“They sit on hay bales in the barn,” Mary says, “and we play the recording of Mr. For many years, in mid-June, a teacher from a school 90 miles away would bring her class to visit. Many of the improvements, she notes, had to do with “opening rooms up to more light.”Įvery spring, Mary would arrive to open the house and ready the gardens for planting. “We think we have changed the barn for the best,” she says. Here’s where Wilbur’s trough would have been, Mary says, and “right here”-she points-“is the hole where I tell children Templeton the rat would scurry back and forth.” Light pours into the barn from massive windows the Gallants found in a salvage yard. There is that rope swing, immortalized in Charlotte’s Web as the one from which Fern and her brother launched themselves from the loft. We walk from room to room in what is possibly the most impressive and well-kept barn I have ever seen. White’s 1952 children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web. Hanging in the doorway is the rope swing made famous in E.B. The interior of the barn, looking out to the fields. The barn itself also provided the setting for one of the most beloved children’s books of all time. “I’m sure you want to do the Charlotte’s Web thing,” Mary says, and quickly ushers me to the barn and sheds that once housed the Whites’ hay, sheep, geese, chickens, pigs and (of course) spiders, and probably a rat or two. Katharine died in 1977, her husband in 1985. and Katharine White, who bought the farm in 1933 and moved here full-time four years later. Within moments she connects the threads of their story with those of the previous owners, E.B. It is time, they say, to downsize to one home and live closer to their four children and seven grandchildren, who remain in the Carolinas. There is a bittersweet feel to our time together.
I learn all of this over the next few hours as I hear Robert’s and Mary’s stories, which speak to a deep love for everything my eyes can see-as well as those things that undoubtedly only theirs can. His right wrist is heavily wrapped after a recent fall, and he’s reluctantly coming to terms with what he can and can’t do anymore. But he’s on the back end of his eighties now, and lately he’s had a rough go of it. He’s led a vigorous life, with a highly successful business career as a managing partner of the Gallant-Belk department store chain and a property developer. They arrived here only a few days earlier, and Robert greets me in a voice with the slow, easy inflection of the deep South.
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