Mount Tom

A Connecticut Property and an American Documentary Archive, 1830 to the Present

Part I. The Carter Line

The property at the back of Mount Tom Pond has belonged to one extended family since 1903. To understand why so many threads of American history run through so small a place, one has to begin a lifetime earlier and an ocean away, with the Scottish bookseller whose firm, whose faith, and whose Princeton connection set the family on the path that eventually led it to a lake in the Litchfield Hills. The line is unusually well documented; the documents are the point. What follows traces it from Robert Carter's immigration in the early 1830s to the generation of Norman D. Carter Sr., and marks, as it goes, the episodes of the larger national history that the family record touches directly.

Robert Carter, Publisher (1807–1889)

Robert Carter was born in Earlston, Scotland, in 1807 and emigrated to New York in May 1831. Family tradition associates the crossing with the ship Francis and remembers it as hard — there was cholera aboard — and records that the young Carter arrived with roughly twenty-five dollars to his name and taught school for two years before entering the book trade. The firm he built, Robert Carter & Brothers, became one of the leading American publishers of religious books of the mid-nineteenth century, specializing in Scottish, English, and Continental Protestant theology and carrying Carter into correspondence with many of the most prominent religious writers of the age on both sides of the Atlantic. He married Jane Thomson — the source of the "Thomson" that recurs as a middle name down the line, and the reason this account spells it so throughout. He was active in the governance of American Presbyterianism: a New York Times notice of 26 April 1873, on the closing exercises of Princeton Theological Seminary, lists "Robert Carter, Esq." among the alternates to the Committee of Examination, in company with James McCosh and other divines of his generation.

The family's mid-century New York was also a node in the wider reform culture of the period. Robert Carter's brother Peter Carter, a partner in the trade and a known abolitionist, published an account of a visit to Harriet Beecher Stowe — a connection that ties the family, two generations before it ever saw the Litchfield Hills, to both the antislavery cause and to Litchfield itself, the town of Stowe's birth and the seat of the county in which Mount Tom lies.

The McCosh Recruitment to Princeton, 1867–1868

The single most consequential thing Robert Carter did outside his own firm was to help bring James McCosh to Princeton. When John Maclean retired from the presidency of the College of New Jersey in 1867, the Trustees — who knew Carter through his publishing house and his service to the Theological Seminary — asked him to recommend, in conscious echo of the call of John Witherspoon a century before, "some good Scotchman." Carter recommended McCosh, then Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen's College, Belfast, with whom he had a long publishing relationship, and furnished a letter of introduction to the Trustee traveling to Belfast to extend the formal call. McCosh accepted and served as Princeton's eleventh president from 1868 to 1888 — the period now generally recognized as the transformation of a small denominational college into a modern university.

Four letters from McCosh to Carter survived in the family. The first, dated Belfast, 7 May 1862, is mostly the practical business of shipping printed sheets in tin-lined boxes from Belfast through Liverpool to New York, but it closes by placing itself squarely in the Civil War moment: McCosh and the Belfast public, he writes, awaited the news from America with great anxiety, most of those not tied to the cotton trade praying for peace. The second, Queen's College, Belfast, 8 February 1868, is the historically weighty one: McCosh, surprised and conditional, will consider the Princeton call only if it comes spontaneously, as a "call in Providence," and writes that he would be honored to follow the line from Jonathan Edwards to Maclean — willing, in his most-quoted phrase, to let his bones be buried where those presidents sleep. In 1947 one of Carter's grandsons, Henry J. Cochran of New York, gave the correspondence to the Princeton University Library. The Librarian who received it, Julian P. Boyd — soon the founding editor of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson — judged the McCosh–Carter letters comparable in importance to those Witherspoon wrote to Benjamin Rush around his own call in 1768; Princeton's president, Harold W. Dodds, wrote Cochran personally to thank him. Princeton is the thread that runs through everything that follows in this family — and it begins here, with a bookseller asked to name a Scotchman.

Samuel Thomson Carter

Robert Carter's son Samuel Thomson Carter entered the ministry rather than the firm, and it is through him that the line reaches Mount Tom. He appears in the record first as a young man abroad. His passport — issued by the U.S. Legation in London under the engraved eagle and shield, numbered No. 138 of the Legation's series — gives his age as twenty and shows him making the Grand Tour of Europe and the Mediterranean through the years of the American Civil War. The visas record Naples and Rome on 17 May 1862, endorsed by both the U.S. Consulate (Alexander Hammett, Acting Consul) and the Papal authority granting passage to Rome for "Il Sig. Carter"; Athens on 8 May 1862, by way of the French Legation in Greece; Alexandria, Egypt, later that year; and the Central European cities of Berlin and Vienna. That a draft-age American of the Northern Protestant elite spent the war years touring the Holy Land and the Continent is itself a fact about the family's economic position and orientation in the early 1860s.

Samuel returned and entered the Presbyterian ministry, serving first at Yonkers and then for many years as settled pastor of the old church at Huntington, Long Island. The family summered at Centerport, on the Long Island shore — the vacation center the family kept before it shifted, a generation later, to Washington, Connecticut, and the Litchfield Hills. Over four decades and three marriages he became the father of thirteen children, a span wide enough that his eldest and youngest sons belonged effectively to different generations, and wide enough to seed the large cousinhood from which Mount Tom would later draw.

Two episodes from Samuel's life touch the national history directly. The first is a notebook. On 7 October 1863 — three months after the battle and roughly six weeks before Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address — Samuel walked the Gettysburg battlefield and kept a detailed record of what he saw. It is not the sanitized battlefield of later memory. He keyed the entry to a sketched profile of the ground — Cemetery Hill, Round Top, the Wheat Field, Meade's headquarters, the rebel camp, Stony Hill — and then described it: houses in the town still shot through, the line of rails and dirt and stone running three miles to Round Top, the 1st Minnesota buried in a row under named wooden headboards, "the most terrible place to attack I ever saw," rebels barely buried in the valley with the bones exposed, a lady in the party stooping to pick up a bone, twenty-six South Carolinians in one grave with the bones sticking out, the trees riddled with balls, and the whole field laid out below from the cupola of the Seminary. It is a civilian eyewitness account of the autumn-1863 battlefield, written by a member of this family, and it survives in family hands.

The second is an invocation. On 4 July 1903, at the 250th Anniversary Festival of Huntington, Long Island, Dr. Samuel Thomson Carter, D.D., minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Huntington, delivered the invocation before President Theodore Roosevelt, who was the day's principal speaker. The moment was reported in The New York Times of 5 July 1903 — the clipping, headed "THE PRESIDENT SPEAKS," noting that "Invocation was said by Dr. Carter." A minister of this family opened a public occasion for a sitting President near the President's own Oyster Bay.

Samuel's Sons: Three Lives

Of Samuel Thomson Carter's thirteen children, five sons went to Princeton. Three are central to this history, and among them they carry three separate threads of the American twentieth century.

Robert E. Carter, Princeton 1885 — the builder

The eldest of the three, referred to here as Robert II to distinguish him from his grandfather the publisher, followed his father into the Presbyterian ministry and served at Washington, Connecticut. In 1903 he built the summer camp at the back of Mount Tom Pond that is the subject of Part III and the anchor of this whole account. He was the father of two daughters who matter here: Rebecca Carter, who went to Vassar — the connection that later opens onto John Burroughs — and Alice Pratt Carter, born on Independence Day, 4 July 1891, at Lebanon, Pennsylvania, whose transatlantic life is the subject of Part IV. Because something on the order of twenty-four years separated Robert II from his youngest half-brother Rex, Alice (born 1891) was very nearly the age of her uncle Rex (born 1889) — two years his junior — while remaining, in kinship, his niece.

Norman McLeod Carter, 1878–1910 — the Adirondack cure

Samuel's son Norman McLeod Carter, born 12 June 1878 at Huntington, was the family's brightest academic promise and its earliest tragedy. He entered Princeton with the class of 1899, edited the Daily Princetonian, took Phi Beta Kappa, and went on to the College of Physicians and Surgeons intending to become a medical missionary. Diphtheria in his final year of medical school broke his health; in March 1903 he was sent to Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks, where he became a patient of Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau — the founder of the famous cure-cottage sanatorium — and finished his medical degree, examined at Trudeau's own home, from his cure-cottage porch. He lived out his remaining years there among his tamed chickadees and named squirrels and his notebooks, and died of tuberculosis on 2 November 1910, at thirty-two; his brothers carried him home to be buried at Huntington beside his mother. His sister Emma wrote the memorial booklet A Good Soldier (privately printed, 1911). His middle name, McLeod, very likely honors the Rev. Norman Macleod, one of the Scottish divines the Carter brothers encountered on the Grand Tour; and in the next generation Rex would name his own son Norman, after this uncle. The thread Norman carries is the one that runs through Trudeau's Saranac and the Adirondack cure — the documented world of American tuberculosis medicine at the turn of the century.

Reginald Loomis "Rex" Carter, 1889–1950, Princeton 1911 — the False Armistice

The youngest of the thirteen children, Reginald Loomis Carter — "Rex" — was born in 1889, when his father was about forty-seven. He took the Princeton class of 1911, spent a year in California, and returned to New York and a position with the Guaranteed Mortgage Company. In 1916 he married and enlisted in the U.S. Naval Reserve as an ensign, serving through the First World War as a duty officer at the Third Naval District Communication Office, 44 Whitehall Street, in New York City. There he played a small, documented part in the prehistory of the False Armistice. On the night of 4–5 November 1918 — days before the genuine armistice of 11 November — a telegram addressed simply "HERALD" reached his office, declaring in capitalized telegraphic prose that the war was over and Germany had surrendered unconditionally. The operator could not trace it. Rex, by his own account "trembling," telephoned Admiral Nathaniel R. Usher, Commandant of the Third Naval District, at about half past midnight and read it to him; Usher, unable to confirm it, concluded it "probably has no official meaning." Two days later Roy Howard's premature dispatch from France broke the false armistice nationally; the real one came on 11 November. Rex kept the telegram and his contemporaneous explanatory note, which descended in the family and were published in James Smith and Geoff Carter's 2023 article on the message — which proposes that this telegram is "probably one of the first rumors that started the 'False Armistice,'" a phrase taken from Rex's own 1918 note.

After the war Rex returned to the mortgage business and prospered through the 1920s, lost his money in the 1929 crash, spent much of the Depression unemployed, and eventually found a place in the real-estate department of a New York insurance company. His health failed in the late 1930s; he retired at the start of the Second World War and worked, when able, with the Red Cross of Englewood, New Jersey. He died of a heart attack on 17 December 1950, at sixty-one — in his son's words, "a devoted Presbyterian all his life." He is the present trustee's grandfather.

The Princeton Family, and Norman D. Carter Sr.

The Princeton thread that began with McCosh became, in this family, almost a law of nature. An October 1943 piece in a Princeton alumni publication identified the extended Carter family — branching through the Cochran, Dodd, and Miller lines, all descended from the immigrant publisher — as the largest Princeton family on record, with at least one member enrolled in each of the preceding sixty years. The line ran on through Edward S. Carter '16 and his son Edward S. Carter Jr. '44, through Rex '11, and into the next generation with Norman D. Carter Sr., Rex's son, Princeton class of 1945.

Norman Sr.'s war, though, was not a soldier's. A chemical-engineering student at Princeton — where as a freshman in 1941 he had played left inside forward on an undefeated freshman soccer team, coached one afternoon by a young Bob Goheen, the future Princeton president, under a captain, John Koelsch, later a posthumous Medal of Honor recipient in Korea — he was selected, on his professors' recommendation, to work as a scientist for the Tennessee Eastman Company on the Manhattan Project. He left Princeton early, in 1944, for the Y-12 electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he helped start up and run the Alpha tracks that separated the uranium isotopes for the Hiroshima bomb, later supervising the chemical preparation of the uranium charges and joining the plant-engineering group. It was at Oak Ridge that he met Jean Benham, also employed at the facility; they married on 9 November 1945. He left the nuclear industry when the war ended, and was haunted for the rest of his life by the bomb's use against a civilian population — in his later years arguing publicly for foolproof international control of the materials that go into nuclear weapons. He settled in Poughkeepsie, New York, and built his postwar career at Texaco, where he became a charter member of its environmental-protection department and the author or co-author of thirteen U.S. patents. His and Jean's five children constitute the fourth generation of the family in this history and, by the family's standing wish, are not named here.

Closing

The line, then, runs in five clear steps: a Scottish immigrant bookseller who helped recruit a president to Princeton; his minister son who toured the Holy Land in the middle of the Civil War, walked Gettysburg in its aftermath, and prayed before Theodore Roosevelt; that son's own three sons, who built a camp, died in the Adirondack cure, and took down a false-armistice telegram; and the Princeton chemical engineer Norman D. Carter Sr., who helped separate the uranium for Hiroshima and then spent his later life arguing against the weapon he had helped to build, carrying the family into the second half of the century. Each of these lives touched a thread of the national story, and each thread is taken up again, at length, in the parts that follow. But the threads converge at a particular place — a small glacial lake at the foot of a particular mountain — and it is to that lake, and to how it came to be the family's center of gravity, that Part II turns.

Part II. Mount Tom Pond

Before there was a camp there was a lake, and before the family there was the place. Mount Tom Pond is a small spring-fed glacial lake in the Litchfield Hills of northwestern Connecticut, about a mile long and half a mile wide, lying at the foot of the mountain that gives both the lake and the surrounding state park their name. Most of its water falls within the town of Washington; the rest is divided among Litchfield, Morris, and Warren. "Mount Tom Pond" is the formal name on the maps; the family, like the neighbors, has always called it the lake. To understand why a minister's family built here in 1903, and why they never left, one has to first understand the lake — its geology, its older human record, the road that reached it, and the small summer colony that had begun to gather at its back by the turn of the century.

The Glacial Lake

The lake sits in a glaciated upland of metamorphic and igneous rock. The bedrock is largely a coarse, quartz-rich granite — coarse enough, in fact, to have been quarried historically for millstones — and the quartz commonly carries garnet inclusions. Loose sheets of mica, large enough to be useful, turn up in the soil and rock around the camp; the family used a piece of it as the sight glass in the door of the potbelly stove in the original cabin, so the state of the fire could be read without opening the door. Boulders the last glacier dropped lie scattered across the property, some of them split where smaller stones were driven into them by the ice. The lake itself is a glacial basin, spring-fed, of the kind common to the Litchfield Hills.

It has, even so, attracted more dramatic explanations. An April 1915 feature in the Hartford Courant, "Never Found Trout Bed a Second Time," recorded the local belief that the water on the northwest side of the lake, fronting the pinnacle of the mountain, was practically bottomless — heavily weighted lines a thousand feet long, it reported, had found nothing to rest on — and that the lake was the crater of a long-dead volcano, a notion the writer said was supported by local tradition. The geology is otherwise: the lake is glacial, not volcanic, and the "bottomless" depths belong to folklore rather than to bathymetry. The volcanic-crater story is worth recording only as a piece of the lake's mythology, of a piece with the article's tale of a fisherman who once pulled sixty pounds of trout from a hidden bed he could never find again. The same article, more reliably, called the lake "enthroned on the very summit of Mount Tom" and described it as becoming a quiet resort for a small and favored set — which it was.

The Indigenous Record

Along the outlet at the back of the lake, where the water runs off into a brook, there is a jumble of large granite boulders forming low overhangs and shelters that the family has always called the Indian caves. Local and family tradition holds that the ridge to the south, perhaps half a mile from the back of the lake, was a site of Native American habitation, and there is a memory of archaeological interest in the rock shelters in the mid-twentieth century. The family's own 2008 preservation brief, which is otherwise scrupulous, declined to substantiate the specific archaeological findings, and this account follows it: the rock shelters are real and the tradition of indigenous use is long-standing, but the particulars remain unverified. What is securely documented is the place's later use of that tradition — Alice Carter Foy, in her decades at the lake, would take the camp children on walks through the woods to the caves, teaching them to paddle a canoe along the way and naming the features of the place as they went.

The Turnpike and the Road

The lake was reached early. A turnpike crossed this country at the end of the eighteenth century, and the camp at the back of the lake sits on or close to the trace of the old Mount Tom road. By the early twentieth century the main highway from Litchfield toward New Milford ran along the north side of the lake, which left the back — the south shore — as the quiet side. That is the side the summer camps took, and the side on which the Carter camp would be built: reached by the public road on the north, but set apart from it, at the foot of the mountain, across the water.

The Litchfield Summer Colony, c. 1900

By 1915 the Courant could describe Mount Tom as a high-class summer resort for a favored few, with no stores and no hotels anywhere near it and the camps gathered at the back of the lake. The article names the set: an organization called the Indian Reservation Bungalow Camp, whose members included Judge James P. Woodruff, Ed Roberts, the attorney Leonard Nickerson, and Donald T. Warner of Salisbury; the Jacob Doll estate, with its own substantial summer residence; and a recreation camp the New Haven Y.M.C.A. maintained on the lake each summer. Woodruff's own camp on the lake bore the name Wyantenuck. This was the world into which Robert E. Carter built in 1903 — not a wilderness, but a small, established colony of ministers, judges, and professional men who had chosen the same quiet glacial lake at the back of the same mountain for the same reasons. The camp that is the subject of Part III was one camp among a handful, on the still side of a lake that the rest of Connecticut had largely left alone.

The Stone Tower and the Summit

About a third of a mile from the back of the lake, on the summit of Mount Tom proper, stands the Stone Tower — an early-twentieth-century structure with a stone interior stair and viewing platforms, listed as a Connecticut state historic resource and now a feature of the state park. The summit also carries a United States Geological Survey brass geodesic marker set near an old white oak, and the surrounding ledges grow the blueberries the family has gathered on its annual climbs. From the top, the view is the whole reason for the climb. A family photograph captioned "Mt. Tom June 1952 From the tower" preserves it: the lake directly below in the middle distance, and beyond it apple orchards laid out in geometric rows across the rolling hill country — the working agricultural landscape of the mid-century, since largely gone back to woods.

The climb to the tower has been a fixed ritual of the family's summers across generations. An undated photograph from the early 1960s shows two boys of the family resting on a granite outcropping just below the tower, the lake and the wooded hills spread out behind them — the same view, a decade after the orchard photograph, with the forest already further advanced.

The Lake Now

The most telling change at Mount Tom over the family's century there is the one the photographs make unmistakable. In the earliest pictures — Robert E. Carter under sail, a young woman standing in the reeds at the shore around the time of the First World War — the far shore is open pasture, a cleared meadow running down to the water. In the photographs of the last several decades the meadow is gone: the woods have grown back and closed over the shoreline, until the camps themselves are all but engulfed in foliage, exactly as the 2008 preservation brief observed. The lake at golden hour today is a reforested one, the buildings glimpsed through trees, the far shore a continuous wall of woods. The naturalistic richness that the family had always prized — the mountain laurel growing densely around the camp, the red-spotted newts, the vividly colored mushrooms of the wet summer woods, the mica and garnet underfoot — is, if anything, deeper now than it was. It is the kind of place, and the kind of seeing, that the naturalist John Burroughs practiced a little way down the Hudson, and the family's acquaintance with Burroughs, taken up in Part III, was of a piece with the lake that drew them.

Transition

The lake, then, was the precondition: a small glacial pond, quietly settled at its back by a colony of summer people, reached by an old turnpike road, watched over by a stone tower and an older indigenous tradition, and rich in the natural detail that a certain kind of nineteenth-century Protestant family found morally as well as aesthetically congenial. In 1903 a minister of that family built a camp at the back of it. Part III is the camp.

Part III. The 1903 Camp

In 1903 the Reverend Robert E. Carter built a small summer camp at the back of Mount Tom Pond, on the quiet south shore among the handful of camps already gathered there. It has remained in the extended family's use ever since — a century and a quarter, five generations. It is best understood not as a building but as a compound: a cluster of rustic structures, raised on stone piers and grown by addition over decades, of a recognizable American type. Its nearest cousin, architecturally and in spirit, is the naturalist's retreat that John Burroughs built eight years earlier on the Hudson; and the family's acquaintance with Burroughs, and a famous novelist's afternoon on the dock, both belong to this camp's history.

Construction and Setting

The earliest known photograph of the original cabin, labeled in the family's hand "Camp Wee-Hae," shows a single-story building with a steep gabled roof and vertical board siding, a front porch on which three figures are seated — a man flanked by two women — and a heavy stone pier at the edge of the frame. The cabin sits on stone piers above the slope to the lake; the surrounding trees are mid-growth, consistent with a former road corridor returning to woods. Robert E. built it on or near the trace of the old turnpike, in the towns of Morris and Litchfield, fronting the pond on the east, with the future state-park land to the west and the neighbors who become Part VI — the Steinways to the south, the Cavarlys to the north — on either side. The name Camp Wee-Hae attached to this first cabin; its etymology is undetermined, the family's conjectures running from a Scottish "wee hame," a little home, to an Algonquian construction on the analogy of Wyantenuck, Judge Woodruff's camp on the same lake.

The Compound, Built in Phases

What stands today grew by accretion. Family memory describes an initial small fishing camp — the first cabin — followed by additions over many years: a wing set on flat stone piers laid directly on the ground; a stone fireplace and chimney with an interior mantel and a pillared cap outside; a third addition the family frankly calls the warehousing; an outdoor kitchen with a cast-iron wood stove; an indoor kitchen added later off a wing of the main house; a boathouse about eighty feet to the west; a small spring house, marked on the 1971 survey; and, importantly for Part IV, a second and smaller cottage that became the long-term residence of Robert E.'s daughter, Alice Carter Foy. The whole was built in the local vernacular — stones gathered from the site and laid flat without poured foundation, the framing resting on the piers, a crawl space beneath that lifted the buildings above the wet of the slope. Each September the family closed the buildings under the same old padlocks and reopened them the following season; for the nine months between, the camp stood unwatched at the back of the lake.

Water, Waste, and the Texture of Camp Life

The camp had no plumbing for most of its life, and its material culture is, in consequence, unusually legible. Water was drawn from a hand-dug well — dug, by family reckoning, back in Robert E.'s years in the Washington ministry — by a hand pump primed with a tin cup kept at the wellhead; the well was abandoned when its water turned bad, and potable water was thereafter carried in. Waste went to two outhouses: a "double cedar" two-seater at the back of the property, and a second by the barbed-wire state-park fence, provisioned with a can of lime. Bathing, absent plumbing, was done in a galvanized washtub set on a cloth-draped table, the water heated and poured in — a scene a surviving photograph records exactly, a small child in the tub on the table in the woods, an empty tin and a folded cloth beside it. The outdoor kitchen, with its cast-iron wood stove, was the family's principal cooking place through the first half of the century. The point of these particulars is not antiquarian: they are the physical evidence of a deliberately unmodernized retreat, kept rustic on principle across an era in which the rest of American summer life was acquiring plumbing, wiring, and the automobile.

The Boathouse, the Boats, and the Dock

About eighty feet west of the main cabin, on its own stone piers and dating to roughly 1920, stood the boathouse. It held the original wooden rowboats Robert E. had bought around the time he built the camp — boats that stayed in family use for sixty years and more; a 1957 photograph shows Norman D. Carter Sr. at the oars of one of them with three children of the next generation aboard, the original hulls carrying a third generation across the lake. The boathouse also held, until they were lost, a set of old fly reels strung with thick line. The dock incorporated a wooden diving board, built into the structure rather than detached and at some point wrapped in jute; an undated photograph — the swimwear places it in the late 1920s or early 1930s — shows the dock in full summer use, a woman holding the board, a man in mid-jump, a child in the water, one of the old rowboats at the right. Bathhouses were added under the boathouse later.

The Dock Photograph: Fitzgerald at Mount Tom

Among the dock photographs is the one that ties the camp to American literary history. In the late 1910s and the 1920s the camp filled each summer with the college friends of Robert E.'s children — Sterling Carter's Princeton friends, Alice's Radcliffe friends, and Rebecca Carter's Vassar friends, as the family's own caption to the photograph records. A long panoramic group portrait taken on the dock, captioned "Early Days at Carter Camp at Mt Tom," shows that gathering; and among Sterling Carter's Princeton set in it are F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund "Bunny" Wilson. The Princeton timing is exact: Edward Sterling Carter was of the Princeton class of 1916, the precise contemporary of Fitzgerald (class of 1917) and of Wilson (class of 1916), and the dock group is that Princeton-and-Seven-Sisters college world of the mid-1910s brought up to a Connecticut lake for the summer. Fitzgerald's presence at Mount Tom, in the family's hands and by the family's account, is part of the camp's record. So far as the family is aware, it has not been noted in the published Fitzgerald scholarship. (An older family caption had garbled Wilson as "Bunny Edmonds, Fitzgerald's editor"; the man was Edmund Wilson, Fitzgerald's Princeton friend and lifelong critic — his editor was Maxwell Perkins.)

John Burroughs and the Naturalist Camp

The camp belongs to a recognizable American kind: the rustic naturalist's retreat. Its nearest architectural and intellectual relative is Slabsides, the cabin the naturalist and essayist John Burroughs built in 1895 at West Park, on the west bank of the Hudson — rustic, raised on a wooded slope, built of walled compartments rather than open rooms, set deliberately apart from modern comfort. Robert E. Carter built in the same idiom eight years later. The kinship was not only formal: the Carters were personally acquainted with Burroughs. A photograph in the family's collection shows the unmistakable white-bearded naturalist seated on a boulder among a group of Carter women, one of them Rebecca Carter — whose Vassar years, directly across the Hudson from Burroughs's West Park, are the most likely point of contact. (The family places the photograph at Mount Tom; Burroughs is more usually associated with his own ground at West Park, so the location is best left to the family's account.) The acquaintance sets the camp firmly inside the naturalist-retreat culture of the turn of the century — the same impulse that had drawn the family to a glacial lake rich in laurel, newts, mica, and vividly colored mushrooms in the first place.

Five Generations of Confined Leisure

The life of the camp was one of rustic, deliberately confined leisure. The family came for two-week residencies and largely stayed put, not going into town daily; the day's outer boundary was the soundscape of the neighboring children's summer camp, whose reveille and taps carried across the water morning and evening. For the children of each generation the camp was a fixed small world: the sandbox with its glass marbles, the nap-blanket corners twisted into "fuzzies," the wicker furniture in the central room, the game of "Up Jenkins" in the shed, the swimming and the jute-wrapped diving board, the old rowboats. By the early 1960s the teenagers of the family found, in the phrase preserved in the family's dictation, "absolutely nothing to do" — one of them spent afternoons draining the station-wagon battery trying to pull a distant New York AM station out of the poor woodland reception in search of the new Beatles records. The one firm social rule, kept by the mother of that branch, Jean B. Carter, was that no strangers were to be brought back from the public park: the camp was to stay a family place even as the surrounding state park drew an ever more democratic summer public. Through all of it ran the continuities — the same rowboats across three generations, the same padlocks reopened each spring, the same climb to the tower each summer — that made the camp less a property than an institution.

Transition

The camp, then, is the still center of this whole account — the rustic compound on its stone piers that drew Princeton and Vassar and Radcliffe friends, a famous novelist, and the kinship of John Burroughs, and that held one family at one lake across five generations. But its single most remarkable inhabitant lived in the small second cottage that Robert E. built beside the main cabin: his daughter, Alice Pratt Carter Foy, whose life between the wars carried the family far from the back of the lake — to the Vosges, to revolutionary Russia, to Estonia, to Vienna on the eve of the Anschluss — and who is the subject of Part IV.

Part IV. Alice Pratt Carter Foy (1891–1973)

The most documented life in the Carter family at Mount Tom belongs to Robert E. Carter's daughter Alice, who lived her later decades in the small second cottage beside the main cabin. Her papers, photographs, decorations, scrapbook, and a symphony dedicated to her together make up the fullest surviving record of any single member of the family — and they carry, in one life, more threads of the early-twentieth-century world than any other part of this account: the American Red Cross at the front in the Vosges, Anne Morgan's reconstruction of devastated France, an extraordinary husband in the Russian famine, a posting in newly independent Estonia, a marriage that ended in abandonment, and, at the end of the 1930s, a quiet act that very probably saved a great Viennese musician from the Holocaust.

Origins

Alice Pratt Carter was born on 4 July 1891 — Independence Day — at Lebanon, Pennsylvania. The date and place are fixed by her mother's sworn affidavit on Alice's 1918 passport application, which states it directly and is corroborated by the application's own description of her as twenty-seven that year; it is this primary document that corrects the family's long-carried memory of an 1881 birth. Her father was the Reverend Robert E. Carter, Princeton 1885, the builder of the Mount Tom camp; her mother was Emma Carter of Washington, Connecticut. The Washington household, a few miles from the back of the lake, placed her near the camp from childhood. Because some twenty-four years separated her father from his youngest half-brother, Alice was very nearly the age of her uncle Rex — two years his junior — while remaining, in kinship, his niece. She went to Radcliffe. She never had children.

The Red Cross in the Vosges, 1918–1919

When the United States entered the war, Alice joined the American Red Cross, and the family's papers preserve her formal assignment. The order — bilingual on Red Cross stationery, under the imprimatur of the American Expeditionary Forces and signed for the command of General Pershing — authorizes "Miss Alice Pratt Carter" to travel by rail from Paris to Neufchâteau, in the Vosges, on behalf of the Graves Registration Bureau, under Red Worker's Permit No. 20119, valid through 29 July 1919. She was, in the document's own term, "militarized" — accorded military status for access to AEF facilities and the front-line zones. The Graves Registration Bureau was the AEF organization responsible for finding, identifying, and burying the American dead; Alice's assignment placed her in that work in the heavily contested eastern French sector in the months after the Armistice.

Several objects survive from this period, framed together in her cottage. Her identification disc — the Red Cross equivalent of an Army dog tag — is inscribed "ALICE P. CARTER / ARC AEF / WASHINGTON CONN," her maiden name and her Connecticut town. There is a Verdun 1916 medal and a small silver pendant of Reims Cathedral; and, separately, a shard of stained glass, labeled in her hand "Glass from Verdun Cathedral" — a fragment of a shelled French cathedral carried home. And there is a small envelope, marked in her hand "Clothing issued to Prisoners taken by Germany," to which she stapled a swatch of coarse burlap-weave cloth, the rough fabric German camps issued to captured Allied soldiers.

CARD: Anne Morgan's Reconstruction of France, 1919–1923

After her Graves Registration assignment closed in July 1919, Alice moved into the reconstruction of northern France. Her papers hold a silver-medal certificate from the Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées — the American Committee for the Devastated Regions of France, known as CARD — the women-led philanthropic operation founded in the war by the American heiress Anne Morgan, daughter of J. P. Morgan, and Anne Murray Dike, M.D., and run from the Château de Blérancourt in the Aisne. CARD rebuilt villages, ran clinics and libraries, and restored agriculture across the formerly German-occupied zone. Alice's certificate, naming her in French as "Mademoiselle Alice C. Foy" and awarding her a silver medal for her devoted collaboration in the restoration of France, is signed by both Dike and Morgan — placing her in direct contact with two of the most prominent American women of the age. Her later passport records her residence in France from June 1918 to April 1922, spanning both the Graves Registration service and the CARD years.

Marriage to John Arnold Foy

Alice met John Arnold Foy in wartime France, and they married — "the culmination of a wartime romance," as the Hartford Courant later put it. A letter from Foy to Alice survives, typed on the letterhead of the Thomas-Bray Co. of New York and dated 20 July 1920, addressing her as "My Dear Pal" and signed "From Jack." It is mostly practical — coaching her through her coming passport application, what to enter and whom to name — but one instruction is telling in hindsight: she was to present his Red Cross commission paper as proof and to say nothing about his Army records, because the passport office would want to see them. Read against what followed, the evasiveness about his record reads as a small early shadow.

Foy himself was an extraordinary figure, the subject of a full chapter in Bertrand Patenaude's history of the American relief operation in Russia. Born at Cork, Ireland — aboard a ship, by his own account, and so under the American flag — he had been in the importing trade in Paris before the war, joined the French Foreign Legion as an aviator in its first weeks, was shot down more than once, was heavily decorated, and ended the war a lieutenant. He transferred to the U.S. Army when America entered the war, served afterward with the Near East Relief in Armenia — where he likely first came to the notice of Colonel William Haskell — and then at the U.S. Consulate in Constantinople. In August 1921 the American Relief Administration hired him as a "chauffeur mechanic" and sent him to the Tsaritsyn district, on the lower Volga, as a roaming inspector.

Foy's Russian Service: the Flivver, 1921–1922

Foy's particular fame in the relief expedition was his automobile. From a wrecked French camionette he rebuilt, by hand, with little more than a monkey wrench and a hatchet, a torpedo-bodied Ford whose entire rear half was a fuel tank holding the equivalent of some 440 pounds of gasoline — enough, in theory, for eight hundred miles. He called it "Henry"; the local Russians called him "Meester Foi." In it he ranged across the famine zone on reconnaissance and supply runs that read like adventure fiction and are documented in the ARA's own records: a subzero tour of the lower Tsaritsyn district in December 1921 during which he outran an ambush of dozens of bandits over ground too rough for horses and traded fire with Red Army soldiers with his Colt; a desert breakdown that left him and his interpreter two days without water, drinking from the radiator, until a Kalmyk on a camel was persuaded at gunpoint to tow them in; the flivver's plunge partway through the Volga ice in March 1922, when the torpedo hull kept it from sinking and nearly a hundred oxen were eventually yoked to drag it out, after which a few hours with chicken wire and clay put it back on the road. On his most celebrated trip, a six-hundred-mile run across the Kalmyk steppe in May 1922, he fabricated new engine bearings from lead sink-pipe, filled punctured tires with sand for the last 165 miles, replaced a broken clutch band with a marine belt, and ran the engine on lard when the grease gave out; the flivver reached Tsaritsyn, an ARA press release reported, gave "a faint apologetic cough, and stood still." He is said to have inspected fifteen hundred kitchens; the ARA in his district fed roughly a million people.

The cost was his body. His doctor at Tsaritsyn wrote the ARA's medical division in July 1922 describing a man who stopped at nothing, but who now had a persistent cough, weight loss, a subdued spirit, and chest findings suggesting early tuberculosis, on top of a fractured hand that could not be properly set in Russia. The recommendation was immediate leave, or a serious breakdown.

Alice in Estonia, 1922

While Foy worked the Tsaritsyn and Stavropol districts, Alice was posted to Reval — present-day Tallinn — in newly independent Estonia. Her passport application, sworn at the American consulate at Reval in December 1922, gives her purpose as welfare work and records her residence in Estonia since April 1922. Her letters home to Connecticut, excerpted that October in a Hartford Courant feature, are one of the more vivid American eyewitness accounts of the period: she relays Jack's reports from the famine country — the dead stripped of their clothes by the roadside, cannibalism, cholera so bad that whole villages might have to be burned — and sets beside them her own Baltic life, the Russian Orthodox Easter at the Reval cathedral with its midnight search by lantern for the body of Christ, a decaying isolated Swedish colony on a Baltic island, the proud red tape of the new Estonian state, the marginalized German Baltic barons, the Bolshevik frontier near at hand, and the medieval streets and two-hour summer nights of Reval itself. Her circle there even included Werner Otto von Hentig, the German diplomat of the wartime Niedermayer–Hentig expedition to Afghanistan, encountered in the postwar Baltic drift of agents and exiles.

The Disappearance and the New Wife

Then the marriage broke, and it broke through abandonment. Family tradition holds that Alice came to believe Foy had died in Russia — that she "thought he died there but he resurfaced in USA with new wife." He had not died; he returned to the United States and remarried. A subsequent Foy marriage is documented in the New York Times summary of Paris divorces of March 1930, in which a Mrs. Blanche Esdin was granted a divorce from John Arnold Foy — reported, as it happened, in the same dispatch as the divorce of Nina Yolande DuBois Cullen from the poet Countee Cullen. Whether Alice was already divorced from Foy by the time of the Esdin marriage, or whether that marriage was bigamous, cannot be settled from the documents in hand. The evasive instruction in the 1920 letter — say nothing of the Army records — is, in retrospect, the first faint sign of a man who would prove able to disappear.

Vienna and Richard Stöhr

After the marriage's collapse Alice went to Vienna to study music, and became a pupil of the composer and theorist Richard Stöhr (1874–1967), for decades a professor at the Akademie der Musik in Vienna whose students had included Herbert von Karajan, Rudolf Serkin, Erich Leinsdorf, and Samuel Barber. Stöhr's diaries and notes, preserved in the Richard Stöhr Collection at Saint Michael's College in Vermont, record that the two became close — a personal and romantic relationship, frankly set down in his own hand in December 1936. What matters for this history is what the closeness became: through 1937, after Alice had moved on to Cincinnati, she arranged the English translation of his biography, placed an article of his in an American music magazine, and sent help when his finances failed; he called her a true friend whose unselfish love was among the few bright spots of a dark year.

The Curtis Rescue, 1938–1939

In 1938, after the Anschluss, Stöhr — then sixty-four — was dismissed from the Vienna Akademie on the basis of his Jewish background; two years later he would appear on a Nazi blacklist of musicians. It was Alice who first suggested he seek a place at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and who put him in touch with its founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok. When Bok wrote that Curtis could not then afford to engage him, Stöhr sent her, on 30 November 1938, what he called a last SOS — begging for even a "sham-engagement" on paper that would let him obtain American entry. On 19 January 1939 Bok wired him a real one: a genuine contract as an assistant librarian which, in the historian Kristina Wilson's judgment, "very probably saved his life." Stöhr left Austria alone on 23 February 1939. He taught at Curtis — among his students there was Leonard Bernstein — and afterward at Saint Michael's College, and died in Vermont in 1967. In 1943 he composed his Symphony No. III in C major, Opus 93; the bound score in the Saint Michael's archive carries a printed dedication to Mrs. Alice Carter-Foy.

Return to Mount Tom

Alice came home — first to Cincinnati, then to the small second cottage at her father's camp, where she lived out her later decades, the cottage hung with the paraphernalia she had carried back from the First World War, the scrapbook from which her papers come still inside it. In her later years the family remembers a woman of marked independence and eccentricity: the open jar of honey she kept on the porch in summer, in which the yellowjackets drowned and so were controlled without violence; the flat rock she had found in deep water near the back of the lake, which she taught her younger relatives to locate by lining up landmarks on the shore; the canoe lessons on the old canvas canoe; the walks through the woods to the Indian caves; and a music career of her own, locally remembered, beyond her study with Stöhr. She died in 1973.

The dedicated symphony, the CARD medal signed by Anne Morgan, the dog tag bearing her maiden name, the glass from Verdun, the honey jar, the secret rock — together they are the surviving documentary and remembered traces of one of the more substantial American lives of the twentieth century that any private family is likely to hold in its own keeping.

Transition

Alice's cottage was the second of the two principal houses on the old Camp Wee-Hae compound. In 1969 the family acquired a third, and very different, house at the lake: a low cedar-clad cottage of 1954, built in the mid-century modern manner and attributed, by family tradition, to one of the most important American designers of the period. That house is the subject of Part V.

Part V. The 1954 Cottage at 19 Mount Tom

The third house in this history is unlike the other two. Where the camp is a rustic compound grown by accretion since 1903, and Alice's cottage a small frame outbuilding on that compound, the house the family acquired in 1969 is a deliberate piece of mid-century architecture: a long, low, cedar-clad cottage of 1954, built in the modernist idiom and attributed, by family tradition, to one of the most influential American designers of the period. It stands on its own wooded parcel at the back of the lake, and it represents — if the architectural reading the family has given it is right — the camp's original purpose, escape into the woods, carried into a new century's idea of how a retreat should look.

The House and Its Acquisition

The house was built in 1954 on a roughly 1.47-acre lot at the back of Mount Tom Pond, in Morris and Litchfield. Its deed history is recorded on the 1971 survey by Douglas G. Little: the land passed from Nelson T. Shields to Edward Newman Horn and Mary Henderson Horn across 1966 and 1967, with a small additional parcel taken in on the Litchfield side, and the consolidated property was conveyed by the Horns to Jean B. Carter on 17 July 1969. The town tax assessment fixes the actual year built as 1954 — a dozen years before Shields sold to the Horns. The 1971 survey shows two buildings on the lot, the principal residence labeled "NEW 1954" and a smaller second building labeled "NEW 1966," along with a spring house in the southern portion; the Steinways adjoin to the south and the Cavarlys to the north, the state park lies to the west beyond a drill hole in the ledge fitted with a pipe as a boundary monument, and the lake lies to the east. The property's bounds were also drawn out by hand by Norman D. Carter Sr. himself, on a sheet of repurposed brokerage paper, in a survey that records its monuments with affection — iron pins, the drill hole and pipe in the ledge, and, at one corner, a Ford axle driven into the ground to mark the line.

The Architecture

The cottage is a single-story house of vertical cedar siding — the assessor's shorthand of "clapboard" notwithstanding, the family's description and the photographs are clear that the cladding is vertical cedar, weathered to a deep brown. The roof is gabled, asphalt-shingled, with a brick chimney; the house carries the number 19; it runs long and low and horizontal under tall hardwoods on a rise above the lake, with a deep covered porch along the front, an open deck, and about 1,846 square feet of living space in seven rooms, four of them bedrooms. A stone fireplace was added in 1964. The heat is electric baseboard; there is no air conditioning — it remains, in its bones, a seasonal house. The interior carries the period clearly: a beamed cathedral ceiling, a wall of windows opening onto the lake, mid-century brass cone light fixtures, a floor of light hardwood, furnishings in the Early American manner, and a parlor pump organ.

The Knoll Attribution

Family research attributes the design of the house to Florence Knoll Bassett (1917–2019), partner in Knoll Associates and one of the most influential American interior architects and designers of the mid-twentieth century. The attribution should be stated for exactly what it is: it rests on family tradition together with a reference, in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, to the Florence Knoll Bassett papers, and no independent published documentation connecting her to this house has been located for this account. The caution is warranted on the merits, too — Knoll Bassett's portfolio is dominated by corporate interior architecture and furniture, and private residential commissions are uncommon in her work. The honest position is that the attribution is unconfirmed: a piece of family tradition worth recording and worth pursuing, which, if it were ever substantiated, would make the Mount Tom cottage a rare example of her residential design. This account does not assert it as established.

The Mid-Century Retreat

The cottage did not stand alone in the family's imagination. It had a near-twin — a redwood house the family calls Kingwood, built within a few years of it, the two read as a mirror pair, one in cedar and one in redwood — and it belonged, in the family's understanding, to a small constellation of mid-century "hideaway" houses expressing a single impulse: escape from the industrial and managerial work of the period into the woods. Read that way, the house completes a lineage that runs straight through this whole property. The rustic naturalist's retreat of the turn of the century — Burroughs's Slabsides, Robert E. Carter's Camp Wee-Hae — and the mid-century modernist retreat of the cedar cottage and its redwood twin serve the same psychological purpose, a half-century of architectural development apart. The 1954 house is the camp's original reason for being, restated in the idiom of a later age.

Transition

The cedar cottage and the old camp sit on adjacent parcels at the back of the lake, two houses of one family among a small ring of neighbors. How those parcels came to be bound together, and who the neighbors were — the Steinways and the others whose own American histories touched the lake — is the subject of Part VI, and of the family corporation formed to hold the back of the lake together.

Part VI. The Mount Tom Corporation and the Neighbors

Two facts about the back of the lake are worth a part of their own, because both point past the family to the American pattern it belonged to. The first is that the original camp has never been one household's property: it is held in common, through a family corporation, by several branches at once. The second is that the back of the lake was always a small society — a handful of camps and the families in them, some of whom carried names that ran out into the wider national history, and some of whom have vanished entirely. The legal frame and the social frame together are the subject here.

The Mount Tom Corporation

The original Camp Wee-Hae compound is not owned by a single Carter household but held jointly through the Mount Tom Corporation, an extended-family ownership entity whose members include the Carter, Copeland, and McConnell branches. The Corporation predates the family's 1969 acquisition of the cedar cottage at 19 Mount Tom State Park, and it is the institutional structure through which the camp Robert E. Carter built in 1903 has stayed in common family hands across the generations since. The McConnells and the Copelands are, in this arrangement, not neighbors but family — woven into the ownership of the back of the lake from the early camp period onward. A photograph captioned "Thanksgiving at Mt Tom 1952" records what that shared ownership looked like in practice: the Copeland and Carter branches at one long table in the main cabin, a turkey carcass in the foreground, an Austrian ski poster and a French travel poster on the wood-paneled wall, a cowhide between them — two branches of one family keeping Thanksgiving together, in the same room of the same camp, half a century into its life.

The Steinways

The Carters' southern neighbors, named on the 1971 survey, were Charles G. and Sarah S. Steinway, and family tradition holds that the Steinways at Mount Tom were of the Steinway piano-manufacturing family of New York. The connection is the family's tradition rather than something this account has independently established, but the neighborly fact is solid: Carter and Steinway were neighbors at the back of the lake for more than a century, in essentially the same arrangement the whole time — Steinways to the south, Carters to the north, the property line and a well-house between them. The well-house stood on Carter land, and the Steinways walked over from their own cabin to draw water from it: an informal sharing of the lake's subsurface across the line, of a kind that long, settled neighbor relationships produce. The well eventually went bad and the well-house fell out of use, but the century of shared water is itself a small record of how the back of the lake worked.

The Vanished Neighbors

Not every camp survived. The Tangway family kept a camp at Mount Tom that was demolished more than fifty years ago; its site is now only a flattened clearing in the rear of the Carter property. What remains of it is a single object — the old electrical service pole, the meter tag still attached, recovered from the cleared ground: a material trace of a neighbor who is otherwise gone from the lake entirely. Over the longer span the neighborhood has turned over more than once, the names on the survey giving way to later owners, in the ordinary churn of a place that began as a small summer colony and became, around it, a state park.

Other Carter Camps: Centerport and Candlewood

Mount Tom was never the family's only camp, and that, too, is part of the pattern. Samuel Thomson Carter had kept the family's earlier summer place at Centerport, on Long Island, before the family's center shifted to the Litchfield Hills; and his grandson's generation kept others, among them a place at Candlewood Lake in Connecticut belonging to Sterling Carter. The multiplication of family camps was not idiosyncrasy but type. The summer retreat in the woods, often shared among an extended family in adjoining or common use, was a routine practice of the Northern American Presbyterian elite in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the same impulse that put the Cochran branch of the family in the Adirondacks at St. Huberts and the Carters at the back of Mount Tom. The camp at Mount Tom is one node in a family web of such places, and that web is in turn one strand of a recognizable American cultural form.

Transition

The Corporation and the neighbors give the camp its frame — the legal structure that held it in common and the small society that grew up around it across a century. Part VII turns from the frame to the people inside it: the five generations of the family who have come to the lake, and what each made of it.

Part VII. Five Generations at the Lake

The deepest fact about Mount Tom is not any single thread that runs through it but the continuity that holds all of them — one family, at one lake, across five generations and a century and a quarter. It is that continuity that produced the archive this account draws on, and that makes the place, in the end, more than the sum of its documents. What follows is the arc of the generations. In keeping with the family's wish, individuals are named only through the generation of Norman D. Carter Sr.; the later generations, still living, are described together and without names.

The First Generation: the Builders

The first generation at the lake was the generation of Samuel Thomson Carter's children: Robert E. Carter, Princeton 1885, who built the camp in 1903, together with his Princeton-bred brothers and nephews who joined him there in summer, and the youngest of the thirteen, Reginald Loomis Carter. Theirs was a Presbyterian extended-family fishing camp in the full early-century manner — the children brought up from New York by train for two-week stays, the boathouse with its wooden rowboats and thick-lined fly reels, the diving board on the dock, the cast-iron stove in the outdoor kitchen, and the settled rhythm of a family that, once at the lake, did not much leave it. The earliest photograph of the cabin shows three of them on the porch of Camp Wee-Hae — by the family's reading, Robert II, his wife, and a third relative — on the stone-piered cabin among the second-growth woods.

The Second Generation: Alice and Rex

The second generation was that of Alice and Rex — Samuel's grandchildren, the children of Robert Carter the publisher's son. This was the generation of the camp's social high-water mark, when the dock filled each summer with the Princeton, Radcliffe, and Vassar friends of Robert E.'s children, and the generation of Alice's long return: after her transatlantic decades she settled into the small second cottage at her father's camp and lived out her life there, the most singular figure the lake ever held. The original rowboats carried this generation as they had carried the first.

The Third Generation: Norman D. Carter Sr. and Jean B. Carter

The third generation — Norman D. Carter Sr. and his wife Jean B. Carter, with their Carter, Copeland, and McConnell cousins — was the generation that consolidated the family's twentieth-century presence at the lake. Norman Sr.'s own childhood already reached beyond Mount Tom into the wider summer world of his class: a photograph captioned at the Pratts' Adirondack lake shows him as a boy in a canoe among the children of the Pratt family, the Standard Oil partners whose great camps were a fixture of the Adirondack elite. As an adult — Princeton 1945, settled in Poughkeepsie — he and Jean made the decisive acquisition of the family's modern era, buying the 1954 cedar cottage from the Horn family in July 1969 and so adding, beside the old camp, a second and fully modern Carter house on the lake. Much of the photographic record on which this account leans is theirs: the 1952 view from the tower, the shared Thanksgiving tables, the boating scenes. A 1957 photograph catches the generations overlapping exactly — Norman Sr. at the oars of one of Robert II's original rowboats, with three children of the next generation aboard, the same hulls carrying a third generation across the same water.

The Fourth Generation and Beyond

The fourth generation — the children of Norman Sr. and Jean — grew up at the camp in its mid-century prime, and theirs is the childhood most fully preserved in the family's own oral history: the sandbox and its glass marbles, the nap-blanket corners twisted into "fuzzies," the swimming and the jute-wrapped diving board, and the particular boredom-into-freedom of a place where, as the family remembers it, there was nothing to do — a teenager draining the station-wagon battery after dark trying to pull a distant New York station out of the air for the new Beatles records. That generation now holds the property jointly in trust. The fifth generation — their children — is the inheritor generation, to whom the family intends the lake to pass. The continuities are the substance of it: the same rowboats across the generations, the same padlocks reopened each spring, the same climb to the Stone Tower each summer, handed down with the place itself.

The Meaning of the Continuity

That a single family has kept a single lake across five generations is, in the end, the rarity this whole account exists to document. The camp has functioned less as a property than as an institution of memory — the reason the passport and the notebook and the dog tag and the dedicated symphony are all still in one place, in one family's keeping, available to be read. It is also a place the family has worked, across a century, to keep and to restore — two remarkable vernacular camps, sound and in use, with nowhere quite like them. The last part turns to that: to the place as it stands today, and to the case for keeping it whole.

Part VIII. The Present

A century and a quarter after Robert E. Carter built at the back of the lake, the place stands — kept, restored, and in continuous use by the family that built it. Three major storms struck it across that century, and through each the family met the damage and put the place back: the roofs are new, the plumbing has been restored, the buildings are sound. There is, by the family's account and on the evidence, nowhere quite like it. This part makes the case for the place on its own terms — as two outstanding examples of American vernacular architecture, and as the uncataloged documentary archive the preceding parts have traced.

The Storms

Three storms mark the property's century, and each was a documented event in its own right. The Great New England Hurricane of 21 September 1938 destroyed the stand of white pines that Robert E. Carter had planted in the camp's first decade. The Connecticut flood of August 1955 — the worst in the state's history, produced by the back-to-back hurricanes Connie and Diane — put the lake over its banks; a family photograph records the boathouse and its dock under risen water, a wooden life-ring on its post and the dock planking torn loose and floating, the birch trees in early-autumn leaf above the flood. And a tornado in the late 1980s struck the camp directly; Norman D. Carter Sr. was on the property and rode it out, and a photograph shows him standing before the damaged buildings under the emergency plastic tarp drawn over the broken roof. Even the weather that struck this place is part of the documented twentieth-century record — and so is the family's answer to it. Each time, across the Carter, Copeland, and McConnell branches, the family met the damage and repaired what was lost; in its own phrase, the family dug in its heels and saved the place.

Two Camps, Two Eras of Vernacular Architecture

The property's architectural significance is, in fact, unusual, because it holds two outstanding examples of American vernacular building — one from each end of the twentieth century. The 1903 camp is a rare, intact survival of the rustic vernacular: the Adirondack-camp tradition realized in local materials, raised on gathered-stone piers, grown organically in phases, kin to Burroughs's Slabsides, and kept very nearly as it was built. The 1954 cottage is an equally fine example of the mid-century woodland vernacular: the long, low, cedar-clad retreat with its beamed cathedral ceiling and its wall of windows to the lake, attributed by family tradition to Florence Knoll Bassett. Together, on one parcel at the back of one lake, the two camps document the whole arc of the American retreat across half a century — rustic to modern — both intact, both maintained, both in use. There is nowhere else where the two stand side by side in a single family's keeping.

The Case for the Place

It is here that the argument of this whole account comes to rest. Mount Tom is, on its face, a well-kept family summer place of two handsome vernacular buildings — and that alone would make it worth recognizing. But the preceding parts have tried to establish something more: that this one small, intact, lived-in property is also an uncataloged American archive. The threads set out at the beginning are not ornaments on a family story; they are its substance, and they survive here, concentrated in one place, as they survive almost nowhere else. The recruitment of James McCosh to Princeton; a minister's Grand Tour through the Civil War and his eyewitness notebook of the Gettysburg battlefield; an invocation before Theodore Roosevelt; the kinship with John Burroughs and an afternoon on the dock with F. Scott Fitzgerald; a niece's service from the graves of the Vosges through Anne Morgan's reconstruction of France to famine Russia and newly independent Estonia, and her quiet hand in saving a great Viennese musician from the Holocaust, commemorated in a dedicated symphony; a false-armistice telegram taken down by a young naval officer in 1918 — all of it ran through, and much of it still rests at, the back of one glacial pond in the Litchfield Hills. The family is the demonstration; America is the subject. The value of the record is precisely that it is private, concentrated, and intact — held whole, in one place, by the family that made it. The case is for recognizing it, and for cataloguing it, as what it is: one of a kind.

Coda

The family's relationship to Mount Tom spans, at this writing, more than a century — from the Reverend Robert E. Carter's building of Camp Wee-Hae at the back of the lake in 1903 down through five generations to the present — and the family's American story behind it reaches back another two generations further, to the Scottish bookseller who landed in New York in the early 1830s and helped bring a president to Princeton. Across that span the record assembled here touches the recruitment of James McCosh; a Civil-War-era Grand Tour and a Gettysburg notebook; an invocation before a sitting President; the Adirondack tuberculosis cure; the naturalist culture of John Burroughs and the Princeton literary world of F. Scott Fitzgerald; the American humanitarian effort of the First World War, the reconstruction of France, the Russian famine of 1921, and the Baltic settlement; one nationally noted communication, the False Armistice telegram of 1918; one rescue from the Holocaust, the 1939 Curtis Institute placement of Richard Stöhr; one dedicated symphony, of 1943; and one mid-century modern house of contested but intriguing attribution.

These threads are corroborated well beyond the family's own holdings — in the Princeton University Library, the Saint Michael's College Archives, the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, the National Archives, the Connecticut State Library, the historical files of the Hartford Courant and The New York Times, and the published work of historians including Bertrand Patenaude and Kristina Wilson. Together they place a single private family, embedded in a single small Connecticut lake, in unusually specific relation to the institutional and cultural history of the modern United States. The history assembled here remains provisional, and in several of its particulars — the year of a Grand Tour visa, the attribution of a house, the war of a scrap of prisoners' cloth — it still awaits substantiation. It is offered as a working record: an account of how much of the American century can be made to pass through one quiet place, and an argument that the place, and its papers, are worth keeping whole.

Bibliography and Sources

Carter family documents (in family possession)

• Robert Carter & Brothers publishing-house papers, fragmentary.
• McCosh-to-Carter correspondence, four letters, 1862–1868. Three originals at the Princeton University Library, donated by Henry J. Cochran in 1947; two in family transcript (Belfast, 7 May 1862; Queen's College, Belfast, 8 February 1868).
• Henry J. Cochran (1947), letter explaining Robert Carter's role in McCosh's recruitment to Princeton.
• Samuel Thomson Carter's American passport, U.S. Legation in London, No. 138, with visa stamps from Berlin and Vienna and from Athens, Naples, Rome, and Alexandria (1861–1862; the Central European date to be confirmed).
• Samuel Thomson Carter's Gettysburg battlefield notebook, dated 7 October 1863.
• Reginald Loomis Carter's False Armistice telegram and contemporaneous explanatory note, 4–5 November 1918.
• Norman D. Carter Sr. (Princeton 1945), tribute to Robert F. Goheen, Princeton Alumni Weekly.
• Edward S. Carter Jr. (Princeton 1944), Princeton alumni address, "A Privileged Group," 15 October 1943.
• Family dictations (the present trustee), 2020s.

Alice Pratt Carter Foy papers (in family possession)

• American Red Cross Ordre de Mission / Red Worker's Permit No. 20119, "Miss Alice Pratt Carter, Graves Registration Bureau," Paris–Neufchâteau (Vosges), valid to 29 July 1919.
• ARC AEF identification disc, "ALICE P. CARTER / ARC AEF / WASHINGTON CONN."
• Envelope, "Clothing issued to Prisoners taken by Germany," with stapled burlap swatch (war undetermined).
• Comité Américain pour les Régions Dévastées de la France, silver-medal certificate, signed by Anne Murray Dike and Anne Morgan.
• Verdun 1916 medal; Reims Cathedral pendant; "Glass from Verdun Cathedral" stained-glass shard; Red Cross enamel pin; USO pin (post-1941); decorative Art Nouveau chain; framed together at the cottage.
• 1918 U.S. passport application, with Emma Carter's sworn affidavit giving Alice's birth as 4 July 1891, Lebanon, Pennsylvania.
• 1922 U.S. passport application, sworn at the American consulate, Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, 16 December 1922.

John Arnold Foy documents (in family possession and published)

• John A. ("Jack") Foy to Alice, letter on Thomas-Bray Co. letterhead, New York, 20 July 1920.

Richard Stöhr documents (Saint Michael's College Archives, Colchester, Vermont)

• Richard Stöhr Collection, 1890–1974.
• Symphony No. III in C major, Opus 93 (composed 1943, copied 1944), dedicated to Mrs. Alice Carter-Foy.
• Stöhr diary entries, December 1936; biographical notes, 1937.
• Stöhr correspondence with Mary Louise Curtis Bok, 1938–1939, including the "last SOS" letter of 30 November 1938.

Property records

• Douglas G. Little, survey of property conveyed by Edward Newman Horn and Mary Henderson Horn to Jean B. Carter, Morris and Litchfield, Connecticut, revised through 24 February 1971.
• 19 Mount Tom State Park, town tax assessment, 2 December 2004 (actual year built 1954).
• Norman D. Carter Sr., hand-rendered Mount Tom property survey (undated).

Published sources

• The New York Times: "Princeton Theological Seminary" (26 April 1873); Litchfield summer-colony notice (12 June 1910); Paris divorce notice (ca. March 1930, Blanche Esdin from John Arnold Foy; Yolande DuBois Cullen from Countee Cullen).
• The Hartford Courant: "Never Found Trout Bed a Second Time" (18 April 1915); "Foy's Auto Nose Dives Into Volga" (4 June 1922); "Connecticut Woman Writes of Russia and Esthonia" (1 October 1922).
• Bertrand M. Patenaude, The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921 (Stanford University Press, 2002), ch. 15, "Flight of the Flivver."
• Kristina Wilson, "Richard Stoehr in Philadelphia."
• James Smith and Geoff Carter, "The 4 November 1918 False Armistice Message" (2023).
• Smithsonian Institution, Archives of American Art, Florence Knoll Bassett papers.
• New Milford and Litchfield Turnpike charter, Connecticut General Assembly, October 1797.

Photographs (family collection at Mount Tom)

• The original cabin, "Camp Wee-Hae," c. 1903, three figures on the porch.
• The Plainfield Carter family assembly, three generations on a columned porch, c. 1910s.
• Samuel Thomson Carter with family at Centerport, Long Island, c. 1900s; and lakeside with Norman and Emma.
• The Roosevelt invocation composite (Huntington, 4 July 1903) and the New York Times clipping.
• Reginald Loomis Carter in naval uniform at a communications desk, c. 1918.
• The dock at Mount Tom, "Early Days at Carter Camp," with the F. Scott Fitzgerald inset.
• John Burroughs with Carter women, including Rebecca Carter.
• The Foy flivver "Henry," Tsaritsyn district, c. 1921–22, Foy at the wheel.
• Alice's framed effects, passport portraits, and the prisoner-of-war envelope.
• The bath in a galvanized washtub; the children's sandbox; a child of the family on the deck, Thanksgiving 1950.
• Robert E. Carter's early rowboat and sailboat on the lake.
• The view from the Stone Tower, June 1952; two boys of the family on the outcropping below the tower, c. early 1960s.
• "Thanksgiving at Mt Tom 1952" (Copeland and Carter branches at table).
• Norman D. Carter Sr. as a boy at the Pratts' Adirondack camp; and at the oars with three children of the next generation, 1957.
• The flood of 1955; the camp under tarp after the late-1980s tornado.
• The 1954 cedar cottage, exterior and interior; the 2021 roof detail; Norman D. Carter Sr.'s hand-rendered survey.
• Mount Tom Pond at golden hour, present day.

Materials pending substantiation

• The attribution of the 1954 cottage to Florence Knoll Bassett (Smithsonian holdings to be reviewed; independent documentation to be sought).
• The reading of the Central European visa date on Samuel Thomson Carter's Grand Tour passport (1861 or 1864).
• The wording of Reginald Loomis Carter's own statement on the telegram (the scan to be re-supplied in a readable format; its "World War Two" filename to be reconciled with the documented 1918 event).
• The war of origin of the prisoner-of-war clothing swatch (First or Second World War).
• The etymology of "Wee-Hae" (Scots versus Algonquian conjectures).
• The divorce status between Alice and John Foy, and the chronology of Foy's later marriages.