Biography | Rudyard Kipling — He Wrote The Jungle Book in This Vermont House Shaped Like a Ship

Most readers put The Jungle Book in India. It was written on a hillside in southern Vermont, in a long green house above the Connecticut River valley.

Kipling's wife, Caroline Balestier, came from a Brattleboro family. The house they built stands just over the Dummerston town line, on eleven acres.

It went up in 1892 by the Landmark Trust USA's account, and in 1893 by the Society of Architectural Historians'. A year apart, and both are in print.

The Society of Architectural Historians names the architect as Henry Rutgers Marshall of New York, a friend of the Balestiers. The shape was Kipling's idea.

He wanted something like a ship, and that is what stands there — two and a half storeys of shingle riding a long fieldstone base, narrow, the rooms strung out in a line.

He called it Naulakha. Accounts translate the name as a thing of great value, or a jewel beyond price, and it carried the memory of Wolcott Balestier, Carrie's brother, with whom Kipling had written a novel.

Here he wrote The Jungle Book and Captains Courageous. Kim and the Just So Stories took shape in the same years.

Four years, and it was over. In 1896 a quarrel with another of Carrie's brothers, Beatty, ended in an arrest and a court appearance, and the newspapers took it up.

The Kiplings left for England and never lived in the house again.

He is often quoted as saying there were only two places in the world he wanted to live, Bombay and Brattleboro, and that he could live in neither.

The Landmark Trust USA owns Naulakha now and has restored it. It is a National Historic Landmark, open for tours and rented out by the night.

You can stand in the study where he worked. The rooms are furnished close to how he left them, and the view east still reaches Monadnock.

Photo: Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: Kipling in his study at Naulakha, about 1895, photographer unidentified, public domain.