when…

Steve Dunn first stepped foot on Norton Island in 1997, he was a screenwriter and a marketing executive, and he was largely unaware of America’s other artist colonies. Remembering the rustic lake house in New Hampshire where he and his friends disported as teenagers, he looked around the island and envisioned an exclave where artists, writers, musicians, and composers could share that same fresh-air freedom. He fought the odds to make this dream a reality. Inspired by the nation’s earliest groundbreakers, he called it Eastern Frontier, and that’s what it became, in fact and in spirit: an outpost on the fringe of America’s first coast.

It took Steve and a band of fearless carpenters several years to build the site. They dowsed for fresh water, dug a deep well, and hauled in construction equipment by barge. They hacked through the forests, grooved out footpaths, and graded a network of service roads. They milled some of the island’s plentiful fir trees, hewed the logs into lodges and cabins, and sourced the wind and sun for power. In the end they had the makings of a village.

The first residents arrived in the summer of 2000, and they found rawboned structures and a breath-taking environment that demanded their participation. Steve tapped them to design their own community. Writing their own rules, they arrived at an ethic of shared maintenance, mutual respect, maximum production, and excellent fun. They joined weekly shopping trips to the mainland, signed up for nightly kitchen detail, and helped haul laundry and recycling to the dock. Everyone pitched in, according to ability, and everyone honored the one sacred rule: never disturb an artist at work.

Two decades of residents now haunt the mossy forests and smooth-granite shoreline – haunt it with their lobster boils, limerick battles, go-kart time trials, and their sunset chants on Moosabec Reach. Their Met Gala openings, featuring writers in gaudy fashions from the Machias thrift store, still echo in the artist’s barn. Every summer, residents get lost in their cabins, or along the Buoy Trail, and they join up for dinner along the twenty-foot pine table, for evening readings in the South Lodge library, and for raucous nights around the bonfire, sometimes huddled in fog, sometimes under the Milky Way. Every summer, Steve’s vision grows, and his beloved wife Rosy keeps carrying it forward. Steve had deep faith in creativity and community. He believed these two virtues are spiritually intertwined, and he brought artists together just to do their thing. That remains Eastern Frontier’s unshakeable mission.

John Beckman
Resident, 2002-2017
Member, Board of Directors

Oil on Canvas by Jackie Clark, 2020