“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

At the end of the first day of the group’s most interesting visit. Richie and Yvette left to return to Connecticut. Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. At the Inn in 1997 and 1999 Laurel and I had been guests at well-attended Seth conferences organized by Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski. Our rich memories of those gatherings are nourished each time we drive past the Inn on our way to the hill house. We met our guests at the Inn the next morning, and the six of us drove in our three cars to a nearby country restaurant for breakfast. Then, with Laurel driving and our friends’ cars following, we traveled up a steep and winding hill just outside the city to not only a fine view but to Quarry Farm, an old-fashioned but large and elegant wooden homestead where Mark Twain had done some of his finest writing. No admittance, private property, a sign proclaimed, so we stood in the driveway just off the road to study the farm and its open and peaceful setting. Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. Jane had lectured to a class in creative writing at the college after the publication of Seth Speaks in 1972.There on the school’s green sward stood the small many-windowed gazebo that Mark Twain had worked in during his summers at the farm; it had been relocated to the college long ago. Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. Mark Twain had been one of Jane’s favorite writers.

The Butts family does have a bit of history in Elmira, though. Here are a few clues for anyone even remotely interested. In the last two decades of the 1800s my grandfather Otis and his wife raised four children on their farm in Wellsboro, PA, a farming community some 50 miles from Elmira, New York. At the age of 15 my father, Robert Sr., followed his three older siblings, Jay and Ernest and Ella, in leaving the farm. All did well, each in his and her way. Ernest left the northeast and never married. After Jay and Ella had each married they settled in Elmira. Jay and his wife had children. My father married Estelle (Stell) in Newark, NJ in 1917, and I was born two years later in Mansfield, a small community near Wellsboro.