A Summer Dream | House For Sale

While most of us live in a house, a few of us—the luckiest ones—know that sometimes a house can live inside us as well. On this day in late June, we are sitting on an expansive porch alongside Walker Pond in Sedgwick, Maine, hearing the story of a summer home that has been a part of Catherine Larson’s life as long as she can remember. Her husband, Dan, joins us and sprinkles the conversation with anecdotes about his own relationship with the cottage that Catherine’s grandfather built and named Kill Kare because, Catherine explains, “you came here and felt all your cares melt away.”

There is a hint of salt air on the breeze; the bay is only a few hundred yards distant through the woods. Roses line the porch. Catherine tells about her many summers here, fishing and picking blueberries and paddling canoes, rowing boats, learning to swim and then testing to see how far her endurance could take her. There were campfires and watching the sun setting and the dark settling into the quiet and the stars filling the sky.

The story of Kill Kare begins in the humidity and heat of the Baltimore–Washington, D.C., region, from which Catherine’s grandparents, Wilbur and Catherine Smith, followed other well-to-do families to Maine’s Blue Hill Peninsula in the early 1900s. There, they found bracing, clean air in a cluster of cottages in Brooklin that came to be known as the Colony.

Wilbur Smith built his cottage by the sea in 1915, but he was passionate about freshwater fishing, too. One day he rowed his boat to the middle of Walker Pond, one of the very few clear and deep freshwater ponds around, and saw two great boulders along the shore. He decided he would build on those boulders a getaway from his ocean getaway, and he’d sit on a wraparound porch and feel as if he were all but floating. He built the shingle-style cottage in 1917.

His wife scoured flea markets, antiques shops, and local farms for the rustic furnishings that gave the pond cottage a personality that remains, even as electric lights replaced candles and kerosene lamps, and showers were added and a bedroom became a dining room. “My grandfather called my grandmother ‘the hostess to the coast,’” says Catherine, and she recalls it was rare for the cottage not to be filled with family and friends.

All that was before Catherine’s mother, Grace Hooper McNeal, started a girls’ camp called Four Winds in 1946 on nearby farmland that Wilbur owned. Then came the summers that worked their way into Catherine’s life, first as a young child, then coming of age surrounded by campers and counselors. The camp became both home and family, and Kill Kare became a place to rest, to host reunions, to house campers’ parents. Camp Four Winds ran for 57 seasons before closing in 2002. The family sold it to a neighbor, an avid environmentalist who, Catherine says, “has cared for the land.”

Catherine and Dan take us on a stroll through the cottage, which becomes a tour through generations of family memories: the framed menu from a gathering in 1932; the fish mounted above the great stone fireplace, which leads to stories about bass that seemed to leap from water to net to frying pan. There’s a photo of Catherine’s son as a boy; he’s now in his early 30s. “We talked long and hard with him about selling,” Catherine says. “He only comes now for one week. And we’re not getting younger.”

The six bedrooms speak of the carefree days of summer, when friends and family seemed to arrive in a happy stream; the lack of closets speak of the casualness of it all, of unpacking and simply hanging clothes on hooks. Catherine points out the kerosene lamp her grandmother designed, how she wanted it homey but also with a hint of the wildness that attracted them in the first place.

When we return to the porch, a loon splashes down in front of us. The sun slants across the water. The quiet is everywhere. “How many family discussions have we had here?” Catherine muses. “This has always been a place for healing with nature. It’s where we came when we lost loved ones. It’s where we have always felt at peace.” Then she adds, “It is heartbreaking, but it’s time.”

“We want to leave on a high note,” Dan says. “We hope we find a family with kids who can grow up here and be careful with the environment. Someone who will want to be here for many generations.” With shorefront building regulations today, he says, a cottage like this, perched on boulders, can never be replicated. “You can buy many places on the water, but the soul that this house has speaks to some people. That’s what we hope.” —Mel Allen

The Larsons’ property is priced at $1.2 million and includes 40-plus acres, 350 feet of waterfront, and—in addition to Kill Kare—a modern two-bedroom carriage house apartment just up the road. For more information, contact Jill Knowles of the Christopher Group in Blue Hill, Maine, at 207-248-2048.