Would You Buy a Ticket to Visit Your Childhood Home?
Connemara, the Carl Sandburg home in Flat Rock; and his granddaughter, Paula
While on vacation have you ever stopped at a historic house, bought a ticket, walked in and felt at home? This happened to me many years ago at an artist’s house in Taos (or Santa Fe?) many years ago. From the first room on, I “knew” what was around each corner.
I had a similar feeling visiting the Carl Sandburg home in Flat Rock, NC, but it was more a recognition of furnishings from the 1940’s and ‘50’s. Things like stacks of papers, floor lamps, a typewriter, old easy chairs, pencils, newspapers and books on shelves and tables. It’s a house for writers and readers, from a time when everything was slow and on paper.
This Greek-revival style house was built in the 1830’s by Christopher Memminger, an attorney from Charleston, SC, who named it “Rock Hill”. It was a haven for friends during the Civil War. Over the years so many low-country people summered in Flat Rock that the town became known as “the Little Charleston of the Mountains.”
When Ellison Adger Smyth bought the house in 1900, he named it “Connemara” after his ancestral district in Scotland. And then in the early 1940’s, when Sandburg’s wife Lilian was looking for a place to raise her Chikaming dairy goats, she showed Connemara to Carl. He said, “We will look no further.”
Later, Lilian’s granddaughter Paula wrote,
Much of my grandmother’s work was done at her desk in the Farm Office, studying the pedigrees and production records of each goat and its relatives.
Below is a picture of Carl in his office. My own grandfather had a typewriter like this on his desk in Pittsburgh, along with long, newspaper-clipping scissors. He edited the Hungarian community newspaper, but he also wrote poetry as did Sandburg.
Bookshelves in every room!
I’ve been re-reading the memoir My Connemara by Sandburg’s granddaughter Paula. There’s one thing she mentions that I’ve been looking for in these photos: orange-crate bookshelves. In my family they were marvelously adaptable, free, paintable pieces of furniture for books and other things. My mother stacked them in her study beside her metal file cabinets.
In her book, Paula Steichen writes about Carl Sandburg,
My grandfather often used orange crates instead of desks or tables. His workroom had one desk, a lamp, a chair, file cabinets and at least fourteen orange crates in it. … He piled them one on top of another into bookcases, or he broke them down and spread them about, perfect height for two fingers to pick at the straddled typewriter in newspaperman fashion; and with their bottoms down they held endless stacks of manuscript in proper confines.
Paula was close to her grandfather during the years she lived at Connemara as a child and called him “Buppong”.
I grew to like the smell of cigar smoke throughout the rooms where Buppong worked. From under the table I could watch my grandfather’s feet, toes resting inward as he typed or read, and hear the sound of his work — the rustling of papers, the swift, penciled shorthand, the click of the typewriter. … As I played with my stuffed animals or painted under the table, I felt that every house in the world was filled with typewriters and books and orange crates full of letters, and inhabited by a man whose toes turned inward, clad in their ancient shoes.
Sam and I knew Paula during his campaign for the NC House a few years ago. She had retired from her very active role helping to organize her precinct in Henderson County and supporting candidates. During Sam’s campaign, Paula mailed him small brown envelopes full of local newspaper clippings to help him know the political landscape as he went about talking to voters.
I still have a fondness for her and feel a connection to her story. I felt right at home with the clippings she sent as I put them in our files, which unfortunately were not stacked in orange crates!
If you’re interested in a girl’s view of life in the 1940’s and ‘50’s on a farm in Flat Rock with Buppong and Gramma, her mother Helga and brother John, you will enjoy reading Paula Steichen’s book. Then when you visit Connemara, you might faintly hear Carl Sandburg’s “click of the typewriter”.
Thanks Deda - lovely remembrances of one of my favorite places in WNC.