The Rudyard Kipling House in Dummerston, Vt. It’s owned by a nonprofit preservation trust and you can pay to stay there. Photo of the library below.
“Here we become angry at an overcast day and accept God’s light as though it were in the nature of things – as indeed I am beginning to believe that it is. The special beauty of the weather is that one can work largely, longly and continuously and the burden of the work evaporates in the sunshine so that a man can do much and yet not feel that he is doing anything.’’
— Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), the great English writer, on his time living in Vermont (1893-1896)
In the house that he had built in Dummerston, near Brattleboro, he wrote Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book, The Day’s Work and The Seven Seas while also working on Kim and The Just So Stories. He called the house Naulakha, after a building in India, where he was born and spent stretches of the first part of his life. Indeed, he considered himself Anglo-Indian.
Kipling and his wife left Vermont abruptly because of a fight with his wife’s brother. They tried to return in 1899 but Mrs. Kipling’s illness prevented that. Still, he loved his Vermont house more than any other place he lived and of course wrote much of his most famous work there.
The house contains this library of Kipling's works, some of which he owned when he lived there.
