A Summer with Birds, Bees and Blossoms - Part I

In May of 1903, Frances Glessner was asked to prepare a paper about her summer estate in New Hampshire, known as The Rocks. The request came from The Fortnightly of Chicago, a private women’s club founded in 1873 to enrich the intellectual and social lives of its members; Frances Glessner had been a member since 1879. Entitled “A Summer with Birds, Bees and Blossoms” (with a subtitle of “A Summer Idyll of a busy woman and an idle man"), the paper was delivered on November 12, 1903. Beautifully written, it focuses mostly on her close observation of birds and her devotion to beekeeping. As it is rather lengthy, and we wish to quote extensively from its pages, we will present this topic in two articles, with Part I devoted to birds and Part II dealing with bees and the paper’s reception as recorded in letters from her friends.

The idea for a summer estate had its origins in son George’s severe hay fever. When he was about seven years old, his doctor suggested that he be sent to the White Mountains of New Hampshire for relief, as were other sufferers from around the country. Accompanied by his mother’s sister, Helen Macbeth, George’s symptoms disappeared upon arrival, and the family soon made the decision to summer in the healthful environment of New Hampshire’s North Country. In 1882, after spending several summers at the Twin Mountain House in Carroll, the Glessners purchased their first tract of 100 acres nestled between the towns of Littleton and Bethlehem. They completed their home, known simply as the Big House, in August of the following year. It was significantly remodeled and enlarged by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge in 1899, as seen below.

The Glessners would continue to spend summers at The Rocks until their deaths in the 1930s, and both George and his sister, Frances Glessner Lee, eventually made the estate their permanent home. In 1978, most of the property, which had grown over time to more than 1,500 acres, was donated to the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests by Frances Glessner Lee’s two surviving children. One portion of the estate is still owned and occupied by a great-granddaughter of George and Alice Glessner.

(The remainder of this article is entirely in Frances Glessner’s own words.) 

Let me say in passing that this paper of mine is not a literary effort, but simply a little group of stories and happenings within my own experience – “all of which I saw, part of which I was.”

After much consideration and a deal of search, we bought a farm – a rough and almost barren hilltop, - thin soil covered with stones, somewhat forbidding in itself, but with a genial summer atmosphere; an old red farm house, and the most magnificent panorama spread out in every direction. The glorious White Hills of Starr King*  - white till the late springtime, and with streaks of snow far into the summer, and verdure and gray rocks everywhere marking the sky line, and the picture filled in by valleys with green meadows divided by silver streamlets, the railroad track of civilization on the far away edge, where we watch the train crawling along, three sleeping villages, and the bluest sky and fleeciest clouds, with play of sunshine chasing fleeing shadows over the whole, and the approach, the passing, and retreat of sudden storms in the distance – all visible from our sunlight.

(*Note: Starr King, 1824-1864, was an American Universalist and Unitarian minister who, in 1859, published The White Hills: their Legends, Landscapes, and Poetry.)

It is a trite saying that the spring air is vocal with bird music, “caressed with song,” but it is a true one throughout the White Hills. Why were these ever degraded to mountains? Save, perhaps, for that monarch of all, Washington, and his lesser mate, Lafayette. And it is true also that these hills are bright with one color following another, each in its own season, as the summer progresses.

My own little eminence is white with winter’s snows, tender green with early spring, blue with violets and star grass, white again with clouds of blossoms on old apple trees, pink in June with cinnamon and wild roses, later gay with masses of yellow roses and scarlet poppies blooming together, and always and everywhere soft warm gray with huge weather-beaten, lichen-covered boulders.

The big window and its view. Note two sets of field glasses on the table.
(Photo by George Glessner)

In front of the big window of the big house, grows a goodly clump of stout young birch trees which in midsummer is completely covered and bowed over with the weight of a wild grapevine that has been encouraged to ramble thus over these little trees; indeed the vine is given full possession, truthfully having its own sweet will, for when in bloom the whole hillside is odorant with its fragrance.

Early in the season and before the leaves are grown, there are many branches of this vine sticking out in every direction, tough as wire, and most inviting to the birds as perches. Here they sit and sing and swing, and swing and sing, and there is no danger of the stiff fiber breaking or giving way. One morning in early June the little lisp of an old friend announced the arrival of the cedar bird, and after watching a while here was a pair of them lilting on the grape vine in the very ecstasy of love, one of the pair with a bunch of twigs in her mouth.

Frances Glessner's contributions of yarn can be seen in this nest
(Photo by George Glessner)

A bunch of coarse blue yarn cut in lengths of about six inches was then hung out on the family tree. Another pair of birds appeared. Blue wool went streaming by in another direction. This second pair we watched, and with field glasses traced them to a spruce tree on the opposite side of the house. From one window we watched them gather the wool; from the other we could see them putting it in place in the nest.

A pair of robins raised an early brood in a spruce tree. Grievous to tell, the young did not leave the nest alive, but furnished breakfast for some ravenous crows.

This disaster sent the birds nearer the house for the second family. Mrs. Robin searched about the vine on the porch. She would nestle down in a thicket of leaves and branches, evidently trying if it were well supported, secure from interruption, and well hidden. A pair of these friendly little creatures built a nest one spring in the cornice of the bee house. They were quite an interruption to the work among the bees, for although tame and unafraid, still I had to pop inside the closet when the mother came home with her mouth full. Then, after she had fed her young, I would come out and go on with my work.

Some days before her babies were ready to fly, I found in the walk a young robin, far too callow to take care of himself; and, to make matters worse, he had swallowed a little, stiff, prickly spear of growing grass. This stuck in his throat and pinioned him to the ground. He was in anything else than a happy condition. It was but the work of a moment to relieve him of the blade of grass, - but what next? Well, I carefully tucked him in the nest in the bee house with the four birds already there. When the old mother came home with her mouth full, she looked the situation over carefully and thoughtfully, hesitated a bit, then adopted the foundling, fed him, and was in a few days rewarded by his being the first nestling to fly from home; he a big, strong, healthy robin, for which he had his foster mother to thank.

Frances Glessner painted this china bowl. It no doubt depicts a nest she was observing at The Rocks.

For many years, some human member (not humane member) – some human member of my family has been in the habit of putting hemp seed on an old rock by the door, but usually not until late in the season. This year, the rock has been strewn with seed all summer and spring, and we have been rewarded by gay scenes; indigo birds, purple finches, goldfinches, white-throated and striped sparrows, and other seed-eating birds come there constantly and are growing quite tame.

And with them comes the chipmunk, or “hackey,” familiar, friendly, bold, confident in his quickness, ever alert and ready to fly from the first intimation of danger. But he is a glutton, a miser, and a wasteful spendthrift. He fills the pouches of his jaws with seed, a teaspoonful at a time, carries it off, buries it for future use, and promptly forgets where he buried it. Presently, I find little tufts of hemp growing up all over the plantations.

The fly-catching warbler’s dart through the porch and almost under my chair, the chimney swift’s beautiful flight and its sudden drop straight down into the chimney, which is the only place he ever alights, the red-headed woodpecker’s cling to a mullein stalk while I walk slowly up – confiding acts like these make the birds a part of my family.

Chimney swift nests preserved by Frances Glessner
(Photo by George Glessner)

These same chimney swifts are a great anxiety as well as pleasure. At the first whirr of wings in the chimney out goes the fire in that room, comfort indoors or discomfort. They persist in raising two or more broods in the same nest, and likely on account of the nest becoming weak from age and use, one brood is sure to tumble down into the sitting-room fireplace to the parents’ sorrow and mine. It is said that the young birds can clamber up the chimney sides unaided, but ours have not done so. 

To tell you about all of these feathered friends would be like repeating the check list of birds of Northern New Hampshire, as this region is a great and favorite breeding ground for many birds. Dr. Prime, Mrs. Slosson, Bradford Torrey, and Mr. Faxon have found and checked one hundred and twenty distinct varieties in the neighboring town of Franconia, and we have checked about ninety-six on our own hill.

These White Hills are teeming with memories of Starr King, Henry Ward Beecher, Phillips Brooks, Dr. Prime, Charles Dudley Warner, and other literary folk. Mrs. Slosson’s Fishin’ Jimmy whipped the streams about Franconia. The scene of Jacob Abbott’s Franconia stories of Beechnut and Malleville is said to be here. Hopkinson Smith’s Jonathan Gordon lived but a few miles away. Artists and scientists, men of letters and of affairs, soldiers and statesmen, and financiers and ministers of Christ, travelers and home-keepers, have broken bread in my dining-room, poets have sung under my shingles, invalids have wooed and regained health, tired men and women have sloughed off weary cares here, and never a one of them all but has succumbed to the witchery of the place. Oh, the luxury of loafing, the delight in the absence of responsibility, the comfort of sitting still in sun or shade, or yet in rain.

(Part II will be posted in September)