Robert Frost Homestead

Robert Frost Farm State Historic Site
The Robert Frost Farm
Location	122 Rockingham Rd, Derry, New Hampshire
Coordinates	42°52′18″N 71°17′42″W / 42.87167°N 71.29500°W / 42.87167; -71.29500Coordinates: 42°52′18″N 71°17′42″W / 42.87167°N 71.29500°W / 42.87167; -71.29500
Operated by	New Hampshire Division of Parks and Recreation
Website	Robert Frost Farm State Historic Site

The Robert Frost Farm in Derry, New Hampshire is a two-story, clapboard, connected farm built in 1884. It was the home of poet Robert Frost from 1900 to 1911. Today it is a New Hampshire state park in use as a historic house museum. The property is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as the Robert Frost Homestead.

Frost lived in the house from the fall of 1900 until it was sold in November 1911. The majority of the poems collected in his first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, were written here. Many of the poems in his 1916 collection Mountain Interval were also written at the Derry farm. Frost once said, "There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after." During this period Frost also published a dozen articles for two agricultural trade journals: The Eastern Poultryman and The Farm-Poultry.

Elliott, first son of Frost and his wife Elinor, died on the farm in 1900 at age four, likely due to influenza. The other children were educated at home by their parents. Lesley Frost later recalled she was "taught the alphabet on a typewriter... My mother taught the organized subjects, reading (the phonetic method), writing (then known as penmanship), geography, spelling. My father took on botany and astronomy."

A hired man named Carl Burrell (and, occasionally, Burrell's father) assisted with farming duties like building hen coops, tending livestock, and picking apples and pears. Locals thought Frost was lazy as a farmer. He later recalled that they were correct: "I always liked to sit up all hours of the night planning some inarticulate crime, going out to work when the spirit moved me, something they shook their heads ominously at, with proper prejudice. They would talk among themselves about my lack of energy. I was a failure in their eyes from the start."

The family moved out in the fall of 1909 to rented lodgings in Derry Village while Frost taught at the Pinkerton Academy. They later moved to Plymouth, New Hampshire, so that Frost could teach at the Plymouth Normal School.