The History of Boyer Estate

The Emerson farm

For most of the 1800s this was the Emerson farm. Generations of Emersons lived, farmed, and owned land on this hill; the place is marked with their name on the 1873 Beers atlas of Berlin, and their graves are in the West Berlin cemetery. Our deed goes back to around 1780 — that is likely the land rather than a confirmed build date — which puts the house among the older ones here.

Berlin was chartered in 1763; the New Hampshire governor's grant asked settlers for a token rent of “one ear of Indian corn” an acre. The first families arrived in the 1780s and worked the land the way central Vermont was worked then — hay and English grasses, corn in the better fields, and cattle. That is what this began as: a working farm.

Lotus Lodge

By the early 1900s the farm had a second life. It became a summer bed-and-breakfast called Lotus Lodge — one of a handful of lodges along this road that drew literary, musical, and intellectual guests up from the cities, part of a wider turn-of-the-century interest in summering in Vermont.

The Adams house, and the Earhart connection

Around 1939, the old Emerson house was bought by Porter Adams and his wife, Sue. Adams was an aviation pioneer: one of the first students of aeronautical engineering at MIT, a founding member and later president of the National Aeronautic Association in Washington, and, from 1934, president of Norwich University over in Northfield.

His close friend was Amelia Earhart. She was matron of honor at the Adamses’ wedding in 1931, and in 1935, at his invitation, she flew into the Berlin airfield and spoke to the Norwich cadets and the Vermont Legislature.

That friendship is why people sometimes call the road “Earhart Hill.” We want to be straight about it: there is no record that Amelia Earhart ever visited this house — the Adamses bought it only after she disappeared in 1937 — and the road is properly Erhardt Hill, named for a different family up the slope. We called our cottage Earhart as a nod to that thread in the house’s history, not a claim that she stayed here.

The Boyers, and the forest

After Porter Adams died, Sue married his assistant, Donald Boyer, and stayed on in the same house — which is how it came to be known as the Boyer house. The Boyers turned the surrounding land into an estate and kept a herd of registered Black Angus, about a hundred head at its largest. Sue Boyer was a pianist and a benefactress of the Vermont Philharmonic.

As a widow, she left much of the land to the State of Vermont, and Boyer State Forest was established in 1986. Her name is set into the stonework at the house. The trails that start within walking distance of the estate are, for the most part, the Boyers’ old pasture grown back to woods.

Bartók on the hill

Just up the road stood a grand summer cottage that no longer exists. It was built around 1905 by the Erhardt family — the ones the hill is actually named for — and later owned by a Hungarian pianist, Agatha Illes, who ran it as a retreat called Mountain View and filled it with musicians.

In the summer of 1941, one of her guests was Béla Bartók. He and his wife had just fled Europe, and he spent a month at the cottage, deep in the Romanian folk-music collection he had been assembling for years. He wrote no new music that summer — his major American works, the Concerto for Orchestra among them, came later, mostly during his summers at Saranac Lake — but he walked the wood roads here in a straw hat, and people in Riverton remembered him for decades.

The cottage is gone. The Boyers bought it in 1960, used it to store hay, and eventually had the fire department burn it down. Its site is now inside Boyer State Forest; with some looking, you can find the old foundation in the trees.

The house today

We live in the old Emerson house now. Earhart Cottage and Meadow Suite are on the same land, and Boyer State Forest begins at the treeline — the hill the Emersons farmed, the Adamses summered on, and the Boyers left to the state.