Early 20th Century Country Cottages in North Stamford

Time was, when a cottage “in the country” meant being within easy driving distance of your home, using your early automobile.  “Here is the wildest of primitive regions, but short daily visits to it would not be possible without the aid of that most modern of man's inventions – the automobile.”

For Stamfordites, that would have been no farther than North Stamford – hard to envision for most of us today.  But you had the added advantage of being able to go there any day of the year and observe and enjoy nature.

So join us for a visit with Mr. Fitch A. Hoyt, retired grocery store owner, who every day got in his car to drive to his log cabin Wawonaissa to commune with nature: The Nature Studies and Recreations of a Business Man. (Photo Selection of the Month, July 2007).

In addition to looking at many photos of the cabin and the woods, you can read about his philosophy on enjoying nature:

I went to Jerusalem, Old Spain, the whole length of Italy, Germany, France, England, Asia Minor, Egypt and the Pyramids; but in none of these did I find the equal of what I find in the woods. Nature does not advertise.  You go by her, you spit on her, abuse her, but there she is with arms wide open, trying to help you and everybody else.  I was fifteen years 'at it' before I knew it was there.

Read all

Or there is Mr. William Judson Delap, owner of a gentlemen's furnishing store, who built his Woodland Home Made of Packing Boxes, Denhurst, with his own hands (Photo Selection of the Month, May 2004).

When he goes to nature, he goes in the best, most primitive and natural of methods.  For many years he has been fond of seeking nature from a local home in the form of a tent or cabin.  As he is a busy man, with a multiplicity of cares, extended trips to distant woods or to the Adirondacks consume too much time.  Then, too, he is a lover of wild nature at all seasons of the year.  He does not believe in limiting his communion with nature to a week or two in midsummer.  Since he could not bring the Adirondack woods to Stamford, nor spare the time to make extended journeys at every season of the year, he solved the problem by building a permanent home that he calls “Denhurst” in the wildest spot of the woods that he could find within a few miles of Stamford.  He purchased several acres of wild woodland on the well-known Den Road, which, for primitiveness, would take first premium in competition with any other part of the Stamford suburbs.

… He solved the problem by building a home in the woods so simple, so incomplex that it is even less complex than a log cabin. It was, therefore, not a matter of economy in lumber, but to carry out, an idea, that he constructed a house entirely of packing boxes from his extensive clothing and gentlemen's furnishing store.

Read all