The Hermit's Hut

The Poet of Tolstoy Park

“You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle. And that is because the Power of the World always works in a circle and everything tries to be round…The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves…
Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux

Here in Fairhope, Alabama, there is a round, stone hut built in the 1920’s by a man named Henry Stuart, a widower and retired professor from Idaho. He came to this area at the age of sixty-seven, sick with tuberculosis, to ‘perfect his soul’ before he died. He chose Fairhope because it was a colony established by free thinkers and non-conformists who lived outside the normal strictures of American society. He bought ten acres of piney-woods just outside the main village and built on it the small, round structure you see above. Instead of dying, he lived for twenty years there, where he wrote and discussed his ideas about an idealized society where capitalism is benevolent and people share the land and its by-products. Leo Tolstoy was his inspiration and people like Clarence Darrow visited regularly to discuss their ideas. He became known as the Poet of Tolstoy Park and his little hermitage stands, preserved, today in the parking lot of an office complex. After twenty years in Alabama, Henry Stuart returned to Idaho and lived and died close to his two sons and his many grandchildren.

Sandy and I visited his Hermitage yesterday and saw the bricks that Henry Stuart made by hand while living in a small barn on the property. There are heavy hooks in the ceiling where his sleeping hammock hung and a small, pot-bellied stove where he cooked his food and warmed his always-bare feet. One wonders whether it was the power of the circle that healed him, or the years of concentrated work and deep thinking. Perhaps it was the hope that the ideas of his beloved Tolstoy, as well as those of Chief Seattle and Henry David Thoreau, would someday find fertile ground and grow into a viable movement in America.

Henry Stuart’s story reminds me again of what a potent place America is, and what she stands for in the world—freedom of thought and lifestyle and the gracious hospitality of an open door. I pray we never lose our way.

In Fair-hope,
Jane