By Carol L. Clarke
September/October 2018
Note: In 1866, William Cullen Bryant purchased the farm in Cummington, Massachusetts where he had spent his childhood. He planned to create a retreat in the Berkshire Mountains, where his invalid wife, Fanny (Frances Fairchild Bryant, 1797-1866), could spend the summer months in a cooler climate. Unfortunately, Fanny died that spring, before the renovation was completed. Bryant completed his renovation of the house and farm over the following years and, until his death in 1878, spent the summer months at the Bryant Homestead, returning in the fall to his Roslyn home, Cedarmere.
Mary Dawes Warner, whose family resided in the home during the winter months, describes a day in the life of William Cullen Bryant during his summer sojourn at the Bryant Family Homestead in Cummington, Massachusetts. (For more information on The Bryant Homestead, see http://www.thetrustees.org/places-to-visit/pioneer-valley/bryant-homestead.html#t1)
Mr. Bryant always arrived for the summer somewhere from the tenth to the fifteenth of July and stayed until the middle or the twentieth of September. He bought his servants, He always had four maids and a coachman, and a span of horses, which he brought from New York. … Some of his brothers were always there in the summer, and other visitors, but life was very simple.
We would be awakened in the morning by a series of thumps. Mr. Bryant was taking his “Daily Dozen” which consisted of a vaulting pole, dumb bells, and other parts of a gymnasium outfit which he brought with him from New York. The thumps, which shook the house, were caused by the use of the vaulting pole, he jumping back and forth over the bed with it. He would also pull himself up by the bar and “chin” himself; and he used a light pair of dumb bells.
He breakfasted at seven, then made a trip around the place, visited the orchards and inspected the place generally. While he owned the farm he set out about 1300 apple trees, nearly 200 per trees, and perhaps half a dozen cherry trees, also a few plum trees – perhaps a dozen or so. In addition to the orchard he planted a great many berry bushes, blackberries and raspberries. On this after-breakfast walk he took a little basket which he filled with berries and some of whatever fruit was ripe.
At about nine o’clock he went to his study and from then until noon he worked, right through his summer vacation. … He wrote his editorials for the New York Evening Post in those hours.
At noon he stopped work for the day. Dinner was at one, and after dinner he and his brothers (he always tried to have some of them with him during the summer) went for a long walk, some ten to fifteen miles, over the hills, in the roads or across lots. On these walks he would hunt out the cellar holes of the old places they knew as boys, and visit the haunts they had known in boyhood. They reached home between five and six. Supper was at seven, after which someone read the paper to him for a little while, as he did not care to read to himself in the evening. The household went to bed early – by nine o’clock.
From William Cullen Bryant: His Home by Mrs. C.F. Warner (nee Mary Dawes), Boston: The Trustees of Public Reservations, 1930.
