By Asa Gallagher – Camp Burgess Director

Triangle House

For the last two years my family and I have been fortunate to live in a fantastic little old farm house on the Burgess property. Triangle House is the Cape Cod style home that you see when entering the parking lot side of camp. It has perfect views of Triangle Pond and gently sloping grassy hills in the back. The house was built nearly 200 hundred years ago and was originally owned by the Jones family. Back then Burgess was a sprawling farm land, and this house sat on the property’s borderline, which is now where Stowe Road is located. 100 years ago Stowe Road was no more than a dirt path for animals and wagons to stroll down, and the shore of the pond was a popular watering hole for soldiers and their horses. I have known this house since 1998 when I first arrived at Burgess, and to be honest I thought it was vacant and or abandoned at first. It turned out that the Maintenance Director Glen Burke was living there at the time with his wife Karen. Almost 16 years later, I know every inch of this house, as well as the last 5 families that have lived in it. They go in this order: Asa Gallagher and his family, Rachel Grostern and Carl Bickerdike, Phil and Elyse Smith, Glen and Karen Burke, Bob and Madeline Vreeland. That takes me back to the late 1980’s. After that I am at a loss, accept for Hiram Jones and his wife Hannah Meiggs from the mid 1800’s. If you know any others please share them with me.

And then there are the old secret doors that look very creepy at night, the rusty oil drum half buried in the back yard, the strange noises at all hours, the old shoe I found lodged in the foundation, the sloping floors, the layers of paint and wallpaper that have been added over the years, and the set of rules that hang by the door, describing how to treat the place when it acted as a guest house for camp in the mid 1900’s. It is a special and quirky place, filled with great history and sunny ambiance. It is surely the most unique home I have ever lived in, and one of the more classic buildings here at camp.

This picture of Triangle House is from March of 1963.