June 1910. Charles Richard Crowningshield, a wealthy industrialist from Chicago, is sending his family east, to escape the summer heat. They arrive by private train, to the village of Woods Hole, a small fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He's just purchased a new home there, high atop Juniper Point, a windswept promentary with views to sea and the Elizabeth islands beyond. But the house, built in 1880, a large Victorian mansion in the Queen Anne stylee, is a beautiful fixer-upper, lacking even the most basic of amenities, like indoor plumbing. Arthur Rouse, an illiterate Scottish foundryman with an almost preternatural relationship with machinary, has also been sent by his employer to set the situation to rights.