Daffodils of the Veblen Grounds

During a recent Rotary Club of Princeton workday at Veblen House, I got a chance to document the many kinds of daffodils that persist on the grounds.

No doubt Elizabeth Veblen, shown in this photo from the 1950s, had a lot to do with their presence.

Others may have been planted by Garden Club of Princeton volunteers back in the 1970s when they were active there.

Some research might reveal cultivar names for all of these subtle variations. Those on the left have whiter petals.

Some may have been planted by the Wells, who rented the house from around 1975 to 1998.

Not everything blooming is a daffodil.

My family's garden in Michigan, bought from the estate of a U of M mathematician, had primroses much like these. Not sure how much can be inferred about mathematicians and primrose from a sample of two.

The large lawn hosts remnant populations of daffodils, some of which still bloom. It would be interesting to match up the primrose in the 1950s photos with what remains today.

First, find the rock.

Update, July 30, 2014: According to Bob Wells, Elizabeth Veblen had a plot of land back in what is now woods where she grew the different varieties in rows, for transplanting to the grounds.

Award-Winning Trail Work by Kurt and Sally

Some news that didn't get posted earlier: Back in January, two members of the Friends of Herrontown Wood, Kurt Tazelaar and Sally Curtis, received a 2013 Sustainable Princeton Leadership Award for their transformative work to clear trails at Herrontown Wood and Autumn Hill Reservation this past summer and fall. Trails through 200 acres of the Princeton Ridge nature corridor had become blocked by fallen trees and overgrown by invasive shrubs over several years. After getting the green light from Princeton's municipal staff, and using a chain saw, loppers and a scythe, Kurt and Sally spent some 400 volunteer hours making these two beautiful preserves a pleasure to hike through once again.

Presenting the awards, Mayor Liz Lempert commended them "for their energetic and inspiring work in clearing trails in 2013, making two Princeton nature preserves inviting and accessible to the public." A post from last August when they were just starting their trail work can be found at this link. 

They are continuing to work on the trails at Herrontown Wood, to make them more passable in spring when the ground is saturated with water. 

Congratulations to Kurt and Sally for this much deserved award.

A Pileated Woodpecker Pays a Visit

After a recent Rotary Club workday at the Veblen House site, one of the volunteers called to us as he was walking down the driveway.

Turned out he'd noticed two gaping holes in a white oak, whose size suggested the work of America's largest remaining woodpecker. The Ivory-billed was larger, but hasn't been seen in the southern swamps for decades.

The tree must have housed quite a cache of carpenter ants--the Pileated's main source of sustenance--to rationalize all of this chopping.

The sound of a pileated's woodpecking is said to be similar to that of someone chopping wood. The impressive size of these woodchips suggest considerable impact.

The long corridor of preserved Princeton Ridge woodland, which began with the Veblen's initial donation of 85 acres in 1957 and continues to be built on through local initiative, makes excellent habitat for these impressive birds.

This link should take you to photos of baby Pileateds poking their heads out of similar holes.

Architect Julie Capozzoli's Talk on Architectural Preservation

Here are some notes (hopefully accurate) from a March 19 talk by architect Julie Capozzoli entitled "Architectural Preservation in Theory and Practice", hosted by the Jewish Center of Princeton. Julie is an architect, chair of the Princeton Preservation Commission, and a member of the Princeton Planning Board. The Preservation Commission has a committee focused on the Veblen House, consisting of Julie and Robert von Zumbusch.

• The modern movement to preserve historic structures began with the fight to save the Penn Central train station in New York City. Though unsuccessful, the effort led to the creation of the NY City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. In 1975, New Jersey passed a law allowing the creation of historic preservation commissions, of which Princeton's is one. 
• She made frequent reference to the Secretary of the Interior's Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties, which include guidelines for "preserving, rehabilitating, restoring, and reconstructing historic buildings".
• Rehabilitation is applied to deteriorated structures, and allows more latitude due to the buildings' condition. Restoration involves retaining components from the most significant period, and removal of other portions. Reconstruction is a rebuild of the original structure.
• She discussed adaptive reuse, and the embodied energy in existing structures, and offered a statistic that operational carbon is 65% of a building's total emissions. Preservation can be more sustainable than building new, because it avoids the carbon footprint of new materials. There's a Nantucket guide to making historic buildings more sustainable.
• There are 18 historic districts in Princeton, including Maybury Hill out Snowden Lane, and Jugtown.
• Historic designation does not preclude changes to a structure, as long as the changes minimize the loss of materials and preserve the building's defining characteristics. Any new work, such as additions, needs to be differentiated from the existing structure.
• Historic preservation is not just about buildings.

Though the Veblen House and Cottage were deemed by an architectural study to be of national historic significance due to their association with Oswald Veblen, they never received the official historic designation. That, along with the rehabilitation required, suggest a measure of latitude in preserving the historic features in the process of adaptive reuse. The talk was particularly useful in distinguishing between the various approaches to preservation, pointing to the federal guidelines as a resource, and suggesting a resource for combining rehabilitation and sustainability.

Veblen, Reidemeister, Colin Adams, Knots, Sailing, Topology and Pi(e)

An interest in knots and Veblen lured me to a lecture on the mathematics of knots two weekends ago at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). One of my ideas for an offbeat daycamp experience at the Veblen House is to reintroduce knot tying to the younger generation, whose exposure to knots may not have advanced beyond tying shoes.

Little did I know that I would witness a mathematics professor being very nearly devoured by a great white shark during his lecture entitled "Blown Away: What Knot To Do When Sailing." Part of the PPPL's Science on Saturday Lecture series, the lecture explored the mathematics of knots through the travails of two characters--a Texan and an Englishman. Colin Adams, of Williams College in MA, was the mathematician/storyteller.

The tall tale he told was of being in a sailing race off the coast of England. In the midst of the race, he discovers there's a knot in the sheet (a sheet, as everyone knows, though I had forgotten, is a sailing term for one of the ropes on a sailboat), preventing him from coming about. Adding to the dilemma, the "sheet hit the flan" that he had brought along for a snack, making it too slippery to handle. He dips the sheet in the water to clean it, a great white shark grabs the rope, and he is suddenly confronted with the question of whether the knot can be undone without having one end of the sheet free.

This segued into an inquiry into how to analyze knots visually and mathematically, beginning with Kurt Reidemeister, who in the 1930s developed what Adams calls three types of "Reidemeister Moves". Knot to be undone, Adams eventually wrestles the rope from the shark, unties the knot, and sails into the sunset.

Reidemeister, it turns out, was a German mathematician who was transferred to a less prestigious university from his post in Konigsberg in 1933, due to his opposition to the Nazis. A search of the internet reveals a Veblen connection: Oswald Veblen wrote a letter of support for his fellow geometer Reidemeister (p. 89 in this online book). The strong connection between mathematics and the arts that is a recurrent theme at the Institute for Advanced Study can also be found in Reidemeister, who "wrote about poets and was a poet himself. He translated Mallarmé."

In another parallel with Colin Adams' thinking: An idea of mine for the Veblen House was to name the farmstead either the Pi Farm or the Pie Farm. The symbol for pi, after all, is shaped like a house, and most everything a farm grows can be put in one sort of pie or another. Turns out that Colin Adams co-wrote a book entitled The Great Pi/e Debate, in which they answer the question, "Which is the better number, e or pi?" Princeton has an annual Pi Day on March 14, to celebrate Einstein's birthday.

Another book by Colin Adams that combines math and whimsy, "A Deprogrammer's Tale", appears in recommendations next to "The Dot and the Line", a childhood favorite of mine that is given a connection to the Veblen's Herrontown Wood in this post. Adams also, like Veblen's family, has a Wisconsin connection, having received his PhD at U. of Wisconsin in Madison.

Yet another book by the prolific Adams is an Introduction to Topology. Here's a description of Veblen's contribution to the field: "Veblen's first work on topology appeared just before he arrived in Princeton. He went on to establish Princeton as one of the leading centres in the world for topology research. Analysis Situs(1922) provided the first systematic coverage of the basic ideas of topology and contributed to the development of modern topology."

And sailing? Well, sailing was one of Einstein's favorite activities, and the Veblens had a cottage in a town in Maine known for its wooden boat building. It's not clear if Veblen ever took to sailing. He may have been more comfortable in the woods, clearing brush.

Veblen Memorabilia Find New Home in IAS Archives

As of December, 2013, some boxes of the Veblen's personal papers and keepsakes have found a new home in the archives of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). Found in the Veblen's attic after their passing, these were items that for whatever reason didn't go directly to the IAS archives or to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. They resided for several decades in a county building in Trenton. Some items were lost to water damage when a pipe broke. Here are a few photos from a visit I organized with county and Institute archive staff two years ago to view the items.

These glasses have a small lense attached in the middle of the regular lens. As described in a succinct summary of Oswald Veblen's life and career at RobertNowlan.com, "In his last years, he was partially blind, leading him to develop devices to help him and others with similar reading problems." Even while partially blind, Veblen played the visionary.

Institute for Advanced Study archive staff took some notes as we went through the boxes.

The boxes had been moved from Trenton to climate controlled storage in the new county parks headquarters at Hunt House. Back around 2000, the county decided to put its resources into restoring the Hunt House and a couple other historical projects, leaving the Veblen house and cottage to an uncertain fate. The boxes of artifacts, at least, found safer keeping via the Hunt House restoration.

Here is a pamphlet the Veblens kept, relevant to our efforts to save Veblen House.

Veblen's grandparents moved from Norway to Wisconsin in 1846. They had a progression of farms, building the farmhouses and associated farm buildings, eventually ending up in Minnesota, where Veblen's father and uncle Thorstein grew up.

This Old Car meets This Old Garage, probably not at the Veblen House site.

Oswald became interested in photography later in life, and left behind many slides, which I'm hoping can get digitized at IAS at some point. The majority of the slides are likely from Brooklin, Maine, where the Veblens had a summer cottage. The Brooklin Keeping Society--a good name for a historical association--has expressed interest in copies of any photos we can send.

Here's a county document expressing appreciation of the Veblens' 1957 gift of 81 acres to the county to create Herrontown Wood.

The county parks commission made the donation of the boxes of Veblen possessions to IAS official at its Dec. 18 meeting, which I heard about thanks to a friend. Agenda item #13:

13) MERCER COUNTY PARK COMMISSION AUTHORIZES THE DONATION OF THE VEBLEN FAMILY PERSONAL PROPERTY TO THE INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY, THE SHELBY WHITE AND LEON LEVY ARCHIVES CENTER, HISTORICAL STUDIES-SOCIAL SCIENCE LIBRARY LOCATED IN PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY.

Mathematics and the Arts

A pleasant surprise: On my daughter's 8th grade math teacher's webpage at Princeton's JW Middle School, I found a quote:

"Mathematics is one of the essential emanations of the human spirit, a thing to be valued in and for itself, like art or poetry."    

Nice sentiment, I thought, then looked at who the quote was by: Oswald Veblen. It's worth noting that the Institute for Advanced Study, the formation of which had so much to do with Veblen's vision, has long integrated the arts into its programming, particularly music. The Veblens' aesthetic sense, clearly shown in their love of nature, extended to his view of mathematics as well.

Writeup on Herrontown Wood in the Princeton Packet

In the Dec. 17, 2013 edition of the Princeton Packet, there's a wonderful writeup on our Herrontown Wood restoration efforts by Pam Hersch, longtime special writer for the Packet. Pam joined us on our Thanksgiving weekend walk. She writes:

"I created my own event during the post-Thanksgiving days launching the holiday season. I connected with and was inspired by some terrific boulders, sticks, berries, leaves, cliffs, historic buildings, and, most significantly, people, right here in Princeton, without fighting crowds and jockeying for parking spaces. I took a trip into the woods, Herrontown Woods, for the first time ever."

This Old Bridge

On the way out to Herrontown Woods, there's an old bridge hiding in the weeds next to Snowden Lane. A branch of Harry's Brook flows through it. This looks to be the original bridge the Veblens, and farmers like Jac Weller, would have used on their way in to Princeton.

 A closer look shows that some stones are coming loose. What's that old expression, "A stone in time saves nine"? I contacted the town engineering department to alert them to the problem. The response was "The old bridge is on private property..........we are considering a bike path along this section of Snowden in the future. If we are successful in obtaining an easement we could fix the bridge at that time."

That stretch of Snowden Lane currently puts cars in close proximity with joggers and people walking their dogs. Anyone in the Little Brook School neighborhood heading out to Smoyer Park or Herrontown Wood has to "run the gantlet" of narrow pavement, with cars passing by on one side and a ditch on the other. It's good news that a bikepath is being contemplated, but until easements can be obtained from homeowners along the route, the bridge and the bikepath will remain in limbo. As the Veblen House has demonstrated, limbo can linger for a long, long time.

From the plaque on the newer bridge, looks like the old bridge served until 1965. 2015 would mark 50 years. Sounds like a nice round number for a ribbon cutting ceremony.

Just Add Snow

Not sure how the snow got activated in this photo, unless I pushed the wrong button on the camera, but it looks like a Happy Holidays greeting card from Veblen House.

Snow adds definition to the landscape, and helps convey how this 1870 farmstead adds to the sense of place at Herrontown Woods.

According to Dorothy Bedford, "My Girl Scout troop Junior troop 1812 did many of the stepping stones on the paths (red, green, yellow trails) and across streams in the fall of 2006 as their Bronze Award service Project, in cooperation with the County. The trail marking tape (red, white, yellow, green dots) are left over from that project so the girls could find their way around the park."

The trees grow Santa Claus beards.

Fallen branches obscure this broad boulder garden, through which a stream flows. The Sourland Preserve has a similar formation called Roaring Rocks, which likely roars when the stream that flows deep within it gets going after a big rain. Herrontown Wood's version might best be called whispering rocks.

The view from the cliff.

Roof lines contrast with the verticals of trees. Nature and culture peacefully intertwined.

Light Snow at Veblen House

A light snow after the most recent workday showed off the front walk recently cleared of dirt and debris. The walk begins and ends with flat boulders--another way in which the Princeton ridge geology is integrated into the landscaping. The wooden planks hold less residual heat from the warmer days prior, so are still covered by snow.

Even with light snow adding definition to the landscape features, the footprint of an old barn still remains obscured by invasive shrubs.

One new rediscovery is an old well near where the barn once stood. The well likely provided water for all the horses and whatever other animals the Veblens had. It will be interesting to see to what extent the water level in the well changes with seasonal precipitation.

Cleaning Up the Grounds

We arrived for another Rotary/FOHR workday at the Veblen House to find the grounds beautifully mown and blown by the county, not only at the Veblen House but also at the nearby cottage, which hadn't been mowed all year. Members of Princeton Rotary and Friends of Herrontown Woods, 12 in all, came at various times from 9-3, cleaning and resetting stones in the front walkway, cutting invasive shrubs and dragging brush to the forest edge to make brushpiles for habitat.

Peter Thompson took on the cutting back of wisteria that has spread over the years across much of the lower garden, including the stone-lined fish pond. In the foreground, you can see how multiple trunks of wisteria intertwine as they reach skyward to smother a flowering dogwood. Judging from a few flowerbuds visible through the tangled mob, the dogwood may have enough life left in it to recover.

In front of the Veblen House, a puddle suggests a location that could be fashioned into a raingarden to catch runoff from the grassy slope.

Rotary and FOHW met with Mercer County officials two days prior, and made good progress towards an agreement that would allow us to restore the Veblen buildings, to serve as community meeting space and exploring the many themes of the Veblen and Princeton ridge legacies.

Thanks to all who came, saw, and conquered on a brisk Saturday.

Volunteer Workday at Veblen House Grounds Saturday, Dec. 7, 9-4pm

The Princeton Rotary and the Friends of Herrontown Woods continue their partnership this Saturday with a workday at the Veblen House grounds in Herrontown Woods. Come by 452 Herrontown Road any time between 9am and 4pm to join in. Among tools, loppers are particularly useful, as we'll be cutting invasive shrubs that have encroached over the years on the landscaping and stone walls around the house. Shovels may come in handy, too. The Veblen site connects with the many preserve trails for those who want to explore the woods. 

To reach 452 Herrontown Road, head out Snowden Lane, past Smoyer Park, turn left where Snowden deadends at Herrontown Rd, then take the first driveway to the left, just where the small pasture ends and the woods begins.

Opportunity to give input on Princeton Ridge and Veblen House

The deadline's tomorrow (Saturday, Nov. 30) for giving your input on a town-funded survey of citizen's priorities for the Princeton Ridge corridor, including Herrontown Woods. The survey includes a text box where you can, if you wish, mention Herrontown Woods specifically, and the initiative to turn the Veblen House into meeting space and a nature center.

The Rotary Club of Princeton, in collaboration with the Friends of Herrontown Woods, has submitted a proposal to Mercer County requesting access to the Veblen House and farmstead in order to begin fixing them up and put them to public use.

Below is the text from an email received from Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS), describing the survey and initiative:

The Princeton Ridge East Conservation Area Partnership is developing a comprehensive stewardship plan.  Input from the public is essential to manage this vital natural area, which now includes 600 acres of protected lands. 

A simple online survey seeks feedback on land stewardship, forms of recreation to be permitted, and essential facilities.  Please complete the online survey by November 30, 2013!  

The Princeton Ridge is a unique ecological area in Mercer County that extends westward from the Millstone River and the Delaware & Raritan (D&R) Canal State Park across the northern part of Princeton Township into Hopewell.

For more than 50 years, the Ridge’s forest and wetland habitats have been identified as among the most important and environmentally sensitive areas in the region. Its mature forests are home to numerous endangered and threatened species, among them the Wood Turtle, Eastern Box Turtle, Cooper’s Hawk and Barred Owl.

The Princeton Ridge’s 1,800 acres are being managed by Princeton Township, Mercer County, D&R Greenway Land Trust, Friends of Princeton Open Space, New Jersey Conservation Foundation and Stony Brook - Millstone Watershed Association.  The Princeton Ridge East Conservation Area Partnership offers a map of this newly defined Conservation Area, so critical to native species, on the Princeton Township website. 

Nature Walk at Herrontown Woods Thanksgiving Weekend

Come join a nature walk this Saturday, Nov. 30, at 1 pm along the newly renovated trails at Herrontown Woods. Along the way we'll visit the Veblen House and Cottage, where volunteers have recently uncovered the circle of stones called a "horse run",

hike the boulder fields of the Princeton Ridge, visit a quarry site, 

and look out across the valley from a newly rediscovered bluff. Dress warmly, and enjoy the light-filled forest.

Meet at the Herrontown Woods parking lot, down a deadend street across Snowden Lane from Smoyer Park (near where Snowden ends at Herrontown Road) (This map may help if you zoom out, using the +/_ in the lower right hand corner)

Chess, Jon Edwards, and the Veblen Connection

The World Chess Championship is underway, and we have a couple Veblen connections. One is Jon Edwards, a local chess master who first illuminated me on Veblen's role in early computing. Jon's article on "A History of Early Computing at Princeton" can be found here. Tonight and next Saturday, Nov. 23, from 7-8, Jon is co-leading a review of each week of the championship play at Princeton Public Library.

My friend Teresa originally put me in touch with Jon. Here's what she wrote:

"You might want to connect with Jon Edwards, who wrote the article you link to. He organized the Turing centennial (along with Bob Sedgewick). Jon knows a lot about the history of computing at Princeton. He is also a chess master and has a bit of an empire of self-published chess books. Interesting guy, Jon, and also one of the world's most decent human beings."

As it happens, the championship is a 12-game match with Norwegian chess superstar Magnus Carlsen challenging World Chess Champion Viswanathan (Vishy) Anand of India. When I checked in, the Norwegian was leading 4 games to 2. 

An internet search for any mention of Veblen's interest in chess, or lack thereof, yielded an interview of Jack Levine, who reminisces about the era of the 1930s, when Fine Hall was the center of mathematics at Princeton, and perhaps the center of gravity of the mathematical universe as well. Edmund Landau and John Vanderslice, a student of Veblen's, are said to have been good chess players, but no mention of Veblen himself taking an interest. Landau appears to be unrelated to the Landau's woolen store in Princeton, the back of which serves as the only permanent exhibit of Einstein memorabilia in town.

A Cliff Rediscovered

One of the most exciting aspects of restoring Herrontown Woods after so many years of laissez faire is the rediscovery of natural treasures long obscured by downed trees and invasive undergrowth. Autumn's leaf fall has been unveiling even more of this boulder-strewn landscape's long lost secrets.

A week ago, walking the yellow trail, I glanced up the slope of the Princeton ridge and saw what looked like a rock bluff larger than any others I'd seen thus far. The thought of returning to approach it from the top of the ridge had since slipped my mind, when today, by chance, I passed a man in town on Ewing Street who was looking with great curiosity at the historic house near the intersection with Harrison Street. I stopped and told him that Thomas Jefferson had reportedly slept there, back in 1783, when the nation's capitol was based briefly in Princeton's Nassau Hall. During that time, George Washington had commuted by horse from Rockingham, passing close by Herrontown Woods on Mount Lucas Road. I mentioned the Veblen House, and the man said he used to hike in Herrontown Woods back in the 1980s. He said that someone, maybe a squatter, had lived in the Veblen cottage for awhile, and that there was a 30 foot cliff just off the red trail.

I returned in late afternoon today to search for the cliff. Using clippers to cut through the dense tangle of multiflora rose and winged euonymus, as if playing the role of the prince in a nature version of Sleeping Beauty, I finally approached the top of the cliff. The view out over the woods, still brightened by autumn colors, was breathtaking.

Veblen House and Cottage in Fall Colors

For lack of a gardener to keep things in balance, some of the remnant plantings of Elizabeth Veblen's gardens have been running wild. Fall colors reveal the way wisteria, which once modestly climbed an arbor behind the Veblen House, has long since gone rogue, obscuring the circular stone horse run in the foreground and most of the yard to the right of the house.

The Japanese maples, originally planted near the Veblen cottage and turning glorious red, have spread surprisingly far into the woods. They have long been a species that, like Rose of Sharon, seeds aggressively in people's backyards, but has fortunately not spread into nature preserves. Herrontown Woods may be proving the exception, raising the question of whether a tree's great beauty gives it free reign to alter the local ecosystem. In the meantime, it sure is pretty.

As with a house, so with the earth

As the paint begins to chip, from the work of the elements over years of neglect, and hands wishing to heal are told not to enter, sometimes I wonder at this long persistence to save a house, like no other, alone in the woods, long neglected.

But then I remember there is a planet, like no other, alone in space, long neglected. It, too, is being worked on by the elements,

with so many hands wishing to heal.

The Horse Run

This photo from the 1950s shows two remarkable features on the Veblen House grounds. The hay barrack on the left, with its adjustable roof for storing hay or, in this case, firewood, was unfortunately torn down six years ago, but could be reconstructed.

The horse run, on the other hand, is still very much present, with its massive boulders skillfully set one atop another to form a circle, within which horses were once run as a quick way to give them a little exercise. My understanding is that the Veblen's longtime groundskeeper, Max Latterman, needed to exercise the horses that were kept in the barn that used to be next to this horse run. The barn burned down in the 1950s. The horse run may later have become a part of Elizabeth's extensive gardens.

The article about Max posted on this website May 7, originally from the 1980 Fall/Winter edition of the Mercer County Park Commission News and given to us by his daughter in law Jean, documents the presence of horses back in the 1930s, before the house was bought by the Veblens.

"Latterman's responsibilities, while employed by Mr. Stuart, included caring for the grounds, the two houses, the barn, shed and hay barrack, and also the hunting horses. Saddle sore or not, Latterman rode the horses every day to give them excercise. "It was not fun by the time I got off all of them", he said."

It's unclear whether the circular stone wall was built by J.P. Stuart or the Veblens, and whether it was originally built for horses or for some other purpose. The internet search most likely to bring up images of circular stone structures such as this is "sheepfold", which is the word used in England to refer to a pen for holding sheep. Elizabeth Veblen grew up in Yorkshire, England, and it's tempting to speculate that it was her influence that brought this structure into being.

Here's a more recent photo, as volunteers with the Rotary Club of Princeton begin to free it from a sea of wisteria. 

The (Not So) Empty Kiosk

This empty kiosk at the parking lot in Herrontown Woods, built years back by the county but never populated with maps or interpretive information, is indicative of the long slumber this nature preserve has been through. Kiosks are great ideas, and you'd think they'd be fairly easy to utilize and keep up to date, but most of the ones I've seen in my travels have been neglected. I know personally how easy it is to forget about them, having had a few that were mine to utilize or ignore.

So along with the incredible work of Kurt Tazelaar and Sally Curtis to clear the trails in recent months, this small step of putting a cork board on the solid steel kiosk runs counter to the laissez faire norms of human behavior.

The board, which looked surprisingly attractive when finally affixed, was a second hand acquisition, mounted by a volunteer. It symbolizes the way public investment in parks can often languish if not for the skill, commitment and resourcefulness of community volunteers. It will be even more symbolic, and useful, when it finally has a map or two to guide visitors.

Update: Nothing like posting photos of an empty kiosk on the web to motivate one to populate it with maps and a description.

The Veblens and E.B. White in Brooklin, Maine

When not at their home in Herrontown Woods, the Veblens would often travel up to their cottage in Brooklin, Maine. While trying to find out if their cottage up there still exists, I found out that Brooklin is quite an interesting place. For one, it was the home of E.B. White, whose farm there provided the inspiration for Charlotte's Web. A member of the Paul Winter consort is also on the list of local notables (Paul Winter has a connection with Princeton open space. An archaeological site revealed that Brooklin's location once was an American Indian trading center. An amateur archaeologist is said to have found an 11th century Norse coin there

Though fewer than 1000 people live there, Brooklin is an important center for building wooden boats. Not sure how many people have memories of wooden boats, but a vivid memory for me as a kid was the spring sanding and varnishing of our C Scow sailboat. I remember the beauty of the wood and the fragrance of the varnish, rather than all the work that (mostly) my father, siblings and friends did to make the boat seaworthy each year. Sailing it was also a group effort, requiring a well-timed switching of the bilgeboards every time we came about, coordinated with a well-timed ducking of the head to avoid the boom. My role was to periodically pump water out as it accumulated in the bottom of the boat, seeping through whatever crack we couldn't completely seal in the spring. My older sisters came home one day, very wet and very excited, with news that they had tipped the boat over in a strong breeze. All mishaps should make us so happy.

I contacted the Brooklin Keeping Society--a great name for a historical society--to ask about the Veblens and their cottage. Richard Freethey responded with two emails:

"I am not sure whether the cottage he owned is still there or not- I remember my father worked for him down there on Naskeag (a part of Brooklin) just before Mr Veblen died. I was only 9 when he died so as far as I know they were very quiet folks, and I am pretty sure they did not do a lot of socializing with the natives here. As for Mr White, his place is about 4-5 miles from where there’s was (or is) and I have never heard of their socializing any."

and

"I asked one of our volunteers who knows more about Brooklin history than anyone. She is around 85. She says her grandfather Walter Crockett did some carpentry work on the cabin for the Veblens. She said they were very quiet and not at all public people who lived a very simple life while they were here. Of course the property was on one of the prettiest spots on Blue Hill Bay, with the lighthouse in the background and the mountains of Mt Desert Island in the background. His and other properties have been taken over by folks who were not so impressed with the simple life. None of us know but we all suspect that his cabin was  replaced by something not as rustic." 

I'm surprised there's no mention of socializing around the Veblens' strong tradition of serving tea, but the gravitation to a place of great natural beauty fits with their affinity for Herrontown Woods, as does the simplicity of their lifestyle.

Update, 11.05.13: Looks like there's more than one Princeton connection with Brooklin, Maine. Just heard a talk at Princeton University in which Robert P. George, director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, told a story of his son going to Brooklin to build a boat with the son's grandfather.