MATERIAL

When we first moved to York Harbor, our neighbor Elvis Reed who was a caretaker for another property would tell us some amazing stories about earlier times. We took his stories with a grain of salt. He told us that the Queen of England's Rolls Royce was kept in our garage (mostly true!) He also told us that our summer cottage was one of the outbuildings of the original Rockledge estate owned by Thomas Nelson Page, a famous author, and US Ambassador to Italy during WWI. As we started our research, we were puzzled at how little information was available on this very large cottage. We learned that when Thomas Nelson Page and his wife Florence Lathrop passed away in 1922, their two daughters divided and sold off parts of the 7.5 acre estate. The main cottage burned down during WWII (1944) and by 1948 all of the property and buildings were in other families hands... Much has changed by 2021 in the 91 years since this booklet was published, but fortunately an estimated 75% of the cottages..