David and Louisa Surprenant and their five children are the first new blood in the aging lakeside community of Chesuncook Village since anyone can remember.

The handful of homes scattered along Chesuncook Lake have always been passed down from generation to generation. Now, they’re increasingly being transformed to summer cabins as grown children flee the stillness of rural Maine.

But when the young Massachusetts family bought the historic Chesuncook Lake House three years ago, the village population increased 300 percent to 12 souls.

And the Surprenant kids, who range in age from 4 to 12, changed its character – breaking the stillness and building friendships with retired neighbors who fondly remember raising their own families here decades ago.

“The village hasn’t been so quiet since we moved in,” Louisa Surprenant said.

The tiny village is located on the northwestern shore of Chesuncook Lake, a narrow man-made body of water that sprawls 22 miles through the heart of Piscataquis County, incorporating the West Branch of the Penobscot River.

Chesuncook Village represents one of the oddities in Maine’s 2000 Census data. While many small rural communities are getting smaller as young people pack up and leave, some of the state’s most remote places, especially in its unorganized territories, are growing, sometimes dramatically, as people seek out lower land costs, reduced taxes – and most importantly for the Surprenants – an escape from urban life. The family lived 40 miles from Providence, in southern Massachusetts.

To reach their lakeside home today takes a 40-mile drive from Millinocket, venturing deep into the woods, where traffic means pulp trucks and tourists’ SUVs en route to Baxter State Park idling along the road to watch moose feeding in the swamps.

Leave the car behind at the Allagash Gateway Campground at Chesuncook’s south end, and from there, make a 17-mile trip by speedboat or canoe to reach T5 R13 and the Chesuncook Lake House.

And that’s the easy route.

For a challenge, you could drive 90 minutes from Millinocket on rough dirt roads to cross Chesuncook by boat at Umbazooksus Stream, or travel north from Greenville on logging trails until the road disappears and you must hike or snowmobile the final four miles.

No matter how you slice it, David and Louisa Surprenant have to travel at least two hours to pick up a quart of milk.

But as she simmers soup and bakes bread for sixteen, including inn guests, in the cozy kitchen of her circa 1864 farmhouse, Louisa has no regrets.

“It’s a different kind of stress here – it’s not like the city when you have a 2 o’clock appointment and you have to get there and it doesn’t matter if it’s raining or if there’s a big traffic jam,” she said. “We set our own pace.”

In the early 1990s, David visited an old family cabin in Chesuncook Village that he had inherited with other relatives. He brought Louisa and their children back a few years later to stay at the more spacious Chesuncook Lake House, and the couple fell in love with the peaceful little settlement.

The Surprenants were living in David’s hometown of Mattapoisett, Mass., a seaside community just a few miles from New Bedford, where Louisa was raised.

“It was a pretty big town, and it was getting bigger, with people from Boston moving in,” Surprenant said. “It used to be a quiet place where everybody knew everybody.”

So when the elderly woman who owned the historic inn lost her husband and decided to sell, the Surprenants jumped headfirst into the innkeeping business.

David sold his automotive parts manufacturing business and found a buyer for their home. Between the two, the family was able to raise enough cash to meet the inn’s asking price.

Its four rooms can sleep 10 people, and with cross-country skiers in the winter and summer vacationers, Louisa has adjusted to feeding as many as 20 people at each meal.

In a throwback to another generation, Louisa and the children gather wild strawberries and apples, and harvest seasonal produce from a gigantic garden. The pantry and freezer burst with homemade jams, jellies, applesauce and canned goods.

“Sometimes we’ll eat green beans for three days in a row – you have to be self-sufficient when you’re out here,” she said.

The monthly grocery shopping trip to the nearest store in Millinocket is an all-day affair, including a rare meal out at McDonald’s or the Chinese restaurant, and picking up UPS packages from a local dentist who offered his office as drop-off point.

The Surprenants’ giant basement freezer typically holds 6 gallons of milk and more than 50 pounds of meat. Frozen foods can’t survive the journey in summer temperatures, so the Surprenants recently bought an ice cream maker. Baked goods don’t keep, so Louisa and the girls make their own.

Sometimes baking or pricing groceries is incorporated into the day’s lessons as Surprenant kids – Alyssa, 12, Erin, 10, Zachary, 8, Jake, 6, and Mitchell, 4 – attend school by the wood stove in the kitchen.

Although they made the move to shelter their children from city influences, home schooling was an afterthought for the Surprenants.

“I think it was July by the time it finally hit me – I’m actually going to have to teach these kids,” Louisa said.

The state pays for a curriculum, and Louisa guides the children as they work independently. The older children attended a private Catholic school in Massachusetts, but they’ve adjusted well to home schooling, she said.

Zach said he liked regular school better because his mother makes him stay on task. The others shrugged, saying that home schooling is fine; it’s still school, after all. Erin said that she misses her cousins.

Family and friends visit regularly, and some of their neighbors have become extra grandparents, taking Zach fishing, and teaching Alyssa to play card games. But the Surprenants are the only children living in a two-hour radius.

“A lot of people come in and say, ‘What about socialization?’ Well, I run an inn,” Louisa said with a gesture of frustration. “There are always people around, and they have each other.”

Last summer, a guest taught Zach to kayak, and just a few weeks ago, a trio of young girls spent their visit baking in the kitchen with Erin.

“I think this is the best place for them to grow up right now – they can be kids here,” Louisa said. “I want my little kids to be little kids a little bit longer. I don’t know if it’s the way we were brought up, but family is the most important thing. For us it was like, we’re doing this for the family.”

“There’s zero crime to speak of – that’s the best part,” her husband said.

Their words tumbling over each other, Erin talks about leaping off rooftops into deep snow last winter, fishing off the dock and swimming on a sandy beach, while Zach identifies all the interesting places to play on the family’s 7 acres.

“You can go bike riding everywhere,” he said. “Before, I had to stay in the yard.”

“They’ve got so much to do up here – there are forts everywhere, swings everywhere,” their mom added. “There aren’t any couch potatoes here.”

The Surprenants do have a television, powered by the same diesel generator that fuels their lights and pumps the water from their well. They use a cellphone whenever the signal is able to blow the 60 miles across the lake to the nearest communications tower, and they’re online, David Surprenant said.

Fourteen cords of wood were required to heat the sprawling house last winter – an improvement since David added modern insulation.

In fact, replacing the home’s infrastructure has kept him busy since the family moved in. Now, he’s refurbishing four more rooms on the inn’s third floor, and planning to build several small guest cabins to meet demand. But no more than three or four cabins, Louisa cautions.

“We’re not going to greatly expand, because we don’t want a lot of people here,” she said. “We like to stay in our own little corner of the woods.”