Steepletop

When poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and her husband, Eugen Boissevain, bought their farmstead in Austerlitz, N.Y., in 1925, Millay was 33 and already a Pulitzer Prize winner, opera librettist, political activist, literary celebrity, and symbol of unfettered feminism. Millay and Boissevain christened the property "Steepletop" after steeplebush, a flowering shrub that flourished in the area. Surrounded by farm fields and orchards, Steepletop, with its Greek Revival farmhouse and outbuildings, was a far cry from New York's Greenwich Village, where the poet had lived since graduating from Vassar College in 1917. For the next 25 years, the property was Millay's home base. Though her life was messy—complicated relationships, mental breakdowns, and health crises—Millay was also extraordinarily creative and prolific while living at the center of the meticulously arranged world she created at Steepletop