Explore the homes of author Gene Stratton Porter
By Glenda Winders // Photography by Phil Allen and Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites
Today, it’s common knowledge that a connection with nature is essential to children’s growth and development, as well as adult mental health and well-being. But long before this information became mainstream, one Indiana woman knew it to be true and authored books about the subject matter. And now, the earlier home where her career began and the home she designed on the lakeshore are available to visit in Rome City, Indiana, just 80 miles south of Geneva. Both are operated as part of the Indiana State Museum and historic sites.
Gene Stratton Porter, called by Smithsonian magazine “the J.K. Rowling of her time,” wrote post-Civil War novels — the most famous being “Freckles” and “Girl of the Limberlost,” children’s books, poetry, essays and nature studies, but her career started with photographs she took of natural phenomena.
She was born in 1863 in Lagro, the last of 12 children, and named Geneva, which she later shortened. For the first years of her life the family lived on a farm, where she loved exploring and was seldom indoors. When her mother died from typhoid fever, the children were divided among family members who lived in town. Porter felt stifled by having to go to school and be indoors, a situation alleviated only by her older sister’s willingness to teach her how to play the violin, piano and flute.
As a young adult, she met Charles Porter at a Chautauqua gathering, and they were married just over a year later. Since he had businesses in Geneva, they moved there and built a home known as the Limberlost Cabin. The name for the area allegedly came from a man nicknamed Limber Jim (McDowell), who became separated from his hunting party, causing them to call out: “Limber lost!” The attraction for Porter was the swampland that surrounded it, so she could once again tramp and explore.
She designed the log-clad house herself after the Forestry Building at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and later, copied many of her favorite parts in its northern counterpart, Wildflower Woods. Both houses have rustic exteriors with elegant finishes. Both also have wide, wraparound front porches, high, wood wainscoting, conservatories, libraries, cabinets and shelves for displaying the bits of nature she collected. To the delight of visitors, most of the furniture, artwork and belongings are original, especially in the latter house.
Porter designed many devices in both homes to meet her needs. The conservatory had a concrete floor with a channel for drainage, for example, and she rigged up a desk lamp by attaching a cord to the gas lamp in the ceiling, so she could work late into the night. A piece of twine tied from one piece of furniture to another accommodated the chrysalises she found, so that she could watch them transform into butterflies inside. A glass box still holds the moths she collected to study in Geneva, and she built the stone fence around that house herself, creating openings so that wild animals could easily get into the yard.
To get the close-up pictures she wanted, she positioned dummy cameras in trees so that the animals would get used to them. When representatives from the Kodak company came to ask how she got such extraordinary photos, she declined to take them into the bathroom where she had created a makeshift darkroom, but she did begin writing how-to guides about her processes.
In 1912, however, she made the decision to leave. Despite her resistance, a timber company came to drain the swamp and cut down the trees around her house. Then, oil was discovered there, and some of the land was soon committed to farming. Everything that had drawn Porter to the site was gone.
She and Charles continued a loving marriage until her death. He stayed in Geneva, and she went north to seek solitude. He visited her often by train, rowing for two and a half hours from the station to reach her house.
“She wanted to get her prairie and wetlands back,” said site interpreter Stacey Poague, who is also a naturalist and forester. “Today you can see, hear and smell the land she walked around.”
This house sits on 13 of the original 120 acres Porter bought in the heart of a forest next to 700-acre Sylvan Lake. The state has now purchased adjacent land, so the total acreage of the site is 148. Porter mapped out a system of trails and lined them with rocks she found on the property, and today, visitors can wander through the woods and enjoy the view from the front porch just as she did.
Porter designed this house with practicality in mind and with the intention of welcoming the wildlife around her. Dutch doors invite birds to fly inside, and the butcher-block table in the kitchen is covered with metal, so that droppings are more easily cleaned up. She had the hardwood floors laid at an angle so they wouldn’t squeak and built a tiny room to insulate her icebox.
Because she lived alone and needed time to work, she factored in room for a staff, with whom she lived with as a family. She built a wall of cupboards in the kitchen, so the cook didn’t have to go down to the basement very often and built bins to held substantial amounts of flour. Porter’s canes and umbrellas remain in a receptacle by the door, and the typewriter where her secretary typed her stories and the binoculars she used to look out over the lake sit on tables in other rooms.
Porter’s English-style dining room was a homage to her father with its rugs, delicate furniture and fine china. For the fireplace, she had bricks shipped from England, and in another room, she built the fireplace herself, using puddingstones from the forest. For a third fireplace, one she called her “friendship fireplace,” she asked friends and relatives to send stones from wherever they lived.
When fame caused Porter’s privacy to evaporate, she left the house and moved to Los Angeles and became a filmmaker. At the age of 61, she was killed when her limousine collided with a streetcar. Porter was initially buried in Hollywood; however, when her two grandsons remembered her love of the forest, they returned her remains to this property. Her burial place is one of the spots visitors can see as they walk the paths she loved to walk.