Where is kezar lake

Now, Cary and her husband, Peter, fill their home at nearby Severance Lodge Club with their own children, grandchildren, and assorted tagalongs all summer long their record is 14 people and four dogs. Kezar is the same every time you come back. Count Lee Conary among the charmed. In the s, when he was a year-old on a camping vacation with his parents, Conary declared his intention to buy Kezar Lake Marina , a jigsaw puzzle of docks and boats on The Narrows, which links Middle and Lower bays.

And he believes it. Our own search of the National Georgraphic archives, which date to , yields only one mention of Kezar Lake — a photo caption in the May issue which points it out in the view from Black Mountain. National Geographic rumor aside, Kezar Lake is uncommonly beautiful. Carving a deep, squiggly J along the easternmost edge of the rugged White Mountains, it stretches nearly 10 miles, never more than a mile wide, through the pastoral town of Lovell, with dips into Stoneham and Stow.

Kezar is the big Maine lake that feels like a small, private pond. The Freedom town clerk responded enthusiastically, encouraging Arthur to visit. No word came from Lovell, which Arthur found too intriguing to ignore. Diamond Match Company president William Armstrong Fairburn hosted clients at Westways, a rustic-looking corporate retreat with swanky amenities like a two-lane bowling alley and fives court similar to a squash court but designed for the English handball game fives.

Over time, the lake changed physically from the one Arthur Stone discovered on that graduation camping trip. Meanwhile, farmland was slowly sold off to cottagers. Over time, forests overtook fields, wrapping Kezar in a dense green cloak. When they return to their cottage at Severance Lodge Club, the Flemings will sit on the porch and enjoy the cool air that comes with nightfall and listen to music of a different sort — the haunting calls of loons.

All of the 37 homes here, in fact, share the same rustic style: chocolate-colored siding and forest-green bargeboard trim decorated chalet-style with cutouts of pine trees and canoes. On the Fourth of July, the neighborhood kids parade to the point where Lillian Severance once serenaded her guests.

The sporting-camp-turned-residential club is a distinctly Kezar phenomenon, and it has helped shape the culture of the lake.

Just up the road from Severance are two comparably styled communities — Westways , the s Diamond Match Company retreat, and Boulder Brook, built in as Lyons Camps.

Residents of each insist their community is the best, but to an outsider, the similarities are striking. Like Severance, Westways and Boulder Brook have individually owned homes and community facilities, such as beaches and docks.

And all have strict rules for uniform cabin-style architecture, an unfussy aesthetic that dominates up and down the lake, even where there are no rules.

Nothing manmade competes with the beauty of Kezar. Peer pressure has been the primary tool for keeping fellow property owners in line. The same is true for jet skis. Eventually many of these hotels and lodges disbanded, camps were bought up and rebuilt, but there are still throwbacks to elegant collective living in Severance Lodge Club, a community of private homes on the eastern edge of the lake.

Crossing the bridge at the narrows, we find the maze of docks bustling with groups coming in from the lake and going out, on motorboats but also kayaks and dinghies. A lot of tan, teenaged marina employees move confidently about on the docks, tying tricky knots and filling gas tanks. Conary is a youthful, middle-aged man who has been running the marina for decades now. This is a real bouquet of humanity.

Conary is set on getting us out on the lake, and makes fifteen-year-old Liz Grzyb the envy of all her coworkers when he assigns her to the task of being our tour guide for part of the afternoon. I notice even shy Liz Grzyb looks our way to gauge our reactions, and I think she is satisfied with our wide eyes and dropped jaws.

We pass few boats, and the brown and deep-green camps I detect along the shoreline blend into the woods that surround them. More obvious are the Adirondack chairs, bright white and red, planted in rows upon the shore like huge flowers. Stephen Anderson, a lifelong Kezar resident and the newly appointed president of the Severance Lodge Club, has told me that National Geographic named Kezar Lake the third most beautiful lake in the world, which comes as little surprise, although the appeal of the lake for the people who love it cannot be distilled to any ranking.

From what people have told me, Kezar is Kezar because of the people. The beauty is in the landscape but also in particular porches and smells, in forest grounds slick with pine needles, dense with memories of midnight swims and first kisses.

A frozen lake in winter. It is January. The rambling, boarded-up wooden halls and small cabins are tucked away in the trees, infused with cold and coated in a layer of snow. In the summer, these woods echo with the sounds of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but now, nothing.

We park and walk out onto the frozen lake, admiring the vastness, the scalloped edges of the White Mountains a darker blue than before, and it is still beautiful. Along Main Street toward Fryeburg we pass farmhouse after frosted farmhouse—the remnants of the robust nineteenth-century Lovell—and finally enjoy the privilege of tucking into one, in the company of artist Roger Williams, his wife, Jane, and their four dogs.

Surrounded by his oil and watercolor landscapes inspired by trips out West and to Europe, but also by Lovell, we talk about what brought Roger Williams to Maine from Ohio almost 40 years ago. His story is a classic one: a vacation to the Pine Tree State inspired a move. Williams traded a well-paying job with one of the largest advertising agencies in the country for a change of life, an opportunity to paint more.

He thought he might settle on the coast, but the charm and affordability of the farmhouse with room for his horses was too perfect to pass up. This light-filled shed is thoughtfully cluttered with art books and paints, canvases, plants, and pictures. To some, Kezar might seem out of the way; for others, it is the way—the roads through Bridgton and Sweden lead home.

Lovell is a place where people work to create the community they want to live in rather than expecting it to work miracles for them. Proof is in the library, which has garnered tremendous support from summer folks and year-round Lovell residents alike Roger helped build a play space for the kids room , the school system, and Fryeburg Academy, which is well over years old and where Jane is on the school board.

Lovell itself is not fancy, no matter how many grand homes exist down long dirt roads. Lovell is a place where families spend evenings chopping vegetables together instead of waiting for their plates to arrive.

The tender love and care that has gone into maintenance of this centuries-old home is reflected in the rooms upon rooms of art and jewelry and sculpture inside. First signs of green and warmth in Lovell. It is May. Buds are popping, and the trees are blooming in that new, light-bright green.

There is the sound of machines in the air, men at work patching roofs, painting siding, raking yards. She has created a place for everyone, for any time of year—although she prefers summer.