Maine Antique Digest, April 2017

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Maine Antique Digest, April 2017 15-A
The Story of a Shingle-Style House with Secrets
by Jeanne Schinto
Photos courtesy Jane Goodrich
The House at Lobster Cove
by Jane Goodrich
Benna Books, an imprint of Applewood Books, 2017, 388 pages, soft-
bound, $24.95. To order, see the website
The-House-at-Lobster-Cove-P6380.aspx) or visit your local bookseller.
“The construction of Kragsyde began with a season
of stones,” Jane Goodrich writes in her enthrall-
ing first novel, The House at Lobster Cove, a fictional-
ized biography of George Nixon Black Jr. (1842-1928),
owner of the formidable late 19th-century house of the
book’s title—an actual place. “There is not a man in New
England who does not know about stones,” Goodrich’s
narrator declares. Driving along New England’s back
roads, many of us invariably admire the picturesque
beauty of the old walls made from stones that men long
ago wrested from the earth and piled up to mark the
boundaries of property. The Boston architectural firm
that designed the house at Lobster Cove in Manches-
ter-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts, “counted on the bounty
of such stones” when drawing up plans for Kragsyde’s
foundation. But these “breakers of backs and plows”
are something to be reckoned with if one wants merely
to farm. As the narrator understates it,
New England’s stones “sent more than
one man west.”
The design for Kragsyde, a shin-
gle-style summer “cottage,” was drawn
in 1882 by Peabody & Stearns. Built
between 1883 and 1885 for Black,
bachelor heir to a fortune from his
father’s Boston real-estate deals and a
grandfather’s trade in Maine lumber, it
was situated on the edge of a six-acre
parcel of land with a 70-foot cliff over-
looking the Atlantic. The exact loca-
tion was a peninsula called Smith’s
Point, but those who go in search of
it, as Goodrich once did, will be disap-
pointed. The house was demolished in
1929, shortly after Black’s death.
Victorian Gothic novels often end
with a house in flames. Even some
contemporary novels do. (Spoiler alert:
A fire concludes Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank [2007],
which recounts Frank Lloyd Wright’s extramarital affair
with Mamah Borthwick.) Kragsyde, however, ends with
the modern version of a conflagration, a teardown. It was
dismantled by a crew that salvaged what could be sold
for reuse during the Great Depression.
Then, in 1955, Vincent Scully, an architectural histo-
rian and Yale professor, published The Shingle Style and
the Stick Style, a book that metaphorically resurrected
Kragsyde and made an icon of it. Posthumously chris-
tening it “a masterpiece,” Scully wrote that “Peabody &
Stearns never again, to my knowledge, created a house of
such quality.” Architecture apprentices have been study-
ing the house’s plans and its widely reproduced images
ever since.
As “barely a teenager” growing up in Vermont in the
late 1970s, Goodrich came across Scully’s book in her
father’s library. For reasons she doesn’t fully understand,
she was captivated by Kragsyde and “its romantic perch
above the sea.” She clipped its photograph from the book
and pasted it into a scrapbook. Seven years later, as a col-
lege sophomore, she happened upon the same book, and
just like that, she and her husband-to-be, James Beyor,
decided to build a replica of it. Beyor, a master builder
by trade, and Goodrich, who in 1986 cofounded Saturn
Press, recognized as a pioneer in the resurgence of let-
terpress craft printing, did exactly what they said they
would do, on Swan’s Island, Maine. Working nights and
on weekends for years, they re-created with their own
hands all of Kragsyde’s 13 rooms, 13 fireplaces, four
chimneys, and two piazzas, and sheathed it all in 130,000
square feet of the kind of shingles that prompted Scully
to give the shingle style its name.
Surely it’s a unique situation for a novelist to live in
a replica of a central setting of her historical novel. But
I hasten to add that this book is about much more than
the building of a summer house by a rich Bostonian (the
city’s biggest taxpayer in his day). It’s the story of a
man’s life, including the two loves of that life: his Har-
vard friend Francis “Frank” Crowninshield (1843-1866),
who survived multiple battles of the Civil War but died of
consumption; and his eventual romantic partner, Charles
Brooks Pitman (1860-1918), a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology dropout who met Black while working on
the surveying crew of a house being built near Kragsyde.
And although it is fiction, employing imagined dialogue,
feelings, and scenarios, it is, as Goodrich explains in her
afterword, “based on ten thousand facts.”
Black, known to his family as Nixon to distinguish
him from his father, was born in Ellsworth, Maine. In the
1820s, his paternal grandfather, Colonel John Black (b.
1780), built a house there, one still standing and open to
the public for tours. Well known to
those who show or attend the Ells-
worth Antiques Show every August,
where Goodrich begins her tale,
and immediately we know we are
in the hands of an accomplished
storyteller capable of delineating
the web of accurate details required
of all successful historical novel-
ists. In Goodrich’s case, these range
from the medicines in an apothe-
cary shop, “where leeches could
be seen wriggling” in a glass jar,
to the habits of lumberjacks, who
emerge from the Maine woods in
spring and head straight for the den-
tist “with toothaches they’d nursed
all winter.” Indeed, Goodrich’s
imagination brings to life all sorts
of people, things, and milieus. These include a scowl-
ing Irish housemaid with her fists on her hips, the Bos-
ton Brahmin class’s “complex catalog of cousinship,”
the decor of a summer house (“gifts from houseguests,
unwanted prints, duplicates of articles not needed in win-
ter homes”), the way of life in a one-room schoolhouse
with students aged five to 15 and a teacher well over her
head, and the gait of a flea-bitten stray dog that Nixon as
a boy cannot resist bringing home although he knows his
father will disapprove.
Of Nixon’s adoption of that dog, the novel’s narra-
tor observes, “Some determinations cannot be fought
against.” It’s a theme reprised throughout the novel as
Nixon acknowledges, accepts, and finally acts on the nat-
ural inclinations of his sexual preference.
Secrets are another recurrent theme here. Frank Crown-
inshield’s consumption is long hidden from his family;
Nixon’s homosexuality is fully closeted for decades; and
Kragsyde itself seems to Nixon like a receptacle of that
secret. “Underneath it all Nixon imagined the cave,” the
narrator says. “Cool and dripping, filled with seaweed and
shells, feathers and cast-up stones. Holed out in the cliff
below, it was like a secret.” Charles Brooks Pitman, on his
first visit to Kragsyde, has a similar thought, feeling “as
though he were stepping inside Nixon himself, a man still
mysterious, silent, with all his treasures hidden.”
In time Nixon and Pitman, 18 years apart in age,
moved in together. When they weren’t living at Kragsyde
or traveling, they resided at Nixon’s Boston townhouse,
at 57 Beacon Street on Beacon Hill. (Designed by
Ephraim Marsh in 1819 and still standing, it may have
been one of the first houses built on Beacon Street with a
bathroom, according to the AIA Guide to Boston.) Nixon
didn’t appreciate Woodlawn, but Pitman did. On a visit
there, he reveled in the “untouched trove...passed down
from Nixon’s grandparents, true antiques of the time of
the Revolutionary War and the country’s early history.”
Nixon had grown up with art and artifacts, including a
miniature of George Washington. David Cobb (1748-
1830), one of Washington’s generals, was Nixon’s
great-grandfather. But Pitman was the collector half
of this couple—an enthusiastic participant in an initial
phase of the Colonial revival.
As does PBS’s Downton Abbey, The House at Lobster
Cove uses real-world events as its backdrops: the Civil
War, the Great Boston Fire of 1872, an anti-Irish immi-
grant atrocity that took place in Ellsworth in the 1850s.
Also as does the TV series, it sometimes edges up close
to melodrama. But moments of heightened emotion are
an expected and enjoyable part of authentic mid-19th-
to early 20th-century historical fiction, and Goodrich
delivers that reading experience along with cinematic
descriptions of interiors and reports on the doings of
social climbers, snobs, servants, and relatives whose
presumed inheritances have been thwarted. Readers will
also undoubtedly enjoy the cameo roles written for many
cultural figures of the period, e.g., Laura Coombs Hills,
John La Farge, Frank Weston Benson, William Sumner
Appleton, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Oscar Wilde.
Of Gardner after the deaths of both her husband and
her only child, the narrator notes: “Calling on a vast and
gritty courage she must have found within herself, she
became a world traveler, an astute collector, and the mis-
tress of a salon of fascinating individuals who were inor-
dinately handsome, unmarried men whom Nixon recog-
nized immediately.” As for Wilde, there is this exchange
between Nixon and his sister Agnes. She: “What exactly
is Oscar Wilde famous for?” He: “For being himself....”
Over the many years it took for Goodrich to research
and write her book, she naturally wondered if her sub-
ject would have approved of her interpretation of his life
and her bringing him and his passions into the light. She
found her answer in his will, which not only left nearly
everything to Pitman but named him as his “lifelong
friend” and recognized “the steadfast and faithful friend-
ship which existed between us for many years....” (Alas,
since Pitman predeceased Nixon, both Kragsyde and
the Beacon Street house went to Pitman’s brother Har-
old, who promptly sold each property.) There was also a
$25,000 bequest to Francis Crowninshield (1872-1947),
namesake nephew of Nixon’s Harvard friend and first
crush. Editor of Vanity Fair, the younger Frank never
knew why he was the beneficiary of “an old Boston
philanthropist” he’d never met. As the narrator tells it,
he suspected Nixon had been an admirer of the magazine
but then dismissed that idea, because Nixon hadn’t been
a subscriber. OK, then maybe he was a friend of his par-
ents. But if that were the case, why weren’t his siblings
also named in the will? “What Frank did not know was
that he merely had the right name.”
One might suppose that, besides the will, Goodrich
had a wealth of other primary materials to draw from,
but when Nixon died he left fewer than a dozen pieces of
correspondence, all involving business matters. She did,
however, find many other clues to the man in that same
revealing will, as well as in the far-flung letters, diaries,
and photographs of his “supporting cast” that took her to
numerous archives and libraries here and abroad. Those
cast members included, of course, Pitman, whose sense
of humor extended to his own will, in which he left to
Nixon a “half-interest in a four-poster bed.”
That very four-poster bed is one of Goodrich’s 10,000
facts. It can be seen at Woodlawn in Ellsworth, Maine,
along with many of the other props used in the “staging”
of this tour de force.
Kragsyde, Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts.
The drawing on the cover of The House at Lobster Cove
is a quick sketch done by one of Kragsyde’s architects,
Robert Swain Peabody, circa 1885. It is housed in the files
of Boston Architectural College, unidentified, but Jane
Goodrich is more than confident that it’s Kragsyde.
The book’s publication date is May 1.
Partial view of Kragsyde II, Swan’s
Island, Maine, home of the author
Jane Goodrich. Photo by Bret
Morgan ).