New England lake district
AA-2026-DF4CAF
On the image
Someone built this house to be looked at from the lake, and looked from, in equal measure, which is why the whole south side surrenders to a wraparound porch of windows instead of wall. That was the summer-cottage logic of the era: a family bought a view, then built a house whose entire architectural purpose was not to get in the way of it. By the time this picture was taken the birches had gone bare and the water had turned the flat gray-blue of a lake that knows it is about to be ignored for six months.
A white dog crosses the lawn alone, doing the patrol that in summer would have been interrupted by children, guests, and the general business of a place built for a crowd. The TV antenna jabbed into the roofline is the one concession to the twentieth century on an otherwise nineteenth-century silhouette, installed by an owner who wanted the view but not, apparently, to miss the news. Nobody in 1950s New England considered it strange to spend a fortune on a porch used four months a year.
The rest of the season the place will sit exactly like this, shuttered and photographed by nobody, its glass reflecting a lake with no one on it. The dog, for now, is the only proof anyone still lives here at all.
The historian's note
The house shown is an example of American shingle-style architecture, a domestic style that flourished in coastal and lakeside New England from the 1880s through the mid-twentieth century, characterized by unpainted or dark-stained wood shingles, broad hip roofs, and wraparound porches oriented toward water views. Such houses were typically built as seasonal retreats for families of means who used them from late spring through early fall.
By the 1950s many of these cottages had passed into second or third generations of family ownership, retrofitted with modest modern conveniences such as the rooftop television antenna visible here, while retaining their original footprint and porch structure. The birch and mixed hardwood tree line and the calm inland lake are characteristic of the lake districts of Maine, New Hampshire, or the Adirondack region of New York, all popular summer-colony areas in this period.
The autumn setting indicates the close of the seasonal occupancy cycle, when families departed before winter and left such properties largely unattended until the following summer.
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Shingle-Style Lake Cottage in Autumn, New England, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-DF4CAF. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shingle-style-lake-cottage-in-autumn-new-england-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026DF4CAF,
title = {Shingle-Style Lake Cottage in Autumn, New England, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-DF4CAF},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shingle-style-lake-cottage-in-autumn-new-england-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Shingle-Style Lake Cottage in Autumn, New England, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-DF4CAF UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/shingle-style-lake-cottage-in-autumn-new-england-1950s ER -
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