Steepletop, Edna St. Vincent Millay's Farm

On a hilltop in Austerlitz, New York, a few miles from the highway, a white clapboard farmhouse sits amid berry fields and pine woods. For the last twenty-five years of her life, it was the home of the most celebrated American poet of the nineteen twenties.

Edna Saint Vincent Millay was already famous by the time she answered a New York Times advertisement in March nineteen twenty-five for an abandoned berry farm in the Columbia County hills. She had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in nineteen twenty-three, the first woman to do so. Her sonnets and lyrics had made her the defining voice of a generation that was done apologizing for wanting pleasure, independence, and love on its own terms. She and her husband Eugen Boissevain paid nine thousand dollars for roughly six hundred thirty-five acres, a farmhouse, and assorted outbuildings. They named it Steepletop, after the pink-flowered steeplebush that covered the meadows.

Millay worked here in a writer's cabin at the edge of the pines. She tended elaborate gardens, corresponded with other poets, and continued to publish, though her reputation dimmed in the nineteen forties as modernism moved away from the lyric forms she championed. She wrote to her editor in her last years with the steady, slightly embattled tone of someone who knew the critics had moved on but believed in the work anyway.

Boissevain died in nineteen forty-nine. Millay lived alone at Steepletop for one more year. On the night of October eighteenth into the nineteenth, nineteen fifty, she fell on the stairs and died. She was fifty-eight.

The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-one. The property now includes the Millay Colony for the Arts, a residency program for writers and visual artists. The fields around the farmhouse are still wild with steeplebush in late summer, the pink flowers nodding over the same meadows she walked for a quarter century.