AI-generated representative image showing the small nineteenth-century log cabin. Credits – Gemini
Around 1886, a log cabin playhouse was built for eight-year-old Fanny Glessner at the family’s vacation estate, The Rocks, near Bethlehem, according to the Society of Architectural Historians . To understand why a girl in 1886 had a cabin like this, it helps begin by looking at her family’s summer traditions. In September 1882 they bought their first 100 acres, and a year later their home, called simply the Big House, was finished. The story begins near the start of that saga, at Osborne, at the Swiss Cottage erected in 1853 for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. A children’s cottage on the grounds of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Newport house was erected in 1886, the same year as Fanny’s. In 2017, the museum showed all 19 studies thought to survive together for the first time at its Renwick Gallery.
Because the mountain air helped her brother George’s hay fever, the family first came to the North Country of New Hampshire in 1878.
Fanny’s father, John Jacob Glessner, was a Chicago businessman who later helped found International Harvester, according to the Forest Society . One of the finest survivors is in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was created by Isaac Scott and used by Fanny to practise her homemaking talents, hosting tea parties and making jams and jellies. After a few summers in a big resort hotel, they bought land of their own. That mansion was planned by the same family friend, Isaac Scott, who would go on to create much of the estate. His buildings included a carriage barn, a gardener’s cottage, an observatory, various summer houses and a bee house for Fanny’s mother, Frances. Fanny’s cottage was hardly the only theatre of the times. Playhouses and Privilege, a new book, examines children’s playhouses built on British and American estates from the 1850s to the mid-1930s. The cabin’s most famous resident moved on to a career that, weirdly enough, was also about establishing little worlds. After coming into the family fortune in the 1930s, she turned to forensic science in her fifties. In the 1940s, she produced the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of highly realistic, miniature crime scenes to instruct homicide investigators, which the Smithsonian American Art Museum describes as a meeting point of craft and forensic science.
It included child-sized furnishings and a working cooker, and it still stands today, open to guests. In Chicago, the Sears family also built a log cabin on Prairie Avenue in the 1880s, and it survives today in Kenilworth, Illinois. Fanny grew up to become Frances Glessner Lee, who is known today as a pioneer of forensic science.
