LB2007.1.72001

LB2007.1.72001

Pingree Mansion, Cobe Manstion 1938 Ira Maurice Cobe, 64, prominent in Boston, New York, and Chicago business circles was educated at Boston Houston. Admitted to the Suffolk bar in 1888, he practiced law in Boston for four years. Four years later he joined in the organizing firm of Cobe & MacKinnon, Investments, Chicago. He had also been president of the Assets Realization Company, chairman of the board of the Chicago City Railways Company, and the director of the Chicago Title & Trust company, Calumet and South Chicago Railway Company, Hammond, Whiting, and East Chicago Railway company, National Bank of the Republic, Financial Corporation of America. Mr. Cobe was a racing enthusiast and sponsored the The Cobe Trophy Race, an automobile race held in Indiana, in 1909 and 1910. The trophy was named for, and donated by, Ira M. Cobe, president of the Chicago Automobile Club. As one of the first long-distance races in the area, it was billed as the "Vanderbilt of the west," a reference to the Vanderbilt Cup Race, which had been held in Long Island, New York since 1904. The first running took place at the Crown Point Road Race Circuit, in northwestern Indiana. For the second year, proposals were submitted by the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and by the Elgin Road Race Course, just west of Chicago. Ultimately, the Board of Managers of the Chicago Automobile Club decided to make the 1910 race a speedway event, rather than a road course contest, and hence the second race was run at Indianapolis. At the time of this decision, the Club also announced the intent to bring the race to the Chicago area in 1911. As it turns out, though, there was no Cobe Trophy race in 1911 or in later years. Only two drivers competed in both Cobe races, 1909 winner Louis Chevrolet and his teammate, Bob Burman. Louis-Joseph Chevrolet (December 25, 1878 – June 6, 1941) was a Swiss-born American race car driver of French descent, founder of the Chevrolet Motor Car Company in 1911. COBE / PINGREE ESTATE HILLSIDE FARM (IRA AND ANNIE COBE ESTATE) NORTHPORT, MAINE In 1892 Ira M. Cobe (1866-1931), a young lawyer from Boston, married Annie Elizabeth Watts (1871-1928) of Belfast, Maine. The couple moved to Chicago, where Ira Cobe started a career in finance that rapidly placed the Cobes within the city's circles of wealth and power. In 1899 they commissioned a Shingle-style cottage, Bohemia Villa, in Bayside, a summer community within the town of Northport, just south of Belfast. A decade later, the Cobes built anew on Hillside Farm, one hundred acres of boulder-strewn pastures, wetlands, and spruce woods behind their existing oceanfront cottage. Although not directly on the water, the site straddled a glacial hill two hundred feet above sea level, providing panoramic views of Penobscot Bay. Warren Manning was designing several private estates in nearby Camden at the time, and it may have been through one of these connections that he secured the Cobe job. The earliest known Manning plan is dated December 16, 1911, the same year that his firm logged Cobe as a client. Construction began on the entrance drive and the house the following spring. The Chicago architectural firm Marshall & Fox built the imposing red-brick Colonial Revival mansion that still stands. Situated about two-thirds of the way up the hillside, the house has a pitched roof and gable ends, with the main entrance on the southwest facade and a colonnade on the northeast facade, where a marble terrace commands the site's principal view of the bay and its backdrop of blue hills. Manning wrapped the hill in a winding drive, which integrates the building and the landscape, highlights their contrasting forms, and provides a grand arrival experience. Lined with a boulder wall, the drive begins at a 45 - degree angle to the slope and then follows the contours for a few hundred feet. The ascending vantage point exaggerates the height of the mansion's columns and its commanding location above a sweep of lawn. The drive then loops around a spruce grove and cuts toward the house, where it branches to outline a teardrop-shaped island opposite the house entrance and a service turn off the west wing. Manning's design honors the site's glacial topography and its native spruce - fir forest. In 1913, when the landscape was under construction, a local newspaper reported that many of the surface rock[s] are to be kept in their natural positions, including an immense boulder near the road in the front, and noted that the plan of the grounds calls for the retention of the natural beauties so far as practical. Manning incorporated other glacial rubble in a rock garden at the base of the boulder wall that supported a formal garden on a flat site originally built for the tennis court. The wall formed a rustic parapet at the top. Boulder steps descended from the formal garden to a stepping-stone path that meandered east through the spruce grove next to the drive. The formal garden was a rectangular space (140 by 30 feet) off the mansion's east wing. A sunken panel, sometimes called the sunken garden, filled the center of the space, enclosed on three sides by a series of three shallow planting terraces. The east end of the formal garden opened to face a rectangular reflecting pool (about 8 by 16 feet) extending from the east wing, its corners anchored by planters with small conifers that repeated the spires of the surrounding spruce. Slightly elevated above the sunken garden, the pool echoed a distant view of the bay. A plant list, prepared by Stephen Hamblin of Manning's office for 1916 - 17, specifies a colorful assortment of annuals for an old-fashioned garden in the sunken space. For the descending terraces he noted shrubs, including barberry (Berberis thunbergii), weigela (Weigela florida), althea (Althea syriacus), buddleia (Buddleia davidii), clethra (Clethra alnifolia),deutzia (Deutzia scabra or D. gracilis) and vitex (Vitex agnus-castus), flowering in pink, white, purple, and pale lilac. Low arborvitae hedges, lined with straight paved walks, enclosed the entire formal garden. Two parallel paths began on either side of the reflecting pool and continued through the sunken garden, visually attenuating the space. Elsewhere, plantings, rather than architectural elements, defined the main spaces. The 1914 planting plan shows sinuous borders of perennials (achillea, iris) and masses of ornamental shrubs (snowberry, lilac, rhododendrons, weigela, viburnums, honeysuckle, spirea) outlining the roughly elliptical lawn on the northeast slope. Near the service drive, oval beds softened the corner of the west solarium and the house. On the lawn below, spruce, flowering shrubs, and perennials were massed around outcrops of granite. The island near the house entrance was a flat lawn, in which the Cobes inserted oval flowerbeds. Screening the service drive, woodland plantings of honeysuckles, viburnums, and other native shrubs filled in among scattered spruce. Uphill to the south, old tote roads and trails wound through the woods, where the Cobes erected a water and observation tower. Since Ira Cobe's death, in 1931, the property has had four owners, starting with the George and Gertrude Pingree family (1936-1978). Photos taken in 1936 show the reflecting pool filled in and the sunken garden devoid of plantings, but the walks and spatial layout remained intact. Images from the ensuing decades show simple flowerbeds flanking the stepping-stone walks and mature trees and flowering shrubs near the house entrance and edging the lower lawn. The Pingrees replaced the sunken garden with a swimming pool in the 1940s or 1950s, but kept the outer borders of shrubs and perennials. The third owners, John K. and Jean Evans (1978-2001), tore down the stone wall near the property entrance and created an Asian - style garden in the island opposite the house entrance. It appears that the biggest changes occurred under the Evans' ownership; in 2001, when the fourth and current owners, Gerald and Dorothy Reid, bought the estate, the property had decreased from one hundred to fifty acres. The flowering shrubs and perennials were gone, but the old oaks, and the bones of Manning's design, remained. The Reids filled in the swimming pool, leaving the flanking arborvitae hedges beside the sunken garden. Their trunks genuflect four feet above the ground, the point at which they had been clipped for the greater part of a century. Like a genie of the place, the immense boulder remains at the base of the hill. Jane Roy Brown 1909 - 1931 Ira & Annie Cobe 1936 - 1978 George & Gertrude Pingree 1978 - 2001 John & Jean Evans 2001 - 2020 (ish) Gerald & Dorothy Read 2020 - Brady Brim-DeForest