The Mill Pond Cottage

Jesse Curran
November 2023

We feel this is the loveliest situation we have ever had,
and am happy to again sniff the salt water.

Helen Torr, 1938

On a stunningly beautiful day in late May, the rhododendrons drip their pink passion and cumulous clouds bound against a French blue sky. I sit on the porch steps of the Dove/Torr cottage. I am awaiting the curator of the Heckscher Museum for a private visit to take a peek inside and from inside, to take a glance outside.

The Dove/Torr cottage sits on the west side of the Titus Mill Pond, a small pond connected to the base of Centerport Harbor. It looks across the pond to a peninsula called Little Neck, home to a Vanderbilt family estate, “Eagle’s Nest.” The Heckscher Museum of Huntington acquired the Dove/Torr Cottage in 1998 and it is listed on the register of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios. While the cottage’s future is uncertain—it has no parking, no bathroom, and sits on the edge of a body of water that routinely rises—it is possible to schedule a private visit. There is both little to see and much to see.

Dove and Torr lived in what we would call a tiny house. They bought the house in 1938 for $980. The five hundred square foot structure had previously been a post office/general store. They were delighted to finally have a place to call home. Before moving to the Mill Pond, they had spent about five years (1933-38) up in Geneva in the Finger Lakes, tending to the management of the Dove family estate. Before their stint in Geneva, there was the famous decade with Mona, their yawl docked at the Ketawomoke Yacht club in Huntington Harbor. Dove wrote to Alfred Stieglitz of the cottage in September of 1938, “Everyone seems quite delighted with this place. It is beautiful, Part of it is out over the water.” He wrote of finally feeling settled. The cottage would be his final home.

After about an hour of absorbing the curator’s vast knowledge of the life and times of these artists, I ask her if she thinks Dove and Torr were happy. She says that she thinks they were. That owning this small cottage perched on the Mill Pond was a real achievement for them. Life was not easy, but Dove was able to paint as he convalesced from the health problems that plagued him. Often, Reds would shew away visitors so her beloved had time to rest and work. It comforts me to know they were happy here. It’s easy to see how they could be happy here. If you sit at certain positions and look out the windows toward the pond, it feels like you’re at sea rather than on land. It isn’t hard to think of it as a house-boat, or a boat-house, of sorts. Still so, the house is so precariously positioned. It would sometimes flood during storms or hurricanes and the thought of acquiring insurance in the twenty-first century of super storms seems well beyond possible. After Dove died, Reds would spend hurricane season in Manhattan, renting a room in the Chelsea Hotel, seeking higher ground. Though the cottage is beautiful, it feels like a bad investment.

After my visit, I take a few moments and sit on the bench by the pond, finding a small corner free of bird poop. I breathe with the place. With the dankness, I’m home, and flush with memories of fiddler crabs and hermit crabs, horse flies and horseshoe crabs. At seventeen, I moved upstate to Western New York for college, and was knocked over by the alfalfa and cow manure residue. I remember coming back on my first fall break and sitting down on the Beachcroft dock on Huntington Harbor at the end of my parents’ block, breathing in the deep sulfuric smell of tidal mudflats and feeling fully home. This is Dove and Torr’s backyard. This is what home smells like to me. I imagine how it must have felt for them to come back here after the long depression years in Geneva. Dove was prolific in the cottage—so many of his subjects were right out the window. In particular, he experimented increasingly with tiny mixed media works on paper, often 3 x 4 inches; perhaps the medium served as a type of analog for the tiny house pitched over the pond. Earthy greens and browns dominate his palette and the late work feels, in so many ways, light and free. He was an artist who continued to innovate and evolve—and to forge deeper connections to natural phenomena through sensate engagement with this place.

I know the Island was quieter when Dove and Torr first docked in Huntington, one hundred summers back. Before the birth of the suburb, before the supermarket and the saran wrap. Before the mall and now, how the mall comes to us on the back of a delivery truck. I know they could have sat on a bench like the one I find myself sitting on and not have to also smell the endless barrage of burning gasoline on Route 25A. I know this place will never really hold the same quiet for me as it did for them—too many people and too much business—too much busyness, as thousands of cars speed by day in and day out. Long Island, quite simply, is no longer quaint. For Dove and Torr, it was.

I’m glad that they were happy here. For a moment, I too, am happy here. Breathing and being with low-tide, with the egret, with the ducks and the rhododendrons and this stunningly bright May afternoon. In such light, everything sings, feels hopeful, feels worthy of pastel and paint. Feels worth the work of words and worry. The Long Island light still holds some promise for refuge, for the possibility of poetry—and of being part of a poetics of place.

But it is the cottage, the nest, the shelter in the storm that I hover close to. I think of my own little writing shed in my backyard three miles down the road, how it has been the very means of my creative making; my space of integration. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is on every page, in every tiny house, in all phenomenology of place. As he writes in The Poetics of Space:

I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream. Past, present and future give the house different dynamisms, which often interfere, at times opposing, at others, stimulating one another. In the life of a man, the house thrusts aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing. Without it, man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life. It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Being is already a value. Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.

I think of Dove convalescing here. So many naps, so many day-dreams, the windows thrown open and the salty air mixing with the smell of paint. His wheelchair from Sears allowed him to be brought outside, then to be brought back in. I think about how tiny houses with lots of light might offer precisely what an artist-of-place needs to explore the thresholds between the inner and outer landscapes. Although he was ill for much of his time here, this tiny house was essential in nurturing creativity. Four walls, a breeze, high ceilings, and a pond alive with the dealings of ducks. A ship in the storm of illness. A houseboat on the seas of suffering. A space of creative integration. Body and soul, soul and body.

…the house thrust aside contingencies, its councils of continuity are unceasing.

Salt Life: Arthur Dove and Helen Torr
November 18, 2023 – March 10, 2024

The Heckscher Museum of Art
Huntington, L.I.

For more information →

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You can read Jesse Curran’s essay, Modern Artists from her series on Dove/Torr

 Modern Artists on Arteidolia →

Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Ruminate, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. www.jesseleecurran.com