Stevens shares his Shingle Style

The following story written by Christopher Glass appeared on knox.villagesoup.com and the Knox County Times "Camden Yacht Club, Celebrating 100 years, 1906 - 2006" suppliement June 21, 2006. 

 

The Camden Yacht Club building is one of the last Shingle Style works of Maine’s greatest architect John Calvin Stevens of Portland. By 1912, when it was built, Stevens had pretty well abandoned the style in favor of the more formal Colonial Revival. When asked by Cyrus Curtis to design the club building, Stevens returned for inspiration to some of the cottages he had done 20 years before, especially the development on Cushing’s Island in Casco Bay. In "American Domestic Architecture," the book that he and his then partner Albert Winslow Cobb published in 1889, Stevens supplied picturesque sketches, one of which titled “Summer Saunterings” shows the landing at the island and the Sargent cottage, which are clearly antecedents for the design of the Camden Yacht Club.

	Sargent Cottage at Cushing Island landing
Camden Yacht Club, 2006

In the book there is a call for architectural attention to “structures of a somewhat transitory character.” In the purple prose of the time, Stevens and Cobb wrote, “It is indeed of far more importance that during our day and generation we live wholesomely together in brotherly love and something like community of efforts, than that we build splendid, long-enduring monuments to capture the wonder of coming generations.” By the time the Camden Yacht Club was designed Stevens had been the architect of record of Portland City Hall and what is now the Hyde School, so he was familiar with enduring monuments. But the yacht club was clearly an expression of “community of efforts.”

One other influence in the design was the growing interest in Japanese architecture exemplified by the publication of Portland native Edwin S. Morse’s "Japanese Homes and their Surroundings" in 1886. The intricate framing on the porte-cocher is suggestive of Japanese framing, and the overall hipped mass of the building is like the thatched-roof country houses of Japan.

The builder of the club was local architect-builder Cyrus Porter Brown, who also built the Capen and Hager houses along Bay View Street to design by Stevens, and who designed as well as built what is now the Rogers house on upper Chestnut Street.

Because of its significance to Camden’s history and its connection with Cyrus Curtis and John Calvin Stevens, the Camden Yacht Club was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.

Christopher Glass moved to Maine to practice architecture in 1970. After living in the Rangeley area for a number of years he and his wife Rosalee moved to Camden, where he opened his practice in 1974. He has designed numerous houses and additions and has been active in historic preservation. For nine years he was author and illustrator of the Newsletter for Maine Citizens for Historic Preservation, and he is currently vice president of Maine Preservation. For 12 years he was a member of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission. He received the State of Maine Historic Preservation Award in 1991, and the Maine Preservation Statewide Historic Preservation Honor Award in 2000.