HARPSWELL, Maine – While some juniors in college opt to spend a year abroad in England, France or Italy, Sophie Lapointe moved to Maine last September to fell and haul trees with the raw power of Belgian draft horses. Over the course of a year, the 21-year-old milled them into lumber to build a tiny house.
Instead of steeping in old-world culture in museums and cafes, the Hampshire College student is immersed in a new world culture, harkening back to the foundational roots of America. Like early settlers, Lapointe, a Vermont native, learned to can, farm, make wine and build things at Stone Soup Institute.
“It looks like a step backward, but it’s a choice,” said Jim Cornish, co-founder of the homesteading school tucked into the woods of Harpswell.
It’s not your typical curriculum. Classes start whenever you wake up. The weather dictates the day’s lessons.
For 10 years the bearded and burly Cornish, 60, has taught people from as far away as Vietnam and Croatia time-honored agrarian and life skills. The goal: become self-sufficient through the abundance of nature. His homesteading school is far from flashy, as the overgrown weeds and hogs outback attest, but it’s helping people, like Lapointe, “become human again.”
“The land and the people are the only things that feel real anymore,” said Cornish, who grew up on a farm in Bowdoin and is a carpenter and logger by trade. “I teach people to reconnect to the ground and soil.”
Different from a farm apprenticeship, which are abundant in Maine, homesteading instruction is “a deeper immersion using a broader range of skills and practices,” said Cornish, who teaches everything from blacksmithing to ham curing to logging on a hodgepodge spread not far from the ocean.
A year ago, Lapointe, the only student this semester, enrolled in Stone Soup in exchange for school credit. Throughout this intimate skills transfer, Cornish taught her everything from slaughtering pigs to harnessing a team of horses to building a tiny house, which she will live in when she returns to Massachusetts this month. Because the work is so intense, he can take on at most four students at a time.
Drafting and constructing the house design together, Lapointe and Cornish worked on the dwelling with cathedral and Gothic-like arches for months. Made with barn board from Topsham, pine and spruce from their own fields and held together with dovetailed joints and oak pegs, “this house is a sculpture at this point,” said Lapointe, who has handled every piece of wood in her 8-by-20-foot abode. “It’s a self portrait, a meditation on this time in my life.”
Lapointe — with a power drill, tape measure and hammer hanging from her belt — is proud of her new home on wheels, which will be on display at The Common Ground Fair at the end of the month. As classes came to an end last week, she harbored no illusion that her workload was easy.
Surviving the harshest Maine winter and turning 21 alone without her peers, tested her will, as much as animal husbandry tested her mettle. She turned toward homesteading “out of necessity,” Lapointe said, taking a break from her tiny house construction last week. “There is not much going for people our age. And I am not willing to settle.”
Unlike the corporate working world, where few have time to look up from their digital devices to notice the weather, much less the sweet nuances of the change of season (celebrated here with a peeper party), Stone Soup Institute provides a needed balance.
“People of my generation are interested in preserving this old, old culture and learning one on one with people who’ve lived it,” Lapointe said.
She heard about the school through a classmate at the liberal college, where grades and majors don’t exist. Entering her final year this fall, Lapointe will write her thesis on traditional homesteading skills in a modern world, using experiences derived from her year here.
Lapointe’s choice was fine with her mother, who took a similar sabbatical when she was her age to live and work in the Caribbean. Her peers raised eyebrows at first, thinking the idea had merit, but wondered if this lifestyle could be maintained.
“Absolutely. It’s the only way of living that feels real to me,” a determined Lapointe said.
When she returns to Amherst, Massachusetts, with a killer show and tell — a hand-crafted, locally sourced, free-range home — she will have concrete proof. On campus she plans to lead discussions on sustainable living and low-impact building. A hot topic with coeds.
On a nearby pasture where horses graze, Lapointe learned to grow zucchini, tomatoes, brussel sprouts and corn. She also became adept at milling timber, canning food, making wine from rose petals and a host of other frontier skills she wouldn’t have picked up studying in Paris.
“Living here is magical,” she said, with a wide-eyed youthful glow.
How many homestead schools exists in the country is hard to tell. But as farming becomes increasingly popular with 20-somethings, back to the landers like Cornish are delving deeper.
“You can apprentice to learn to be a farmer, but where do you go to learn to homestead?” said the instructor, who is focused on 1900 to 1930 agricultural practices combined with newer trends, such as composting and cover cropping. “Moving it forward to where our past meets our future,” is the school’s motto.
So far he has taught three students to build tiny homes, which have exploded in popularity. TV shows, magazines and blogs focus on living small because “people have their necks in the yoke, going to work every day to pay their mortgage,” Cornish said. “This is affordable housing.”
And easy to maintain. Lapointe’s tiny house will be heated with a wood stove. Electricity comes from a photovoltaic panel, water will be reused, meals cooked on a three-burner propane stove. There are several windows, a loft for sleeping and a composting toilet. Cornish can build you one for $20,000, but most enthusiasts want to do it themselves.
Homesteading to Cornish “is inherent in our DNA. We are hunters and gatherers and farmers,” he said, adding students immersed in his programs, like Lapointe, learn to “eat well and live well.”
What else has she learned? “What haven’t I learned?,” said Lapointe, not eager to return to college life after a year spent in a rhythmic rural rhapsody. “That would be easier to answer.”