Repairing the Field Stone Basement in Veblen Cottage

The 1875 farmhouse we call the Veblen Cottage has been a remarkably patient structure. It has long appeared to be standing forlorn in a forest clearing, but has in fact been getting considerable attention of late. Donated to Mercer County by the Veblens in 1957 as part of Herrontown Woods, it had been Oswald Veblen's study and getaway, a place to spend Saturday afternoons with Einstein and other close friends. Veblen died in 1960, and the cottage has stood empty ever since. After Elizabeth Veblen died in 1974, Mercer County spruced it up for the celebration of the country's 1976 Bicentennial, and in the 1980s, a NY Times article told of plans to make it into a nature center. That initiative was evidently abandoned, and recurrent vandalism eroded any further interest. Before the Friends of Herrontown Woods was able to intervene, the roofs of the kitchen and study had been allowed to collapse. Vines grew up and over the walls. It seemed pretty far gone, and yet appearances were deceiving. The original, 2-story portion of the cottage remained dry and intact. At some point, I pulled the vines away, built serviceable roofs for the kitchen and study, and augmented the 2-story portion's roof with a progression of tarps.

There are several reasons to preserve the Cottage. For one, it appears to have been Oswald Veblen's spiritual center. He asked that his ashes be buried nearby, and Elizabeth's ashes were to join his. The Cottage is also the only remaining, unaltered example of the smallholder farmhouses that dotted the Princeton ridge in the 19th century.

We are thrilled, then, to report that the Friends of Herrontown Woods has made the first substantial investment in the Veblen Cottage's future. In October, FOHW hired the first-rate masonry firm, deGruchy Masonry Restoration, to repair and repoint the field stone walls in the basement. Through his 40 year career, Andy deGruchy has been part of a movement to bring back the tradition of lime mortar, of the sort that was used in cathedrals and other stone buildings before being displaced by Portland cement.

Though the stones in the cottage basement had long since lost their mortar, the walls had nonetheless remained standing. Only a couple stones had to be hammered back into place. Fifty years of neglect and still sturdy and repairable!

The grout bag that Charlie used to refill the crevices with mortar looked a lot like a pastry bag. Turned out he had enjoyed making cakes when he was a kid. 

This photo shows the prepped wall on the left, applied mortar on the right. Before hiring deGruchy, we had gone through a lot of hemming and hawing about whether to use mortar containing Portland cement, and if so, what percentage. Portland cement largely replaced lime mortar in the 1920s and '30s. It's easy to use, sets quickly, and is very strong. But deGruchy made the case that Portland cement's impermeability traps moisture in the walls. Only by using high quality lime mortar could we restore the walls to have both strength and breathability. I found this concise writeup on the history of lime mortar very informative.

DeGruchy's lime is actually sourced in France, of the sort that was used to build cathedrals. Here, the mortar is being brushed in preparation for application of a lime whitewash. 

The whitewash they used is thicker than normal, for durability. 

The high quality and authenticity of deGruchy's work has raised the bar for work to follow, as we rehab  the sills, walls, and floors. Our aim is to preserve the unique features of this smallholder farmhouse while making it useful, as a nature center and museum to tell the story of Herrontown Woods.

The Emanns and Einstein at the Cottage

There are many stories about the Veblen House and Cottage that have yet to be written up on this blog. Blame it on the sheer pleasure of pursuing history on the internet. We could call it "history bathing"--a form of immersion not unlike forest bathing. It also reminds me of fishing, in that one casts different "baits", e.g. Oswald Veblen or JP Whiton Stuart, into the richly stocked waters of the web, then starts landing lunker after lunker. The sheer joy of making connections and finding meaning in lives made more profound by time is enough to satisfy. To forge the catch into narrative for others to read has pleasure, too, but any attempt to overcome entropy involves effort.

Still, I feel remiss to discover that it has been almost nine years since an email came out of the blue from a woman named Rebecca Martin. She was researching her ancestors, one of whom she had discovered had rented the cottage from 1933 to 1937. 

"My grandmother," she explained,  "lived in the farm house along with her parents and siblings during the 1930s. There's a story about Albert Einstein walking through the woods around the house and speaking to my great grandmother, who would feed him a sandwich and talk with him. She spoke German, so I'm guessing that if this story is true, he probably appreciated communicating with someone in his native language."

She later told me that her grandparents' names were Harry C. Emann and Claire M. Emann. The farmhouse she refers to is what we now call the Veblen Cottage. Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen bought the farmhouse and farm in 1936, apparently from the bank. According to Rebecca's timeline, the Emanns moved out the following year.

Reading Rebecca's email more closely, I realize that it was the great grandmother, not the grandmother Claire, who spoke in German with Einstein. The assumption has always been that the Veblens bought the cottage and farm, and would then have their friend Einstein come out to visit. But if Einstein's friendship with the great grandmother preceded the Veblens' purchase of the property, might it have been Einstein who told the Veblens about the place, which back then was out in the country, far off on the other side of town from where the Veblens lived on Battle Road? And might the great grandmother also have known Max Latterman, who by then was likely working for the Whiton-Stuarts next door, tending to their many horses? Max, too, was a German immigrant, who would continue caring for the property, and the farmhouse as well, after the Veblens bought the Whiton-Stuart's house and land in 1941. 

What we have, then, is the apparent connection between three German immigrants--Einstein, Claire Emann's mother, and Max Latterman--that may have influenced the beginnings of what is now Herrontown Woods. 

Toss the grandmother Clair's name into the waters of the internet and "Find a Grave" tells you her full name was Claire Magdelina McClure Emann, and that she was born October 23, 1906 and is buried in Fountain Lawn Memorial Park in Ewing. A 1998 article in Town Topics tells a bit about her life and family:

Claire Emann, 82, of Longwood, Fla., formerly of Princeton, died December 19 in a nursing home in Longwood Born in Trenton, she lived in Princeton most of her life before moving to Longwood 10 years ago. She was employed by Educational Testing Service, retiring as a supervisor after 20 years of service. Wife of the late Harry Emann, she is survived by three sons. William of Kingston, Walter of Princeton and John Emann of Flemington; two daughters. Ruth Rowley of Longwood, Fla , and Marion Martin of Orlando. Fla.; 19 grandchildren and 17 greatgrandchildren.

The Historical Society of Princeton's staff did some helpful research, finding the Emanns living (apparently renting) on Herrontown Road in 1936. We had hoped a historical address would be found, but the address was "RD" for Rural Delivery. 

Rebecca wrote to me in 2014 about how she feels about the farmhouse her ancestors called home: "It would indeed be a shame to lose it. I was able to visit that house in the spring ten years ago. It was boarded up and falling apart even then. It's too bad more people aren't interested in preserving it."

Well, nine years of persistence later, we do have more people interested in preserving it. FOHW's architects have carefully measured the cottage and with a structural engineer are developing designs for stabilizing it. We've been keeping the structure dry with tarps. Architectural drawings are helping us consider options for repurposing the farmhouse, whose farm so many years later is now a forest.

Writers Stephen Dixon and E.B. White, and the Veblen Cottage in Brooklin, Maine

This time of year, as summer loses its hold on the land, people of means or circumstance return to Princeton from their summer retreats in the north. Through coincidence or serendipity, the story of Veblen House, and the profound meaning a homestead can have in people's lives, will head the opposite direction: north from the unexpectedly endearing vulture family perched on a farm cottage in Herrontown Woods to the town in Maine where a beloved spider named Charlotte once lived. There were many spiders weaving their webs on E.B. White's farm in Brooklin, Maine, but Charlotte became singularly famous for making the leap into White's imagination, and coming to life in the story he weaved.

E.B. White's farm overlooking Allen's Cove in northern Brooklin, with Arcadia National Park rising in the distance, is for sale. For properties with special histories and owners, like E.B. White's farm or, as we'll see, the Veblen's seaside cottage 5 miles to the south, a change in ownership, like the change in leadership of a nation, is fraught with peril. Will a house's special charms be preserved, or be lost to neglect or gentrification? Both E.B. White's farm and the Veblen's cottage in Brooklin came up for sale in the mid-1980s. Veblen's cottage at the time was being rented out in the summer to the writers Anne Frydman and Stephen Dixon, who loved the cottage like E.B. White loved his farm. How E.B. White's farm fared since being sold in 1986, perhaps aided by its historic designation, is described in this article in New England Today. The trajectory of the Veblen's Maine cottage is described in the correspondence I had with Stephen Dixon, below.

The Veblens would journey north from Princeton each summer to their rustic cottage on Nasqueg Point in Brooklin. They had discovered the area through Elizabeth's sister and brother in law, Charlotte and Clinton Davisson, who had bought a house there. Beginning in the mid-1960s, with Oswald gone and Elizabeth getting up in years, the cottage stood empty for about ten years, until poet and translater Anne Frydman found it and convinced the Veblen's niece Elizabeth Davisson to let her rent it.

From 1979 to 1986, Anne and her husband, writer Stephen Dixon, spent their summers there, surrounded by the simplicity and soul of the cottage, and breathing what must be the most delicious ocean breezes. As Stephen describes in his emails to me, he and Anne left everything in the cottage just as it had been when the Veblens lived there--the formidable cooking wood stove, the bookshelf of Ulysses, Conrad and Yeats, the antique clocks, even the Veblen's spicerack, with spices long since hardened in their jars. The cottage was "too beautiful to change", even the curious combined toilet-shower accessed from the patio (knowing about it adds extra meaning to a similar toilet-shower combination in the Veblen House).

Like E.B. White's farm, whose barn and animal life found its way into Charlotte's Web, the Veblen's cottage in Maine found its way into stories Stephen Dixon wrote while living there. He sent me a list, which I'll include here further down, and the cottage shows up in photos on the front and back of a book of Anne Frydman's poetry, published posthumously in 2016, The Three O'Clock Bird.

There are many characters in the story of Veblen House, and not all of them are people. Some are animals, others are plants (the writer of the story being a botanist), and a number are the buildings themselves. Along with the Veblen House and the Maine cottage, there was, and still is, the cottage in Herrontown Woods that began as a farmhouse in 1875. Both cottages were unwinterized when the Veblens owned them, with two chimneys and a large cooking stove.

Brooklin, as described on its wikipedia page, sounds like "Herrontown North". Fish fertilizer was used to make the rocky ground productive, and back in the 1880s, around when Veblen was born in Iowa, the town of Brooklin was known for its smoked herring. All this can also be said of northeastern Princeton, which was originally known as "Herringtown". Is it chance that a man whose grandparents had come to America from Norway would be drawn to rocky landscapes and live his summers with a view eastward across the Atlantic?

In our work to save and repair the Veblen House and cottage in Herrontown Woods, there's been discussion of whether it's worth saving the cottage, which is in considerable disrepair. Veblen bought it in 1936, and used it for his study. Now it is unique in Princeton, a small, simple but well-built farmhouse, made both vulnerable and enchanting by its isolated setting surrounded by woods.

Both E.B. White, writing at a simple bench he built in a converted boathouse, and Stephen Dixon's descriptions below, speak to the affection people can hold for simple but elegant shelters. E.B. White's favorite book is said to have been Thoreau's Walden. Less can be more, and the cottage in Herrontown Woods can be an enduring reminder of a simpler past if we are able to save it.

I learned of Stephen Dixon and his 8 years residency at the Veblen cottage in Maine through Jane Smith of Charlottesville, Virginia, a good friend of the Veblen's niece, namesake and sole family heir, Elizabeth Davisson, who inherited the Veblen cottage when Elizabeth died in 1974. Stephen taught in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins for 26 years, and over the course of his life has written more than 500 short stories and 15 novels, two of which were nominated for the National Book Award.

During the summers they spent in Brooklin, the Veblen Cottage found its way into their hearts and into their writings. After a lifetime of writing on a manual typewriter, Dixon's hands overpower a computer keyboard, like a steam engine casting sparks of collateral letterage as he types his emails. The collateral letterage has been edited out, the better to appreciate all he has to tell.

Of note in the correspondence is what he heard about Oswald (that "he got his best ideas chopping wood"), the gradual memory of the special kind of tea the Davissons drank (lapsang souchong, which is truly distinctive and delicious), the mention of caretaker Stan Gray (who served in Maine as Max Latterman served at the Veblen House), and Stephen's deep appreciation of the cottage's charm and simplicity. There is a mix of joy and sadness. While the Veblen's farm cottage in Herrontown Woods suffered from neglect after it was donated to the public trust, the Veblen cottage in Maine experienced the opposite when it was sold in 1986--a gentrification that preserved the cottage while sacrificing the qualities that the Dixons had found so appealing.

The correspondence can be seen by clicking on "Read more".

A Black Vulture Family Up Close at the Veblen Cottage Farmstead

Black vultures four--who could ask for anything more? Okay, there are just three in this family photo. We'll get to the fourth one in a minute. This past Sunday, prior to a work session clearing invasive shrubs in Herrontown Woods, and equipped with better cameras, we returned to Veblen Cottage to check in on the black vulture family mentioned in a previous post.

I guess family values aren't the first thing that comes to mind when people think of vultures, but these black vultures are a tight-knit group. That's mom and pop on the right, with the wrinkly skin on their heads (best not to sully any feathers when dipping one's head daintily into rotting carcasses). Hard to know which parent is which. Vultures don't flaunt their sexual identity. And that's a fledgling on the left, still with baby fuzz on the head.

Family means something for black vultures. On this AllAboutBirds site, they are described by the writer as "one of my favorite birds." He describes their characteristic flight pattern: a few beats of the wings followed by a glide." "Highly social birds with fierce family loyalty," he says, "Black Vultures share food with relatives, feeding young for months after they’ve fledged." It may not be coincidence that, in this serendipitous photoshoot, the parents gave their fledgling the top perch on the chimney.

As we snapped photos from below, the birds were surprisingly cooperative, adopting various poses, from noble, to domestic, to nobly domestic.

Laurie Larson, longtime birder in Princeton who has tracked population numbers over the years as part of the Christmas Bird Count (her data and stories below), suggested the fledgling bears a striking resemblance to Voltaire. People have long suspected a ghost residing in the rather disheveled Veblen Cottage. Was it Veblen himself? Einstein? Now we know.

While the three vultures were preening for the camera up on the chimney of the cottage, another fledgling, looking a bit down and out, was hiding in the corn crib. It didn't seem to be able to fly up to join its kin on the chimney.

When I approached, it shuffled out of the corn crib and hid in the brush.

Laurie's Voltaire comparison is spot on, but I also see something of Art Garfunkle here.

As an aside, given that the photos were taken at the Veblen Cottage at Herrontown Woods, Oswald Veblen died on the brink of the 60s era, but Garfunkel, who performed last year in Princeton, shares Veblen's broad interest in math, architecture and great books. Garfunkel initially majored in architecture, and completed coursework for a PhD in math education while part of Simon and Garfunkel. His interest for numbers expressed itself early on as a fascination with the rise of hits on the pop charts. He has kept a full and public accounting of books he has read, including Voltaire in 1969. He also has that second banana status, which Veblen knew well from living, perhaps contentedly enough, in the shadow of his more famous uncle Thorstein and science icons like Einstein and von Neumann. Part of the joy of the Herrontown Woods project is rediscovering the value of forgotten buildings and legacies that have long flown beneath most people's radar.

Here's the farmstead's little barn and corncrib, whose impending demolition earlier this year by the county, along with all the other Veblen buildings, seemed unstoppable until so many people in the community spoke out to support an initiative by Friends of Herrontown Woods (FOHW.org) to save them. Fortunately, for the black vultures as well as the history of Herrontown Woods, Princeton town council swooped in, raptor-like, and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. FOHW is now working on an agreement with the town to repair and sustain the buildings, while, of course, continuing habitat and trail work, and snapping photos of the local wildlife.

It's funny about the black vultures. They've provided a somewhat haunting presence around the farmstead for years. Not sure what to do with the connotations they carry, we tried to pay them little mind, preferring to talk about the flashy pileated woodpeckers and the elusive great-horned owl. But maybe it's time to give the vultures their due. They are a cleansing force in the universe. They deal with stuff no one else wants to deal with. They find sustenance in unlikely places, and extend the food chain one link further. They're faithful and diligent parents.

I liked this pose, two generations on a branch.

In the distance, you can see the other parent perched on the chimney of the cottage. This was just before they assembled for the group shots on the chimney.

The vultures appreciate the Veblen Cottage's classic design with a chimney at either end.

Any good photo shoot includes grooming behavior. The parents groomed the juvenile; the juvenile groomed the parents.

One adult aimed for the noble raptor look, confirming the AllAboutBirds writer's view that these vultures are "almost dapper."

Things got downright statuesque here, with the juvenile taking the parents under its wings.

Five days later, we were standing in the Veblen House driveway in late morning when we heard a great ruckus in the treetops behind the barn, not far from the cottage. My friend was giving me advice about fixing up the Veblen House. He didn't have much time, and what he was saying was important. I dismissed the ruckus in the treetops as small birds hassling a crow or hawk or owl. I continued to listen to my friend as the calls reached a blood curdling frenzy. Life was on the line, be it a bird or squirrel. We headed over to take a look just as a large black bird flew off down the hill, the noise fading behind. It looked large enough to have been an eagle.

We walked over to the cottage, and found the second juvenile had been hiding in the crawlspace. It came out and walked ahead of us around the corner,

then hopped onto the old kitchen sink and spread its wings, looking our way, as if to impress us, then hopped down and headed towards the corncrib.

Later, I grew concerned about what might have transpired in the treetops. Who was the aggressor and who was the victim? Eagles are one of the few predators of black vultures, which in turn occasionally prey on weak or injured animals. Was that large dark bird that flew off a vulture, and had it been on the attack or defending its own fledgling? Black vultures lack vocal organs, so the mortal cries must have been generated by something else.

It occurred that the reason the vultures had been so patient with our photoshoot five days prior was that they were lingering at the cottage to guard the weaker fledgling, hoping it would find the strength to join them in flight.

I returned to the Veblen Cottage the next day to find the vultures gone. After years of trying to ignore them, I suddenly felt their absence.

(This post also appears at PrincetonNatureNotes.org, along with some historical data on vultures in Princeton.)

Veblen House Written Up in Area Magazine

Now, isn't that weird. I could have sworn there was an article about the Veblen House and cottage in the latest edition of Weird N.J.

Oh, right,

there it is,

page 62,

a lovely four page spread,

right between a pictorial portrait of the Overbrook sanitorium and a man who gave his left arm for Asbury Park.

Weird N.J. is a beautifully rendered magazine edited by Mark and Mark (Sceurman and Moran), who clearly love our state as an bottomless trove of weirdness in truth and legend. Whether buildings or people, we all are worked on by a mixture of care and neglect, elements and time. It's truly weird that buildings and a legacy as distinctive and extraordinary as those Veblen left behind have been neglected, and so we're proud to be part of this edition of Weird N.J. Our aim, passion and privilege, as the Friends of Herrontown Woods, is to make care the dominant influence going forward.

The photos and writeups are by FOHW volunteer Glen Ferguson and myself. I bought a copy online for $7, free shipping, at this site.