These Lit. Women Landmark house histories were produced for the Finger Lakes Film Trail’s “Lit. Women of Silent Film” weekend, October 14-16, 2022, as part of Silent Movie Month in Ithaca.
The Lit. Women Landmarks below identify the homes associated with three Ithaca authors whose popular works were adapted into silent films—films with strong women heroines portrayed by the leading screen queens of the silent film era.
Well-known in the early 1900s but largely overlooked a century later, writers Ruth Sawyer, Maude Radford Warren, and Grace Miller White lived and wrote in Ithaca. The homes in which they dwelled provide revelatory glimpses of women’s creative spaces at a time when women’s social, economic, and political roles were undergoing rapid change.
For more details about Silent Movie Month, visit whartonstudiomuseum.org.
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A Hilltop Home Filled with Stories
ADDRESS: 100 Iroquois Road (formerly 501 Highland Road)
NAME: “Hilltop”
DATE COMPLETED: 1916
STYLE: Craftsman
ARCHITECT: Clarence A. Martin
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” British writer Virginia Woolf asserted in a 1928 lecture. Ithaca author and storyteller Ruth Sawyer (1880-1970) fortunately had both. Her Cayuga Heights home at 501 Highland Road (now 100 Iroquois Road) proved a nurturing space for Sawyer’s literary imagination.
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From the Front Lines to the Home Front
ADDRESS: 416 Highland Road
DATE COMPLETED: 1930
STYLE: English Cottage Revival
ARCHITECT: Lowe & Speer
“Now, after fifteen years of writing, I have enough to live on simply,” wrote novelist and journalist Maude Radford Warren (1875-1934) to Saturday Evening Post editor Horace Lorimer in about 1917-1918. “This means that I can afford to put all the time I need on incubating ideas for fiction, without the nagging necessity of doing the work too hastily, or pushing it aside for a pot-boiler.”
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At Home in Storm Country
ADDRESSES: 1039 Taughannock Boulevard, 605 N. Tioga Street, and 309 S. Plain Street
Popular novelist Grace Miller White (1868-1957) was well known in the early 1900s for her best-selling Storm Country novels set in Ithaca and Tompkins County. Several of them, including Tess of the Storm Country (1909) and The Secret of the Storm Country (1917), were made into silent films produced by and starring two of the leading actors of the time, Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge.