The York Harbor Cottage Project

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 We started this project by trying to answer the question of 'how one of the largest cottages in York Harbor could just disappear'?   How there could be so little information available?

When we first moved to York Harbor, our neighbor Elvis Reed who was a caretaker for another property would tell us some amazing stories about earlier times.  We took his stories with a grain of salt.  He told us that the Queen of England's Rolls Royce was kept in our garage (mostly true!)  He also told us that our summer cottage was one of the outbuildings of the original Rockledge estate owned by Thomas Nelson Page, a famous author, and US Ambassador to Italy during WWI.  As we started our research, we were puzzled at how little information was available on this very large cottage.  We learned that when Thomas Nelson Page and his wife Florence Lathrop passed away in 1922, their two daughters divided and sold off parts of the 7.5 acre estate.  The main cottage burned down during WWII (1944) and by 1948 all of the property and buildings were in other family's hands.  Over many months of research, we started to piece the whole story together - and it was quite a story.  More importantly, we started to understand how a 15,000 square foot cottage could be lost.  

DOWNLOAD at the bottom of this page the individual stories of some of the most important cottages in York Harbor, Maine

What's different?  Sometimes the journey leads you to new and unexpected places.  Through our personal cottage research, we began to see that the York Cottage story really had not been told.  There has been much written on the history of York Harbor during the 1880-1930's era with a focus on the Marshall House, the Reading Room, Trinity Church, and the York Country Club - but actually very little on the architecture of the individual cottages.  We decided that we would try to tell that story - but we wanted to do it a little differently: 

For The York Harbor Cottage Project, we created this website www.YHCottage.Com to both collect and share online in raw form as it became available.  We adopted a ‘crowdsourcing’ approach to go beyond what we could find in paper files and dusty filing cabinets. We believed that a significant amount of information was ‘still out there’ and could be provided by current cottage owners. As “Citizen Historians” we believe the past belongs equally to us and that these projects are intended to involve a broader public.  We are committed to collecting and sharing the information in a digital format.  An on-line story is easier, and less expensive to access by a broader group and this also better reflects the way knowledge is created and consumed in our increasingly digital world. 

 Between 1885 and 1910 the York Harbor Colony was firmly established with 125 cottages, and their supporting resort hotels, churches and clubs. What unfolds is a story of a Maine summer colony that was built by wealth from a new industrial age.  The cottage owners that came to York Harbor were from an emerging economy based on luxury goods, automobiles, communications, and business capital.  The back story is the creative business model and cooperation of 10-12 local town fathers that accelerated the growth and provided the infrastructure to make the summer colony work.  They not only accelerated the growth but acted with a steady hand when things got overheated.  Amazingly, 80% of the Colony and supporting infrastructure was constructed in a very short 3-year period between 1899-1901.   Add to this the 27 eminent architects and 4 landscape architects that designed cottages and gardens for their clients, and the story becomes even more interesting. To tell this story, we assembled over 1100 photographs, drawings and images, and created 70 profiles of cottages owners and their architects.  

The York Harbor Cottage Project has just published its first book on the Architecture of EB Blaisdell and FC Watson of York Harbor, Maine.  The book is available FREE in PDF format and can be downloaded.  Based on information collected through the York Harbor Cottage Project from 2011 to 2016, this 108 page full color book with 285 photographs documents the work of local architects EB Blaisdell and FC Watson between 1885 and 1910.     

There are a number of Maine summer colonies along the coast that were established in the late 1880's.  Affluent families from Boston, New York, Philadelphia Washington, and as far away as Chicago would escape the heat and pollution of the cities for the clear, cool weather of Maine.

• Bar Harbor (including Northeast Harbor and Seal Harbor)
• Biddeford Pool
• Boothbay Harbor
• Camden (including Rockport)
• Cape Elizabeth - Delano Park
• Islesboro - (Dark Harbor)
• Kennebunkport
• North Haven
• Scarborough - Prouts Neck
• Vinalhaven
• Winter Harbor - Grindstone Neck
• York Harbor   

This is a photo gallery of many of the cottages built in York Harbor from 1895 to 1019.  If the cottage does not exist, we have marked it as 'not standing'.  There are also photo galleries for hotels, churches, commercial buildings, and private clubs.