ADDRESS: 100 Iroquois Road (formerly 501 Highland Road)

NAME: Hilltop

DATE COMPLETED: 1916

STYLE: Craftsman

ARCHITECT: Clarence A. Martin

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” British writer Virginia Woolf asserted in a 1928 lecture. Ithaca author and storyteller Ruth Sawyer (1880-1970) fortunately had both. Her Cayuga Heights home at 501 Highland Road (now 100 Iroquois Road) proved a nurturing space for Sawyer’s literary imagination.

A year before Harper & Brothers published Sawyer’s first novel, The Primrose Ring (1915), Sawyer and her physician husband, Albert C. Durand (1879-1967), purchased a Highland Road lot from Westinghouse heiress Catherine Westinghouse Fletcher (1883-1946). Architect Clarence A. Martin (1862-1944), who was at the time dean of Cornell’s College of Architecture, designed the home the Durands came to call “Hilltop.”

The Craftsman-style house was completed in 1916, the same year that daughter Margaret “Peggy” Durand (1916-1990) was born, joining her older brother David Durand (1912-1996). A year later, in 1917, Paramount Pictures released a silent film based on Sawyer’s Primrose Ring.

Sawyer was a prolific and popular author, known for her magazine articles and children’s books. Many of Sawyer’s works focused on Christmas themes and were based on folk tales that Sawyer had collected from Cuba, Ireland, Spain, and Mexico. Noted librarian Anne Carroll Moore (1871-1961), who largely shaped the emergence of 20th-century American children’s literature, early on supported Sawyer’s career as a storyteller, hiring her for the first storytelling program at the New York Public Library in 1910. Sawyer’s novel Roller Skates (1936) won the Newbery Medal in 1937. In 1965, the author’s lifetime contributions to children’s literature were recognized with the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (now named the Children’s Literature Legacy Award).

Sawyer collaborated with her son-in-law, illustrator Robert McCloskey, on Journey Cake, Ho! (1953), for which McCloskey won a Caldecott Honor in 1954. Ruth and Albert’s daughter Margaret had married Robert at Hilltop in 1940. The next year Robert McCloskey penned and illustrated the Caldecott Medal-winning Make Way for Ducklings. The McCloskey’s elder daughter Sally was born while they were living at Hilltop, in 1945. Sally was the inspiration for McCloskey’s Blueberries for Sal (1948), also a Caldecott Honor-winner.

Sawyer, who owned Hilltop until 1945, provided glimpses of her life in her Cayuga Heights home through both her fiction and in an article about her work.

“O, but it is an ideal place for a writer who needs blue spaces and the winds of heaven in which to send her thoughts a’glimmering,” journalist Grace Farrington Gray wrote of Hilltop in a 1935 Farmer’s Wife magazine article. “It stands on the crest of a hill,” Gray continued, noting that “from the wide picture window in the living room, you look down a sloping lawn, across the tree tops of a deep ravine, to the blue lake.” Sawyer confided that she had first imagined some of the characters that peopled her stories “trooping up the slope” toward Hilltop.

The author, the Farmer’s Wife article noted, was “a charming hostess to townspeople, and to the faculty and students of Cornell University, especially the Girl Scouts.”

The opening scene of Folkhouse: The Autobiography of a Home (1932), a novel first serialized in The Farmer’s Wife magazine in 1931, speaks to the idea of a home as a place of inspiration and also as a source of enduring legacy. In the story, a writer much like Sawyer tends to the fall gardening tasks of “bedding down” flowers and digging up bulbs. Attuned to the sounds of the rain-swollen brook (perhaps inspired by Pleasant Grove Brook, which flows toward Cayuga Lake near Hilltop) and the wind through the poplars and cornstalks, the narrator notices the slate roof of her absent friends’ home, “Folkhouse,” and crosses the gorge to visit it.

“Homes are more than the houses that shelter them—more than the brick and mortar, stone and shingles that button them in,” the spirit of the house tells the writer. “There’s immortality to an honest house,” the Folkhouse spirit explains.

And, indeed, the tales that Sawyer wove at the “honest house” at Hilltop can hope to endure as they delight new generations of readers who rediscover Sawyer’s work, just as Hilltop has housed several generations of subsequent residents.