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Stillmeadow #5
Stillmeadow Daybook
Provides a month-by-month account of rural life in a seventeenth-century Connecticut farmhouse restored by the author.
274 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
About the author
Gladys Taber
90 books134 followersA prolific author whose output includes plays, essays, memoirs and fiction, Gladys Taber (1899 – 1980) is perhaps best recalled for a series of books and columns about her life at Stillmeadow, a 17th-century farmhouse in Southbury, Connecticut.
Born Gladys Bagg on April 12, 1899 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she was the middle child and only one to survive to adulthood. Her parents were Rufus Mather Bagg, who could trace his ancestry back to Cotton Mather, and the former Grace Sibyl Raybold. An older sister, Majel, had died at the age of six months while a younger brother Walter died at 15 months. During her childhood, she moved frequently as her father accepted various teaching posts until they finally settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. Gladys graduated from Appleton High School and enrolled at Wellesley College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1920. She returned to her hometown and earned a master’s in 1921 from Lawrence College, where her father was on faculty. The following year, she married Frank Albion Taber, Jr., giving birth to their daughter on July 7, 1923.
Mrs. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.”
By this time, she had separated from her husband and was living at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690 in Southbury, Connecticut, sharing the house with Eleanor Sanford Mayer, a childhood friend who was often mistakenly identified as her sister. Beginning with Harvest at Stillmeadow (Little, Brown, 1940), Taber wrote a series of books about her simple life in New England that possessed homespun wisdom dolled out with earthy humor and an appreciation for the small things. She published more than 20 books related to Stillmeadow, including several cookbooks.
In 1959, she moved from Ladies’ Home Journal to Family Circle, contributing the “Butternut Wisdom” column until her retirement in 1967. In 1960, her companion, Eleanor, died and Taber decided to abandon life at Stillmeadow. Having spent some summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, she decided to relocate to the town of Orleans where she would live out the remainder of her days. While a resident of Orleans, Taber contributed “Still Cove Sketches” to the Cape Cod Oracle . Her final book, published posthumously, was Still Cove Journal (Lippincott, 1981).
Gladys Taber had divorced her husband in 1946 and he later passed away in October 1964. She died on March 11, 1980 in Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts at the age of 80.
Born Gladys Bagg on April 12, 1899 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, she was the middle child and only one to survive to adulthood. Her parents were Rufus Mather Bagg, who could trace his ancestry back to Cotton Mather, and the former Grace Sibyl Raybold. An older sister, Majel, had died at the age of six months while a younger brother Walter died at 15 months. During her childhood, she moved frequently as her father accepted various teaching posts until they finally settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. Gladys graduated from Appleton High School and enrolled at Wellesley College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1920. She returned to her hometown and earned a master’s in 1921 from Lawrence College, where her father was on faculty. The following year, she married Frank Albion Taber, Jr., giving birth to their daughter on July 7, 1923.
Mrs. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.”
By this time, she had separated from her husband and was living at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690 in Southbury, Connecticut, sharing the house with Eleanor Sanford Mayer, a childhood friend who was often mistakenly identified as her sister. Beginning with Harvest at Stillmeadow (Little, Brown, 1940), Taber wrote a series of books about her simple life in New England that possessed homespun wisdom dolled out with earthy humor and an appreciation for the small things. She published more than 20 books related to Stillmeadow, including several cookbooks.
In 1959, she moved from Ladies’ Home Journal to Family Circle, contributing the “Butternut Wisdom” column until her retirement in 1967. In 1960, her companion, Eleanor, died and Taber decided to abandon life at Stillmeadow. Having spent some summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, she decided to relocate to the town of Orleans where she would live out the remainder of her days. While a resident of Orleans, Taber contributed “Still Cove Sketches” to the Cape Cod Oracle . Her final book, published posthumously, was Still Cove Journal (Lippincott, 1981).
Gladys Taber had divorced her husband in 1946 and he later passed away in October 1964. She died on March 11, 1980 in Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts at the age of 80.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 1, 2014
In the early 80s I came upon these delightful books that relate the story of a farm in Connecticut named Still meadow. I had really forgotten about them until Susan Branch did a blog on her visit to Stillmeadow as she did a lecture for the friends of Gladys Taber. The Taber family along with dear friends purchased a 1690 farmhouse in Connecticut to escape the stress of NYC where they resided and worked. Stillmeadow allowed them to give their children a country experience and both families adored the old farm. After the death of their husbands, Ms Taber and her dear friend decided to make Stillmeadow their home where they raised Cocker Spaniels and Irish Setters. Ms Taber relates life at Stillmeadow in a charming stream of consciousness that perfectly evokes a time gone by.
July 17, 2014
This is my mother's copy ( with much annotation)! She treasured all Gladys' books and was even able to meet her when on vacation to the East coast. The book makes me long for this simple and slower lifestyle. Her writing is quite poetic in describing their Stillmeadow year month by month.
August 31, 2023
Cozy little 1955 book of reflections that fits nicely into this certain genre I'm always drawn to: something like wishing-I-lived-in-the-country or slow-living-on-land. It's perfect for reading to calm down.
October 29, 2018
While this book was copyrighted in 1955, it has the timeless quality of all good books. Gladys Taber writes of troubled times and if you didn’t know, you might think she is describing current events. She shares her thoughts about country living, raising dogs, feeding the birds, cooking, fires on cold winter evenings, and even the heroes and heroines of mystery stories. It is a book to be savored and considered in the light of one’s own life.
November 23, 2020
Another calming read of daily life in rural Connecticut during the 1950's. I enjoyed that the chapters of this book was divided into seasons, but I also enjoy when she separates the chapters into months. It is a cozy read, and I am not sure if anyone can describe nature as well as Gladys Taber did. You can feel the winter storms, the hot summer air... just delightful. I agree with another reviewer who found her worries on current events at the time applicable to today.
January 1, 2025
I need more of Stillmeadow, I need more of peace and tranquility and solitude and nature and God and beauty and good, good things. I breathes so well as I read this book, I loved so well in it's pages.
"And whether rich or poor, well or ill, happy or sad, books can be a refuge, they do not change with changing circumstance, they are the open highway to yesterday, today and tomorrow wherever you will to travel."
"And whether rich or poor, well or ill, happy or sad, books can be a refuge, they do not change with changing circumstance, they are the open highway to yesterday, today and tomorrow wherever you will to travel."
August 12, 2009
I enjoyed Taber's descriptions of daily life and nature. Was I perhaps a little jealous that it's not so easy nowadays for New Yorkers to just to go pick up a country house and really get to know their neighbors? Perhaps. And I confess that I am not quite as fascinated by cocker spaniels as she is. But she's great for marking the seasons with a sense of cozy domesticity.
April 25, 2015
This book was so relaxing to read. I loved the month-by-month chapter structure. I felt as if I knew Gladys by the end.
March 14, 2026
I had forgotten or I may have read past it without taking much note in previous books, but Gladys Taber is cloyingly religious. That is naturally her prerogative, but I don't like being told we have no choice but to believe, to have a faith, to worship God, because I don't, and I won't, and I find the fact that anyone does--the fact that most people do--as totally incomprehensible as I do the fact that 49% of my country voted for Donald Trump.
I am very afraid that were she still living, Gladys Taber might have voted for Donald Trump. Just the fact that she is, when she visits Montreal, a foreign city in the foreign country of Canada, totally flummoxed to discover that she cannot spend her American dollars on par, nor can she use American stamps to send postcards, mailed in Canada, back to her friends in the States, lands her firmly in MAGA camp, had there been such a thing as MAGA in the 1950s. She is clearly an intelligent woman, and yet, how ignorant is that?
She is deeply conservative, in the old-fashioned way of conservatives of former eras. She fears the bomb, she fears communism, and she is very, very skeptical of what she calls socialized medicine. She opposes what she calls the debunking of heroes. Assumably she might today approve of the sanitizing of history by the American Right, the Trump administration's erasure, figuratively and literally, of any record that illuminates anything other than a glorious and blameless American past, including slavery.
Nowhere in "Stillmeadow Daybook" does she mention Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee trials--which would have been happening as she was writing--but she had a radio, she even had a tv (in the Common Era 1955, which was ahead of the curve), and she read the papers, so she must have been aware of the trials. Unfortunately she also read the "Reader's Digest," which was one of the most popular Right Wing publications of that day. Was she overly influenced by the "Reader's Digest"?
We don't know if she approved of the trials, but I would hope she did not. She was friends with many musicians and artists and writers and performers; all of the above tend to be progressive and humanistic in their worldview. That alone could have made them targets of HUAC.
She also read books, lots of books. Because she mentions the pleasure she got from Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" and "Miss Pym Disposes," as well as Dylan Thomas's "Quite Early One Morning," I took a break from "Stillmeadow Daybook" to request "Miss Pym Disposes" and "Quite Early One Morning" from the library, and to read them. I have already read "The Daughter of Time"..at least twice. She quotes from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Rosemary," a poem which I too quoted in our Ladies' Aid cookbook, "...and cook until done."
I've added "The Sea Around Us" and "The Edge of the Sea," by Rachel Carson, to my to-read list, as well as "No Time for Sergeants" by Mac Hyman. I added the Lockridges' "The Norths'Meet Murder" and Nero Wolfe's "Fer-de-Lance" to my reading list too. Heaven knows if I will ever get to them.
So many books, so little time. Even so, I have added "The World is Not Enough," by Zoe Oldenburg, the predecessor to a book Gladys mentions, "The Cornerstone."
And now to finish with a couple of cutisms, cute because lo, how times have changed all these 70 years on:
No. 1. Gladys loved the new motels, preferring them hands down to hotels. They were so handy and tidy and clean and inexpensive. Even families with children could afford them. Although, "We stayed once in a new kind, a super, super-colossal motel. It cost TWELVE DOLLARS A NIGHT (emphasis mine), and was worth it.... Naturally with our American talent for excesses, we shall soon have too many motels. More motels than people.... The entire road to Hartford is paved with them already."
No. 2. "I have finally made up my mind about television.... At first we gingerly turned it on for news, then we advanced to a single program. I had a feeling that we had gone far enough with radio and that was enough.... And by the time Jill said hesitantly, 'isn't this the night for "the Halls of Ivy"?' I knew we should buy a set ourselves. It is a dangerous medium, I think. Children should not replace reading with television skits.... But if we can control it, it is immensely important.... (T)he vast power of this new thing does worry me. It comes into any home. It comes into hospitals, to the bedside, it can teach and inspire and illuminate. The bedridden can enjoy it as much as the casual passer-by. And it is a terrible responsibility for the men who choose and shape the programs."
Oh Gladys. If you only knew.
I am very afraid that were she still living, Gladys Taber might have voted for Donald Trump. Just the fact that she is, when she visits Montreal, a foreign city in the foreign country of Canada, totally flummoxed to discover that she cannot spend her American dollars on par, nor can she use American stamps to send postcards, mailed in Canada, back to her friends in the States, lands her firmly in MAGA camp, had there been such a thing as MAGA in the 1950s. She is clearly an intelligent woman, and yet, how ignorant is that?
She is deeply conservative, in the old-fashioned way of conservatives of former eras. She fears the bomb, she fears communism, and she is very, very skeptical of what she calls socialized medicine. She opposes what she calls the debunking of heroes. Assumably she might today approve of the sanitizing of history by the American Right, the Trump administration's erasure, figuratively and literally, of any record that illuminates anything other than a glorious and blameless American past, including slavery.
Nowhere in "Stillmeadow Daybook" does she mention Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee trials--which would have been happening as she was writing--but she had a radio, she even had a tv (in the Common Era 1955, which was ahead of the curve), and she read the papers, so she must have been aware of the trials. Unfortunately she also read the "Reader's Digest," which was one of the most popular Right Wing publications of that day. Was she overly influenced by the "Reader's Digest"?
We don't know if she approved of the trials, but I would hope she did not. She was friends with many musicians and artists and writers and performers; all of the above tend to be progressive and humanistic in their worldview. That alone could have made them targets of HUAC.
She also read books, lots of books. Because she mentions the pleasure she got from Josephine Tey's "The Daughter of Time" and "Miss Pym Disposes," as well as Dylan Thomas's "Quite Early One Morning," I took a break from "Stillmeadow Daybook" to request "Miss Pym Disposes" and "Quite Early One Morning" from the library, and to read them. I have already read "The Daughter of Time"..at least twice. She quotes from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Rosemary," a poem which I too quoted in our Ladies' Aid cookbook, "...and cook until done."
I've added "The Sea Around Us" and "The Edge of the Sea," by Rachel Carson, to my to-read list, as well as "No Time for Sergeants" by Mac Hyman. I added the Lockridges' "The Norths'Meet Murder" and Nero Wolfe's "Fer-de-Lance" to my reading list too. Heaven knows if I will ever get to them.
So many books, so little time. Even so, I have added "The World is Not Enough," by Zoe Oldenburg, the predecessor to a book Gladys mentions, "The Cornerstone."
And now to finish with a couple of cutisms, cute because lo, how times have changed all these 70 years on:
No. 1. Gladys loved the new motels, preferring them hands down to hotels. They were so handy and tidy and clean and inexpensive. Even families with children could afford them. Although, "We stayed once in a new kind, a super, super-colossal motel. It cost TWELVE DOLLARS A NIGHT (emphasis mine), and was worth it.... Naturally with our American talent for excesses, we shall soon have too many motels. More motels than people.... The entire road to Hartford is paved with them already."
No. 2. "I have finally made up my mind about television.... At first we gingerly turned it on for news, then we advanced to a single program. I had a feeling that we had gone far enough with radio and that was enough.... And by the time Jill said hesitantly, 'isn't this the night for "the Halls of Ivy"?' I knew we should buy a set ourselves. It is a dangerous medium, I think. Children should not replace reading with television skits.... But if we can control it, it is immensely important.... (T)he vast power of this new thing does worry me. It comes into any home. It comes into hospitals, to the bedside, it can teach and inspire and illuminate. The bedridden can enjoy it as much as the casual passer-by. And it is a terrible responsibility for the men who choose and shape the programs."
Oh Gladys. If you only knew.
August 2, 2022
Absolutely wonderful! How on earth did I manage to spend decades of my life without the joy of reading Gladys Taber? And why don't libraries carry her books and sing her praises from dawn-to-dusk? It's a mystery.
March 14, 2011
I loved this book and highly appreciate Ms. Taber's philosophy about life.
February 13, 2015
Not my favourite style.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews