The places that capture our imagination

Caroline Ferriday's house and the State Road farm

The places we come from shape who we become.

As a novelist, I can’t begin a book until I know the setting, extra points if there’s a charming old house on the premises. There’s something about the way any kind of residence soaks up the lives of the former occupants that makes a story come alive. I still remember the day I visited the Bellamy-Ferriday house in Bethlehem, Connecticut, to see the famous lilacs there.

Now a museum, it’s the former home of socialite, Broadway actress and philanthropist Caroline Ferriday.

On a house tour, I asked the guide about a photograph propped up on her desk, of a group of women posing for a picture.

“Those are the Rabbits,” the guide said. “Polish women experimented on during WWII by Nazi doctors at Ravensbruck, Hitler’s only all-female concentration camp. After the war Caroline brought them to the U.S. for rehabilitation and the trip of a lifetime.”

Her answer would change my life, as it sparked the beginning of my research into what would become my novel Lilac Girls. Knowing every inch of Caroline Ferriday’s house was essential to telling her story, since she and her mother spent their summers up from New York City at the lovely old Federal style house, working tirelessly in their garden, planting the specimen lilacs and antique roses they collected from points around the globe. I ended up spending years researching Caroline’s story, pouring through her diaries and old photos, which are stored in the archives located in what was once the old stone root cellar under the old barn (now used as the museum welcome center). Not only was the Connecticut house her most personal space, furnished with treasured family heirlooms, but she hosted five of the Polish Rabbits there, who became like daughters to Caroline.

I came to know the house so well it became a character in Lilac Girls. Caroline’s library, which looks out over her garden, the picture window flanked by the drapes her mother embroidered. Her bedroom, with the canopy bed, her dolls arranged at the head of it, and her Russian language textbooks stacked on her desk. The linoleum-tiled kitchen where she often hosted casual dinners with her Polish friends—and where we hold book signings today. I can feel her presence in the house most days and believe she wanted me to come there and write her story, somehow knowing it would be good for the house. And it really has been. Each year at lilac time, the house is flooded with Caroline fans coming from all parts of the country and the globe to pay homage to Ms. Ferriday.

Today I want to introduce you to another wonderful old house that inspired me to tell its story.

This is the farmhouse where my mother Joanne Finnegan Hall grew up. It still stands in the town of West Tisbury on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts. It's the center point of my new novel, The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club. I’ve long had a strong personal connection to this storied island and a desire to bring its history to life.

My great grandparents William and Emma Smith moved to the Vineyard and this house in 1891, from New Bedford, where they met working at the textile mills, and they started a flower farm here—it was, according to the Vineyard Gazette, a local landmark in their day.

My Scottish great grandfather, a famous curmudgeon, ate his meals alone on the porch and had Emma pass his plate through a window. It’s hard to imagine putting up with that spousal behavior but if I were her, I’d be just fine with him eating separately from me on the porch. According to family folklore, William’s dyspeptic attitude extended to his neighbor, Farmer Greene, and led to a heated argument over property boundaries. This allegedly led William to chop off Farmer Greene’s little finger with a garden hoe when he refused to remove his hand from the fence between their properties. Though it sounds far-fetched, given William’s ill-humored personality, I give it a more than fifty-fifty chance of being true, though I wish I’d asked my mother what she thought. And what happened to the finger? How many stitches? Forever a mystery I suppose.

Their daughter, also named Emma, Emma Louise, loved tending the flowers, but went to school off-island, became a teacher and married Christopher Finnegan, a grocer from Keene, New Hampshire. They had four children, including my mother Joanne and moved home to take care of her ailing mother during the Depression.

My mother’s mother, Emma Louise, in the garden behind the State Road house

My mother talked a lot about growing up in this house—the round dining room table that her grandfather made, and how Emma Louise would serve Potato Bargain for dinner, just potatoes and onions simmered in water, and would set the table with her red linen tablecloth so the family wouldn’t notice how simple the meal was. And how the town dump was just down Stagecoach Road, around the corner. My mother loved the dump and found her prized tricycle there and rode it everywhere in West Tisbury—hard to imagine today with the cars clocking forty miles per hour on that road. She also loved the dairy cows they raised on the farm, “with their big brown eyes and tails that swished as they walked,” and her job was to bring them home from the grazing fields each evening. To make ends meet after her husband died, Emma Louise sold her warm cider doughnuts in front of the house to passersby—something my Aunt Mary, a teen at the time, never got over the embarrassment of—but my mother loved since it brought people to that sleepy part of the island.

Aunt Mary Finnegan Johnston and my mother, sitting.

Once my mother was ready for high school, she and Emma Louise moved to the nearby harbor town of Vineyard Haven (the big city LOL) and my parents eventually sold the house.

My mother leaving the island on the ferry.

As the new owners were renovating, they found my mother’s red pleather autograph book behind a wall, encased it in a hazy Ziploc bag, and returned it to her. For some reason she gave it to me, maybe knowing how much I prized my own grade school autograph books, and I turned the brittle pages carefully, recognizing some of the Vineyard friends my mother kept for the rest of her life, and some old Island family names. That was the first inkling of wanting to write about the Vineyard—imagining her schoolmates and wondering what the young authors of the autographs were like.

Though I never lived there, the State Road farm still feels like it’s ours. My husband took a picture of me with the house in the background as we stood in the adjacent market’s parking lot in one-hundred-degree heat. It was hard not to think of Farmer Greene and his finger and hope that was just one of those stories that got increasingly exaggerated over the years.

As we drove out of the parking lot, I asked my husband to drive slowly by the house, and I tried to get a glimpse of the dining room, where my mother once sat after driving the cows home at twilight, and ate Potato Bargain at the dining room table with the red linen tablecloth.

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📣 Today marks my debut as an author on Substack! 📣 I would love to hear from you in the comments section of this post. Is there a place from your own family history that you think of often? A place that has become part of your family’s lore? A place you wish you could return to? Share your own special setting in the comments and I will choose one lucky reader to receive a very special Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club tote bag from LL Bean!

The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club comes out on May 27th and is available for pre-order now. You can also add it to your “want to read” shelf on Goodreads.

Stay tuned for updates about my summer book tour! ☀️🌊