Sylvia [HEERENS] and I worked with letters from the cabin itself - boxes and boxes of them. Eddy [Edmund Livingstone BROWN, husband of Undena Lisbeht (Betty) EBERLEIN] had been the guardian of the letters. You must remember the wall of bread boxes. Then there was a great wooden box which the mice had made inroads in. We rescued those also. All the letters we worked with were original ink written letters. Many of the letters in the great wooden box had been written on by mice also and to work with these we had to wear contractors' masks and sometimes go out in the cool air to get our lungs clear. Ammonia was the product of the mice urine.

Ernestine [Minerva Ernestine (Gretchen) EBERLEIN Benninger] constantly wrote us and blessed us for our rescue efforts. We did not know about her trove of letters which you sent to us [in August 2003] years later [sic] after she died [in July 2003]. Roxy [Davida Roxane EBERLEIN] had been copying letters from 1903 and called her document "Undena's Legacy." Many of the letters in the trove you sent to us in 2003 after Ernestine died were included in our "book" ["Treasures of the Little Cabin, A Free Acres Cabin tells the Story of Those who Loved it and Sought its Shelter," 1999] but many many letters which she had type but did not put back with Eddies collection were unknown to us and not part of our book. Other letters she made copies of and typed. Luckily we never saw Roxane's work before we finished OUR book or we never would have written it or even worked on it. We actually heard from Ernestine that Roxane's best friend (possibly her room mate) refused to give up the box of letters you gave us in 2003. I guess at last she did.

You will see immediately that our book is different from "Undena's Legacy" because ours spans the early time before 1900 until WII [sic]. Our book has only about 20 pages prior to 1901. 1902 to 1903 up to page 70 I believe then 1904 page 77 (Undena and Ernest marriage [in 1904]) up to page 82 or so (1905). Page 90 (1907) with Undena on the road with May Tully's troupe, and of course we were fascinated by the family's life at Helicon Hall Home Colony where Undena reconnected with the Upton Sinclair's. She had gone out with Upton while she lived at the Straight Edge colony [in NY City], before she had her relationship with Ernest [EBERLEIN]. Ernest too was acquainted with Upton. At the colony they got to know Upton's wife Meta and his little boy as well as other luminaries like Sinclair Lewis who lived at the colony for a while as well. The colony in Englewood, NJ, was firebombed and destroyed, and Undena, Ernest and Davida who had been caring for little Betty while Undena was on the road, all had to find themselves again. Betty was "rescued" from the Helicon Hall disaster and had told us about it during her lifetime in Free Acres.

Chapter VI of our book is where Free Acres comes in - around 1919. We did not leave out WW-I. We allowed Milton [DE GUIBERT] to describe his war experiences. We had followed Milton's life from the time he was around 6 years old until his untimely and tragic death in an auto accident after the war, after he was wounded and hospitalized, after he had returned to civilian life and married his girl. That was hard to accept even for us so many decades and generations later. We really lived through the pages we selected and typed into our book (Syl and I selected together but I retyped every thing and annotated all. I even threw in an essay by my own family members when Undena seemed to say unintentionally of course rather dismal things about a visit to the lower east side to purchase a hat).

Our book takes the family through the girls' school years living through the great depression and then follows Roxane to [Mount] Holyoke [College], the Carl Schurz organization, and her life in Berne, Switzerland, working for American interests in the code room. We interspersed that with a few of her love affairs and a correspondence with the wife of one of Hitler's U Boat engineers back in Germany. I happened to remember while we read Edna Heerhertz's letters to Roxane that because of these, Eddy had a dispute with the Berkeley heights postmaster who "somehow" spotted one of the German eagles on an enclosed letter and called him out as a Nazi spy or something like that. Eddy refused thenceforth to use the Berkeley heights post office and walked miles and miles back and forth to Gillette to receive Roxane's letters from Switzerland. Puzzle pieces began to fit into my own memories of the war years and the darling Brown family I always loved. We included Roxane's great effort to help rescue Margot Ascher her Jewish friend from Berlin and her attempts to help deliver one of Margot's brothers from the jaws of the Nazis on the Swiss border in an internment camp.

Our book is about 330 pages with photos interspersed and some photos and memorabilia at the end. We included all the letters in French and German in their original languages at the end of the book for people who might be interested. Rutgers [University] loved our book and of course had the entire trove of letters which we donated. The Center for Jewish History in Manhattan digitized the book and it is on line though the type font is tiny and difficult to read. Our book was completed, all before 1999. It took several years for us to create it. You can imagine in 2003 when I got your precious box that I was completely floored with Roxane's collection of retyped letters from 1903 which she called "Undena's Legacy".

Now Sylvia [HEERENS], before she went [in late September 2012] on her trip to Nepal (due back on the 18th of October), told me about a box she had placed in her basement back in the 1990's and did not open until the spring of 2012 (recently that is). IT contains a collection of letters to and from Roxane from after the war. I have not looked at it yet. We were going to go through it after Sylvia recovers from her trip, and we will.

I was thinking that my big box which you gave me could go to Rutgers but I wanted your feedback and Ted Lollis's as well and Sylvia's. The letters Roxane used from the bread boxes, some anyway she seems to have copied and put back in the boxes, then typed them. You may recall that in the box of letters we got from you in 2003, most of the copies were on onion skin - obviously from carbon paper between the pages.