White House on Haviland Hollow Road, Lake Mauwehoo, Stone House at Timber Lake
When I arrived at Vassar in 1964, I was delighted to find that one of my new classmates was Karen Thorsen, whom I had known in Sherman as Heidi. She still lives in Connecticut and made the journey to revisit her old haunts with me. After another great breakfast at The American Pie Company, we began with a visit to Lake Mauwehoo, which both of us remember as the heart of our summers. The polo fields we remembered at the top of Mauweehoo Hill are gone to houses. Then on to Timber Lake, and then Haviland Hollow Road, to see the houses she'd lived in.
As I drove, we talked about our summer experiences. To my surprise, I learned that the still glamorous Karen, a documentary film-maker, felt an outsider in the Timber Trails Club. That, I suppose, was the intention of a place which advertised itself as "Timber Trails-A Restricted Community," and whose pages of deed restrictions I had seen in the Sherman Town Records. I , too, felt an outsider.
Restricted from what? Timber Trails now seems rather like the palace in Poe's The Masque of the Red Death. Death can't be restricted, and what it doesn't take away, divorce and lawyers will. In any case, Timber Trails is now a piece of suburbia, placed remotely, on a hill above a eutrophic pond, with bad roads.
1 comment:
My sister sent me the link to your blog, it has been a great trip down memory lane. We grew up in Timber Trails summers, 1950-1962. We owned the first stone house to the right across the dam on Timber Lake. We sold it to start a family business. TT was a wonderful place to spend summers for kids from LI, NY. In those days there were constant activities, we could walk alone to the club house, there was a softball league, square dancing, nightly movies, horseback riding, a tennis league, rowboating, canoeing, sailing, swimming, and instruction for all of it. There were only 3 houses on Timber Lake then, all stone cottages. The one up the hill to our right (not picture in blog) was owned by the Match King at the turn of the century. He was wisked away from it during a hurricane by 4 local farmers in his Model T on 2 rails to the main road to escape revenuers. I was told this story by our neighbors, in 1951, and given his sailboat mast to cut down for my first rowboat-sail boat conversion, to sail on Timber Lake. I have been back many times to witness the decay of TT, it began after Colin Farley's death. Ask Ward Moss if he remembers bird hunting in the woods, and a shot in the toe?
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