Robert Frost, a four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, celebrated the fields and forests of New England in his work. After spending most of his young adult life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, he moved to Vermont in 1920 to seek a better place to farm and especially grow apples, then spent four decades living there seasonally and became the state's official poet laureate. He wrote much of his work from a log cabin in Ripton, one-half mile from this site, and the surrounding Vermont landscape of small rural populations, a robust agricultural base, and scenic vistas evokes lines from his poetry. In 1983, Governor Richard Snelling designated the surrounding landscape as Robert Frost Country, including the Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, Robert Frost Wayside picnic area, Robert Frost Memorial Drive, the farm where Frost lived, and the Bread Loaf School of English that Frost cofounded. The area's deeper history includes Vermont's settlement and independence in the 1700s, Ripton's chartering in 1781 and later organization and growth in the 1800s, the creation of Middlebury College and the Center Turnpike, the rise of forest industries and later conservation laws, the development of the U.S. Forest Service and Green Mountain National Forest, Frost's connection to Bread Loaf beginning in 1920, the creation of the interpretive trail in 1976, and continued efforts through 2020 to preserve access to the landscape, poetry, and the South Branch Middlebury River.

Photo: Conrad Ward

East Middlebury, Vermont · USA