On Mother’s Day in 2000, Martha Hall Kelly drove to Bethlehem, Connecticut, to tour the Bellamy-Ferriday House & Garden. She had first read about the property’s last resident, Caroline Woolsey Ferriday, in a May 1999 issue of Victoria Magazine. Ferriday had worked to secure medical care for survivors of Ravensbruck, Hitler’s only all-women concentration camp during World War II. Women in the camp, many of them Polish, had been victims of medical experimentation, and many of them suffered long term health complications from their time in the camp. Martha Hall Kelly was the only person on the tour that day. The guide shared the story of Ferriday, who had worked from the rooms of the summer home her family called “The Hay.” Kelly departed the property with a deeper understanding of the profoundly moving actions of Caroline Ferriday—and an idea.

Winvian’s History

In 1775, Dr. Seth Bird, an eccentric but respected physician known for bringing a coffin along on his house calls, built a home for himself and his family in the Litchfield Hills of Connecticut. It was a white clapboard beauty, aproned with meadows and woods, and a comfort and sustenance for the generations.

In 1948, the Smith family bought the historic Bird estate and named it Win-Vian, a combination of the first names of Winthrop Smith and his wife Vivian. They raised a beloved son, bounteous fruit and vegetables, and livestock on the property (today the luxury Spa stands where the pigpens once did but offers a rather nicer kind of mud treatment). When Win died, Vivian married Charles McVay, captain of the USS Indianapolis, whose riveting story is detailed in the book “In Harm’s Way.”

With the addition of eighteen individually designed luxury cottages and Hadley Suite, Winvian Farm remains in the Smith family today, lovingly restored by Maggie Smith, her daughter Heather and son Win Smith III into a luxurious, unconventional and absolutely magnificent getaway.