All Dennis Carter knew for sure was that his building would have a stone foundation. It was 2006, and after years of saving and planning, he was preparing to break ground on a new structure on his wooded 17-acre property on Deer Isle, Maine. A tiny coastal island hamlet that’s accessible only by boat and a narrow two-lane bridge, Deer Isle is known for its abundance of lobster and granite. The region’s quarries have supplied raw materials for projects like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Smithsonian Institution. In the 1990s, Dennis worked his way up from slinging a shovel to running his own business hand-laying stone walls around town. He enjoyed stonework, but the profession was merely a means to an end. Before settling on Deer Isle, he’d spent three years volunteering at a rural hostel in Brunswick, Georgia, where travelers sleep in hand-built geodesic domes and treehouses, and learn about organic agriculture. Ever since, Dennis had dreamed of one day establishing his own sustainable homestead with a dwelling big enough to accommodate several travelers.

Early in the project, he’d decided on laying down a granite “cellar hole” foundation, but he wasn’t sure how to design the structure. Something newfangled or experimental didn’t appeal to him. He’d always liked the simplicity of American Colonial architecture, the classic style he’d grown up around in New England. But when it came to the timber framing, he was at a loss. He didn’t want a traditionally constructed frame that would require a big crew or a crane to raise. He wanted something simple, yet still robust enough to stand the test of time.

Dennis headed to the public library in nearby Blue Hill, Maine. He thumbed through a handful of books, but nothing jumped out at him—until he stumbled on Abbott Lowell Cummings’s The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725. He flipped randomly to a page with pictures of the Boardman House: a two-story residence built around 1687 in Saugus, Massachusetts, that’s intact today. The old building—with its commanding façade—appealed to him. Dennis stared at the book’s detailed illustrations, which showed a conjectural sequence of how the house’s frame must have been raised. “I had a feeling of déjà vu,” recalls Dennis, whose family comes from a long line of carpenters, boat builders, and farmers with roots in New England since the 1600s. “My ancestors have been there in reality. They’ve done this. It’s not far under the surface in me.”

Dennis looked at the illustrations and intuited how he might be able to raise his frame in stages by installing one beam at a time—instead of pushing up several preassembled bents. After poring over Cummings’s book from front to back, he continued researching. He learned that during the 1600s, there had been a lot of experimentation with materials and techniques in New England, because carpenters from England were trying to adapt to the new region. Timber-frame buildings like the Boardman House, which were constructed with basic iron hand tools and traditional joinery, were still standing because they’d been engineered to last. By the 1830s, Dennis understood, carpenters were starting to build homes using cheaper materials and hastier methods, which partly explains why so many of those structures had since been rebuilt or demolished.