, the plantation around them was called Canaan, after the biblical Promised Land, the land of milk and honey. By the time the Youngs built their sprawling farmhouse, around 1810, the town around them had incorporated as Lincolnville, and in the generations that followed, the Young farmstead became a land of milk and eggs: a dairy, at first, then a laying farm. 

Today, it’s a land of milk and wine — or it can be, if you order chef Michael Nowak’s superb Bolognese at Aster & Rose, the unpretentious contemporary-European restaurant he and his wife, Karrie, opened in 2022 in what is today the Youngtown Inn. Chef Nowak’s Bolognese is a fragrant marriage of slow-braised pork, beef, and lamb, a protein triple-threat served over the fettuccine noodles he makes in-house almost daily. It’s a luscious standard on a fairly protein-heavy menu that otherwise changes frequently with what’s in season, and it’s of a lineage with his output at the meat-centric Black Pig, a much-praised, French-influenced farm-to-table joint the Nowaks owned outside Cleveland before relocating to Maine, in 2021.

“We’d vacationed here a lot and just felt like this was our place,” explained Karrie, a native New Hampshirite with Maine family roots, when I stopped in recently. “In 2019, we were staying in Stockton Springs, and I saw a listing for this cute inn in Lincolnville: land, a restaurant, and six guest rooms.” Two of those things they wanted; running an inn wasn’t part of their vision. But the next year, COVID shut down the Black Pig, and Karrie’s corporate job was restructured. The couple thought, hey, we can be innkeepers if it facilitates the Maine dream.

The Nowaks, who now live next door with their three kids, aren’t the first to look at the Young family spread and see the Promised Land. The white-clapboard farmhouse became an inn back in the ’80s, after the collapse of the midcoast poultry industry. Before the Nowaks, it was run for 30 years by Maryann and Manuel Mercier, who raised their own three kids at Youngtown Corner and cultivated a loyal clientele. The Merciers’ dining room was elegant, a white-tablecloth affair, with Manuel, classically trained in his native France, known for his delicate sauces and lobster ravioli.  

The Nowaks’ approach at Aster & Rose is more relaxed. On one recent visit, I sat solo in the snug bar, wearing Chacos and a hoodie, attacking a plate of fettuccine Bolognese and draining an Oxbow pilsner while admiring the patterned wallpaper, which shows Benjamin Franklin blowing a big, pink chewing-gum bubble. It’s the most whimsical of the contemporary touches the Nowaks have put on the place, which include new furniture and fixtures throughout. “We did that for a reason,” Michael says. “To say, this is not a serious room — hop in here anytime for a snack and a cocktail.”

The adjacent dining room is a smidge more serious but still far from stuffy. Gone are the white tablecloths. The vibe is, well, country farmhouse, with wide-plank floors, exposed wood beams, gauzy drapes, and just a few bright landscape paintings. When my wife and I came in for a date night, our fellow diners were mostly in street clothes, with a few boomers in blazers and pearls. The menu was simple, six entrées, each described in fewer than a dozen words, half protein (including a fish dish — scallops on my visit) and half pasta (Chef Nowak, though trained in French technique, cut his teeth at an Italian restaurant).

We started with a salad of local greens and lion’s mane and oyster mushrooms, grown at Troy’s Moorit Hill Farm, tossed lightly in a tahini dressing and made decadent with a beautiful poached egg on top. We foolishly skipped the chicken-liver toast I now know to be the one anchor item on an otherwise rotating starter menu. It’s a favorite seasonal canvas of Chef Nowak’s, dressed with pickled shallots, spicy honey, and pistachio on my first visit, then pickled strawberries when I came back a few weeks later. Our entrées, both off the menu’s non-pasta side, were rich and robust: The bistro steak, on a bed of broccolini and nutty onion farro, was as tender as could be. A perfectly seared duck breast got a bit of sweetness from a citrus demi-glace and a veggie-and-apple hash (midcoast purveyors, like Morrill’s Calyx Farm and Hope’s Three Bug Farm, supply the kitchen with produce).

Dessert was a slab of spiced-pineapple and toasted-coconut cheesecake and a raspberry-chocolate custard, with a healthy dollop of mascarpone mousse, both served on colorful, irregularly shaped ceramic plates. From start to finish, the experience hit a sweet spot between classic and rustic. Which is by design, the Nowaks say — the Ben Franklin wallpaper notwithstanding.

“My style of cooking is kind of more-than-meets-the-eye, with a lot of little prep steps and nuances you don’t necessarily read on the menu,” Michael says. “But we don’t want to get too modern or too wild with anything. We’re aiming for approachable food that, you know, fits a 210-year-old colonial farmhouse in the Camden Hills.

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By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Rachel Sieben
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East

“I’ve always been drawn to odd, Edward Scissorhandsy things, and this house felt like a place where my things fit,” floral designer Anika Wilson says, referring to the “lived-in” Cape she and her husband, Giles Healey, bought in 2015. Built in 1816, on land bequeathed to the original owner by King George III, the home sits at the end of a long dirt drive behind a stand of old-growth trees that shields it from a busy road just outside of Portland. Wilson keeps chickens, ducks, geese, peafowl, and sheep on the 34-acre property, which includes her flower garden and a swath of dense forest. Inside, “the windowsills and doors are caked with so much paint they feel kind of bumpy. The stairs are steep and creaky. Nothing’s perfect,” she says. “And to me, that’s what a house is.”

Clockwise from top left: An entry staircase in Behr’s Drama Queen picks up the shades in acrylic-and-ink abstracts by Portland’s Victor Stewart; on the radiator are woodblock prints by Japanese artist Tetsuo Aoki. In Anika Wilson and Giles Healey’s living room, a bouquet by Wilson, who owns Bad Rabbit Flowers, and a bull skull set off the granite fireplace. In the living room, a whimsical nuLOOM rug complements linen pillows from Etsy that read like abstract art and a cherry coffee table with a pair of golden hands by Wilson’s grandfather, artist William Wilson.

When they bought the place, Wilson, who traveled the world working as a scuba instructor for nearly a decade, had amassed a Pinterest board of decorating ideas and was ready to put down roots. “I’d lived out of a suitcase for most of my life since I left home, so it was a weird nesting thing,” she says. First, she and Healey redesigned the kitchen, knocking down a wall to open up the space and replacing old upper cabinets with wood shelving. Fresh white paint on the walls provides a clean backdrop for the floral and produce bounty she hauls in from the garden; in the adjoining dining area, tone-on-tone grays on walls and wainscoting set off a prolific liquor collection that includes homemade infusions. Elsewhere, electric accents, like bright coral on the entryway trim and stairs and marigold on doors and dining chairs, rebel against the Scandinavian minimalism of her childhood home in New York, where her Swedish mother’s palette “was like a thousand shades of white.”

From left: The Cape’s front door, in Benjamin Moore’s Citrus Blast, radiates against clapboards in the company’s Deep Space. Healey and Wilson, pictured with their chickens and Babydoll sheep, Oskar.

When the refurbishing was complete, Wilson unboxed her things. Since childhood, she has amassed art, trinkets, and oddities from thrift stores and family members. Her collection to date is too large to display at once, so she constantly rotates pieces in and out. Among them: cross-eyed doll heads, vintage globes, gold horse figurines, resin human skulls, big-game skulls, a glass menagerie, and her grandfather’s wooden sculptures of giant tools poking out of rough-hewn bases. Many of the items are creepy, though Wilson prefers the term mysterious. “I like a little bit of darkness,” she says, pointing to inspiration from her grandfather’s macabre art, her father’s animal-skeleton collection, showcased in the living room when she was growing up, and her mother’s book of illustrated Scandinavian fairy tales, where glowing fairies hovered over mist-covered glens and trolls lurked under stones at the bottom of waterfalls. “It was not the classic fairy tales of princes and princesses,” Wilson says. “It was darker and more deep than that, and I loved it.”

Clockwise from top left: Wilson is writing a book on homemade liquor infusions, and her research library is stored in the dining room above a mid-century-style sideboard from Craigslist. In the entry, a psychedelic bath mat, gifted by Wilson’s mother, lightens the mood, while a theatrical gravity rules the dining room, with its walls in Behr’s Asphalt Gray and antique portraits of doleful strangers bought at an estate sale. In the primary bedroom, monochromatic bedding from English Bed Linen Company mellows out a lively Boho rug from Safavieh.

One might easily feel unsettled in a home where severed wooden hands grip the ends of the living-room coffee table — another of Wilson’s grandfather’s creations. But the experience here is playful, even life-affirming. “I don’t want my house to feel overly intentional or stuffy, just fun,” Wilson says. “It’s a reflection of me, so it’s colorful, chaotic, and a little strange.” On a recent afternoon, she and Healey relaxed in the living room beneath a hollow-eyed longhorn-bull skull mounted over the fireplace and a half dozen unblinking doll heads arrayed on shelves. Outside, their Babydoll sheep, Oskar and Elmo, grazed placidly in the gathering mist. Soon, they’ll try to come in, Wilson said, because they’re convinced they’re dogs. It’s weird, she knows, but that’s to be expected.

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After Phil Rose retired from teaching high-school English, he launched a boat-delivery service and, in 2000, built himself a house shaped like a prow. Perched on a bluff on Machiasport’s Howard Cove, where the Rose family has summered for more than a century, the folded-in A-frame is surrounded by granite outcrops and blueberry bushes that “emerge from the house like a wake,” says Phil’s son, Rich, who now owns the place with his wife, Julie. By contrast, the opposing façade is a simple gabled box, amplifying the drama when you round the “hull.” After Phil passed away, in 2011, Rich and Julie brought in Marshfield contractor Donald Cole Jr., who said, “As an English-teacher-carpenter, I give your father an A-minus,” Rich remembers. “Grading him as an actual carpenter, I might not be so generous.” The couple installed a foundation, finished the crude interior, and cut a network of trails on the property’s 12 acres. But Phil’s expression of a grounded ship remains the most enchanting feature. “If you’re in the second-floor bedroom during a storm, the waves come up and you can’t see the cliff,” Rich says. “Then you’re on the vessel.”

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A thin note hangs in the air as the three members of the DaPonte String Quartet lower their bows. In an instant, they take to debating, passionately, how to perform a passage in a Beethoven trio they have already presented twice and will play twice more in the weeks to come. The musicians, among Maine’s most heralded performers of chamber music, are seated in the sanctuary of Freeport’s First Baptist Church, dappled by light falling through stained glass. It’s a familiar space where they have rehearsed for years, a constant during a time when much has felt unfamiliar.

It has been a trying few years for the quartet, whose original members settled in Maine in the mid-’90s after forming in Philadelphia, in 1991. Like all performing ensembles, DaPonte abruptly shut down its concert season when the pandemic arrived. Two years later, just as audiences began returning to live performances, founding member and violinist Ferdinand “Dino” Liva developed severe neuropathy in his hands and feet, leaving him, at least temporarily, unable to hold his instrument, let alone play it. Then, just as the quartet planned a drastically revised season, an even more unexpected blow fell: the ensemble’s nonprofit affiliate, Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, announced it was terminating its relationship with the four players.

The stunning news was perhaps best conveyed in a letter to the editor by longtime fan and patron David Shipman, of China, published in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville’s Morning Sentinel, in May of 2022. The FDSQ’s executive director had recently emailed donors, Shipman wrote, promising “exciting news” about the DaPonte String Quartet’s 30th-anniversary celebration to be announced in the spring.

“Well, spring is here,” the letter went on, “and the exciting news is that FDSQ is celebrating the quartet’s 30th anniversary by firing them, changing the name of the organization to Chamber Music Maine, and taking the money that the supporters of the quartet donated . . . and proposing to use that money in ways that the donors did not intend.”

Rather than continuing to pay the four musicians their $40,000 salaries, the FDSQ board wanted instead to fund individual performances by a wider range of musicians. The quartet’s players were stunned. When the Portland Press Herald ran a story about their dismissal, it went viral among classical-music devotees. “Within two hours, we were the talk of the Juilliard faculty,” says Myles Jordan, DaPonte’s cellist and other remaining founding member. “By evening, the story was being translated into Hungarian and Japanese.”

In short order, the quartet heard from some top-flight lawyers, two of whom agreed to represent them pro bono. Brief, intense negotiations with the board followed. Two months later, the FDSQ’s entire board and executive director resigned, and the $300,000 treasury (“or almost all of it,” Jordan says) was transferred to the newly formed DaPonte String Quartet Foundation, with Shipman as chair. 

Then, just as the quartet was getting its feet back under itself, the cruelest stroke fell. Shortly after the players’ reinstatement, Liva told the group that he would be unable to return as a performer. He’d had heart surgery, and afterward, his neuropathy did not improve — there seemed no hope, he told his fellow musicians, for him to ever play at a concert level. Heading into 2023, the group’s future had never felt less certain. 

In Philadelphia, where the original DaPonte members gathered at Temple University, Liva remembers the players practicing “six or seven hours a day, every day.” The young ensemble looked up to icons like the Guarneri Quartet, which helped popularize chamber quartets in the 1960s, and the Emerson String Quartet, which formed at Juilliard, in 1976, and had multiple Grammy awards by the early ’90s. “We liked to say, ‘If you want to sound like the Emerson, you have to put in the hours they do,’” Liva recalls. “If you want to sound better, you have to put in more hours.”

The quartet took its name from Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose name derives from the Italian word for “bridge.” Its first concerts in Philadelphia wowed critics, earning DaPonte favorable comparisons to the long-established quartets they admired. They were too hot for the city to hold them, Jordan jokes. In 1995, they headed to Maine on a three-year residency, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that involved playing concerts in all 16 counties, often in surprisingly humble venues. A New York Times critic, after hearing the group play in a Newcastle retirement home, wrote that it was “the equivalent of, say, the Boston Celtics playing in the high school gym.” When the residency was over, the group decided to resettle in Maine permanently. 

They’ve been delighting modest but exceptionally loyal audiences ever since. Prior to the pandemic, DaPonte averaged 30 to 35 performances a year, four different seasonal programs, in venues across the state, though primarily along the midcoast. In the early years, they played concerts and festivals outside of Maine, even touring Europe — among the more notable outings was a residency at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Music, in Glasgow, Scotland. Until the pandemic, the quartet hosted what they called the DaPonte Institute in the summer, working intensively with newly formed, college-age ensembles, without charging tuition. Over three decades, few other classical-music organizations in Maine have had as consistent and respected a presence.

That’s why so many were shocked at their brief, turbulent dismissal moment in 2022. Confidentiality agreements prevent all parties from discussing details of the settlement or of conflicts among individuals — as Kirsten Monke, DaPonte’s violist since 2008, repeatedly reminds an animated Jordan when I interview the group at Freeport’s First Baptist. But the experience, they all agree, was traumatic. 

Violinist Lydia Forbes remembers their perplexity at the Friends of DaPonte’s stated desire to expand “its” programming. “There’s a tremendous variety of chamber groups in Maine already,” she says. “It’s not as if there’s a niche there needing to be filled.” The former board, she says, took advantage of a moment when, facing the prolonged absence of Liva, they were particularly vulnerable. For Forbes, who joined the quartet in 2005, “the fact that it went ’round the world and touched a nerve” suggests that the clash was about more than just music. “It’s about the individual and the survival of small things. Things that were meant to be small. It can’t be, ‘Bigger is better, and may your quartet grow into a symphony orchestra.’”

In their dismissal letters, according to Jordan, the members were chastised for their limited repertory, the implication being that DaPonte wasn’t playing enough contemporary music. Jordan says the former executive director told them their concerts didn’t include enough works by women and people of color. The message, he says, was, “No one wants to listen to Beethoven and Schubert anymore,” and that the group needed to broaden its focus beyond the “dead, white, European males” at the foundation of the classical repertory.

But the players defend their track record of new works: Last year, DaPonte was scheduled to record a piece it had premiered in 2018, by Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour, evoking a poem by the late Amy Clampitt and commissioned by Shipman, the new foundation chair. (Liva’s disability forced cancellation of the session.) A 2016 commission showcased a quartet by Dutch American composer Rocco Havelaar, a Mainer and Forbes’s ex-husband. In its Maine Bicentennial program, DaPonte included a rare transcription and arrangement of a Mi’kmaq composition, “Songs of Chief Membertou.”

Moreover, the DaPonte musicians say their former board’s criticism missed the point of why audiences continue to turn out for chamber concerts. Sure, Liva acknowledges, many programs continue to rely on 18th- and 19th-century compositions, but it doesn’t mean they’re not relevant today. Beethoven, he offers, was a politically subversive composer, tweaking the noses of the very aristocrats who commissioned his works. “He was the guy who invented the scherzo, which means ‘joke,’ that now takes the place of minuets,” Liva says. What that meant? “Royalty, the kings and dukes, no longer had something they could dance to.”

The quartet tries to offer similar nuggets of historical context and social relevance for every piece it plays — often presented in idiosyncratic program notes that Jordan riffs from during live introductions. “Something in the world has caused the composer to write that exact piece,” Liva says. “It gives a reason for why we play what we play. It’s not just a bunch of notes that sound pretty — there’s a meaning behind it.”

One might see a mild riposte to the old board in the program that the quartet-minus-one chose for this year’s spring concerts: big chamber works by dead white men Beethoven and Brahms, a string trio and a piano quartet, the latter performed with University of Southern Maine professor Laura Kargul. DaPonte played both pieces shortly after the Freeport church rehearsal, just down the street, at Meetinghouse Arts. Some 120 concertgoers turned out, exceeding, Liva says, the size of pre-pandemic, pre-dismissal audiences.

Liva’s departure, after three decades, is an emotional one.

“That beautiful sound, we’ll miss it, and his presence,” Forbes says. “Dino is a measured person, with a big heart and an understanding about people that’s very valuable in an ensemble like this one.” She and Liva have alternated first- and second-violin parts for 17 years. “Quartets are not just as good as the players’ performances,” she says. “There’s a lot more a member brings to the group.” 

“The relationship between members of a string quartet, of any quartet, is something very difficult to verbalize about,” Jordan says, “because there’s so little verbalization in the process of becoming as one with your colleagues. It comes almost as a surprise that you’ve become part of one another in a very fundamental way.” Jordan and Liva met as Temple University students, and he can feel his friend’s absence as the group plays now. “It’s almost like losing your husband or wife,” he says. “Something’s been amputated.”

More than a year since making his decision, Liva is matter-of-fact about being able to perform again. “Chances are I’ll never be able to return,” he says. He will continue to teach and conduct (among other roles, he is a USM adjunct faculty member and conducts the Portland Youth Junior Orchestra). He draws strength, he says, from the example of his wife, Gia Comolli, a composer who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987 and continues to work at the keyboard, despite the disease’s effects.

He hasn’t left the quartet entirely, however. After creating the DaPonte String Quartet Foundation, the group decided it needed an administrator, and Liva readily accepted the role. His first major task is overseeing the selection of his own successor. Concerts this year have been devoted, in part, to auditioning violinists, one of whom will join a group whose personnel had been unchanged for 15 years. There’s been plenty of interest, some 30 serious inquiries. Several aspirants have joined a month’s worth of rehearsals, followed by performances, and Liva says a decision is expected by year’s end. 

It’s not a job for everyone. The modest pay means members generally have other incomes, and those with families may have to stretch further. The quartet practices 10 or more hours per week, and rehearsals involve seemingly endless repetition, as well as each member giving candid critiques of one-another’s playing. (Chamber quartets are notorious for spectacular breakups, and DaPonte has not been without its own moments of interpersonal drama — a few years after Forbes joined the group, both she and Jordan divorced their spouses and became romantic partners, as they remain today.)

Once DaPonte is a quartet again, there’s talk of returning to European touring and of playing with guest soloists in new venues. Liva would like to bring back the DaPonte Institute, which he sees as having a unique role in mentoring new talent. “There are plenty of other programs for young string players,” he says, “but most of them are very expensive.”

In general, the prospect of a “new” ensemble has the current members pondering the future in ways they otherwise may not have. “It’s caused me to think about the quartet beyond any of our own involvement,” Forbes says. “The DaPonte Quartet is valuable regardless of who’s in it. It’s special because of its longevity, and also because it’s independent” — that is, unaffiliated with any school or institution.

Jordan, now the group’s last remaining founding member, says he can envision a day when he too steps away. Thirty-two years is time for a lot of changes, which he hears when he listens back to the quartet’s early recordings. “It’s almost sterile in its technical focus,” he says. “Now, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s all about personal expression.” What hasn’t changed, though, going back to the days of playing retirement homes, is DaPonte’s relationship with audiences. “There’s this intimacy that really appeals to people at our concerts,” Forbes says. “They can be so close that everybody feels like they know us. It’s almost a friendship.” 

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Tree #146, an eastern red cedar, appears at first to be approaching death, but it’s not. Half uprooted on the edge of Marginal Way by some maniacal storm, it has continued growing, albeit horizontally. In its peculiar way, it’s thriving. On the water, out past the cedar’s exhumed roots and a neighboring basalt crag, a red-breasted merganser contends with the relentless surf in Oarweed Cove. It begins to fly, sputtering and bouncing over the swollen waves like a skipped stone.

Rain begins to patter onto Marginal Way and me, so I leave tree #146 and take shelter in a stand of junipers, next to an interpretive sign: ORIGIN OF THE ROCKS AND STRUCTURES OF THE MARGINAL WAY. My damp sneakers planted on the Kittery Formation, I scan the stone in front of me for slivers of ancient magma. For a moment, my mind wanders to an email I should have sent, then to the dinner I should start prepping. As my mental to-do list grows, I feel a tinge of guilt for prioritizing this downtime. Then, a small black arrow on the raindrop-speckled map reminds me: “You are here.”

The Marginal Way footpath is a Maine icon, and for good reason. The one-and-a-quarter-mile coastal walk between Ogunquit and Perkins Cove offers arresting vistas at every turn, endless vignettes of thrashing waves and toothy rock. For waterfowl, like the merganser, the churning seascape is formidable. But for land-bound pedestrians, Marginal Way is pure ease. The topography beneath the paved path is surprisingly gentle, as if it were asking, “Why should you have to struggle to be rewarded?” Marginal Way is a foil to Maine’s many steep climbs, those wooded ascents to solitary lookouts. Here, there is no destination and no striving. Hamstrings spared, one is cordially invited to slow down.

At any time of day, I find an opportunity to marvel. At dawn, the sun spills over Perkins Cove’s gray-shingled rooftops, bathing Marginal Way in a sense of possibility. At sunset, a creamsicle hue lingers on the horizon — stubborn, like the exotic bittersweet vines that flank each step of the walk. At the edge of the bluffs, beach-rose hips dangle from thorny, woody shrubs. Rosa rugosa, introduced from Japan in the mid-19th century, has become a quintessential emblem of the New England coast. Mainers of a certain age may remember their mothers making tea from the scraggly rose hips. As foreign as the bittersweet, as Maine as lobster.

After dark, the margin between land and sea is cold and nondescript. I fumble my way to a bench that sits on the edge of oblivion. At the edge of the cliff face, I can distinguish almost nothing. A pruned-back beach-rose bush might be a giant, belly-up tarantula. In the distance, the irregular blinking of buoys punctuates the horizon. To their left, the lights of Kennebunk glimmer. If I forget, for a moment, that I’m in Maine, the silhouette of a pitch pine against the sky behind me suggests a desert scene. The dankness of seaweed in my nose, however, is unmistakable. 

I notice all this because I have resolved to. Mindfulness is not in my genes. Though I moved to Maine just a few months ago, I’ve walked Marginal Way since I was a toddler, often alongside — or slightly behind — my speed-walker mother. On our summer jaunts, the tan quartzite and magenta beach rose must have blurred in her periphery as she propelled her five-foot-one frame past each scenic vista. Stopping to rest at one of the 39 memorial benches might have been permitted if a herring gull had swooped in, untied her sneakers, and flung them into the Atlantic. Probably not even then. 

My father’s energy was similarly hectic. At the end of our annual trips to Ogunquit, he often drove the seven hours back to Pennsylvania without stopping. On two occasions, he speedily unloaded the Ford Explorer and reopened our family pizzeria within an hour of our return. To make up for a week of Shirley Temples, trolley rides, and overflowing bags of gummy candy. To get back to the comfort of busy.

My first year as a resident Mainer is slower and more indulgent than those summers. I soak up Marginal Way during midday breaks and spontaneous nighttime visits. I take time to observe waterfowl long enough to learn more than just their names. Harlequin ducks, in particular, command my attention. Geometric collages of gray, white, and terra-cotta against the indigo high tide, Maine’s harlequins spend the warmer months in southeastern Canada. In October, instead of heading to Florida to sunbathe, they gather at the jagged edges of southern Maine, to spend the fall and winter. From my vantage on Marginal Way, I watch five-foot waves pummel their slick bodies, then whoosh into a milky froth. Beneath the ducks’ pantomime plumage is the resilience of ocean-battered bones.

One afternoon, I meet a woman who came to Marginal Way specifically in search of the harlequins. She’s seated on a bench at the path’s highest point, her mulberry puffer shielding her from the hefty winds. I approach her and work up the courage to ask her what she’s seen. “Harlequin ducks!” she exclaims. She’s been mesmerized, watching the subjects of her pilgrimage bob and dive through her new spotting scope. We drift together down Marginal Way, and she offers me a look at a crowd of purple sandpipers squatting on a seaweed-covered rock — a new bird for us both.

Like a looming wave, a sense of urgency builds in my mind when I remember I have a Zoom meeting at the top of the hour. I was raised by chronic doers, and my first instinct is to rush home. Instead, I make what feels like a brave choice and lean into this joyful conversation about shorebirds and our shared love for this place. Today, I will be a few minutes late. 

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Maine’s most influential architects since the early 19th century designed buildings that expressed the priorities and aspirations of their generation. But their projects were not merely of the moment. They often worked on the cutting edge of aesthetics and engineering, creating structures that continue to elevate our daily lives. Here, we introduce 10 colorful characters — including an outspoken modernist and a militiaman who attempted to annex Canada — who profoundly shaped the way Maine looks.

Meet the Experts

FREDERICK L. SAVAGE

Claim to Fame: Savage’s hundreds of houses, hotels, and public buildings are as integral to the understated elegance of Mount Desert Island’s built landscape as John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s carriage roads and stone bridges. He’s best known for Shingle-style cottages, but he was equally skilled in traditional regional forms, such as his additions to the 1820 Cape named Old Homestead, in Northeast Harbor, and in classic styles like his own 1901 Tudor Revival home, in Bar Harbor, now the Atlantean Cottage inn. Savage’s portfolio, amassed between the 1890s and 1920s, also includes grand cottages in Dark Harbor, on Islesboro.

History: Savage’s ancestors settled in Northeast Harbor in 1798, and his parents founded the Asticou Inn, in 1883. In his early 20s, he worked as a carpenter on Harvard College president Charles Eliot’s summer home, leading Eliot to persuade his brother-in-law, Boston architect Robert Swain Peabody, to hire Savage as an apprentice. The refined Savage aesthetic extended to his nephew, Charles, who designed Northeast Harbor’s Asticou Azalea and Thuya gardens.

From left: Sunset Ledge cottage, photographed by Jeff Roberts; the Asticou Inn, photographed by Sue Anne Hodges.

Highlights: Though 6,500 square feet, the Shingle-style Sunset Ledge cottage, in Northeast Harbor, typifies the genre’s informality and Savage’s deference to natural surroundings. He designed it and the Colonial Revival replacement for the fire-damaged Asticou Inn in 1900. Larger than anything Savage had conceived to date, the inn was a career milestone, according to Savage biographer John M. Bryan, who says the commission likely paid for the construction of the Atlantean and signaled Savage’s foray into other styles.

EATON W. TARBELL

Claim to Fame: Tarbell not only introduced modernist architecture to Maine, in the mid-1940s, he advocated for it, meeting with community groups to explain his projects and the evolution of building design. His work often met resistance; nevertheless, he was prolific: He retired in 1988 with 2,500 buildings to his credit, most of them in Bangor and eastern and northern Maine. Ever the educator, he championed modernism even as he was closing his office, telling the Bangor Daily News that new buildings executed in antique styles were “fake, all fake . . . You don’t want a grandfather and his grandson walking down the street in the same clothes, do you?”

History: Born in Aroostook County, Tarbell studied under modernism pioneer Walter Gropius, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1947, when he was 33, Industrial Design magazine declared his sleek corporate guesthouse, in Brewer, one of the year’s best new buildings. In 1952, Bangor’s Vine Street School scored high in a national design contest and celebrated with an Eaton Tarbell Day open house. Trailblazing came with risks too. Tarbell accepted blame when a portion of Waterville Junior High’s flat roof collapsed after a multi-day snowstorm, in 1978.

From left: The Green House, photographed by Trent Bell; Bangor’s One Merchants Plaza, photographed by David Hughes.

Highlights: Tarbell’s best-known work, the 1955 Bangor Auditorium, embodied the city’s ambitions with a roof resembling uplifted wings. It was demolished, in 2013. Though twice renovated, the 1970s oceanfront residence referred to as the Green House evidences Tarbell’s hand with its flat roofs and expansive glass. Built of weathering steel and bronze-tinted glass, Bangor’s One Merchants Plaza remains much as Tarbell designed it, in 1972.

FRANCIS H. FASSETT

Claim to Fame: Fassett was a leading architect in Portland, and is credited with helping rebuild much of the city after the Great Fire of 1866. His work over 50 years embodies many of Maine’s best public and private buildings.

History: Born in Bath, Fassett learned carpentry, draftsmanship, and design as a teenage apprentice to architect and builder Isaac Cole and studied architecture at firms in Boston and New York. He was 24 when he opened his first office, in Bath, and for the next 16 years, he designed houses and other buildings throughout the Kennebec Valley. In 1863, he relocated to Portland, first working primarily in the Queen Anne style, then transitioning to Romanesque and Classical Revival genres. Most of his surviving buildings are historic landmarks, such as the 1888 Richardsonian Romanesque Baxter Library, a richly textural mix of red brick, sandstone, and brown freestone, and Sacred Heart Church, inspired by Notre-Dame de la Garde, in Marseille, and completed in 1908, not long after Fassett’s death, at age 86. Fassett had been working his own ideas into sketches of the French basilica since he first saw it nearly 40 years earlier.

From left: The Francis hotel, photographed by Irvin Serrano; Francis H. Fassett’s 1876 West End home, photographed by Scott T. Hanson.

Highlights: Two Fassett buildings in Portland now offer lodging. Maine Preservation gave one of its 2017 Honor Awards to The Francis hotel for its restoration of the 1881 mansion that Fassett designed for dry-goods purveyor Mellen E. Bolster. Fassett’s own 1876 West End home is a 3,900-square-foot, High Gothic–style duplex with tall pointed gables and a tower trimmed in lacy ironwork. One side is an Airbnb; the other houses condos.

WILFRED E. MANSUR

Claim to Fame: Bangor’s leading architect in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Mansur so dominated the brisk reconstruction of downtown after the Great Fire of 1911 that even today he is largely to credit for its look and feel. Mansur was skilled in various current and developing styles. “If he had lived in a more important place, the consistent quality and versatility of his work would have earned him a national reputation,” Deborah Thompson writes in her architectural history.

History: Mansur started out as a carpenter, first appearing in the city directory as an architect, in 1884. By then, he’d had his first municipal commission, the 1882 Bangor High School. His work over the next decade — in particular the 1891 Richardson Romanesque YMCA — “made his talent so obvious that it no longer seemed necessary or advisable to call upon an architect from elsewhere,” Thompson says. His contributions to the Great Fire of 1911 Historic District include the Graham, Stetson, Sterns, and Nichols blocks.

From left: The 1911 Graham Building, photo courtesy of Rudman Winchell; the 1893 Charles Emerson House, photo courtesy of the Fish Team.

Highlights: The New England Historical Society ranks the 1911 Graham Building, rendered in yellow brick with Romanesque Revival and Beaux Arts details, as Mansur’s best commercial structure. The 1893 Charles Emerson House, on State Street, is an elegant Tudor mansion built for a dry-goods store owner.

JOHN CALVIN STEVENS

Claim to Fame: Maine’s most acclaimed architect, Stevens was a leading designer of Shingle-style homes, characterized by unpainted shingle siding, multiple gable roof lines, broad porches, abundant and varied windows, and, often, towers. Between 1880 and 1940, Stevens designed or altered more than 1,000 houses, commercial buildings, and institutions, in Portland and beyond.

History: Born in Boston and raised in Portland, Stevens joined Francis H. Fassett’s architectural firm straight out of high school, in 1873, rising from apprentice to junior partner in seven years. While managing Fassett’s short-lived Boston branch, he befriended William R. Emerson, the originator of the Shingle style. Upon returning to Portland, Stevens opened his own firm. He used formal styles for business blocks and public buildings, lending them texture with a mix of materials, like brick, glass, stone, terra cotta, and wood. His portfolio includes Portland and Biddeford city halls, public libraries in central and western Maine, waterfront hotels, country clubs, and schools. Stevens led a rich after-hours life as a landscape painter, and he was an enthusiastic cyclist who organized group rides and races. “No other Maine man helped to a greater degree to make wheeling popular,” the Portland Sunday Telegram reported, in 1903.

From left: The Charles S. Homer Jr. Cottage, photographed by Dave Clough; Winslow Homer’s home and studio, photographed by Trent Bell.

Highlights: Stevens designed scores of seaside cottages, including most of the dwellings in Cape Elizabeth’s Delano Park neighborhood; the 1901 gambrel-roofed Charles S. Homer Jr. Cottage on Scarborough’s Prouts Neck is a classic example. In 1884, Winslow Homer enlisted Stevens to convert a carriage house on Prouts Neck into a Shingle-style home and studio. It’s now owned by the Portland Museum of Art, which conducts tours there.

CHARLES G. BRYANT

Claim to Fame: Bryant is responsible for some of the best Greek Revival buildings in Bangor when it was a burgeoning lumber port, but his exploits as a militia officer and expansionist can detract from his professional accomplishments. The first housewright to advertise himself as an architect in Bangor, he courted lumber barons during the 1820s and 1830s, winning their favor not only with his designs but also his leadership in quelling a riot involving loggers and newly arrived Irish immigrants.

History: Bryant learned carpentry from his father, a Belfast shipwright. He enjoyed a robust career in Bangor until the Panic of 1837 financial crisis. A year later, after illegally crossing the international border, in upstate New York, he was arrested along with other members of a paramilitary group whose aim was to annex Canada to the U.S. He escaped and fled to Galveston, in the Republic of Texas, where he resumed his architectural career. A major in the Texas Rangers military force, he was killed in a battle with Lipan Apaches, in 1850.

From left: Bangor House, photographed by John Phelan; the 1837 Cutting-Kent duplex, photo courtesy of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.

Highlights: Bryant’s buildings are striking for their sophistication. “There’s nothing like them anywhere else in Maine,” says Earle G. Shettleworth Jr., who unearthed Bryant’s forgotten past for The Flight of the Grand Eagle: Charles G. Bryant, Maine Architect and Adventurer. His innovative Greek Revivals include the 1837 Cutting-Kent duplex, on Penobscot Street, and the 1831 Nathaniel Hatch House, on Court Street, which has front and back temple façades. He modeled the Bangor House, which introduced luxury lodging to the city, in 1835, after Boston’s Tremont House; today it houses apartments.

EMILY MUIR

Claim to Fame: Despite having no architectural training, Deer Isle artist Emily Muir was a pioneer of modernist design in Maine. She was 57 in 1960, when she offered her first response to a spate of boxy new houses she considered discordant with their untamed coastal setting: her first Crockett Cove spec house was built of native stone and wood and configured to appear like an extension of the craggy granite on which it sat. She went on to build 29 more homes distinguished by simple lines and two full-glass façades — one facing the cove, the other Penobscot Bay. “The house has to fit the site, not dominate it,” Muir explained in her 2002 autobiography, The Time of My Life. “I leave every possible tree, even allowing some to grow through the deck.”

History: Born in Chicago and raised in New York, Muir spent childhood summers in Stonington. After marrying sculptor Bill Muir, in 1928, she designed their modest house above the Deer Island Thoroughfare, as well as their glass-walled studio, a tourist-attracting forerunner to her Crockett Cove cottages. The Muirs were instrumental in relocating the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts to Deer Isle, and Emily, an environmentalist, donated the 98-acre Crockett Cove Woods Preserve to the Nature Conservancy.

From left: The Boat House, photo courtesy of the Island Agency; the Falls at Crockett Cove, photographed by Maura McEvoy.

Highlights: Muir’s cottages are only visible from Crockett Cove. One, dubbed the Boat House, fairly clings to a cliff and operates as an Airbnb. Another, referred to as The Falls at Crockett Cove, is ensconced among spruces and was recently elegantly renovated.

GEORGE M. COOMBS

Claim to Fame: In 1908, Coombs concluded his 37-year architectural career with a flamboyant flourish: Lewiston’s Kora Temple, whose Moorish-inspired onion domes, bulbous arched entryway, and filigree-capped windows are so unlike anything else in Maine that first-time viewers often stop and gape. Coombs’s legacy extends far beyond Sabattus Street, however. His banks, churches, courthouses, factories, schools, and homes are found in 50 communities around the state.

History: As a young man, Coombs worked as a carpenter in his native Brunswick. He learned drafting from Boston architect Frederick Hamilton, then moved to Lewiston, where he collaborated with several architects, eventually settling into a partnership with William H. Stevens. The 1876 Victorian Gothic Odd Fellows Block, on Lisbon Street, is one surviving example of the Stevens & Coombs firm. After Stevens’s death, in 1880, Coombs expanded the office’s geographic and stylistic reach, working in Second Empire, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne styles.

From left: Lewiston’s Kora Temple; the 1889 Charles Cushman House. Photos by Dave Clough.

Highlights: Coombs designed the 1882 Dominican Block, a rare Queen Anne commercial building, in the heart of Lewiston’s Little Canada. His client was the Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul, which used it as a school and social center. Coombs’s residential triumph is the 1889 Charles Cushman House, in Auburn, a Queen Anne uncommonly built of fieldstone. The house is an emblem of LA’s manufacturing heyday: Cushman headed the Cushman-Hollis factory, one of the world’s largest makers of canvas shoes.

CALVIN RYDER

Claim to Fame: In the mid-19th century, when the river ports of Belfast and Winterport were experiencing unprecedented growth, businessmen showed off their wealth by building fancy homes. Ryder, one of Maine’s foremost architects of the Greek Revival style, was often their designer of choice.

History: Orrington-born Ryder’s influences include two contemporaries, Bangor architects Charles H. Pond and Charles G. Bryant. His first known commission, Winterport’s 1833 Union Meeting House, is nearly a replica of Pond’s Gothic Revival Methodist Church built the year before, in Orrington; Ryder’s 1840 Sherburne Sleeper House, in Belfast, uses features, such as its five-bay façade and simple moldings, found in several Bryant homes. Ryder came into his own as a designer, however, and architectural historians believe he is responsible for many more houses than the handful that have been documented. Around 1850, he relocated to Boston, where he worked in partnership with several architects.

From left: The 1842 James P. White House, photographed by James Hogarty; the 1844 Joseph Williamson House, photo courtesy of the Morrow family.

Highlights: Ryder’s masterpiece is one of Belfast’s largest homes, the 1842 James P. White House, built for a prominent businessman (and future mayor and state senator). Its high-style details include an elaborate octagonal cupola, a two-story entrance porch, flush board siding, and abundant carved ornamentation. Another Ryder-designed Belfast mansion, the 1844 Joseph Williamson House, resembles a Greek temple with its columned two-story portico. Ryder’s hand is also found in Bangor, where he designed and built the 1858 William Blake House, one of Maine’s earliest, and finest, Second Empire dwellings.

NICHOLAS CODD

Claim to Fame: Architectural historians know with certainty only one structure designed by Codd — that’s the 1807 St. Patrick’s Church, in Newcastle’s Damariscotta Mills, the oldest surviving Catholic house of worship in New England. They’re confident, however, that Codd is the master behind several Federal residences considered intrinsic to the stately character of Wiscasset and Damariscotta villages.

History: Codd was a housewright who moved from Ireland to Boston, around 1795, and later settled in the Newcastle area’s Irish immigrant community. Little else is known about him; even his birth date is fuzzy. His obituary puts it as 1754; his resident-alien papers say 1762. Mystery surrounds his structures as well; no plans by him have ever been found. But his St. Patrick’s commission connects him to the parish’s organizers, Irishmen James Kavanaugh and Matthew Cottrill, and to other midcoast entrepreneurs, who, historians believe, commissioned him to design their houses in that prosperous era.

From left: the James Kavanaugh House, photo courtesy of Drum and Drum Real Estate; the 1807 Nickels-Sortwell House, photographed by Susan Cole Kelly.

Highlights: “I was blown away the first time I saw the James Kavanaugh House, in Damariscotta Mills,” the best-known residence attributed to Codd, Julie Senk says. Built in 1803, “it sits on a hill as if on a pedestal. Its octagonal cupola seems almost a touch oversized. It has flush board siding, Palladian windows, and other gorgeous Federal details.” Many of these same high-style Codd signatures appear on the 1801 Cottrill House, in Damariscotta, the 1807 Nickels-Sortwell House, in Wiscasset, and the 1806 “Spite House,” which Thomas McCobb built in Phippsburg to out-dazzle the childhood home he lost in a family dispute. In 1925, it was barged to Rockport.

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By Michaela Cavallaro
Photos by Hannah Hoggatt
From the Fall 2023 issue of Maine Homes by Down East

Perched on a vintage metal kitchen stool that appears plucked from a 1950s chemistry lab, Erica Berman declared, “I don’t like new stuff.” The irony, of which she’s fully aware, is that she sits in a light-filled Newcastle home that she and her husband, Alain Ollier, built on 30 acres, in 2014 — a spring chicken by Maine housing-stock standards. But the couple, who previously lived in a 19th-century Paris apartment, went to great lengths to take the shine off the new construction, applying textural clay plaster to the heavily insulated, 12-inch-thick walls; incorporating antiques and red-oak doors and windowsills Ollier crafted from trees harvested on the property; sourcing vintage doorknobs and window latches; and laying pine floorboards salvaged from a nearby teardown. A zinc-topped kitchen island and pulley light over a pair of yard-sale dining tables nod toward Parisian styling.

Clockwise from top left: Euphorbia trigonas, a lemon plant, and whimsical tile from popham design enliven the primary bath; Moroccan cement-tile backsplash from popham design and vintage-inspired vinyl floorcloths create an intriguing constellation in the kitchen, which also features black-granite countertops from Topsham’s Morningstar Stone & Tile; in the kitchen/dining area, reclaimed pine flooring, hand-crafted oak doors and windowsills, a cupboard Berman picked up in Boston during her college years, and yard-sale tables inject warmth.

The couple bought the property in 2012, after moving to the area from Ollier’s native France, where Berman founded a luxury-vacation-rental company. She’d grown up visiting South Bristol and had been enamored of the midcoast ever since. The neglected wooded lot they found offered so much potential that Berman calls it their “lifetime project.” First up: the house they largely designed themselves, prioritizing an open floor plan. “This is where everything happens,” said Ollier, a high-school French and Spanish teacher, gesturing around the airy kitchen/dining/living area. To limit visual clutter, the windows and closets have no trim —“that drove our builder over the edge” — Berman says — and the kitchen- window sashes are set high, allowing for unobstructed views while cooking. Off the living room, a heated sun porch provided safe lodging for guests during the pandemic and its flat roof serves as a second-floor deck.

Upstairs offers two bedrooms, a second full bath, and an office/sitting area — more square footage than the couple needed, due to the design of the first floor. “We wanted the space downstairs,” Ollier says, noting that a substantially smaller upper story would have dictated forms they didn’t like. “You’d have a Saltbox or maybe an A-frame,” he says. However, the extra rooms have come in handy since Berman founded Veggies to Table, a nonprofit farm that grows 85 types of organic produce and flowers that get donated to local food pantries, schools, and summer lunch programs, in 2019. In spring, much of the home becomes a de facto greenhouse, complete with grow lights and a troupe of employees and volunteers traipsing through when it’s time to transplant the seedlings.

Clockwise from top left: Berman’s nonprofit, Veggies to Table, grows organic food and flowers on-site for donation to food pantries, schools, and other organizations across Lincoln County; Ollier and Berman largely designed their cedar-shingled home themselves, incorporating personal details like a porch nook for stacked wood and foundation cladding made from granite excavated during building; the season’s produce bounty often overflows into the home.

The garden the couple planted in their early years here now covers three-quarters of an acre and its bounty sometimes spills over into the downstairs living space, alongside the begonias, Chinese money plants, and massive euphorbia trigonas that thrive in the south-facing kitchen and living room. Over the last few years, they’ve added a cold-storage building, an outdoor kitchen for staff and volunteers, and three raised wooden platforms where long-term volunteers can set up camp.

Still, Berman looks forward to the day when all farm tasks happen outside the cedar-shingled walls of her home, when she can spend more time relaxing in one of the antique Bergère armchairs she had upholstered in soft gray and blue and gaze out past the elm that towers protectively near the house, to the land she and Ollier have cultivated so carefully. “I really wanted to make sure that our farm was not only efficient and productive, but beautiful too,” Berman says. “We take great joy in looking out at it.”

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The Filson x Governor Baxter Reversible Vest costs $495, looks like something Kevin Costner might wear on Yellowstone, and — on my 5-foot-3 frame, anyway — is shockingly heavy. When I try one on at Pejepscot Purchase, Topsham’s pleasantly cluttered nostalgic-outerwear emporium, it’s like sliding into my burliest winter coat: the vest feels as sturdy as armor, as comforting as a weighted blanket.

Phinney Baxter White, who designed the vest and runs the shop, is the great-great-grandnephew of Percival Baxter, Maine’s governor from 1921 to 1925 and an avid outdoorsman who spent more than 30 years acquiring and donating the Katahdin highlands now protected as Baxter State Park. When White launched a side hustle, back in 2012, designing rugged, outdoor-friendly dog beds, he named his brand after the uncle he idolizes (who loved his Irish setters). Today, Governor Baxter turns out small runs of outdoor apparel and other goods inspired by the American-made outerwear the 57-year-old White remembers growing up with — particularly old-school L.L.Bean goods. Pejepscot Purchase, which he opened last year, is filled with packs, jackets, pocket knives, and other “sturdy goods” — some that White has designed, much that he’s collected — that wouldn’t look out of place in one of L.L.’s earliest catalogs. “I look in antique stores and at vintage clothing for inspiration,” he says. “I grew up around these things, and they have the aesthetic that I want to be associated with.”

White’s latest collaborative Filson vest. “It’s rugged outerwear, but it has rustic elegance,” he says. “My products are engineered for the elements and to be durable but also cool looking and stylish in their own way.”

Of late, White has been collaborating with Seattle-based Filson, maker, for more than a century, of famously durable workwear for miners, loggers, and ranchers — and, more recently, the style-conscious urbanites who enjoy dressing like them. White’s done two vests with the heritage brand, which started out selling his Governor Baxter dog beds. The most recent was a run of 50 zippered, reversible vests, with pockets on both sides, sewed by a Maine sailmaker. One side is made with Filson’s waterproof waxed canvas (hence the heft), the other with White’s signature material: World War II–era military blankets, which he sources from flea markets and online sellers, giving all of his Governor Baxter vests both warmth and historic character. 

“There’s an element of mystery to each blanket,” he says. “Was this blanket in Europe? Or the Pacific theater?” All but one of the Filson x Governor Baxter Reversible Vests sold within 24 hours. White kept one for display in his shop; as of this writing, the Filson website touts a single vest still in stock (size small, in teal).

Gear and trinkets at Pejepscot Purchase look like they were salvaged from one of Percival Baxter’s mid-century Katahdin trips.

Governor Baxter products don’t come cheap — a dog bed costs $500, an external-frame pack with vintage-blanket tarpaulin sets you back $975 —  but then neither do the materials White uses: waxed-cotton canvas, fluffy kapok fill, organic silk. Other than thread he uses to stitch things together (made partly with polyester), he relies only on all-natural fabrics. “Cotton and wool are the original performance fabrics,” he says. “All this extra synthetic stuff companies use is overkill.” 

Since hanging his shingle at Pejepscot Purchase, White’s left a full-time job in retail design. He’s focusing these days on custom vest orders, refining his mitten pattern, and a jacket design he has percolating. He’d love to do another collab with Filson. But whatever his next project, he says, what won’t change is his commitment to a throwback aesthetic and time-tested materials. “I think they’re the future,” he says.

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The homemade signs taped above Jon Wallace’s computer suggest he’s prone to obsession: Learn When to Quit! and Avoid Pain!!! Get Off the Computer NOW! Wallace, however, doesn’t seem to have learned much about quitting. A retired high-school science teacher and a self-proclaimed “science nerd,” his latest preoccupation has him tracking down flecks of space dust that perpetually and imperceptibly filter down from the heavens. “See that little black dot on the white piece of paper?” he asks, sitting in his basement workshop, in Durham, which he keeps at a balmy temperature for the sake of his bug zoo (occasionally, in one of his many terrariums, something rustles or chirps). The dot he’s pointing at is about the size of a sewing pin’s head. “This,” Wallace says, “is a really big micrometeorite.”

Our solar system is full of hunks of mineral and metal, whirling around the sun like hell-bent race-car drivers circling a track. When the orbits of those small, craggy rocks intersect with a planet, they crash through the atmosphere at speeds between 25,000 and 150,000 miles per hour, burning up along the way, becoming what we call a meteor or, more commonly, a shooting star. Many meteors completely melt before they reach the ground, but the ones that make it, reduced in size from the heat, are known as meteorites. 

Meteors can be quite large — scientists have suggested that one seen blazing across Maine in 2016, its bright light visible as far away as Pennsylvania and parts of Canada, may have been five feet across when it hit the atmosphere (although even with a $20,000 reward offered by Bethel’s Maine Mineral & Gem Museum, nobody has found any part of it). Micrometeorites are meteors’ tiniest progeny, maybe the width of a few human hairs, and they’re everywhere. Tens of thousands of tons of them hit Earth every year, carrying discrete bits of information about the composition of the solar system, but hardly anyone is looking for them.

Wallace’s best guess is that, worldwide, a little more than 100 people are similarly dedicated to seeking micrometeorites. In his case, a 2017 book, In Search of Stardust, by Norwegian citizen-scientist Jon Larsen, got him hooked. Wallace made his first find in 2018, in the gutters on his home — gutters, as well as flat roofs, have become some of his favorite hunting grounds. He sorted and dried what he found, then used sieves and magnets (since space dust is heavy on metals) to further refine his piles. After that, he took pictures of his findings using microscopic photography. Still learning the ropes, he emailed the images to Larsen. “The first couple were like no, no, no, no, that’s not it,” Wallace recalls. It took him 70 hours of peering through the microscope until Larsen finally confirmed one micrometeorite. 

Since then, Wallace has swept up piles of grime from the roof of a middle school, a college athletic complex, and a Portland coffee shop, among other sites. He took out an insurance policy to cover any potential injury from his searching, mostly to assuage building owners’ concerns over liability. He’s also given talks to astronomy groups around the region, and he’s trained a handful of other Mainers to look for micrometeorites, although none of them have been overly inclined to stick with it. This fall, a display at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum will include some of his specimens.

Recently, Wallace’s collection of micrometeorites hit 200 specimens. Under his microscope, bits of nondescript grit transform into otherworldly gemstones — shiny, opaque, deeply textured. “Every one is different,” he says. “It’s like a snowflake. Every time you find one, it’s something nobody’s ever seen before, from out there.” 

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When the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association planted its first trees in the Maine Heritage Orchard, in 2014, they were all apples — nary a pear to be found. But pears were once common on Maine homesteads. By the 1800s, probably a couple of dozen varieties had arrived from Europe, just like apples. So, a year into their project, the Heritage Orchard’s managers started grafting twigs, from the USDA National Clonal Germplasm Repository, of pear trees traditionally grown in Maine. Between the orchard and MOFGA’s neighboring fairgrounds, in Unity, 16 varieties have taken root, and staff finally got to bite into some of the fruit last fall. Like apples, pears can be eaten fresh, used in cooking, or pressed and fermented. Orchard assistant Lauren Cormier thinks of a great pear as “the ultimate dessert,” with an almost buttery texture and a bright sweetness. But apples fare better in northern climes, and, over time, heirloom pears petered out. Now, they’re Cormier’s white whale — she scours the state for unidentified heirlooms that might have survived the centuries. “We have yet to actually find some,” she says, “but it’s possible those trees still exist.” 

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