Julie purchased the Kellogg house in 1871, just to the south of Esperanza.  That house burned that fall, probably due to the spontaneous combustion of oil-soaked paint rags.  A house was later built on the site to serve as a farm cottage; it was sold off in the 1960’s.  Rather than go to the trouble of rebuilding, Julie and Morris decided to purchase the neighboring Lyman property.  There were probably two reasons for this: first, it meant they could move in that summer; secondly, the house prices for hilltop farms were sufficiently depressed that it was actually cheaper. (the majority of southern New England farmers had given it up as a bad job, the immediate area had close to a dozen abandoned farms at that time)

So, in January 1872, with the sales of her books going well, Julie purchased what would become Esperanza.

“hundreds of nights on the white road have I passed it by, in my lonely walk, and stopped and listened to it, standing there in its lights, like a kind of low singing in the trees; and when I have come home later, on the white road, and the lights were all put out, I still feel it speaking there, faint against heaven, with all its sleep, its young and old sleep, its memories and hopes of birth and death, lifting itself in the night, a prayer of generations.”

Gerald Stanley Lee, writing of Esperanza in his book ‘The Lost Art of Reading’ published 1902.