Full text from Ernest W. Bowditch's typescript Memoirs on file in the library of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.:
“This [the Jesup commission] brought me to the attention of Anson Phelps Stokes who had had tentative sketches made by the Olmsteds for the remodeling of the Appleton Estate, which he did not like. When I met him he had just purchased the old Ward Estate and adjoining land — in all some five hundred acres; had started a gigantic stone house, with a Pittsfield Architect, and had just come to a realizing sense that by no possibility could he drive to his front door in safety, and furthermore, if he succeeded in reaching that point it was a physical impossibility to turn a vehicle around unless he had a mechanical turntable. Incidentally, he had no water supply, no sewage disposal and the entrance to his estate was so tangled with his next neighbor’s property that it was cause for great anxiety. He told me the neighbor was George Higginson, a violent tempered man of some sixty years, whom they did not know but who was, by reputation, a very difficult man to do business with. “I told them the first thing, it seemed to me, was to try to adjust matters with this terrible neighbor, who happened to be a first cousin of mine; that though I had not seen him for some years, it seemed to me not necessarily a difficult job to explain to him that certain proposed expenditures by Mr. Stokes could scarcely fail to be of financial value to the Higginson property and that if the plans of what was to be done on that part of the estate were handed to him for approval, etc. etc. The scheme worked, and I was able to get George Higginson to agree to what the Stokeses wanted, though I did not care very much about it myself. Then I dug the house out of the ledge in which it had been placed, and built a proper sized turn for the avenue, which probably is insufficient for automobiles of today. I built a dam for a water supply, a large terrace for the house, etc., and the results were always a betterment of the estate.”
Elizabeth S. Eustis
