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Updated: September 5, 2025
We will have an old-fashioned time; I will roast a duck in the pot; it will be great fun." This invitation came from Mr. Burroughs in 1911 to friends who proposed to call on him early in December. Riverby was closed for the season, its occupants tarrying in Poughkeepsie, but, ever ready for an adventure, the Sage of Slabsides proposed a winter picnic at his cabin in the hills.
There evidently had been a family jar, something that came far too frequently, and Father was alone here at Riverby. West Park, July 24, . Your letter is rec'd. Glad you are going to try the hay field. Don't try to mow away. But in the open air I think you can stand it. It is getting very dry here. I think you had a fine shower Saturday night about eight o'clock.
I can remember taking lessons in taxidermy from Father, and of skinning and mounting wildfowl, and today there are a loon and a prairie chicken here in the house at Riverby that he mounted in those early years. The collections of birds he made are scattered far and wide or were destroyed long ago.
Riverby, Feb. 3 Your letter came this morning. Winter is rugged here too. Snow about 20 inches and zero weather at night. I almost froze the top of my head up there in the old house. The ice men are scraping off the snow, ice 8 or 9 inches. Your mother is in Poughkeepsie, I was down there Monday night.
I shall be very glad when the Easter vacation brings you home once more, you are seldom out of my thoughts. I made two gallons of maple syrup. Walt Dumont has an auction this P. M. Nip and I are going. Your loving father, Nip was a fox terrier that was for years Father's constant companion, and they had many adventures together. Riverby, Mch. 8
When I went away to college in the fall of 1897 I was able to see our home life there at Riverby from a new angle, as one must often do, get a short distance away to get a clear perspective of a place. And it being my first time away from home Father wrote more frequently, and he dropped the formality of his earlier letters. Your letter was here Monday morning.
When they returned to Riverby, in the still, lonely house, they missed me, and Father wrote of it all: Slabsides, Oct. 16, 1897. ... We reached home safely Thursday night after a dusty ride and tiresome. It is very lonesome in the house. I think we both miss you now more than we did before we left home; it is now a certainty that you are fixed there in Harvard and that a wide gulf separates us.
First he had the place here, Riverby, to which he added another nine acres later, clearing and ditching it all and getting it all out in the best grapes, the ones that made the most work and trouble: Delawares, Niagaras, Wordens, and Moore's Early. There were other kinds tried, the once famous Gaertner, Moore's Diamond, the Green Mountain or Winchell, and so on.
Here the sun does not rise so early as it does down at Riverby. 'Tired nature's sweet restorer' is not put to rout so soon by the screaming whistles, the thundering trains, and the necessary rules and regulations of well-ordered domestic machinery.
He called it Woodchuck Lodge, and the last years of his life were spent largely there, going out in June and returning in October. At the time the following letter was written, Father spent much of his time at Slabsides and his interest in both the celery and lettuce grown there, as well as the grapes at Riverby, was most keen.
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