Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site (Connemara)

Christopher Memminger built the Greek Revival house on Big Glassy Mountain in 1839 as a summer place. He called it Rock Hill. During the Civil War, the house was fortified and used as shelter for friends protecting themselves from Union raids and Confederate deserters turned bandits. Memminger would serve as Confederate Treasury Secretary.

After Memminger's death, the house passed to Colonel William Gregg, Jr., then to Captain Ellison Adger Smyth, who renamed it Connemara after his ancestral district in Ireland. The Smyths winterized it, enclosed the porch as a dining room, and installed an eight-hole golf course in the pastures.

Carl Sandburg bought Connemara in 1945 for $45,000. His wife Lilian had been looking for a farm in a warmer climate to raise her Chikaming dairy goats — she needed more than thirty acres of pastureland. When she showed him the place, he said yes. More than 42,000 pounds of personal belongings came by train from Michigan, most of it books. They hired contractors to work on heating, plumbing, electrical, the roof, the basement floor. They installed new chimneys, bathrooms, dozens of bookshelves for his library. The remodeling took two and a half years.

Sandburg lived at Connemara from 1945 until his death in 1967. He published more than a third of his works here. The working goat dairy still operates — the government has designated the herd historic. Some 12,000 of his books remain in the house. The 264-acre site includes the residence, the barn, rolling pastures, mountainside woods, five miles of hiking trails, two small lakes, flower and vegetable gardens, an apple orchard. The trails range from easy to moderately strenuous.