Remembering Kate D. Tallmadge
Kate D. Tallmadge 1917-2021
Kate D. Tallmadge passed away on July 11, 2021 in her own home by her beloved Lake Waramaug surrounded by her family. She was 104 years young. Kate saw six generations at the Lake, where her family grew to three children, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
An accomplished sailor, she did photogrammetry mapping during World War II and was at the cutting edge of computer programming in the 1960’s. Throughout her life Kate was also a poet and philosopher, a gifted storyteller and a talented craftsperson.
Her family helped form the Lake Waramaug Association in 1917 and contributed greatly to the environmental improvements around the Lake. She saw Waramaug as a place of nature, adventure and imagination.
The below article about Kate’s life was written by her son, John Tallmadge, on April 5, 2017.
Kate Tallmadge: One Hundred Years on Lake Waramaug
In the beginning there was Brooklyn, where Nana and George Albert Allin raised their children Kate Duryea and George Litchfield. In the summer of 1910, fleeing the heat and congestion, they stayed at the Loomarwick and fell in love with the Lake. They bought a twenty acre hayfield with water frontage on West Shore Road, where Nana later built an Adirondack style cottage with green shutters and cedar shingles. Soon grandchildren began to arrive, and in 1917, the Allins helped found the Lake Waramaug Association. That same year my mother was born, and Nana gave her mom, Kate Weber, a plot on the hillside where she built a rustic Cape Cod cottage surrounded by wildflowers that drew the butterflies so beloved of her husband, the Rev. Herman Weber, an accomplished theologian, naturalist, mason, and wood worker. My mother, Kate Duryea Weber, grew up spending summers at the Lake, which became for her and her cousins a magical place of nature, adventure, and imagination.
In those days the road around the Lake was still unpaved, there were no phones, radios, showers, indoor plumbing, or electricity. The family had a cow for milk and a big garden for vegetables. They gathered wild blueberries on the top of Mt. Bushnell, wild strawberries in the meadow, and wild grapes in the woods. They drank spring water from a hand-dug well and washed their sheets, clothes, and bodies in the Lake using Octagon soap made from pork fat and lye. Mom remembers scratchy wool bathing suits that never dried and the long, two-day drive from New Jersey using the Yonkers Ferry and later the Bear Mountain Bridge. She remembers riding to the village on the hay wagon after a local farmer had mowed the meadow for tax money, and coming back afterwards to make ice cream with home-grown strawberries, chipping ice from a hundred-pound block cut from the Lake and hauled up the hill by a sweating Swanson boy. She remembers Mr. Schiapacasse’s vegetable wagon with its jangling bell making weekly rounds. She remembers lighting and cooking with kerosene.
Altogether, it was a summer life of rustic simplicity, full of exploration and outdoor delights. In those days the city where we lived, worked, and went to school was much more congested and polluted. Mom remembers how we kids would climb the neighborhood beech trees and come back for dinner grimed with soot, our cheeks streaked from tears and sweat; she remembers hanging her nylons out to dry on a clear day and finding them limp and tattered after an invisible cloud of sulfur dioxide blew in from the Bayway refineries. The Lake came to represent all that was clean, natural, wild, and free, a place of refuge and redemption for us city folks. From the earliest days, we led a migratory life.
Then came the Depression and World War II. Mom and her cousins grew up and married; their men went to war and returned to take jobs in industry. They raised us baby boomers in urban New Jersey but made sure we could escape to the Lake. They improved and expanded my grandmother’s cottage to accommodate her growing flock of grandchildren; they upgraded the waterfront, adding a pier of stones hauled from the lake bottom, making a wading pool for the little ones, and building a float for the teens and grown-ups. Finally, my Mom and Dad asked for a piece of land so they could build their own cottage using field stone and hand-hewn barn timbers; they wanted a house that reflected a rural, Eric Sloane aesthetic and seemed to have grown out of the land itself. Walter Couch, long retired but still a legend in the building trades, took a shine to us and agreed to supervise the construction. By 1960 we had three houses in the family but still shared most of our resources, including the garden, the well, the waterfront, and even the drive up the hill. We also shared the Lake’s beauty and adventure with our neighbors and schoolmates, inviting them up for weekends of swimming, hiking, and cookouts by the shore. And in later years we hosted rowers competing in the spring regatta, including the Cincinnati Junior Rowing Club and the Dartmouth Women’s Crew.
During these postwar decades the Lake and the community were changing relentlessly. New highways and bridges shrank the trip from two days to three hours. More and more people came to the Lake with their boats and motorcycles. There were still eight friendly inns, and you could launch or refuel at the Casino or the Lakeshore Pavilion. Tacky cottages sprang up next to stately Victorian homes. New Preston slowly began to gentrify, but in those early days you could still get fishing tackle, nails, and baling wire at Washington Supply, or stop at Krasselt’s a few doors down for donuts, fresh eggs, or porn mags. There was a small public library in a former mill shed, a pharmacy where Honey the druggist would fill your prescription, a liquor store for your bourbon and a grocery with sawdust on the floor and a big wheel of rat trap cheese on the counter. You could get your car fixed at Couch’s Garage right on the main street, but you had to go down to the city for chocolate croissants, designer coffee, French antiques, or upscale Southwestern fashions.
Environmental change was also under way. With the outbreak of war, the market for hay had dried up, and we stopped mowing the meadow. The forest began to encroach, providing seclusion and wildness at the expense of the view. We had to dig deeper to pay our taxes. On the Lake itself increasing boat traffic left trails of gasoline shimmer and the bodies of white perch, torn by outboard propellers, floating in the shallows.By late summer, fertilizer runoff from farms and lawns had caused dense blooms of algae that fouled our hair and swim suits. Our family got actively involved in efforts to clean up and protect the Lake, mainly through the Lake Waramaug Association, which my father Howard Tallmadge helped rejuvenate in the 1970’s, and the Lake Waramaug Task Force, which undertook pioneering research and mitigation efforts. Now, thanks to intensive management, the Lake has regained much of its wildness and purity. Although gentrification has changed the character of both land and community, there is also more peace, and quiet around the Lake than when I was a boy. Wildlife such as bald eagles and bobcats have also returned; last summer a black bear even sauntered onto our waterfront.
As our generations matured and expanded, some moved far away while others settled near the Lake. Summers brought us together from places like California, Minnesota, Ohio, and North Carolina as well as New Milford, Southbury, Albany, and Glen Ridge NJ. Some of our youth took summer jobs at the Boulders, the Loomarwick, the Country Club, Doc’s, or the Inn. The Lake was a homestead and gathering place that anchored us in a world of accelerating change. My uncle, Larry Weber, bought a neighboring parcel from our neighbor, Walter Addicks, and built a retirement home in 1987, becoming our first (and so far only) year-round resident. He was easily recognized around town in his black Converse hightops, buffalo plaid shirts, and old carpenter jeans, an active presence at zoning board meetings, a supporter of the VNA and the New Preston church, and a watchful steward of our family estates that now comprised some 25 acres. Larry brought us ham radio, cable TV, and the internet but still liked living tucked back in the woods. Anyone driving along West Shore Road would encounter our place as a refreshing stretch of wild, unkempt forest after miles of well-tended lawns, flower beds, and artisanal stone walls.
Kate Tallmadge turns 100 this spring. She has known six generations at the Lake, which still calls to her children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and extended cousins each summer. With luck our place will survive the continuing diaspora, the inevitable disputes and heartbreaking departures, the corrosive pressure of inflating markets and rising taxes. Already we’ve been forced to sell off some of our land. But in the end the Lake still holds us together, offering a touchstone for our values, loyalties, and dreams. For us, as for Henry David Thoreau, “a lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye, gazing into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”