The Frost Place: Where Fame Found the Poet in the White Mountains

Robert Frost first came to the White Mountains to escape hay fever. That brought him to Franconia, and Franconia brought him back.

By nineteen fifteen, Frost was no longer a nobody. His first two books, "A Boy's Will" and "North of Boston," had been published in England to serious acclaim, and he had returned to the United States as a recognized poet after years of obscurity. He was looking for a place to settle. He found a small farmhouse on the west side of Ridge Road in Franconia, spotted it through a gap in the trees, and bought it from a farmer named Willis Herbert, who reportedly moved into his cousin's house down the road.

Frost lived here full-time from nineteen fifteen to nineteen twenty, and returned for nineteen summers after that. The view from the porch takes in the ridge of the Franconia Range, including the cliff where the Old Man of the Mountain once looked down on the valley. Frost walked these hills obsessively. The landscape here, spare, demanding, beautiful in a way that does not try to please you, matched his mature voice.

Three of his most celebrated collections came out during and just after the Franconia years: "Mountain Interval" in nineteen sixteen, "New Hampshire" in nineteen twenty-three, the latter winning him the Pulitzer Prize. He was not a writer who needed exotic material. He needed a place that was itself.

When Frost finally stopped returning to the farmhouse, it passed through private hands until nineteen seventy-six, when the town of Franconia voted to purchase it and open it as a museum. Every summer since nineteen seventy-seven, the Frost Place has awarded a fellowship to an emerging poet, who lives and writes in the house for several months. The old farm is still doing what Frost found it useful for: giving a writer time.