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By Root 416 0

that had been delivered on trucks, chalets, teepees and even a yurt. I paid close attention to the barns, my long-standing fascination, and old public buildings such as the Odd Fellows Hall, the Grange and a wood-framed structure in North Lovell that had been converted into a library. I spent the better part of an hour one morning looking over a vacant wood building that had once been a dry goods store, examining its exterior trim, cornices and lintels. I also found a house, down near Great Brook, that had once been Stoneham’s schoolhouse. It had been moved there decades ago from another location in town to be closer to where most of the children lived.

This moving of buildings was common in town in the nineteenth century—people moved houses and barns rather than build new ones, a testament to both their frugality and their skills as builders. The buildings—barns, houses, churches, schools—were moved in winter, typically, when they could be pulled on runners over the snow. Sometimes they were moved for miles. A house or barn moving was a big event, and lots of people turned out for the fun. Long strings of oxen were employed—both ahead of and behind the structure. The animals in front pulled it forward; the animals behind kept it from rushing down the snowy hill. During one move in nearby Lovell, a barn got hung up and blocked the road. The farmer simply opened the doors front and back and let the traffic pass through. There were so many of these movings that I have to wonder if it ever happened that a line of oxen pulling a barn had to stop at an intersection to let another line hauling a house pass by.

My drive-around made it clear that the oldest houses in town were built with the most craftsmanship, and they also seemed to best fit their settings. Of course, this made sense: the best home sites were the first ones taken. I could not help but also notice the decline, over time, in the appearance of the town’s housing stock. The successors to the people who had built sturdy, pleasing homes of oak and pine on granite foundations—the same people who had evolved the connected architecture of big house, little house, backhouse and barn—now often occupied factory-built boxes of plastic, vinyl and aluminum. This is an observation, not criticism: my neighbors live in what they can afford, and what is available to them. The story of the deterioration in housing here is one piece, I assume, of the more general slide of the entire nation away from an expectation, regardless of wealth, of craftsmanship and good native materials.

On the older homes, the predominant siding material was clapboards, almost always painted white, and the old seasonal cottages and camps near the lake employed a beveled siding of pine boards, almost always painted green, which appealed to me. It struck me as pleasing, practical and inexpensive. It was this style that I settled on, though I decided I would oil rather than paint them. Paul had recommended a mix of linseed oil and turpentine. It had worked wonders, he said, on preserving wooden ladders.

Billy and I made a trip in his pickup truck to the Lovell Lumber Co., which sawed and milled the siding boards that I liked. It was at the south end of Lovell, on the Kezar River, near the remains of an old water-powered mill. The log yard at Lovell Lumber was piled high with big pine logs that had been cut and hauled from throughout the Saco River valley, which is about as close as one gets to the perfect environment for growing white pine—well-drained sandy gravel soil, adequate rainfall and cold winters. Many of the logs in the yard were three feet in diameter. They smelled of pitch and faintly of licorice, and they made an impressive sight stacked ten and twenty feet high. Still, these logs were pygmies compared to the logs that came from trees that had once grown in this part of Maine. The white pines of the old forest of what is now middle New England were giants. Their bases were bigger around than the columns of the Parthenon, they soared more than two hundred feet into the air and they occurred