July 23, 2014 at 2:10 p.m.
A trip to the cabin
Back in the Saddle
It’s more than just a shack in the woods.
But it would be wrong to refer to it as a “cottage.”
I tend to call it “the cabin.”
My wife points out that to the generation that built the thing nearly 100 years ago, it was simply “camp.”
That was a generation relying on trains instead of interstate highways, a generation that fled the cities each summer because of the heat, a generation whose ideas of creature comforts were far simpler than ours.
It was about 1912 that a man named Thayer began promoting the idea of a summer grouping of cabins on a hillside in southern New Hampshire. His pitch was aimed at folks who wanted to escape an urban environment in an era before air conditioning and when diseases such as polio and tuberculosis tended to be more prevalent in the summertime.
He kept his plans modest and affordable, marketing them to teachers and university academics who had several weeks free each summer.
And some of his sales pitch made its way to Philadelphia.
That’s where a woman named Alta Grace Ellis was working as a Latin teacher. She’d grown up on a farm in upper New York State and was what would have been described in that era as a spinster. She wasn’t married. She had no children.
But she loved nature, and she must have had an adventurous spirit because in 1913 — 100 years ago next year — she had a cabin built in Mr. Thayer’s development on a hill rising sharply up from a point jutting out into a New Hampshire lake.
It was, in those early years, a pretty humble structure. And it still is today.
At first, there was essentially one large room with a fireplace, some sort of kitchen, a couple of unscreened sleeping porches — which must have delighted the hungry New England mosquitoes and deer flies — and a preposterously small room that was labeled on the floor plans as “the library.”
Much about the place was impractical, at least by today’s standards. There was no plumbing. The only heat was from a fireplace built in front of a boulder, and that fireplace tended to produce as much smoke as warmth.
But Alta Ellis loved it. And she soon shared it with a couple of young people she knew, a couple that she’d played matchmaker for: Her niece, a young art student, and a bright young man from Philadelphia whom she was tutoring in Latin.
That young couple married and raised a family, including a daughter that I was fortunate enough to marry more than 40 years ago.
Aunt Alta Ellis — Tante to the family — was so fond of my wife’s parents that she bequeathed the cabin to them in her will.
Whether that was a gift or a burden depended upon one’s outlook, the weather, and how badly the mice had gotten into things over the winter.
For decades, little changed. One of the sleeping porches collapsed. Screens were added to others.
Until the 1960s, there was still no plumbing. The family relied on a two-holer in the woodshed out back. Then, slowly but surely, improvements began to be made.
An addition was built that included a bathroom and shower room. Plumbing was installed, though the water still comes on a gravity-fed hose from a spring higher up on the hill.
The old dining porch was rebuilt with real windows. When our twins were about two, the old “library” was demolished and replaced with a real bedroom. In the 1990s, a new, screened sleeping porch was added. And last year a shed dormer was put in to give better headroom in the sleeping area of the loft, making it a real second bedroom.
But as with any century-old property, the projects go on and on.
We’re just back from our annual two weeks at the cabin. I made my first visit there in 1969, and the two of us have been there almost every summer since.
That means, in addition to enjoying the cool evenings on a New Hampshire hillside, a full ration of work. This year, that translated into staining one large section of exterior wall, widening an earthen path so that another retaining wall can be built, working with Connie to remove three stumps, repairing an old bookcase that wasn’t very well built in the first place, and replacing some ugly porcelain hooks with some spruce ones that fit better with the cabin’s style. All that, along with cleaning out a zillion cobwebs and worrying about what the mice had gotten into.
Am I complaining?
Never in 99 years.
Never in 100 years in 2013.[[In-content Ad]]
But it would be wrong to refer to it as a “cottage.”
I tend to call it “the cabin.”
My wife points out that to the generation that built the thing nearly 100 years ago, it was simply “camp.”
That was a generation relying on trains instead of interstate highways, a generation that fled the cities each summer because of the heat, a generation whose ideas of creature comforts were far simpler than ours.
It was about 1912 that a man named Thayer began promoting the idea of a summer grouping of cabins on a hillside in southern New Hampshire. His pitch was aimed at folks who wanted to escape an urban environment in an era before air conditioning and when diseases such as polio and tuberculosis tended to be more prevalent in the summertime.
He kept his plans modest and affordable, marketing them to teachers and university academics who had several weeks free each summer.
And some of his sales pitch made its way to Philadelphia.
That’s where a woman named Alta Grace Ellis was working as a Latin teacher. She’d grown up on a farm in upper New York State and was what would have been described in that era as a spinster. She wasn’t married. She had no children.
But she loved nature, and she must have had an adventurous spirit because in 1913 — 100 years ago next year — she had a cabin built in Mr. Thayer’s development on a hill rising sharply up from a point jutting out into a New Hampshire lake.
It was, in those early years, a pretty humble structure. And it still is today.
At first, there was essentially one large room with a fireplace, some sort of kitchen, a couple of unscreened sleeping porches — which must have delighted the hungry New England mosquitoes and deer flies — and a preposterously small room that was labeled on the floor plans as “the library.”
Much about the place was impractical, at least by today’s standards. There was no plumbing. The only heat was from a fireplace built in front of a boulder, and that fireplace tended to produce as much smoke as warmth.
But Alta Ellis loved it. And she soon shared it with a couple of young people she knew, a couple that she’d played matchmaker for: Her niece, a young art student, and a bright young man from Philadelphia whom she was tutoring in Latin.
That young couple married and raised a family, including a daughter that I was fortunate enough to marry more than 40 years ago.
Aunt Alta Ellis — Tante to the family — was so fond of my wife’s parents that she bequeathed the cabin to them in her will.
Whether that was a gift or a burden depended upon one’s outlook, the weather, and how badly the mice had gotten into things over the winter.
For decades, little changed. One of the sleeping porches collapsed. Screens were added to others.
Until the 1960s, there was still no plumbing. The family relied on a two-holer in the woodshed out back. Then, slowly but surely, improvements began to be made.
An addition was built that included a bathroom and shower room. Plumbing was installed, though the water still comes on a gravity-fed hose from a spring higher up on the hill.
The old dining porch was rebuilt with real windows. When our twins were about two, the old “library” was demolished and replaced with a real bedroom. In the 1990s, a new, screened sleeping porch was added. And last year a shed dormer was put in to give better headroom in the sleeping area of the loft, making it a real second bedroom.
But as with any century-old property, the projects go on and on.
We’re just back from our annual two weeks at the cabin. I made my first visit there in 1969, and the two of us have been there almost every summer since.
That means, in addition to enjoying the cool evenings on a New Hampshire hillside, a full ration of work. This year, that translated into staining one large section of exterior wall, widening an earthen path so that another retaining wall can be built, working with Connie to remove three stumps, repairing an old bookcase that wasn’t very well built in the first place, and replacing some ugly porcelain hooks with some spruce ones that fit better with the cabin’s style. All that, along with cleaning out a zillion cobwebs and worrying about what the mice had gotten into.
Am I complaining?
Never in 99 years.
Never in 100 years in 2013.[[In-content Ad]]
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