"What has driven him to question his sanity is Turtle's Hill—or Tuthill, as it's known—the improbably picturesque village he built in the small Maine town of Pittston (pop. 2,500). Spread across its rolling 55 acres are 24 Early American wooden buildings, most of which Tuttle, 55, bought for a single dollar to spare from the wrecking ball, then moved from surrounding towns and painstakingly refurbished. With nary a power line or telephone pole in sight (all wiring is underground), and with plenty of barns and stables clustered on the grounds, Tuthill looks like the village that time forgot—except for the dozen or so tenants Tuttle has invited to be his neighbors. "Not many people have the opportunity to relive the past, but we have it right here," says Dianne Gorman, 50, a piano teacher whose first Tuthill residence was an 18th-century Federal-style home with pumpkin-pine floors and wainscoting in every room and who now pays $550 a month for a smaller Greek Revival. "I can't imagine living anywhere else."
Money was never Tuttle's motivation, and no tenant pays more than $850 a month. A former house painter and now a successful antiques dealer, the unassuming Maine native "has a love for historic buildings," explains son Nathan, 22, who helps his father run the antiques business and lives with him in Tuthill. Earle Shettleworth Jr., director of the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and Tuttle's friend, says, "I'm not aware of anyone else who has done anything on this scale. Some people will move an old home for personal use, but not to create an entire village. Ken deserves a lot of credit."
Unlike other museum-style instant villages in New England, Tuthill is a thriving community built without grants or corporate funds. Instead, Tuttle has spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars—and countless backbreaking hours—moving and restoring the buildings over the last 17 years. He even trucked in fully grown trees and lilac bushes to give his village an authentically old feel and can still be spotted fixing doors and mowing lawns himself. "I've always said that you can't save the world," Tuttle explains, "but you can save your little corner of it."
Tuttle has rarely strayed from his little corner; he was born about a mile away, across the Kennebec River in Gardiner. The youngest son in a family of 12 children raised by his father, Ruby, a house painter, and his mother, Francis, a shoe-factory worker, Tuttle caught the collecting bug as a child, hoarding old stamps. He skipped college, got work painting homes and married Paulette Adams in 1964. Five years later they bought a rundown Greek Revival house in Pittston for $11,000. When the 1820 church next door became slated for demolition, Tuttle bought it for $1,500 and opened an antique-furniture shop inside.
The business took off, allowing Tuttle to build a new shop and to keep snapping up land and homes in the area. In 1981 he paid $1 for an old house in nearby Hallowell, sparing its owners the cost of tearing it down. Envisioning how nice it would look on his property, Tuttle thought, "Why not?" and spent a few thousand dollars lifting it off its foundation and trucking it to Pittston. "And that," says Tuttle, "was the start of the hill."
Together with his friend Reggie Albert, 67, a gifted carpenter, Tuttle researched 19th-century neighborhoods and set out to build one for himself. Finding old, neglected houses was the easy part; people who heard of his village were soon calling with offers. Moving the buildings cost about $6,000 each; some had to be cut in half, then reassembled. Tuttle paid for everything with profits from his fine-antique-furniture business and saved on the big expenses—renovation and maintenance—by having his partner Albert and his crew do the work themselves. "When I moved in, Ken said, 'We're not landlords and tenants here, we're neighbors and friends,' " remembers Dianne Gorman, who relocated to Tuthill after a divorce in 1993. "I feel really blessed to live here."
The village is also home to Tuttle's family: daughter Kimberly, 32, a married Realtor with two kids of her own; son Tony, 28, a GM mechanic; and Nathan. "Having your children and your grandchildren all around you, that's success," says Tuttle, who has already put the village in a trust for his children. Tuttle's other pet projects include revitalizing whole blocks of his old hometown (he bought and refurbished a number of buildings in downtown Gardiner, earning a prestigious Margaret Chase Smith Foundation award for entrepreneurship) and tending to his budding collection of antique Fords.
As for his field of dreams, Tuttle trucked in the last house in 1995 and has said he considers the village complete. "We're already the biggest taxpayer in town," he laments. Still, he may not be finished tinkering; over in a nearby backwoods town there's an 18th-century general store with a ballroom on the second floor that has caught Tuttle's eye. "Right there," he says, pointing to an open, sun-dappled stretch of land in Tuthill. "Wouldn't that store look nice right there?"
Alex Tresniowski
Mark Dagostino in Pittston
- Contributors:
- Mark Dagostino.
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