Bailiwick

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“Many years ago I planted rather heavily of dwarf apples and they did well as long as they received particular care. Two hundred trees were imported from France. Many others were propagated to choice kinds on imported Paradise-apple roots, and these were most satisfactory […]. The only published result of my work with the dwarf apples is Waugh’s vivid (and truthful) comment that I had had a lot of experience but did not know what it was.” –LHBGC, pp. 148-9

About the same time that Bailey was having the home on Sage Place built, he also had his eye on a property about seven miles north, along the shore of Cayuga Lake. He purchased a large tract of land stretching uphill from the lake shore, which in the early 1900s he proceeded to clear and establish as a hobby farm. At first he named the farm Arbutus, after a wild fruiting plant that was prevalent on the property, but it quickly became known as Bailiwick. He admired the many walls surrounding farmers’ fields throughout the area, made from the native stone, and began to trade with the farmers, exchanging new wire fencing (then a novel innovation) for the old stones, and had a beautiful lodge built from those stones on his property, overlooking the lake. The cottage became a favorite summer retreat for the Bailey family and their friends and colleagues, and late in his life Bailey donated that lake-facing portion of the property to the Girl Scouts to help establish a camp which continues to this day as the Comstock Adventure Center, named after Bailey’s colleague and champion of nature-study Anna Botsford Comstock.

The farm itself has not received much attention from historians, partly, perhaps, for the reason Bailey provides in the quotation at the top of this page. But we know from the planting journals he left behind that it was a considerable property growing many varieties of fruits and vegetables, for market as well as for the family. The real emphasis was on the fruit trees, however. There, above Cayuga Lake’s shores, Bailey recreated something of his childhood fruit farm, which his father was then still managing a mile from Lake Michigan. He even grafted scions from his father’s apple orchards in South Haven onto a number of the stocks he planted at Bailiwick, like the roots from his mother’s pink garden that he transplanted into the front gardens in Ithaca. Bailiwick became one more way for him to ground himself in the everyday care for plants and to remain rooted in his family’s heritage.