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The deep-red board-and-batten Bryant Homestead barn on a sunny summer afternoon. A long agricultural building with a steep gabled shingle roof and a small white-and-red bell-shaped cupola with a weather vane at its peak, large board doors and small multi-pane windows along the side, a single mature deciduous tree in full green leaf at the left framing the scene, low grass and a gravel drive along the front, and a high blue sky with wispy cirrus clouds overhead.
Things to See · Historic Site
The barn at the William Cullen Bryant Homestead, Cummington, July 2013. Photo by Robert W. Salthouse, source, CC BY-SA 3.0.

William Cullen Bryant Homestead

Cummington, Hampshire County

Category
Historic Site
Town
Cummington
County
Hampshire
Admission
Grounds free year-round · house tours $10 non-members, $5 Trustees members on select summer dates

The William Cullen Bryant Homestead is the 1783 farmhouse in Cummington where the poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was raised. The house was built by Bryant’s maternal grandfather Ebenezer Snell; Bryant’s father bought it in 1799, and the future poet lived here from about age four until he left for a legal career at 22. He drafted “Thanatopsis” as a teenager in these hills.

Bryant left Cummington for New York, where he became the long-time editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the most prominent American poets of the 19th century. In 1865 he bought the family farm back from relatives, renovated it as a summer retreat, and returned every summer for the rest of his life. The homestead stayed in the Bryant family until 1929, when his granddaughter donated it to The Trustees of Reservations, which still operates it. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962.

What to see

  • The house. A yellow-clapboard farmhouse with a long covered front porch and a Victorian-era addition Bryant commissioned during his 1865 renovation, with the family’s furnishings, library, and artifacts substantially intact.
  • The barn. A deep-red board-and-batten outbuilding with a small cupola, a working part of the original hill farm.
  • The grounds. About 195 acres of fields, woods, and old stone walls along the ridge above the Westfield River’s West Branch.
  • The Rivulet Trail. A short loop through old-growth pine and hemlock down to the small stream Bryant wrote about in his poem “The Rivulet.”

Visiting

The grounds and trails are open daily, sunrise to sunset, free for all, year-round. House tours run only on a handful of dates each summer (typically one Saturday a month from late June through September) with guided “Literary Legacy” tours at 11am, 12:30pm, and 2pm and self-guided first-floor visits in between; the Trustees site posts the current dates and is the canonical source for hours and admission. Tickets are $10 for non-members and $5 for Trustees members. The parking lot may not be plowed in the first day or two after a snowstorm in winter.

The homestead is at 207 Bryant Road in Cummington, off Route 112 south of the village center.

Sources