Tag: Farmhouse

The Farm Backstory

As we hurtle toward completion of the icehouse rehab, I catch myself in barn reflection. Again. Yes, I consider the icehouse a barn. And, yes, migrating my books and artifacts and works in progress from a bedroom-turned-office (aka study/studio) in our home into the almost renovated icehouse is enthusing me beyond reason. It’s also catalyzing reverie and rumination into my farm backstory. Let’s dig a little deeper?

Undoubtedly my affinity for barns is rooted, albeit subconsciously at times, in early to mid 1970s recollections of a tumbledown farmstead tucked into a wooded holler in Cossayuna, New York.

The Farm in Cossayuna, New York (Painting: Louise Coldwell)

The painting above, made by my godmother, Louise Coldwell, has hung above my study/studio fireplace for the last 15 or so years. In this façade of the first home I remember, the two small windows at the top, right were my bedroom. Below my bedroom, the dining room. To the left of the entrance doorway, the living room. My parents bedroom was above the living room. I say, “the first time I remember”, but there were others. An apartment in Manhattan and another in Bronxville. Also, overlapping, a house in Glens Falls and another in Lake Placid. Itinerant years when my parents were still primarily living and working in New York City and then orchestrating a shift upstate. I’ll sit down with them to try and map out these years and lodgings. I muddle these memories in part to offset the fact that The Farm stands out for me. I’m not 100% certain why, but it is the first home the main impression on me, a home that still conjures poignant flashbacks.

Recently I’ve been sifting through memories and mementos of those few-but-formative years, and I’m coming to suspect that my association between barns — especially old, weathered, rural farm barns — and “home” (as well as “homing” and basically all matters related to “homeness”) is intrinsically rooted in my early childhood adventures at The Farm.

Omnipresent: OMC and The Farm (Photo: Geo Davis)

Note the painting, partially cropped, in the photograph above. For a decade and a half this is what I saw when sitting at my desk, if I turned away from Lake Champlain to look at the fireplace. And if you allow your eyes to drift down to the cluttered mantle above the fireplace, you’ll see a black-and-white photograph.

That’s me as a shaggy, bowl-cut youngster, with OMC, a family friend and neighbor when we were at The Farm. He was also my godfather and, in many respects, a surrogate grandfather. The initials stand for Old Man Coldwell, a nickname he used to sign the pottery he made (including the enormous bowl featured in this post: “Generosity of Friends: Lemons from Afar”).

Memories of The Farm and OMC overlap for me. Not always, but often. His presence and guidance, his physicality — apparent in this photograph — and his wonder-welling words. Our time together was guided by adventure. Riding an old tractor through a field to round up a cow that had gotten out. Riding an old tractor through a field to round up a cow that had gotten out. Walking to a distant meadow where he kept a rowboat and fishing rod ready on a pond bank. Squatting among strawberry bushes hunting for the largest, ripest fruit. Harvesting honey from a hive and eating it, thick and warm from a spoon. Massaging clay and squishing it through my fingers when he and my mother were potting…

At The Farm with OMC circa 1974-5

My parents’ friendship (and eventual falling out) with OMC remain intertwined with their memories of The Farm as well. I’ll inquire what if any memories they might share. Until then, I’ll loop back to the property itself.

My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres in Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later. Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle. (Source: The Farm)

Bucolic. Burnished, no doubt, by time’s spirited sentimentality.

I weave The Farm in Cossayuna (aka “The Farm“) into a conversation, a blog post, a social media update. Why? Not sure. Maybe the omnipresence of The Farm as a defining point of reference in my own life? (Source: Preservation by Neglect: The Farm in Cossayuna)

I’ve explored elsewhere the overlap between my lifelong fascination with barns (and barn vernacular) and my early memories at The Farm. The chicken or the egg? Which came first?

Woven into the earliest tapestries of my childhood are fond associations with barns. (Source: A Barnophile of Bygone Barns)

I wander my patchwork memory map and wonder, wandering, wondering, where is the margin mocked by tides and waves, the littoral boundary of fact and fiction, fluctuating with wind and moon? What was The Farm? And what have I imagined into it?

I inevitably distort history, omitting and abbreviating and emphasizing, distilling the vast landscape of data into vignettes. These accrete gradually, revealing the narrative design of my story. (Source: Remembering and Recounting)

Are these memories of The Farm in Cossayuna accurate? Reliable? Are they actually defining details in my life, reliable anchors tethering my current contemplation of homeness?

“Life is not what one lives, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” — Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale (Source: Remembering and Recounting)

This rings true to me. We are our story. Our stories. And The Farm, embedded inextricably into my attraction to Rosslyn, has provided a sort of scaffolding for many of my homing initiatives since about 2005.

As I bring this meandering meditation to a close, it’s worth noting that I’ve shared images of The Farm over the years. Always the farmhouse, never the barns. Peculiar that I don’t have any images of the barns. I’m almost certain that I took a few photographs when I visited within the last decade, but I haven’t managed to put my fingers on them. I will keep looking, but in the meantime, I’ll ask my parents if they might have an old photograph or some other representation of the outbuildings at The Farm.

June 5, 2023
The Farm

Rock Harbor Rhubarb (and memories of The Farm!)

We walked down the road from the tennis court and stopped off at my parents’ house, still closed up for the winter. It would be several weeks before my parents arrived in Rock Harbor for the summer, and by then the asparagus would have gone to seed, so we picked enough for dinner and enough extra to bring back to the city for another meal.

I also picked a fistful of rhubarb to sauté with maple syrup for dessert. Susan disliked rhubarb, but I loved the lip puckering tartness. The taste transports me instantly to The Farm.

My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres near Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later.

Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle.

May 31, 2011
Bygone Barns
Swapping December for January signals that we’re four months into Rosslyn’s icehouse rehabilitation which, in turn, means that I’m four months overdue for a look at (or perhaps the first of several looks at) my love of barns. Truth be told, I’m a bit of a barnophile. And, given my weakness for wabi-sabi, I’m especially keen on bygone barns.

Backcountry Bygone Barns (Source: Geo Davis)

By “bygone barns” I’m conjuring an entire class of rural farm and utility buildings belonging to an earlier time. Think of a barn vernacular with classic lines, practical design, form following function, wearing age and even obsolescence with pride,… I’m even smitten with buildings so dilapidated that they’ve been reduced to their skeletal essence by the forces of nature. Sunlight, moonlight, weather, wildlife, and vegetation permeate these carcasses. The sparse assembly of materials — beaten by the elements for more years than anyone alive can definitively claim to know — endure erect, monumental, lavishly adorned with forgotten functions and the patina of passing time.

My romantic heart and my wabi-sabi aesthetic cling conspiratorially to the possibility of resuscitating, reimagining, and repurposing. Meanwhile the rights of rewilding attempt to discipline my disposition; I ache for the victory of natural forces over human will, the return of these materials to the earth. This tension between between revitalizing and rewilding winds my wonder and perpetuates my desire.
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Backcountry Barns Haiku
Time torn, weatherworn
byways by backcountry barns.
Watercolor skies.
(Source: Backcountry Barns)
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It’s not uncommon for me to interrupt a bike ride in sight of a bygone barn, ostensibly to make a photograph (which I do), but often I’m still standing ten minutes, fifteen minutes later, still observing, often lost in a sort of contemplative gaze.

[Bygone] barn architecture, especially minimalist barns, patinated with weather and time, speaks to something practically primordial in me. My earliest hope when looking for North Country properties was to convert an old barn into a home. I looked at lots of backcountry barns, but I never made a match. (Source: Backcountry Barns)

Inevitably this lead us to farms, mostly no longer actively being farmed, vestiges of an early time, and earlier lifestyle.

I began looking at forgotten farms, bygone barns, meandering stone walls hemming in overgrown fields… (Source: Leaping & Untethering)

Sagging Bygone Barn (Photo: Geo Davis)

It was a romantic errand that exposed Susan and me to many fascinating properties.

Susan… shared my dream of an old farmhouse surrounded by open meadows with views and sunlight. She liked barns and was even receptive to my occasional flights of fancy about converting an old barn into a home. (Source: The Hunt for a Perfect House)

But the bygone barns in my mind and those we visited were failing to align.

Although a farm on the lake (especially an old barn that could be reimagined as a home) was proving an impossible ambition, our imaginations were piqued on several occasions…

A handsome slate roofed barn, still square after a century or more standing at the crest of an immense field just south of Westport, beguiled me for a while. I imagined a lofty open plan; exposed, rough hewn beams; magnificent views in all directions. But the seller was unable or unwilling to subdivide the field and barn from a much larger farm which included additional fields, an immense dairy barn, various other building for hay and equipment storage, a “pond” for storing cow manure and a large square farmhouse with cupola. And in the end it was a relief to Susan, because, after all, this magnificent barn did not stand on the shores of Lake Champlain. (Source: The Hunt for a Perfect House)

Gradually our search evolved. And shifted.

Some day I still hope to explore the barn vernacular, perhaps in a modern and somewhat interpretive way. (Source: Backcountry Barns)

I wrote that last sentence about a year and a half ago. And, while it’s still 100% accurate, I’m also allowing this curious quest to inspire the icehouse rehab which is, after all, a bygone barn, albeit a diminutive one, purpose built for storing ice. Watching the building get stripped back to its oldest and boldest elements, honoring the legacy of a functionally perfect building that has outlived its functional utility, searching for the simplest and purest path forward, restraining the instinct to disguise the building’s age, and summoning the bygone barn’s story from the dusty darkness. It would not be absurd to compare this last four month’s endeavor to a protracted meditation.

In reworking my notes for this post — notes is too vague; perhaps field notes is closer, or travelogue — I come across a hastily jotted note.

Renovation or Story?!? (Photo: Geo Davis)

I’d written the question to myself as if posed by another, perhaps one of the many capable collaborators on this project. I don’t recall when or why I wrote this, nor am I certain why this seemingly frustrated inquiry was posed in this way. It’s as if I imagined Pam or Hroth or someone else, exasperated, almost pleading to simplify the journey, our journey, to focus fully (and exclusively) on rehabilitation of this bygone barn.

What’s more important, the renovation or your damned story?!?

I’m only about halfway through these notes, but this feels like the right place to pause. I’ll continue this reflection tomorrow, but for now I’ll prime the contemplative pump with an intriguing short film by Matt McFarling called “Bygone Barns” that the inimitable Katie Shepard discovered while helping me sort my jumbled thoughts.

Thanks, Katie!
January 2, 2023
A Barnophile of Bygone Barns
Yesterday I meditated a minute on bygone barns. Ancient farm buildings. Tempered by time, tempted by gravity, and sowbacked beneath the burdens of generations, these rugged utility structures retain (and sometimes gain) a minimalist elegance long after design and construction and use fade into history. My meditation was meandering and inconclusive. In part this was due to the wandering wonder these timeworn buildings inspire in me. And in part it was because my observations are still evolving and inconclusive. I’m not a barn expert, an agricultural architecture preservationist, or even a particularly astute student of barns and farms. But I am a barnophile.

Barn·o·phile /bärnəˌfīl/ noun (from Greek philos ‘loving’)
1. 1. a connoisseur of farm buildings
  2. a person with a fondness for structures used to house livestock, grain, etc.
  3. an admirer and/or collector of agricultural outbuildings
Aside from the hubris I’ve just exercised in birthing this barnophile definition, I’m generally inclined to a humbler and less presumptuous relationship with the mostly agrarian artifacts we categorize as barns.

[As an unabashed barnophile with a] weakness for wabi-sabi, I’m especially keen on bygone barns.

By “bygone barns” I’m conjuring an entire class of rural farm and utility buildings belonging to an earlier time. Classic lines, practical design, form following function, wearing age and even obsolescence with pride,… I’m even smitten with buildings so dilapidated that they’ve been reduced to their skeletal essence by the forces of nature. Sunlight, moonlight, weather, wildlife, and vegetation permeate these carcasses. The sparse assembly of materials — beaten by the elements for more years than anyone alive can definitively claim to know — endure erect, monumental, lavishly adorned with forgotten functions and the patina of passing time. (Source: Bygone Barns)

Barn Vernacular (Source: Geo Davis)

But why do forgotten farm buildings enchant me? What reason lurks beneath the tidy text, what foundation for my unusual fascination with these vestiges of a simpler, more local, perhaps even a slower time? Katie Shepard, so very rarely off target, suggests this childhood reminiscence might play into my barn-centric attraction.

My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres in Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later.

Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle. (Source: The Farm)

As usual, Katie is right. Woven into the earliest tapestries of my childhood are fond associations with barns. This was undoubtedly further reinforced during our years at Homeport given the inordinate amount of time that my brother, sister and I occupied ourselves in the mysterious old barn complete with ballroom and servant’s quarters long since adapted to other uses. And in my grade school years my siblings and I memorized Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” to recite as a birthday gift for my father. I wish I could take credit for this creative gift giving tradition, but it was my mother, Melissa Davis, who gently guided the three of us each winter to select a poem that would appeal to my father, and then to memorize it during our daily 45-60 minute commute to school each morning and and each evening. Three days after Christmas, on my father’s birthday, we would recite the poem together, and (with one notable exception that’s better reserved for another day) my father enjoyed the gift, leaning back, sometimes closing his eyes, and listening attentively. I think “Fern Hill” may have been the best received, and it became a go-to for family recitation over the years, hypnotically weaving itself into the ethos of our childhood the way a prayer might.

Boundaries of a Barnophile

There comes a time to focus the “philos”, or at least to try and narrow or delineate the subject of interest.

I’ve talked around my fascination with barns, barn architecture, barn construction, and barn aesthetics… But I haven’t outlined the tenets for my enduring intrigue, nor have I articulated exactly what I mean when I refer to a barn vernacular. It’s time to draft at least a preliminary look at my love of barns. […]

In the vernacular vocabulary of quintessentially North American architecture, the barn endures as a practical yet proud icon of rural living. […]

Although my fascination with barn vernacular isn’t limited to Yankee barns, it is my most consistent and encompassing vision.(Source: Toward a Barn Vernacular)

In other words, I’m inclined toward classic geometry, roofs steep enough to shed water and snow (with a particular fondness for 9:12 pitch), and unembellished details. And I will always favor bygone barns to new construction. The quality of workmanship and materials stands out, but so too does the story stretching across decades, even centuries.

I consider aging utility buildings — barns, boathouses, icehouses, sugarshacks, etc. — to be at least as intriguing as old houses. More sometimes. So many relics, unselfconscious, candid. Less penchant for concealing, fewer makeovers, more concurrently present years and lives. Sometimes it’s the old, banged up subjects and objects that look the best. Thank goodness for that! (Source: Horse Stall Haiku)

And what of other barn-like buildings, rural utility buildings designed and constructed after the same manner?

School Bus Stop Ahead (Photo: virtualDavis)

They appeal to me as well. In fact, the agricultural DNA isn’t essential to me at all. I suppose I’m somewhat “barn androgynous”, equally smitten with similarly origined buildings even if they’ve never seen a horse, cow, chicken, pig, or hay bale.

That said, it’s worth acknowledging that the architecture of New England barns, Yankee barns, and even — drifting a little further southeast — tobacco barns are especially appealing to me. And if it’s fair to assume that my affinity is at least partly nostalgia-driven, then it’s probably worth adding another influence the those sited above. Four year of boarding school in Old Deerfield, Massachusetts definitely instilled in me an appreciation for early colonial building, and there were a couple of barns that still loom proud in my memory.

Beyond Boundaries

Although I wish I could gather these strings and call it caput, I must further complicate the boundaries I’ve endeavored to delineate above.

While there’s something alluring about the volume and the efficiency of barns, the unpretentious posture with no attempt to conceal functions or mechanism, scale isn’t essential. The small corn crib above, for example, intoxicates my imagination nearly as much as the grand barn at the top of this post.

Baked into my identity as a barnophile, into this somewhat esoteric aesthetic and philosophical appetite, is a tendency to stretch my definition of barns to include other similar outbuildings.

While Rosslyn didn’t fit squarely into the vision of an old farm or a collection of dilapidated barns that I originally was hunting for, this stately home does have three remarkable outbuildings, all three of which lured me as much as the house. In fact, well before we completed our top-to-bottom rehabilitation of the home, we tackled the icehouse, boathouse, and carriage barn. All of them were on the brink. Actually much of the house was as well. But just as we committed to salvaging the home, returning it to its former grandeur, we likewise undertook laborious, challenging efforts to salve the icehouse, boathouse, and carriage barn. All buildings were dilapidated, but the icehouse and boathouse were both succumbing to the omnipresent challenges of weather and neglect.

I’ve posted plenty in the past about Rosslyn’s boathouse, the lakeside folly that beckoned to us from the beginning. For a whimsical mind like my own, smitten with boating adventures — real and imagined — becoming irreversibly enchanted with our small dock house protruding out into Lake Champlain was pretty much inevitable. Although its mission has always been tied to watery locomotion, it is for all practical purposes a sort of barn. A diminutive lakeside barn purpose-built for boating. A utility outbuilding conceived and specifically confected to serve the Kestrel just over a century and a quarter ago.

And Rosslyn’s icehouse, occupying much of my attention these last few months as we cartwheel through an ambitious rehabilitation and adaptive reuse project, is likewise a barn. We often refer to the carriage barn and icehouse, standing as they do side-by-side, as “the barns”. As a utility building designed to complement the architecture of the carriage barn and home, it was nevertheless first and foremost a utility building constructed to support the residents with year round cooling at a time when refrigeration did not yet exist. It was an ice barn!

And so you see perhaps the elasticity of my identity as a barnophile. A barn might not immediately appear to be a barn. But the rudiments, the purpose, and likely the longevity have profited from the heritage of barn building. And this, my friends strikes me as the right place to wrap up. If this this post was intended as a more intimate look at the romance of bygone barns, those that have endured a looong time and even those no longer viable, then I’ve covered my bases. And too, I’ve revisited my original hope of locating an old barn to convert into a home, a hope that has not altogether faded away.

In fact, Susan and I have been for a few years brainstorming a barn-inspired for the future, our future, that just might begin to emerge in the years ahead. Stay tuned…
January 3, 2023
Preservation by Neglect: The Farm in Cossayuna

The Farm in Cossayuna, New York, circa 1975 (Painting: Louise Coldwell)

Although long overdue, toooooo long long overdue, today I’d like to introduce The Farm in Cossayuna. Or reintroduce it, for those of you who’ve been with me for a while. I refer to it often, and yet I don’t usually contextualize my reference in any sort of useful manner. It’s as if I unconsciously assume everyone knows what I’m referring to when I weave The Farm in Cossayuna (aka “The Farm“) into a conversation, a blog post, a social media update. Why? Not sure. Maybe the omnipresence of The Farm as a defining point of reference in my own life?

This upstate New York farm property figures prominently in the childhood memories underpinning my Rosslyn obsession. It was also my first experience of preservation by neglect. And judging from my most recent visit a decade ago, it looks likely that this once-again-woebegone holding may be depending upon the mercy of preservation by neglect once again. But I’ll flesh that out in a moment. First let’s fill in the backstory a little bit.

One of the first (if not the first) mentions of The Farm on Rosslyn Redux was back in May 31, 2011 when this blog was still young.

My parents, living and working in New York City, had purchased an 1840s farmhouse on 85 acres near Greenwich, New York five months after getting married. I was born less than two years later.

Although The Farm served primarily as a weekend getaway for the next five years, it dominates the geography of my earliest childhood. A stream of nostalgia gilded memories flow from this pastoral source: exploring the time-worn barns, absent livestock except for those conjured up by my energetic imagination and the swallows which darted in and out, building nests in the rafters, gliding like darts through dusty sunbeams; vegetable gardening with my mother; tending apple, pear and quince trees with my father; eating fresh rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries; discovering deer and raccoons and snakes and even a snapping turtle. (Source: The Farm)

And a few months later on September 29, 2011 I returned to the same theme.

My idealized notion of a country house had its roots in a small farm that my parents had bought in Washington County while still living in New York City in the 1970s. Initially a getaway for my recently married parents trying to balance life and careers in New York City and later, albeit briefly, a full time residence, The Farm underpins my love for countryside and provides my earliest childhood memories.(Source: Abandoning City Life)

Sadly, I don’t know when this farmhouse was originally built but it was ours four about seven years. My mother confirmed this afternoon that they sold The Farm in 1977. And yet forty five years later I’m still dusting off memories and drawing upon The Farm’s wellspring of influence for my homing projects.

Preservation by Neglect: The Farm

If we contemplate The Farm in Cossayuna through the lens of preservation by neglect, there are at least two timeframes to focus on: the period prior to 1970 when my parents purchased the property, and the period after 1977 when my parents sold the property. Both are interesting, and I’d like to touch briefly on both.

But first let’s refresh the idea of preservation by neglect. Although sometimes considered a conservation strategy, this invests it with a greater degree of intention than I suspect is usually the case. Often historic buildings deteriorate because they are no longer necessary or desirable, or they’ve become too difficult or expensive to maintain, or conditions have become too precarious or dangerous to attempt renovation. Entropy. In some cases this inevitable natural deterioration resulting from human inaction can help protect a building from alteration, demolition, etc. that might otherwise permanently alter, damage, or eliminate the underlying architectural or cultural heritage. In essence, these forgotten properties, are spared by virtue of being too far gone for convenient rehabilitation. Their neglect has in some (but certainly not all) cases leads to eventual preservation.

The painting of The Farm in Cossayuna at the top of this post was made and gifted by Louise Coldwell, a next door neighbor and family friend. In my memory, that is the home I remember. Perhaps from the years of looking upon the painting, and perhaps because the romance of a house, a person, a view seems to win out when rendered in a painting versus a photograph.

But when my parents purchased the property it probably looked a bit more like this black and white photograph (if you can use your imagination to pull three years of renovation away from the image.)

The Farm in Cossayuna, New York, circa 1973 (Photo: Gordon Davis)

I believe that the photograph was taken in 1973 by my father. The miniature portico over the front door has been removed (and replaced with an eagle) by the time the painting was made. But otherwise things look pretty similar. The near chimney looks like it could use a repointing (my memory takes me to a chimney fire in this small stone stack) and the roof’s ridge beam shows some sagging, especially on the right side. But all told, the house looks pretty good. My memory fails me in providing a proper assessment of the home’s condition when my parents purchased it, so I’ll see if I can tease it out of them. What I do recollect is the condition of the barns. They were in rough shape even then, though I’ll save those memories (and a few photographs from my 2012 return to the property) for another post focusing specifically on the barns. Spoiler alert: one of the large barns had to be torn down when I was still a baby…

But let’s fast forward almost three decades and take a look at the house, albeit from a different angle, when I returned with my parents and an old neighbor in 2012.

The Farm in Cossayuna, New York, Autumn 2010 (Photo: Geo Davis)

Following a community cider day at the one time home of Louise and Dwight Coldwell, we were fortunate to be offered a ride and an introduction to the new owner of our old house. Wilbur McIntyre, a dairy farmer who lived a couple of doors away, took us down the long wooded driveway to see the home and barns. We met the adult son of the owners and were invited to look around. Ostensibly undergoing some maintenance, the main door to the exterior had been removed and a blanket hung in its place. Chickens pecked around on the floor inside what had been our dining room once upon a time. We abbreviated our inside visit and returned to the yard noting some changes like a small pond that had been dug at the far end of the home. The barns, to my satisfaction, were still standing and in remarkably fine fettle for utility buildings clearly neglected for many decades. There’s something about a well built barn, even as nature punishes it relentlessly day after day, year after year.

In some respect the outside of the house looks virtually unchanged. The sag in the roof is still visible, and there’s an even more pronounced sag in the single story addition at the far end of the house (the location of our kitchen in the 1970s). Inside the house appeared to be in a state of advanced disrepair, but for all I know we might have caught a thorough rehabilitation effort in the early phase. Perhaps today the interior is bright, sturdy, inviting, and the chickens are back outside in the yard.

The Farm in Cossayuna

I’ve talked elsewhere about the curious pull this house exudes upon me, but for now the matter at hand is how this property — neglected before and after my parents’ short stewardship — has endured so admirably, so unmuddled by “makeovers” and ill conceived additions. The existing addition I’ve already noted predates my parents’s purchase, and it is perhaps an architecturally unfortunate departure from the simple colonial bones of the house, and the windows were clearly replaced at some point, perhaps also prior to the period my mother and father loved this little home in the woods. In short, this property appears to have endured more neglect across the decades than preservation, and yet it endures. It affords a gentle optimism that even the inhospitable winters and the relatively moist year-round conditions are nevertheless allowing for this one-time farm to exist another year, another decade, perhaps another century.

During this last visit to The Farm in Cossayuna Susan and I had already undertaken the brunt of Rosslyn’s ambitious 4+ yearlong rehabilitation. Work on the grounds was ongoing, and the 2011 floods had devastated the boathouse and waterfront, so we were once again working against the odds. In addition to salvaging the boathouse after about three months under water, we need to rebuild stone wall terracing, replant gardens, lawns, and trees. Rehab ad infinitum!

Rosslyn, no longer being preserved by neglect, was now being historically rehabilitated with intention and determination. And to this day, our commitment has not wavered. The current boathouse gangway repairs and the icehouse rehabilitation project are only the two most current efforts to ensure that our stewardship of this historic property allows it to be enjoyed for generations to come. And yet we are well aware that our good fortune, the longevity and endurance of this stately property, is due in no small part to preservation by neglect, much as…

December 7, 2022
Totally Incompatible

Image by virtualDavis via Flickr

My fixer-upper forays with Bruce Ware and other local realtors evolved when Susan joined the search. She shared my dream of an old farmhouse surrounded by open meadows with views and sunlight. She liked barns and was even receptive to my occasional flights of fancy about converting an old barn into a home.

But our notions of size and simplicity were less aligned. And Susan was particularly keen on finding a Lake Champlain waterfront property. “What’s the point of having a place that’s not on the lake?” she asked repeatedly as if the answer were self evident.

The odds of finding an old farm on Lake Champlain (bygone barns “In Old Champlain“) were slim enough, but the prospect of finding a simple, inexpensive property on the lake was totally implausible unless we shifted our thinking toward seasonal camps. South of Westport and north of Essex there were many small properties tucked along the lakeshore that Bruce insisted on showing us despite repeatedly explaining that they were not what we had in mind.

We also looked at inland farms and interesting old homes in small towns and hamlets, “Just so you can see what’s out there…”

We enjoyed looking and brainstorming, but we were growing frustrated with the increasingly diffuse range of properties we were seeing. We had lost our focus.

Bruce was trying to show us all of the options available which in equal turns dilated and frustrated our search. But there was an even more fundamental problem: Susan and my interests were not perfectly aligned.

Although a farm on the lake (especially an old barn that could be reimagined as a home) was proving an impossible ambition, our imaginations were piqued on several occasions by totally dissimilar and totally unlikely properties.

An old “Great Camps” style summer house in Westport overlooking Lake Champlain’s Northwest Bay intrigued me until I realized that this pedigreed manse adjoined — indeed partially overlooked — the town’s sewage treatment plant.

A handsome slate roofed barn, still square after a century or more standing at the crest of an immense field just south of Westport, beguiled me for a while. I imagined a lofty open plan; exposed, rough hewn beams; magnificent views in all directions. But the seller was unable or unwilling to subdivide the field and barn from a much larger farm which included additional fields, an immense dairy barn, various other building for hay and equipment storage, a “pond” for storing cow manure and a large square farmhouse with cupola. And in the end it was a relief to Susan, because, after all, this magnificent barn did not stand on the shores of Lake Champlain.

And then there was Rosslyn, a Merchant-Ivory film set for The Great Gatsby’s Adirondack prequel. A century earlier. Located on the lake in Essex, it included a boathouse I’d loved since I was a child, a carriage barn, an ice house, and plenty of stone walls. But there were no fields and too many buildings. And the house was too big. And too run down. Way too run down. And the price tag was beyond unrealistic.

During our first visit Susan and I had both known immediately, instinctively, conclusively that Rosslyn was not for us. Purchasing this once stately but now desperately dilapidated property was a bad idea. A really, really bad idea.

The expense alone. There was no conceivable short term return on investment. None.

And the amount of time it’d take to understand all of the property’s problems, let alone begin to fix them, to build her back to her former glory? It was incomprehensible.

But money, scope, logistics, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Long deferred maintenance, decades overdue; a gutted rear wing with failing floors suspended from cables that stretched through the middle of rooms; crumbling foundations; faulty electric, plumbing and heating; a boathouse that was one ice flow away from a watery grave; an ice house with corn cribbing walls and a collapsed roof. The current owner had dedicated the better part of four decades of his life, four decades — full time — to renovating Rosslyn and yet it was disintegrating around him.

Buying Rosslyn was totally incompatible with our means, our lives and our plans. And yet Rosslyn seduced us. Susan and I visited and then, months later, revisited the property, each time musing about its potential despite knowing that we shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t ever own it.

Our increasingly unfocused search — Susan and my notions of the perfect fixer-upper diverging and converging unpredictably — must have vexed Bruce despite his perennial good humor and patience. Though we did periodically visit additional properties when Bruce called with new listings that he thought might appeal to us, our enthusiasm for discovering the perfect spot gradually waned. And our enthusiasm for Rosslyn, for brainstorming and daydreaming and scheming some way to transport this once stately property into our new home, gained momentum.

October 3, 2011
Leaping & Untethering

Rosslyn Dock House, by Bill Amadon

In the spring and summer of 2006, when Susan and I took a leap of faith and made the decision to pursue Rosslyn as our future home, it was apparent to both of us that we were biting off considerably more than we could chew.

Dream big. Dream a little bigger. And then leap!

From leaping capriciously, optimistically, idealistically, and oh-so romantically into this Rosslyn adventure 16 years ago to an eventual and inevitable untethering at some point in the future, Susan and I have courted an unconventional but rewarding existence. In a sense we’ve never stopped leaping.

Now with 20/20 hindsight (and a decade and a half of years of lessons learned and humility earned) I’m comfortable admitting that we got in over our heads. Waaayyy over our heads. Our skillset and our checkbook were too lean; our romantic outlook and our self confidence were too stout. Needless to say, that’s a fraught combination. But I wouldn’t change a single thing. Well, maybe a few things…

I envisioned Rosslyn’s rehabilitation as an adventure, a risky adventure, but an adventure well worth the risk (and the 100% investment it would take, not the least of which was our undivided time and energy.) Rosslyn would become our love affair, our work and play, our vocation and avocation, and — despite a resolute decision early in our relationship to embrace unclehood and aunthood while remaining childfree — Rosslyn would become our surrogate child.

In due course, heck, practically from day one, Rosslyn would eclipse literally everything else in our lives. That’s truly not an exaggeration. And, in all candor, it wasn’t particularly wise on our part. If we could do it again, we would try harder to define and observe boundaries. We would create actual limits. We would take breaks. Or at least, we tell each other that that’s what we would do differently. We would try to create boundaries. We would try to take breaks.

But you can’t un-live life. And regrets are uncomely.

Re-examining life, however, is not only possible. In this case it’s prerequisite to the task at hand. The tasks at hand…

Rosslyn Dock House, by Melissa Davis

Leaping

Today Susan and I are longer-term Rosslyn residents — by a factor of four! — than even our most unbridled expectations at the outset. And yet we struggle to untether ourselves from our adventure fairytale with this home, property, and community. In the months ahead I’ll explore this curious connection with place, with an old house that became our home, with a community that beguiled us from the outset and wove us into its enchanting tapestry, and also with the fact that we originally envisioned this chapter of our lives as a temporary transition, a wholesome regrouping, and how challenging it has been to separate ourselves from Rosslyn, and from this community. The complex liminal space we envisioned Rosslyn becoming way back in 2006 was not ready to graduate us after three of four years as we’d originally anticipated. And today Rosslyn’s remarkable liminality is once again catalyzing profound and important growth for us. Transformation is omnipresent, not only at Rosslyn, but everywhere. We’re living through many levels of concurrent transition. And Rosslyn, as she has since 2006, is guiding us, nurturing us, and preparing us for what awaits us down the road.

Today’s post, though rambling and unwieldy, comes at a time when we are brainstorming and daydreaming and contemplating what it would look like to untether and disembark on a new adventure. The vision is still forming, the seed still germinating. But you’re invited to join us as we contemplate and eventually cast off.

Bur first, before introducing the wonders we’re currently navigating, let’s hopscotch through a few earlier posts that refresh our memory about how this marvelous tale began.

Rooted in a personal shift from wanderlust to houselust, I spent 2003 through 2005 recognizing that I was thinking differently about home and community.

I’d made it into my early thirties without owning a home due to my intentionally peripatetic lifestyle, and despite an aesthete’s appetite for buildings and furnishing and gardens, I hadn’t the least interest in settling down. No biological clock ticking. No nesting instinct. No yen for taxes and maintenance and burst pipes and snow shoveling. No desire whatsoever for the trappings of a settled, domestic life. I understood why it appealed to others, but for me the commitments and encumbrances far outweighed the pride and financial wisdom of home ownership.

Until recently.

Something had changed, and I couldn’t quite figure out how or why. (Source: Paris Renovation Bug)

Perhaps for nostalgic reasons I began looking at forgotten farms, bygone barns, meandering stone walls hemming in overgrown fields…

The perfect place, I explained to Bruce, the friend and realtor who shuttled me from property to property, would be a small, simple farmhouse in the middle of fields with a sturdy barn and some acreage, maybe a stream or a pond or access to a river. Barns, in particular, pulled me. Secluded places with good light and views, forgotten places with stories still vaguely audible if you slowed down long enough to hear the voices. No loud traffic. An old overgrown orchard, perhaps. Asparagus and rhubarb gone feral near the barn. Stone walls, lots of stone walls and maybe an old stone foundation from a building long ago abandoned, the cellar hole full to bursting with day lilies. A couple of old chimneys in the farmhouse with fireplaces. A simple but spacious kitchen. A bedroom with plenty of windows. A room to read and write and collage the walls with notes, lists, photos, drawings and scraps. Someplace I could tinker at myself, gradually restoring the walls and plaster and roof. Timeworn wide plank floorboards of varying widths that I would sand by hand to avoid erasing the footpaths and dings and cupping from a burst pipe years before. (Source: Serene, Patinaed Fantasy)

As Susan became more and more interested in my North Country real estate search, we both began to imagine what it would look like to spend more time in a place that pulled us like poetry, viscerally if sometimes inexplicably.

“I’d be living a green lifestyle in the Adirondacks too. I love it here. I’d be thrilled to live here for a few years.” Peripatetic by nature, I enjoyed relocating every three to four years. Having grown up in the Adirondacks, mostly in the Champlain Valley, I had long yearned to reconnect, not just for vacation or a weekend. (Source: Postprandial Soak)

Projecting our lifestyle fantasies onto the tapestry of the Adirondacks’ Champlain Valley became a constant pastime.

We could waterski and windsurf for half the year instead of just two or three months, starting in May with drysuits and finishing in the end of October. We could sail the Hobie Cat more instead of letting it collect spider webs on the Rock Harbor beach. I could fly fish the Boquet and Ausable Rivers in the afternoon while Tasha snoozed on the bank. We could join Essex Farm, the local CSA, supporting a local startup while eating healthy, locally grown and raised food. I could grow a vegetable garden, an herb garden, an orchard. Susan could work for an architecture firm in Burlington and volunteer at the animal shelter. We could buy season passes to Whiteface and downhill ski several days a week. We could cross country ski and snowshoe and bike and rollerblade and kayak and canoe and hike, and maybe I would start rock climbing again… [With] our collective brainstorm leap frogging forward, it all started to make a strange sort of sense, to seem almost logical. (Source: Almost Logical)

Susan and I loved to tell stories, and increasingly we were beginning to insert ourselves into the intoxicating plot of a co-authored fairytale nestled into the Adirondack foothills, rebooting our lives and our work in a more intentional, healthier, happier way. Creating a new chapter together.

“Are you serious? Would you really want to live at Rosslyn?” Susan persisted.

I was unclear whether she was horrified or excited. I had made the suggestion spontaneously, without forethought, and now I felt embarrassed. I knew the idea was absurd. We both knew it made no sense at all. And yet we had returned to see the house again that morning. A second visit to a house we had already decided not to buy. Why? It exerted an inexplicable pull for both of us. It had awakened our imaginations, our fantasies, our hopes.

“No. And yes,” I said, hedging. “No, I’m not really serious. I just suggested it off the cuff. It’s probably the stupidest idea ever, or at least the least serious idea ever. But yes, there is a side of me that would love to live at Rosslyn. I’ve felt it each time we’ve visited the house. I’m not sure I can explain it…”

“You don’t need to,” Susan said. She was beaming. “I agree.” She rose out of the bath and wrapped a towel around her broad shoulders. “What a dream it would be, to live in that grand old home!” (Source: We could live at the Rosslyn)

Little by little we were talking ourselves, talking each other into a transformation that would encompass virtually every aspect of our lives. It didn’t happen overnight, but the possibilities we were conjuring had begun to eclipse our desire to stay in Manhattan, my desire to return to Europe, and our realistic sense that anything else in the world could possibly make as much sense as relocating to the western shores of Lake Champlain to build a home together.

October 26, 2022
Serene, Patinaed Fantasy

East 57th Street between First and Sutton (via Wikipedia)

Accustomed to living out of a suitcase, I pendulumed back and forth between Manhattan where Susan was wrapping up a degree in interior design following a decade-long career in video production, and Westport, New York, where both of our parents owned homes and where we’d met a couple of years prior.

Susan had recently refinished a one bedroom apartment in The Galleria, and she was itching to sell it and start a new project. I was intrigued by the prospect of collaborating on a project and plugging my recent Paris experience into a tired but dignified New York apartment, but the Adirondacks were pulling me. After almost half a lifetime living in cities, I yearned to return to the rhythms and pleasures of rural life.

My idealized notion of a country house had its roots in a small farm that my parents had bought in Washington County while still living in New York City in the 1970s. Initially a getaway for my recently married parents trying to balance life and careers in New York City and later, albeit briefly, a full time residence, The Farm underpins my love for countryside and provides my earliest childhood memories.

The perfect place, I explained to Bruce, the friend and realtor who shuttled me from property to property, would be a small, simple farmhouse in the middle of fields with a sturdy barn and some acreage, maybe a stream or a pond or access to a river. Barns, in particular, pulled me. Secluded places with good light and views, forgotten places with stories still vaguely audible if you slowed down long enough to hear the voices. No loud traffic. An old overgrown orchard, perhaps. Asparagus and rhubarb gone feral near the barn. Stone walls, lots of stone walls and maybe an old stone foundation from a building long ago abandoned, the cellar hole full to bursting with day lilies. A couple of old chimneys in the farmhouse with fireplaces. A simple but spacious kitchen. A bedroom with plenty of windows. A room to read and write and collage the walls with notes, lists, photos, drawings and scraps. Someplace I could tinker at myself, gradually restoring the walls and plaster and roof. Timeworn wide plank floorboards of varying widths that I would sand by hand to avoid erasing the footpaths and dings and cupping from a burst pipe years before.

Although I’d painted the picture often enough, my budget and unwillingness to abandon the serene, patinaed fantasy resulted in a few false starts but mostly a very clear idea of what I was not interested in buying. On the upside, I came around and helped Susan select and renovate a coop in a 1926 McKim, Mead and White prewar located on 57th Street just off Sutton Place. An elegant apartment in a handsome building. Great bones, view and sunlight enhanced with a top-to-bottom environmentally responsible, non-toxic renovation. A success!

Though there were occasional fireworks when our aesthetics and convictions clashed, we enjoyed working together and decided to look for a North Country property that would suit both of our interests…

September 29, 2011
Farmhouse Furniture Wax: Green Product with a Nostalgic Feel

Farmhouse Furniture Wax (Source: Sweet Grass Farm)

We’ve had good luck with using Earth Friendly Products’ Furniture Polish on unsealed wood such as cherry and walnut furniture that hasn’t been varnished, lacquered, etc. Because the grain is open and receptive to oil, the furniture polish works nicely to brighten the natural pigments and grain while maintaining the requisite moisture in the wood. But this product is decidedly unsuitable for our mahogany dining room table, leaving behind unsightly smears and swirls from the applicator.

My current quest to source a green furniture wax connected me with Betsy at Farmhouse Wares, a user-friendly online purveyor of the sort of essentials you might have found at a general store in the distant, slightly idealized past. Betsy’s goal complements our own ideals nicely: the marriage of classical elegance and healthy, ecologically responsible design. So the website was an obvious match for me this morning when I was dredging the web for a non-toxic wax to maintain our French polished and lacquered antiques.

Farmhouse Furniture Wax

Farmhouse Furniture Wax from Sweet Grass Farm promises to be exactly what we need. More once the wax arrives and we’ve had a chance to test drive it…

Sweet Grass Farm

Update: Time for a re-order! It’s been eight months since I first posted, and I’ve just placed another order for more Farmhouse Furniture Wax, and this time we’re trying the lilac as well as the lemon scent. Lavendar is not likely to be a big hit with Susan’s who’s sensitivity to fragrance tends to rule out lavendar. A shame since I love the smell; reminds me of Provence…

Verdict is that this product is a good, reliable hard wax for highly finished wood furniture. We’ve been using on finicky antiques with great results!

February 19, 2009