Don’t know who Gene Stratton-Porter was? Me neither until a year or so ago. I first encountered her at Indiana in 200 Objects: A Bicentennial Celebration.
Gene was an author, an artist, a musician, a naturalist, a photographer, and an entrepreneur. She studied nature and wrote about it in books, novels, poems, children stories, and magazine articles. By 1924, 10 millions copies of her books had been sold internationally.
She originally studied nature in wetlands surrounding her home in Geneva, IN. She designed the house, Limberlost Cabin, which was named after the Limberlost Swamp that she studied. By 1912, the swamp had been drained for agricultural and commercial purposes. With her natural laboratory—the swamp—gone, she went in search of another site, and ended up designing a house on Sylvan Lake in Rome City, IN.
I visited this second home, the Cabin at Wildflower Woods, or as the docent referred to it, Limberlost 2.0. Gene took what she liked from Limberlost and improved on it at Wildflower Woods.
To find the house, I had to meander on some back roads. The entrance to the property is a narrow road flanked by two stone columns affixed with stone owls. (Why owls? I neglected to ask the significance.) The one-lane road wound a short way to a parking lot with a covered picnic area and outhouse (not bad but better restrooms await you in the visitor’s center).
A brief stroll through the woods takes you to the visitor’s center and the house. Along the way, you pass Gene’s gravesite. Although she died in California, in 1999 her remains, as well as those of her daughter Jeannette, were brought back to Indiana for burial near the Cabin at Wildflower Woods.
The visitor center is a two-story structure that includes exhibits, meeting rooms, and a store. One room contains a couch for comfortable viewing of the wildlife that gathers around the bird feeders.
Stop by the visitor’s center to pay for a guided tour of the cabin. It is well worth it. I was the only person around and got a private tour of the house by a former school teacher (often the best kind of tour guide). He was clearly very enthused with Gene and the property. He grew up in the area and frequented the site in his youth, though didn’t read any of Gene’s books until adulthood.
Gene herself didn’t start writing until later in life. (Well, later is a relative term.) She started writing magazine articles at age 35 and her first book at age 40. By the time that she moved to Sylvan Lake, she was 50 and a well-known author (the J.K. Rowling of the time, according to the docent). Her last book was published in 1927, 3 years after her death. (Her daughter found the book draft of The Magic Garden tucked in a drawer.)
Gene used the money that she earned from her writing to buy land around Sylvan Lake in 1912 and then built the house in 1913. She moved in the following year but only lived there for five years.
In 1918, she contracted the Spanish flu and needed warmer climes in the winter. She summered at Wildflower Woods and wintered in California until 1924 when she moved to California permanently. While in California, she had three other houses built—in LA, in Bel Air, and on Catalina Island—which still exist today.
After her death in 1924, the family attempted to give the property to the state, but at the time, the state could not afford it. The Boy Scouts used the home as an administrative building (with a camp on an island in the lake) until 1929. With the start of the Depression, the Boy Scouts could no longer afford it. The property reverted back to the family. In 1946/47, the state took ownership with only 20 acres of the original 120 remaining.
At the time it was built (1914), the house was quite progressive, with hot and cold water, electricity, and a phone. A tour of the house consists of the first floor only. The second floor and the basement are off limits, unless you rent the cabin for overnight stays. Then you are allowed to enjoy the entire house, under the watchful eye of a chaperone.)
A large porch, covered by a sleeping porch on the second floor, looks like an inviting spot from which to enjoy the lake. The view is spectacular.
The foyer contains wonderful wood paneling and a beautiful staircase, along with photographs and artifacts. The docent and I spent a bit of time here discussing Gene, the photographs, and the house.
Immediately past the foyer is the dining room. As with the foyer, we stayed here for a while, discussing the various articles in the room. (The docent did tell me to ask him anything. And I warned him that maybe he’d regret saying that. Near the end of the tour, he was often glancing at his watch so clearly I was a bit too inquisitive.)
The dining room includes a fireplace (one of four in the house), made of English brick to memorialize Gene’s father who was from England. Around the walls of the room hang numerous nature photographs that she took, made from glass plate negatives. Scattered throughout are knickknacks—the mahjongg set caught my eye.
The front room contains a piano. Gene was quite musical, playing piano, violin, flute, and recorder. The big window—the million-dollar view as my docent described it—shows an unobstructed view of the lake. Regulations have kept the view as it would have appeared to Gene, a pristine wooded lake with no development in the direct sight line. The front room also includes a second fireplace—The Friendship Fireplace—made of rocks that Gene collected from friends and jigsawed together herself.
Directly behind the front room and across from the dining room is a work room, set up the way Gene would have used it with a desk and typewriter directly behind a couch. Gene, ever busy with her hands (ADHD?), typically worked on something while sitting on the couch and dictating a book to her secretary who sat typing at the desk behind her.
This room also includes a fireplace—The Puddingstone Fireplace—made of puddingstone. (What? Yeah, I didn’t know what puddingstone was either.) Puddingstone is a composite of rock, usually jasper and quartz. (The stone columns that the owls at the entrance sit on are also made of puddingstone.) Puddingstone was apparently a favorite of Gene’s.
A conservatory, with large windows to let the sun in, is on the backside of the house (facing the South?). Ever the naturalist, here Gene could cultivate her plants and flowers. A dark room (for developing photos…odd to think of developing photos even though we aren’t that far removed from film cameras), a bathroom, and a kitchen round out the backside of the house.
Old time tins with the image of James Whitcomb Riley grace a shelf in the kitchen. This gave me pause. Apparently, the famous of earlier eras endorsed products for money just like today. (The docent mentioned that Lew Wallace did the same thing. Mind blown.)
As the tour came to a close, the docent recommended walking the paths to the Porter Spring a short distance away and visiting the one-acre garden of 35 flowerbeds directly behind the house.
I followed the boardwalk along the lake to the spring. The well is at the end of the lake and flows into it. I bent down to touch the water. Cold, just like the docent said.
Although well past the spring bloom when I visited, the garden was still home to a variety of flowers. Lilies, black-eyed Susans, and other flowers were on display. An arbor covered with wisteria, which unfortunately was not in bloom, divides the two sides of the garden. I wondered if the wisteria was purple (which looks beautiful) or white (which smells divine). I love wisteria.
The house and the woods were so peaceful that it seemed unlikely anyone would willingly leave the place. But Gene was driven away and to California not just for her health. Her books were so popular that several were made into movies—bad movies. Miffed, Gene decided that the only way to ensure the caliber of future movies made from her books was to establish her own movie production company. The company produced just two movies before her untimely death from a car accident. Over seventy years later, she found her way back to Wildflower Woods, where she can enjoy the woods once again.
The Gene Stratton-Porter State Historic Site is a wonderful outing that takes you away from the present, or at least the hubbub of daily life, and into the soothing caress of nature. Tour the house, walk the woods, stroll the garden, and sit by the lake. It will make you wish for your own Cabin in the Wildflower Woods.
Inside the World of Amy 