Millay the PoetProlific Writer & Pulitzer Prize Winner

Edna St. Vincent Millay, born in Rockland, Maine on February 22, 1892 and brought up in nearby Camden, was the eldest of three daughters raised by a single mother, Cora Buzzell Millay, who supported the family by working as a private duty nurse. Having divorced her husband in 1900, when Millay was eight, Norma six, and Kathleen three, Cora struggled to make ends meet but provided the girls with a steady diet of poetry, literature, and music, encouraging them, by example, to write poems, stories, and songs.
Learn More About Millay and Her Life

The PROPERTYHistoric Steepletop


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The House

Built in 1892, the year Millay was born, its Victorian glories were removed by Millay to create a simple New England farmhouse. Today the house still holds all of her furniture, books and other possessions, many of which remain where they were on the day she died - October 19, 1950.
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Garden & Grounds

During Millay's years at Steepletop the farm encompassed 700 acres including a large group of wonderful gardens designed, planted and maintained by Millay herself.

Beginning in 1927 on the former site of an ancient barn, Millay used the existing stone foundations to create “exterior rooms” entered through garden doors.

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The Trails

Decades before Millay lived at Steepletop, the road served two farms and was used to drive cows out to pasture. By the time she and Eugen bought the property, pasture had turned into woods. John Pinnie, the poet’s devoted grounds keeper and farmer, used the fallen trees from those woods for the logs to cut to size for the fireplaces in the Millay house.