Mount Desert Island.(Books about antiques)(Maine Cottages: Fred L. Savage and the Architecture of Mount Desert )(Book review)

It is fitting that Fred Lincoln Savage of Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine, should have shaped the island's architecture. Starting as a carpenter in his hometown, he designed some three hundred houses, most of them on the island, and renovated or supervised work on many more. His great-grandfather John Savage had emigrated from Glasgow to the American colonies in 1770, settling on Mount Desert in 1797 or 1798. The family prospered, chopping wood for export in the winter and engaging in coastal shipping during the summer. Fred's father, Augustus Chase Savage, began taking in summer boarders in their Northeast Harbor house in the late 1860s. These off-islanders, many of them artists, were known as rusticators, perhaps because they were peculiar enough to want to rough it on what was still a sparsely settled and truly rustic island. As John M. Bryan, the author of this book, writes: "Today we take pleasure in undeveloped and rugged landscapes. The early settlers, however, saw things differently, and their point of view was shaped by more than practical difficulties. The colonists typically regarded wilderness from a biblical perspective that defined the natural setting as an opponent, a state of chaos to be conquered, put in order, and made fruitful."

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The most famous of the artistic rusticators were Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, champions of the sublime wherever they found it, who were enraptured by the wildness of Mount Desert. They were reinforced in print by William Cullen Bryant, whom the author calls "the preeminent poet of the American landscape." The establishment of a regular ferry service between Bar Harbor and the mainland during the 1870s regularized the flow of tourists, who had been trickling in since the 1840s.

Fred Savage learned his craft in the Boston office of the architects Peabody and Stearns during the 1880s. There he was exposed to the obliging eclecticism practiced by the firm, which, according to the architectural historian Wheaton Arnold Holden, "had no compunctions about designing houses in the Queen Anne style one day and in the Renaissance style the next." Savage was a retentive pupil because during his career he sampled all the revival styles while favoring the shingle style that seems to grow out of the wooded slopes of the island.

Among the virtues of sheathing a New England house with shingles was their availability and the fact that they could be sawn from small diameter second growth timber. Typically they were made of white cedar, which resisted rot and needed no protective finish. Overlapping as they did, they allowed these unheated summer houses to expand and contract during freeze and thaw.