Join the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests for a tour of Fanny’s Playhouse at Forest Society North at The Rocks. The event will be held on Saturday, May 17 from 2-4 p.m. at 113 Glessner Road in Bethlehem. Registration is strongly recommended and the cost is $20 per person.

In 1886, Isaac Scott designed a log cabin playhouse for eight-year-old Fanny Glessner at the family's summer estate, The Rocks, in Bethlehem. It was complete with child-sized furniture and a working stove. It was in the playhouse that Fanny honed her skills at homemaking, hosting tea parties and making jams and jellies. The playhouse still stands outside the carriage barn at The Rocks.

Participants will learn about the history of The Rocks, hike up to the original site of construction, look at where the building was moved to by Fanny’s daughter, and then go through the building in its current location. After the tour, participants will move inside the newly renovated Carriage Barn to watch a viewing of the talk author Abigail A. Van Slyck recently gave about her new published book, Playhouses and Privilege: The Architecture of Elite Childhood. Playhouses and Privilege makes clear that, far from being frivolous, playhouses were carefully planned architectural manifestations of adult concerns, integral to the reproduction of class privilege.

ABOUT THE ROCKS
The Rocks is a 1,400-acre property, owned and managed by the Forest Society. Built as a working farm in the 1880s by John Jacob Glessner, a cofounder of International Harvester, The Rocks retains much of the grandeur of White Mountain retreats – exceptional period architecture, an Olmsted-designed Garden, and a network of woodland trails open to the public year-round. In 1978 descendants of the Glessner family donated The Rocks to the Forest Society, which has operated it since as a vibrant Christmas tree farm, conservation and nature education center, and working forest. Learn more about The Rocks at forestsociety.org/the-rocks.

ABOUT THE FOREST SOCIETY
The Forest Society is a private, non-profit land trust and forestry organization established in 1901. The Forest Society now owns 200 protected forests constituting nearly 65,000 acres in 105 New Hampshire communities across the state. In addition, it currently holds nearly 800 conservation easements statewide permanently protecting an additional 131,000 acres of New Hampshire’s natural landscape.