John Burroughs had become popular enough by 1895, and visitors were disrupting the quiet he needed to write. His answer was a small cabin in the woods near his West Park, New York, home. Burroughs built Slabsides that year with help from his son and a carpenter, and used rough wooden slabs with their bark still attached for the exterior walls. The cabin sat on a wooded tract about a mile from Riverby, which was the home where Burroughs lived with his family. The naturalist used the retreat for writing, farming and observation, and it eventually became the physical center of a much larger nature sanctuary that now covers about 170 acres.
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The cabin was built as an escape
Burroughs was already an established nature writer when Slabsides went up, with his books having made him one of the best-known American writers on the natural world, and the attention brought visitors to Riverby. The Hudson River Valley Institute 's historical account says Slabsides served several purposes, but one was to give Burroughs a place away from the steady stream of people arriving at Riverby. He also used the property for farming, cultivating celery in a reclaimed swamp beside the cabin.
The name came from the cabin's construction, and its outside walls were covered with rough slabs of wood that still carried their bark. Inside, it had an open main room, a partitioned sleeping area and a fireplace. Burroughs made some of the furniture himself, and much of the interior has survived.
Visitors of the cabin included naturalist John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt and industrialist Henry Ford. Burroughs wrote several works at Slabsides, and used the surrounding woods as both a workplace and a source of material for his nature writing.
Nine acres became 170
Burroughs and his son developed about nine acres around the cabin, and after Burroughs died in 1921, the property passed to the John Burroughs Association, which had been established to preserve his work and legacy. Supporters raised money to acquire additional parcels as logging and development threatened nearby woodland in the 1960s.
Today, the John Burroughs Sanctuary encompasses about 170 acres, with Slabsides at its center. The surrounding property contains woodland and hiking trails rather than the development that Burroughs had sought to avoid when he first built the cabin. The cabin itself received federal recognition in 1968, when it was designated a National Historic Landmark. The landscape is now maintained for both conservation and public access, and the sanctuary grounds are open year-round, while access to the cabin is more limited.
Slabsides remains largely intact
The Library of Congress holds photographs of Burroughs at Riverby and Slabsides that were taken between 1915 and 1922. Its catalog says the collection includes images of the naturalist, his family and visitors at the cabin and lists the photographs as having no known restrictions on publication.
The sanctuary's trails run through the woods that Burroughs used for walking and observation, while the cabin preserves the setting in which he wrote. The additional acreage was acquired specifically to keep the woods around the cabin from being broken up as development expanded, which makes the 170-acre sanctuary considerably different from the nine-acre tract on which Burroughs originally built his retreat. The property is still maintained by the John Burroughs Association, and is available for hiking, while the cabin is opened on selected occasions and special tours rather than operating as a conventional daily museum.
