Dramatic Driftwood

In Maine you just never know what the tide will bring in. Usually the flotsam and jetsam isn’t quite as massive as this cedar-shingled house that floated up on Goose Rocks Beach back on September 24, 1951. But Yale Joel, a photographer with Life magazine, captured the almost boyish exhilaration on the face of J.N. Jutras as if he’d just stumbled across a surfside discovery.

Indeed, although Joel’s composition was contrived, Jutras’ toothless smile is genuine. The Lewiston mover had accepted just four thousand dollars to move the sixty-by-thirty-foot building from its foundation on Kennebunk Beach. Transporting the house by water, using four pontoons and a tugboat, meant that Jutras could undercut competing land-based bidders by some seventeen thousand dollars. He had no doubts that the building, formerly a community hall in Kennebunk known as Ramanascho Hall and built by E.N. Larabee in 1891, could make the nine-mile voyage. He was less certain about himself — Jutras had never been on the ocean before.

As if the money wasn’t enough motivation, Jutras also had the hopes of all Goose Rocks’ residents traveling with him. The Great Fire of 1947 had virtually wiped out the summer community (as well as much of coastal Maine) and reusing Ramanascho Hall as Goose Rocks’ own meeting place was key to knitting the village back together. “A summer without the Saturday night dances, the bowling alleys, the movies, without a safe place for the children on a rainy day and patient Henry to baby-sit was unthinkable,” wrote Gertrude “Scotty” Mackenzie in her book, My Love Affair with the State of Maine. Mackenzie and Ruth Goode were instrumental in purchasing the hall, attracting newsmen like Joel and raising the money to pay the mover. Goode actually made the ocean voyage along with Jutras, perhaps exiting the houseboat by lowering herself down the blanket hanging from the open window, left of center. Two thousand people gathered on the beach to haul the house ashore as the tide receded.

Goode and Jutras’ efforts were not in vain; Ramanascho Hall still stands today a half-mile from the spot where this photograph was taken. Each summer it serves as the headquarters of the Goose Rocks Beach Association and hosts bingo games, movies, and other community events. The roof has been replaced and some of the cedar shingles repaired, but otherwise it has changed very little. Even the broad wood floor remains the same today as it was when Jutras and Goode stood upon it more than fifty years ago, as Atlantic swells washed over it during their dramatic voyage.