The Shelter Institute Celebrates a Half-Century of Home Building

For 50 years, the midcoast school has given novice home builders the tools they need to get started.

welding student at the Shelter Institute in Woolwich, Maine
By Brian Kevin
Photos by Brandon Buza
From our October 2024 issue

On a recent afternoon in Woolwich, three generations of Hennins guided a visitor across the grounds of the Shelter Institute, offering a nickel tour of the wooded 68-acre campus where tens of thousands of students have flocked, from all across the country and the world, to learn one of the most basic and least understood of all human tasks: the art and science of building a home.

Leading the way was CEO Pat Hennin. Pat cofounded the Shelter Institute in 1974 with his late wife, Patsy, and a friend, Charlie Wing, who stuck around only a few years. Following behind him were Gaius and Blueberry, two of Pat and Patsy’s three kids and, respectively, the Shelter Institute’s president and vice president. Two of Gaius’s kids, Clayton and Tanner, both in their 20s, walked alongside. 

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Scenes from a  two-week design-build course at the Shelter Institute, with CEO and co-founder Pat Hennin pictured at top center and bottom left, and president Gaius Hennin at top left and top right.

The group wandered out behind Shelter’s retail store — a neatly organized trove of dovetail saws, framing chisels, peaveys, and other semi-obscure tools — before pausing in the bay of an immense, steel-girded building, one of two 8,000-square-foot workshops at the heart of the campus. The space inside, insulated and heated, is big enough to house offices, a roomy classroom, a videography studio, several towering piles of lumber, and the skeleton of a good-size barn or a cozy cottage: a 24-by-24-foot timber frame, erected the week before by a class of 34 would-be carpenters, many of whom had hardly swung a hammer before showing up in Woolwich. “Patsy and I used to build these outside on our farm,” Pat said, a bit wistfully, recalling the institute’s early days, when the headquarters was an old brick building in downtown Bath. “Our most important tool was a framing square — we used it to scrape the ice off the beams.”

A former lawyer, Pat put himself through law school on a home-construction crew. In the early ’70s, a partner at his Portland firm hired him to build a passive-solar house in Buxton. The energy crisis was just ramping up, and the finished home got enough media attention to give Pat and Patsy the kernel of a business idea. They moved to Bath in 1974 to found the Shelter Institute, offering classes on energy-efficient home building, basic carpentry, mechanical repair, and more. Soon, a New York Times headline was trumpeting “They Have Learned the Art of Building a Home Cheaply,” and classes were selling out.

On the side — and with the small helping hands of their growing family — Pat and Patsy began constructing custom timber frames for clients. Over time, as class enrollment ebbed and flowed, the design-build segment of the business blossomed. Today, it occupies much of the 12-person staff’s non-classroom time. Around Maine, Gaius said, more than 500 timber-frame structures have been erected by Shelter crews or from Shelter kits (author’s note: I lived in one in Damariscotta for several years). Count those constructed by Shelter alums, and you’re talking thousands of sturdy post-and-beam structures across the state.

In 2002, a couple of years after Shelter shifted operations to its Woolwich campus, Patsy was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer. She died of complications four years later, and Pat remembers some 1,000 people crowding her memorial, at Bath’s Chocolate Church. Patsy had shaped what became the institute’s signature teaching style: welcoming and affirmational, incremental and hands-on, treating everyone as if they were starting from scratch. “You can’t imagine how hard it was for me in the beginning, standing up in front of a classroom,” said Pat, a self-identified introvert. “I learned by her example.” 

a white house at dusk
A modified Shelter kit home, in Pownal. Photo by Myriam Babin

Enrollment, however, was sputtering around the time of Patsy’s death. A wave of interest from young boomers in the ’70s and ’80s had tapered in the ’90s. For a while in the aughts, it was, to hear Blueberry tell it, “crickets.” Not so today. “Social media has made the trades cool again,” Gaius said. Nearly 3,000 students will take a Shelter course by the time 2024 is through. All but about 220 of them have enrolled in online courses, which have grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. “They’re here because they’re tired of not building anything, of not using their hands, of sitting at their desks,” Gaius said. “And they’re tired of feeling incompetent,” Blueberry added, “of feeling untethered during the pandemic, when they had to confront their inability to deal with a problem, when they couldn’t get a plumber or a contractor. But people have the ability — that knowledge is so accessible.” 

Shelter Institute, Pat explained, has simply spent the last 50 years helping to unearth it. And maybe that’s not all. “I think we might have awakened in them the idea of being an American,” added Pat, who immigrated from France as a young child. “I love to inspire people to feel that their life is theirs, that they are free to build — they just need to know that they can.”

August 2024 cover of Down East Magazine

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