Robert Frost Farm Derry
— — the farm that taught him how to listen.
Not only on a wall.
“A two-story white farmhouse on Rockingham Road, with a dry-laid granite wall running through the woods out back. Robert Frost farmed thirty acres here from 1900 to 1911, kept chickens, and taught at Pinkerton Academy in town. He drafted much of A Boy's Will and most of North of Boston on the property, before he had a publisher. The barn still stands. The Hyla Brook still dries to a bed of stones by midsummer. from the studio
Robert Frost Farm Derry, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Robert Frost Farm sits on Rockingham Road in Derry, about ten miles south of Manchester. Frost bought the thirty-acre property in 1900 with money from his grandfather's estate and farmed it for eleven years, keeping a few cows and a small orchard while teaching English at Pinkerton Academy in town. The two-story clapboard house, the connected barn, and the stone walls running through the back woodlot are preserved by New Hampshire State Parks as a National Historic Landmark. The Hyla Brook, named in the poem of the same name, still runs through the same back acreage.
The walls running through the woodlot behind the house are the literal ground of Mending Wall. Frost and his French-Canadian neighbour Napoleon Guay walked the line each spring, replacing the granite boulders that frost-heave had spilled into the pasture. The walls are dry-laid New Hampshire granite, two stones wide at the base, and predate Frost's tenure by a century. Sections still stand along the half-mile poetry-nature trail, marked at the points where the poems locate them. The trail loops past the orchard remnants and through second-growth pine and hemlock on the back ten acres.
New Hampshire State Parks operates the site from May through October, with guided house tours offered Thursday through Sunday. The grounds, the barn, and the half-mile poetry-nature trail are open free of charge; the house tour carries a small admission fee. The trail markers carry the poems written on this ground, set at the landscape features they describe. The barn hosts the Hyla Brook Poets reading series on summer evenings. The address is 122 Rockingham Road; parking is on site, with room for about thirty cars.