Savage beauty Northeast Harbor native was MDI’s most prolific architect

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More than painting, literature or music, the soul of an era is defined by its most social art – its architecture.

The Greeks had their temples, the Egyptians their pyramids, and turn-of-the-century architect Fred Savage lent his soul to the gilded age of Mount Desert Island.

With his weathered, shingle-style “cottages” and airy porches, Savage created seasonal homes that were elegant in style but complemented the wild scenery. The houses fit into the landscape and didn’t detract from the majesty of the Somes Sound fjord or the subtle beauty of the fog rolling over the Porcupines isles.

“If you interpret the architecture of a time and place, you can learn a great deal about its values, the things that aren’t spoken,” architectural historian John Bryan says. “Architectural history is very much a focus on using the building as a lens through which to understand the psychological and artistic life of the people who used it.”

Bryan, a longtime summer resident of Swans Island and a professor at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, is writing a book that uses Savage and his work to tell the story of Mount Desert Island’s wealthy rusticators and their impact on American society at the turn of the last century. Princeton Architectural Press is publishing Bryan’s book, which is due out in 2003.

A Northeast Harbor native, Savage was the most prolific architect to ever work on MDI, with hundreds of summer cottage-mansions and luxury hotels to his credit.

At a time when islanders didn’t mix with the upper crust, Savage also was one of the few of his time who bridged the disparate cultures of the locals and the summer people, according to Jaylene Roths, director of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society.

Yet, this architect who gave Bar Harbor the Breakwater and Northeast Harbor the Asticou Inn is little known nowadays. And with new money being flashed around the island, some of his creations are being razed to make way for trophy mansions by the sea.

But let’s begin at the beginning.

Fred Savage was born while America was just starting the Civil War. Descended on both sides from colonial families, he was truly a native son of MDI. He dabbled in fishing and carpentry before, but in a happy twist of fate was “discovered” by prominent Boston architect Robert Swain Peabody.

According to local lore, Savage was among the builders working on a vacation cottage for one of the island’s first summer residents, Harvard president Charles Eliot, in 1881. Eliot had purchased the land for his summer home from Savage’s sea-captain father and just happened to introduce the boy to his brother-in-law who had designed the house.

Peabody saw something promising in Savage and whisked him off to the city, where he spent several years as an apprentice, learning the peculiar combination of art and enterprise that is architecture.

“Peabody took him to Boston, cleaned him up and gave him a coat and tie – that’s where it started,” Bryan said.

By 1887, Savage had married and set up shop in his hometown of Northeast Harbor. With his Boston connections, the architect soon became known in the thriving summer colony that had sprung up while he was away.

Before Savage came on the scene, local architects were unheard of. Most wealthy visitors brought their city architects north to create summer cottages. But once his reputation became known in the right circles, Savage was involved with more than 80 percent of the summer houses built on the island, according to Bryan.

“He was able to make it purely on talent,” Roths says.

His influence was concentrated on MDI, but Savage also worked for clients on Islesboro, in Machias and Bangor, and as far afield as Michigan and California.

More than 250 projects have been catalogued, running the gamut from grand summer homes to the old Bar Harbor High School, which now serves as Bar Harbor’s municipal building, said Northeast Harbor librarian Bob Pyle, a historian in his own right.

“You can swing a rock on a string and hit dozens of his places,” Pyle says.

It didn’t matter to Savage if he was designing a summer cottage for the hoity-toity or an outhouse for his neighbor – he had no pretension, according to the librarian.

Perhaps it was this quality that opened up the doors of old society to Savage despite his lack of pedigree.

“I don’t think he was too concerned with his social position, and I think that’s why he made it,” Roths says. “He just went where he pleased, did what he wanted to do.”

In his personal affairs, too, Savage went his own way, scandalizing his Victorian family with a divorce and a quick second marriage to his secretary.

“His work was respected, his behavior was not,” Pyle says.

In the 1890s, Savage moved away from his family to start anew in Bar Harbor, where he partnered with architect Milton Stratton and continued his fast-paced design work.

Most of Savage’s residential work was done in the shingle style, a trend that first emerged during the centennial of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock and echoed the shape of their rustic homes, Bryan said.

Savage didn’t create the shingle style, but his ability to tweak the king of cottage forms – incorporating the elaborate porches of Queen Anne or the columns of Greek Revival into cottages – made his work popular among the socially ambitious of Bar Harbor’s summer colony.

“Bar Harbor, right from the beginning, was different. It was much more transient. there was less old Boston money, less old New York and Philadelphia money. It was, in a word, fussier, and Savage responded to that,” Bryan said.

Breakwater, a home on Bar Harbor’s Shore Path that is now called Atlantique, is the most elaborate Savage design that stands to day. The gigantic Tudor-style home is owned by Bob and Catherine Barrett of Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, Fla..

A few miles away on Somes Sound, Texas businessman Charles Butt has a subtler Savage house, a shingle-style mansion called Roscerne.

“I’m really in love with Savage’s work,” said Butt, who is financing Bryan’s book.

“The shingle-style houses are approachable,” he said. “They’re warm and they’re elegant and funky at the same time.”

This admiring host of homeowners, however, is a new phenomenon. A decade ago, almost no one knew the name Fred Savage.

“It wasn’t that long ago that he died [in 1924], and it didn’t take them long to forget him,” Roths says. “His work was attributed to all kinds of well-known architects.”

A Savage renaissance began in 1985 when a Bar Harbor man named Lewis Gerrish surprised local historians by revealing hundreds of Savage’s drawings – proof that the hometown boy had designed many of the island’s most valuable houses.

Pyle recalled his surprise when Gerrish told the story of purchasing Savage’s own home and saving the piles of blueprints that littered the basement until they could be preserved properly. Hundreds of supposedly nonexistent drawings sat on the floor, sealed up in white plastic garbage bags. When they were opened, Pyle found drawings scrawled on bits of paper bag, detailed watercolor renderings made on fine linen, and even a 12-foot-long scroll showing a portico column drawn to scale.

Half the drawings now reside at the Northeast Harbor library, the other half at Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor.

After Pyle, Roths and the Maine Historic Preservation Commission mounted an exhibit of the drawings, homeowners, too, were shocked.

“People were devastated that their house was designed by this dinky little small-town guy,” Pyle said.

Some, such as Butt and the Barretts, embraced their homes’ unique stories. Others haven’t spoken to Pyle since.

But Pyle and other preservationists are very serious when they talk about a new breed of wealthy people who have purchased a handful of Savage homes and leveled them to make way for bigger, newer places.

Education about the rich architectural history on MDI may be the only defense, Pyle said.

“We’re dealing with something that we’ve never seen before, people who believe the place sprang into being when they crossed the bridge,” he said.