The Houses · H-01

North House

Penobscot County, Maine · Established 1974 · Open to visitors

North House is the oldest of the houses and looks it. It was a grange hall before it was anything else, and the floor still slopes toward the road.

Region

North America

Residential places

22

Residential periods

Twenty-two places. Residential periods of three to twelve days, arranged with the steward.

Public gathering

Open Table, monthly, first Sunday, four o'clock. No notice required.

Arrival

Two hours from Bangor by car. The Thursday bus stops at the crossroads a mile and a half short of the house; write ahead and somebody will meet it.

Access

The long room, kitchen, and two ground-floor bedrooms are step-free. The archive room is reached by four steps and is cold; a reading desk can be set in the long room instead, on request.

Correspondence

Write to the steward at North House. Post is read on Thursdays.

The house

The building was bought in the spring of 1974 with money raised among the Thursday gatherings and a loan from a Bangor credit union that took nine years to discharge. The two outbuildings came with it: a woodshed, and a long shallow barn that has been, in turn, a dormitory, a cannery, and since 1987 the archive room.

The archive room is unheated by decision rather than by neglect. Vale held that paper keeps better cold than comfortable, and successive stewards have declined to argue with her about it. Readers are given a blanket and a pair of cotton gloves.

Most of what the Institute knows about its own first decade is here, and a good deal of what it does not know is here too, in the form of gaps that have been catalogued rather than filled.

The work

• The archive is the principal work. Four residents and a rotating body of volunteers catalogue, repair, and transcribe; the transcription backlog stands at roughly eleven hundred pages and has stood at roughly eleven hundred pages for some years.
• The house runs a food distribution with two churches and the county food bank, out of the woodshed on Tuesdays and Fridays. In 2025 it moved just under forty tons.
• Adult education is held in the long room: literacy, arithmetic for the trades, and a reading course that has been taught by the same retired schoolteacher since 2009.

Observance kept here

The shared forms, here

The Repair Table

Household objects: crockery, chair joints, window furniture, and the archive blankets.

The house year

Kept in use

• The kitchen bell

  Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.

• The archive blankets

  Worn in the archive room at North House, which is kept cold for the paper and is uncomfortable for people.

• The white cups

  Tea, at the table and at the bench. They recur in house photographs from the late seventies onward, which is an accident of ordering and not a design.

Local participation

• The cold-room rota: two members check the archive temperature and the damp trap each week.
• Thursday kitchen, on a four-week cycle. Those who cook do not serve.

Separation

Notice is given to the steward or left in the book by the kitchen door. The rota is filled from the standby list the same week.

Succession

The cold-room rota has had six holders since 1977. The sequence is written inside the door of the cupboard. The work is reassigned; the person is not replaced.

A life in the practice

The steward

Records

• The Founding Letter
• Institutional history
• The Common Record

Other houses

• Shore House — Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
• River House — Ramsey County, Minnesota

Entry H-01 · reviewed 14 March 2026