Salt Meadow was a summer estate centered on grounds maintained much as they were circa 1940, where Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read, two professional women from New York City, spent time with their close friend Eleanor Roosevelt enjoying horseback riding, badminton, gardening, and other outdoor pastimes. The estate included the Enoch Murdock House, a circa 1750 post and beam farmhouse built by the Murdock family, early settlers of Westbrook, later given a stone exterior to match the fieldstone manor that Lape and Read built in 1929 while retaining its colonial interior. Their large summer residence, built in 1929 and used until 1972, was designed in the style of an Alpine lodge, a type of home called a cascina in the mountains of Italy and Italian-speaking Switzerland. After the destructive hurricane of 1938, Elizabeth Read used downed trees to create rustic log structures for guests, of which one small cabin survives. The estate also featured stone structures overlooking the salt marsh where refreshments were served, stone walls used in the New England tradition to mark property lines and contain livestock, and a private railroad stop where train engineers let Eleanor Roosevelt off near the trail. In 1972, Lape turned the property over to the federal government to create Connecticut's first national wildlife refuge. The refuge includes a large salt marsh formed by fresh water from Gatchen Creek and the Menunketesuck River mixing with salt water from Long Island Sound, along with maritime forest and scrub-shrub habitat that support many bird, animal, and plant species.