It's all about the view: Robert Frost bought a simple clapboard house on Ridge Road, a mile outside Franconia, New Hampshire, because he loved the view. From the porch of the house now known as The Frost Place, a museum and centre for poetry since 1976, you can see miles of undulating forest that flows all the way to the famous White Mountains and Frost's favourite peak, Lafayette.
Aged 41 when he came here in 1915 with his wife Elinor and their four children, Frost and his family lived on Ridge Road for five years, and then returned every summer for the next 18 years. Time has warped the floors and wooden lintels of the two-storied house, but changed nothing in terms of atmosphere.
The old wood-burning stove that warmed the Frosts is still here, as is Elinor's piano, and some of Frost's books, including signed first editions. Robert Frost arrived at the house on Ridge Road virtually unknown as a poet, but publication of North of Boston and A Boy's Will changed all that. By the time he left Franconia for Vermont in 1920, his reputation was assured: he has since been described as America's national bard.
What makes the Ridge Road house so interesting to the visitor is the knowledge that the landscape that surrounds it provided much of the material for Frost's most famous poems. He had bought the house for the view, and the view rewarded him. Here are the New Hampshire stone walls, and fences that test good neighbours, and dark woods that get snowy in winter. The barn adjacent to the house once housed Frost's "little horse".
It was in this house, surrounded by woods full of bears, that he wrote "The Road Not Taken": that classic meditation on choices, and what might have been, where two roads diverged in a narrow wood. Visitors can walk through the surrounding woods and guess for themselves which spots inspired his poems. His favourite armchair is in a downstairs room, complete with a wooden board he placed between its arms to create a makeshift table: an uncomfortable-looking arrangement he liked to set up out on the veranda.
Upstairs, in his bedroom, a wooden desk stands under a window. It was varnished when Frost had it, but the varnish has since disappeared, "Because he liked to write with the window open, even when it was raining", informs the placard on the desk.
The tiny population of Franconia (only 750 at the time) bought the property in 1976, as their way of marking America's Bicentenary, and set up their own trust to administer it. The house is now on America's National Register of Historic Places, although still held in trust by the people of Franconia. Since then the Frost Place, as it is now known, has been lived in every summer by a visiting poet, and every year, there is a week-long festival of poetry workshops and readings here. The view, obviously, still inspires.
The Frost Place, Ridge Road, Franconia, New Hampshire is open from May 29th to October 9th. Franconia is three hours north of Boston. Telephone 00-1-603-8235510.
