At this year’s Fall Festival, we explored the enduring legacy of these two milestones and celebrated the recent designation of Tor House as a National Historic Landmark. At the Lectures and Talks given on October 4th, we began with three presentations that provided a wide-ranging review of what was happening globally in 1925, in Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, and at Tor House. This first talk by Professor Richard Kezirian provided the audience with the historical highlights of 1925.

I am pleased to inform you that on December 13, 2024, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland

designated Tor House (Robinson Jeffers Home) in Carmel, California, a National Historic

Landmark, in recognition of the property’s national significance in the history of the United

States.

“Eagle for Robinson Jeffers” has become one of my major and favorite stopping points, an occasion not only to talk about Gordon Newell, his profound relationship with Jeffers, and my brief but memorable encounter with Gordon, but also to talk about the profound influence that Jeffers and his poetry has had and continues to have on artists in all fields—sculpture, painting, photography, and music.

This sacred place will continue to cast its spell over those who visit … Waiting for them will be the docents of Tor House. We may not be the only group in the world that cares about Robinson Jeffers, but we are the only group that once again has the privilege and the joy of sharing the magic of this place.

Now, in 2020, looking at what is happening in the world and in our country, Jeffers’s words, like shards of abalone, like Stolpersteine, glitter in the sunlight, reminding us how important are our connections to “earth and stars and [our] history,” and how “atrociously ugly” we appear “dissevered” from them.