Mount Desert Island: Shaped by Nature

Today, in the early 21st century, we exist in an era of mass production and global sources of readily available building materials. Under these conditions, it is usually economically and temporally more expedient to forego recycling, moving, and reincarnating our older structures. An adept and skilled backhoe operator can efficiently dismantle a 1,500 square foot house and put its mangled pieces in a dumpster to be hauled off in a matter of a few hours. Continually evolving modern building techniques and materials such as modular construction or patterned, pre-sealed ply-woods along with power assembly tools including portable saws and nail guns make a compelling argument to just tear down and haul off the older buildings when they near functional obsolescence and replace them with all new, higher tech and more energy efficient materials and structures.

The time value of money comes into play in today’s world in a way it probably did not in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, many individuals and businesses in our year-round Mount Desert Island communities must finance the majority of the cost of the construction and purchase of their homes and businesses. Many lenders require adherence to standardized construction timelines and methods to protect their borrowers and collateral – these standards help ensure a successfully completed and readily useable and marketable product. It is cheaper and more efficient monetarily to build new rather than try to save or re-use the old because it is faster to do so.

Will modern standardized building practices cause our communities to more quickly change their visual character than they did in the past and cause our Mount Desert Island communities in particular to have a more homogeneous appearance? Or, will some people in our communities still have enough time and interest to make the physical and temporal effort to save and re-purpose our older buildings? Or will other broader forces, such as an exponentially increasing global population, expected to reach 8.6 billion by the year 2050, affect the availability and affordability of new raw materials and necessitate our conservation of existing buildings and recycling of existing building materials?

If so, we are fortunate to have many examples in our community of how our ancestors creatively and capably reinvented their villages and neighborhoods using materials they already possessed. As a counter to today’s very efficient but also more homogenized building techniques, the Savage family has been resourceful, thrifty, and persistent in the recycling of many Asticou neighborhood structures, but they certainly were not unique in their propensity to do so. Many families in Northeast Harbor and Mount Desert Island routinely moved and recycled their homes and buildings, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

There are plenty of other existing examples around Mount Desert Island of "houses on wheels." Readers are encouraged to find other examples around the Island of transformed structures to see what stories other Mount Desert Island buildings and their occupants, past and present, can tell, and how we might need to look to these examples of reinvention as we develop our communities in the future.

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