Walk the road less-travelled
Homer Noble Farm, site of Robert Frost’s Vermont summer home, is open to visitors
Middlebury College in Vermont is famous for its foreign language summer schools and its “language pledge”: No English Spoken Here. Speak it, and risk expulsion.
Sixteen kilometres away, it’s a different story at the college’s Bread Loaf School of English, the existence of which is inextricably linked with the history of American literature through its connection to one of its deepest poets.
Robert Frost spent 30 summers writing, teaching, and living at Bread Loaf.
His rustic cabin about a kilometre-and-a-half away is preserved – pretty much as he left it – by the college.
As a keepsake, it is profound and simple, kind of like Frost himself.
Robert Frost bought the property known as the Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, Vt., in 1938. I won’t bother describing the main house. Picture in your head a typical white Vermont farmstead. There, you’ve got it. Now forget it.
The important piece of architecture is the plain wooden cabin set back out of sight behind it where Frost lived during the summers between 1939 and 1963, while teaching at Bread Loaf.
The man known so well for his “snowy woods” and “roads less travelled” knew what he was talking about.
The delicious location brings to mind poetic acrobatics. Dappled sunshine. Bending birches. Paths pocked with tree roots like the veins on the back of an arthritic hand.
While located near the main Middlebury College campus, the cabin seems part of a different world, swallowed up by the suddenness of the Green Mountains. The last few miles of the trip there on Route 125 are the windiest, shadowing the convolutions of the Middlebury River, more boulders than water.
Frost’s connection to nature is a given, but what about his connection to Middlebury College?
In 1915, the German language school was founded at Middlebury College, the first of many summer language schools to follow. To keep things fair, it was decided there needed to be an English summer school as well, and the Bread Loaf School of English was established in 1920 on the grounds of the former Bread Loaf Inn in nearby Ripton. (Bread Loaf is the name of the looming mountain that Ripton perches on.)
The famed Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference was established soon after in 1926.
Jay Parini, who is professor of English at Middlebury and author of the popular biography Robert Frost: A Life, says Frost was the one to suggest a conference there, “so in a sense he founded the School of English and the Writers’ Conference.”
When he purchased the Homer Noble farm in 1938, Frost kept the cabin for himself, and made the main farmhouse available to Ted and Kay Morrison.
Architecturally, the structure is not a gatehouse, but the Morrisons were in a sense gatekeepers.
According to Jay Parini: “Ted was a Harvard professor and director of the School of English. Kay was Frost’s secretary. I don’t know how much they protected Frost from visitors; but they were the first wall to leap over in getting to the poet.”
These days, Middlebury College is the gatekeeper.
The public is free to explore the grounds of the Homer Noble Farm and see the buildings, but access to the interior of the cabin is restricted.
The cabin in Ripton may be lonely, but it comes to life easily with a little imagination. His tea cups are stacked above the sink, just waiting to be filled. Books lean into each other on his bookshelves, as if exhausted from just having been read.
In his kitchen, as claustrophobic as a submarine, frying pans rest on the top of a wood stove, ready for the next meal. There are signs of the poet in unlikely places. Frost used his wooden doors to write in the margins of life, scrawling temperatures in pencil in an act of literary graffiti.
Otherwise, graffiti and vandalism would be unthinkable here but sadly possible.
In 2008, the main house was broken into and $10,000 worth of damage was done. The cabin itself was not touched.
The Homer Noble Farm
is 1.4 kilometres west of the Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton, Vt., on Robert Frost Road. The grounds are accessible to the public. Entrance to the cabin is restricted. To view an online exhibit: http:// midddigital.middlebury.edu/local_ files/robert_frost/index.html